Information about Ins Dakar

INS Dakar (77-צ) was originally a British T class submarine built for the Royal Navy by H.M. Dockyard in Devonport. She was launched on 28 September 1943 as HMS Totem (P352) and served the Royal Navy until she was purchased by Israel, along with two of her T-class sisters, in 1965. She was commissioned into the Israeli Navy on 10 November 1967 as Dakar (דקר)("Swordfish" in the Hebrew language) under the command of Lieutenant Commander Ya'acov Ra'anan.

Dakar left the shipyard for Scotland to conduct her sea and dive trials. Late in 1967, after two successful months of trials, Dakar returned to Portsmouth, England, and made preparations to sail for Israel.

Voyage to Israel

On 9 January 1968, Dakar departed England. On the morning of 15 January Dakar put into Gibraltar, departing at midnight, and proceeded across the Mediterranean Sea on snorkel. She reported her position by radio to submarine headquarters in Haifa every 24 hours, and radioed a control telegram every six hours. She was scheduled to enter her home base on Friday, 2 February, but as she was making excellent time, averaging over eight knots, Ra'anan requested permission to enter port earlier. He was ordered to enter on 29 January. Later, Ra'anan requested to enter a day earlier, on 28 January. This request was denied — the scheduled welcoming ceremony could not be moved.

At 0610 on 24 January Dakar transmitted her position, 34.16°N 26.26°E, just east of Crete. Over the next 18 hours she transmitted three control transmissions, which did not include her position, the last at 0002 25 January 1968. No further messages were received.

Immediate search

On 26 January an international search and rescue operation began, including units from Israel, Great Britain, the United States, Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. On 27 January, a radio station in Nicosia, Cyprus, received a distress call on the frequency of Dakar’s emergency buoy, apparently from south-east of Cyprus, but no further traces of the submarine were found. On 31 January, all non-Israeli forces abandoned their search at sunset. Israeli forces continued the search for another four days, giving up at sundown on 4 February 1968.

Long-term searches and discovery

On 9 February 1969, one year after Dakar was lost, an Arab fisherman found her stern emergency buoy marker washed up on the coast of Khan Yunis, an Arab town southwest of Gaza. British T class submarines had two such buoy markers, bow and stern, secured behind wooden doors in cages under the deck and attached to the submarine with metal cables 200 meters (650 feet) long. Experts examining the 65 cm (two feet) of cable still attached the buoy determined that the buoy had remained attached to the submarine for most of the preceding year until the cable broke completely, that Dakar rested in depth between 150 to 326 meters, and that she was 50-70 nautical miles off her planned route. All of these determinations were wrong, and misled searchers for decades. It was not until April 1999 that a search effort was concentrated along the path of the original route.

On 24 May, 1999 a large body was detected on the seabed at a depth of some 3000 meters (9800 feet). On 28 May the first video pictures were taken, making it clear that it was Dakar that had been found. She rests on her keel, bow to the northwest. Her conning tower is snapped off and fallen over the side. The stern of the submarine, with the propellers and dive planes, broke off aft of the engine room and rests beside the main hull. Some small artifacts were recovered, including the boat's gyrocompass.

The exact cause of the loss is unknown, but it appears that no emergency measures had been taken before Dakar dove rapidly through her maximum depth, suffered a catastrophic hull rupture, and continued her plunge to the bottom. The emergency buoy was released by the violence of the hull collapse, and drifted for a year before washing ashore.

On 11 October 2000, Dakar’s bridge and forward edge of her sail were raised, and are now a memorial display in the Naval Museum in Haifa.

The possibility had been seriously discussed of trying to recover the remains of the crew members and giving them Jewish burial in Israel. This idea was finally abandoned, due to the enormous cost of such an operation and in deference to the long-standing maritime tradition of letting the sea bottom be the final resting place of drowned sailors. The crew members' families had to content themselves with holding a cermony in a ship over the submarine's remnants.

In the thirty-year period between the loss of the submarine and the final discovery of its remnants, various fanciful suppositions and conspiracy theories circulated, and some members of the public have long believed the crew members to be alive and held in secret capitivy in an Arab country or at the Soviet Union. The Rabbinical authorities had to solve complicated problems of Jewish Religious Law before the crew members' wives could be declared officially widows, so that they could marry again.

Various Israeli cities and towns have a Dakar Street, and several schools and other public institutions are also named for the lost submarine.



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