A British U class submarine lost with all hands in 1942 and finally located in 2019, sitting upright on the seabed a few kilometres off the Grand Harbour approaches at around 130 metres. She is a war grave rather than a dive in the ordinary sense.
WreckDivers rarely, if ever, come here.
We found no record of anyone diving this site. It is charted so the picture of what lies under the water is complete, not because it is a place to go: there is no set route, no local briefing to lean on, and nothing on this page has been proven in the water.
Sea conditions
Stay dry right now
Sea is up (3.2 m NW) · Fresh W wind (41 km/h) · Gusts to 58 km/h
Done for today. Tomorrow: not looking good. Best it gets is 17 at 17:00: Sea is up (1.3 m NW)
Forecast for the site, updated 19:45 · Models disagree
Measured at Fort St Elmo (7.7 km away, 20:29): 35 km/h from W, gusts 40. The next hours lean on it.
- Waves
- 3.2 m
- from NW, biggest 5.1
- Wind
- 41 km/h
- W, gusts 58
- Swell
- 0.9 m
- 10 s period
- Sea temp
- 22 °C
- air 19 °C
Hour by hour
Next 7 days
0 3.2 m54 W
0 3.1 m53 WNW
47 0.9 m21 WNW
82 0.5 m15 ESE
66 0.6 m14 E
65 0.6 m22 NE
72 0.5 m21 E
Sunrise 06:24, sunset 17:05
Waves: Copernicus Med-Waves 4 km + MFWAM 8 km + EWAM 5 km + ECMWF WAM 9 km. Wind: ICON-2I 2 km + ECMWF IFS 9 km + ICON-EU 7 km + UKMO 10 km + ARPEGE 11 km. Read a few km out on the side the site is open to, then blended.
Exposed to wind and swell from: N (0°), NE (45°), E (90°), SE (135°), S (180°). An offshore site with almost no natural shelter. Anything above a light breeze makes the surface work unpleasant and the deco stops miserable, so trips go on flat, settled days only. Visibility at that depth is usually good and the light is gone, so it is a torch dive whatever the surface is doing. Best season: June to early October, on the calmest possible day.
The dive
Urge was one of the small, hard worked boats of the Tenth Submarine Flotilla, the Malta based unit that made life miserable for Axis convoys during the worst of the siege. She is not long, a shade under sixty metres, and she carried a crew who knew every rivet of her. On 27 April 1942 she slipped out for Alexandria and simply never arrived.
The seabed picture matches the story exactly. She stands upright and looks almost ready to get under way, deck gun trained forward, conning tower intact enough that divers were able to read three letters of her name on the side plating. The bow tells the other half of the tale: it is torn open and driven down into the soft sediment, the forward torpedo compartment laid bare by the mine that killed her.
What you need to understand before you get excited is that nobody dives this for fun. At roughly 130 metres she is trimix and closed circuit territory, well beyond the depth most technical programmes in Malta will take a visiting diver, and she carries forty four people who were never brought home. Access is controlled and the site is treated with the respect a cemetery deserves. For almost everyone reading this, the honest answer is to look at the virtual model and leave the water to the archaeologists.
- One of the most storied submarines of the siege of Malta
- Upright and remarkably coherent apart from the shattered bow
- The lettering on the conning tower that ended eighty years of argument
- A properly protected war grave, worth knowing about even if you never dive it
Typical plan
Not a plannable recreational or even ordinary technical dive. Anyone who does go is on closed circuit with hypoxic trimix, a bottom time of fifteen to twenty minutes at roughly 130 metres and a couple of hours of decompression, running a single pass along the hull from stern to bow with no entry into the pressure hull. Permission from the authorities comes before anything else.
What the bottom looks like
- 1Stern and propellers132 m deep · under the boat
- 2Conning tower with surviving name lettering127 m deep · 22 m from the boat
- 3Deck gun trained forward130 m deep · 30 m from the boat
- 4Mine damage at the bow, torpedo tubes exposed133 m deep · 54 m from the boat
- 5Flat sediment plain beyond the bow134 m deep · 77 m from the boat
A flat plain of soft grey silt and fine sand that the bow section has ploughed into.
Who you might meet
Almost always
Lucky day
Marked ones can hurt you. What they do and what to do about it is under Getting in and staying safe.
Getting in and staying safe
Only for serious professionals who know exactly what they are doing. With no record of anyone diving here there is no one to ask and no set route, so treat every line below as the start of your own planning, not a briefing. Plan it as an expedition, not a dive.
Boat only, and not a charter you can simply book. The wreck lies several kilometres offshore in open water and diving it requires official permission. Surface support needs to be properly set up for long decompression: live boat cover, a shot and lazy line, deco gas hung off, and a plan for the swell that builds outside the harbour approaches in the afternoon.
Where the boat stops
Permit only. Dived only through a centre registered with Heritage Malta, from a boat with AIS and clearance from Valletta or Marsaxlokk VTS. Nobody else may stop inside the protected area around it.
A war grave. Touch nothing and take nothing.
Positions as charted (WGS84) in Transport Malta Notice to Mariners 02 of 2024, archaeological zones at sea . Check the latest notice before you rely on them.
- Extreme depth, well past normal technical limits
- Long mandatory decompression with no bail out to shallow water
- Open water boat traffic including commercial shipping into Grand Harbour
- Exposed position with little shelter if the wind picks up
- War grave status: penetration and any disturbance are off limits
- Fine sediment around the damaged bow silts out instantly
Marine life to respect
Blackbelly rosefish · Ċippullazza tal-għajn Can hurt you
Venomous spines, like a scorpionfish. Do not handle it; hot water if stung.
Conger eel · Gringu Can hurt you
Crushing bite if a hand goes into its hole. Look in from a distance and keep fingers out.
A bit of history
Laid down as a U class boat of the second group, about 58 metres long, Urge served under Lieutenant Commander Edward Tomkinson and racked up an extraordinary record from Malta: she damaged the battleship Vittorio Veneto in December 1941 and sank the Italian cruiser Giovanni delle Bande Nere in April 1942, and she was also used for landing raiding parties by folding canoe. She sailed from Malta on 27 April 1942 bound for Alexandria and struck a mine shortly after leaving, taking down 32 crew, eleven naval passengers and a war correspondent, 44 people in all. Her fate fed decades of speculation, including a persistent claim that she had been sent on a secret mission elsewhere. That was put to rest in October 2019 when a remote sensing survey run by the University of Malta's Maritime Archaeology Programme, prompted by the commanding officer's grandson, found her. Divers confirmed the identification from lettering on the conning tower in 2021, and she was formally protected as a war grave.
Divers say
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Further reading: Underwater Malta: HMS Urge · Wikipedia: HMS Urge · BSAC: wreck of famous British WWII submarine found off Malta · Times of Malta: confirmed, wreck off Malta is the submarine sunk in 1942 · Malta Dive Sites: HMS Urge