Sunfish was a Royal Navy S-class submarine - the 1931 group, the most-built British submarine class of the Second World War. She was launched at Chatham on 30 September 1936. By 1939 she was one of the twelve boats memorialized in the wardroom song 'Twelve Little S-Boats,' a litany of submarines counted off in dark humor as they were lost one by one. Sang to the tune of 'Ten Little Indians,' the song eventually accounted for every submarine in the original list. When war broke out in September 1939, Sunfish was a member of the 2nd Submarine Flotilla, deploying between 26 and 29 August to her war stations at Dundee on the east coast of Scotland and at Blyth on the Northumberland coast - the bases from which British submarines would patrol the North Sea for the next five years.

Sunfish had what the trade called a busy war. Under Lieutenant Commander J.E. Slaughter for most of her career, she went after the most heavily defended German shipping lanes. In February 1940 she attacked a German U-boat and missed. In April 1940, during the German invasion of Norway, she sank the merchant ships Amasis and Antares, narrowly missed Hanau and an auxiliary patrol vessel, damaged the Q-ship Schuerbek on 12 April, and sank another Q-ship - Schiff 35 - on 14 April. A Q-ship was a heavily armed warship disguised as a merchantman, designed to lure submarines into surfacing for a kill; sinking two of them in three days was not luck. On 7 December 1940 she sank a Finnish merchantman and damaged the Norwegian Dixie off the Norwegian coast. By the standards of British submarining in 1940, she was a successful boat with an experienced crew.

In 1944 the Royal Navy transferred Sunfish to the Soviet Navy as part of the strange Anglo-Soviet wartime cooperation in northern waters. The Soviet North Fleet badly needed submarine hulls to operate out of Polyarny near Murmansk, and the British loaned several elderly S- and U-class boats. Sunfish was renamed V-1. Her new commander was Captain 2nd Rank Israel Fisanovich, an experienced Soviet submarine officer with a Hero of the Soviet Union to his name. A small Royal Navy liaison team went with the boat to help her new crew settle in. On 25 July 1944, V-1 sailed from Dundee for the long passage around the north of Scotland and up to Murmansk, taking the well-marked corridor along which Allied air patrols had been told to expect her.

On 27 July she did not behave as expected. For reasons that never came out clearly - Fisanovich was an aggressive commander, and there is some suggestion he wanted to go U-boat hunting on his way home - V-1 was found at least eighty miles outside her assigned patrol corridor by a Consolidated Liberator of RAF Coastal Command. The aircrew should have been able to identify her: the silhouette was distinctive, the area was a known transfer lane, the recognition codes were available. The submarine should have stayed surfaced and flashed the proper signals on sight of the aircraft. She dove instead. The Liberator attacked. V-1 went to the bottom with all hands - fifty Soviet sailors and one British liaison officer. Both the Royal Navy and RAF boards of inquiry that followed found the aircraft crew fully at fault: they were lost, they ignored unmistakable signs that the boat was friendly, and they pressed an attack they were not entitled to make.

The men of V-1 - they were V-1 by then, not Sunfish - are commemorated together at the Dundee International Submarine Memorial. The memorial stands in the city from which the boat sailed on her final passage, and lists the fifty Soviet submariners alongside Petty Officer Telegraphist Sidney Ravensdale, the British liaison crew member who went down with them. The story is uncomfortable from every angle. A submarine that fought a hard war well was killed by her own side, after she had been handed away in the name of an alliance that all parties knew was temporary. Fisanovich, the man Stalin had decorated, was killed by an Allied aircraft after surviving years of his own war. The crew lost is buried in cold North Atlantic water. The Dundee memorial does not try to resolve any of that. It just names them.