HMS Usurper
1942 U-class submarine
HMS Usurper (P56) was a Royal Navy U-class submarine built by Vickers-Armstrongs at High Walker. So far, she has been the only ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name Usurper.
Career
Usurper had a short-lived career with the Royal Navy. During her work-up patrol off the Norwegian coast, she made a torpedo attack on the German submarine U-467. The target was not hit. On being assigned to operate in the Mediterranean, she sank the French ship Château Yquem.
Sinking
Usurper had left Algiers on 24 September 1943 to patrol off La Spezia. On 3 October 1943 she was ordered to move to the Gulf of Genoa, after which there was no further contact. She was overdue at Algiers on 12 October 1943. The German anti-submarine vessel UJ-2208/Alfred reported attacking a submarine in the Gulf of Genoa on 3 October 1943 and it is believed that this may have been Usurper.
“HMS Usurper” enters the record as 1942 U-class submarine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Usurper, U-class and submarine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5634787. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Usurper” 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.