HMS Taku was a British T class submarine

British T class submarine

The Royal Navy's T class of diesel-electric submarines was designed in the 1930s to replace the O, P and R classes. Fifty-three members of the class were built just before and during the Second World War, where they played a major role in the Royal Navy's submarine operations...

 built by Cammell Laird

Cammell Laird

Cammell Laird, one of the most famous names in British shipbuilding during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came about following the merger of Laird, Son & Co. of Birkenhead and Johnson Cammell & Co. of Sheffield at the turn of the twentieth century.- Founding of the business :The Company...

, Birkenhead

Birkenhead

Birkenhead is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. It is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the city of Liverpool...

. She was laid down on 18 November 1937 and was commissioned on 3 October 1940.

Career

Taku served in home waters and the Mediterranean. In April 1940, she mistook HMS Ashanti

HMS Ashanti (F51)

HMS Ashanti was a Tribal-class destroyer of the Royal Navy. Following the style of her sister ships she was named for an ethnic group, in this case the Ashanti people of the Gold Coast in West Africa. She served in the Second World War and was broken up in 1949...

 for a German destroyer and fired several torpedoes at her. Fortunately, they all missed. In an attack on a German convoy in May, she damaged the German torpedo boat Möwe, and in November, launched a failed attack on the
German tanker Gedania.

Assigned to the Mediterranean in 1941, she scored numerous kills, including the Italian merchants Cagliari and Silvio Scaroni, the Italian passenger / cargo ship Caldea, the German munitions transport Tilly L. M. Russ, the Italian auxiliary minesweeper Vincenso P., the Italian tankers Arca and Delfin, and the Greek sailing vessels Niki, Lora and a small unidentified one. She also attacked, but failed to hit the German merchant Menes and the Italian tanker Cerere.

Reassigned to operate off the Scandinavian coast in 1944, Taku sunk the German merchants Rheinhausen and Hans Bornhofen, and heavily damaged the German merchant Harm Fritzen. In March she attacked a convoy, but missed her target, the ex-Norwegian Kriegsmarine transport Moshill.

Taku struck a mine in April 1944, and was damaged. After the end of the war, she was sold for scrap in November 1946 and broken up in South Wales.