HMS Pandora (N42)
1929 Parthian-class submarine
HMS Pandora was a British Parthian-class submarine commissioned in 1930 and lost in 1942 during the Second World War. This class was the first to be fitted with Mark VIII torpedoes. On 4 July 1940 she torpedoed and sank the French aviso Rigault de Genouilly off the Algerian coast, an act that is still controversial today. In an extension of the Lend-Lease program, Pandora, along with three other British and French submarines, was overhauled at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in the United States. She was sunk on 1 April 1942 by Junkers Ju 87 aircraft from Sturzkampfgeschwader 3 at the Valletta dockyard, Malta.
Design
The Parthian class was designed as an improvement of the earlier Odin class; the new class was larger, built with a raked stem, and given a shield to cover the 4-inch gun. The class had a design flaw in that the riveted external fuel tanks leaked, leaving an oil trail on the surface.
All submarines of the Parthian class were fitted with eight 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, one QF 4-inch (102 mm) Mk XII deck gun, and two machine guns. The class was the first to be outfitted with the Mark VIII torpedo. Submarines of the Parthian class were designed for a complement of 53 officers and men.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5633679. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1930, 1942 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Pandora (N42)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.