Anthony Miers

Born in 1906 in Inverness, Scotland, the son of an army captain killed in the First World War, Miers was educated at Stubbington House School in Gosport, Edinburgh Academy, and Wellington College. In 1924 he joined the Royal Navy as a special entry cadet and volunteered for the submarine service in 1929. He could be hot-tempered, and in 1933 was court martialled for striking a rating. Miers' career however continued, with his first submarine command (1936–7). He then served in the battleship , before joining, as a lieutenant commander, the staff of the commander-in-chief, Home Fleet (1939–40), where he was mentioned in despatches. ==War service==

In November 1940 Miers was given command of HM Submarine Torbay. While working up, Torbay collided with the British tanker Vancouver in Loch Long though no serious damage was caused. Torbay began its first patrol in March 1941. The submarine left at very short notice, with half the crew on leave and replaced by members of the spare crew of the depot ship, the reason being that the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had arrived at Brest and the Royal Navy wanted them shadowed in case they sailed for the Atlantic sea lanes. The submarine later continued to Gibraltar, then Alexandria, Egypt to join the 1st Submarine Flotilla. On 27 April 1941, while on patrol off Cape Ferrato, Miers attacked a two-masted single-funnelled merchant ship of about 4,000 GRT. Torbay fired two torpedoes but both missed. Torbay's third war patrol was in the northern Aegean Sea. On 28 May 1941, Torbay sank two Greek caiques with gunfire, then torpedoed and damaged the Vichy French tanker Alberta off Cape Hellas. In 1989 former Royal Naval officer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy published his autobiography, in which he describes "a submarine atrocity" on the night of 9 July 1941, which gave rise to the accusation of war crimes. According to the accounts, on two separate occasions Miers ordered the machine-gunning of several shipwrecked German soldiers in rafts who had jumped overboard when their vessels were sunk by the Torbay. These events were witnessed and reported by acting First Lieutenant Paul Chapman who reported "everything and everybody was destroyed by one sort of gunfire or another". Miers also made no attempt to conceal his actions, his patrol log recording: "Submarine cast off, and with the Lewis gun accounted for the soldiers in the rubber raft to prevent them from regaining their ship..." When informed of Miers' actions, Flag Officer Submarines, Admiral Max Horton wrote to the Admiralty about the possibility of German reprisals: "As far as I am aware, the enemy has not made a habit of firing on personnel in the water or on rafts even when such personnel were members of the fighting services; since the incidents referred to in ''Torbay's'' report, he may feel justified in doing so." The Admiralty then sent a strongly worded letter to Miers advising him not to repeat the practices of his last patrol. According to historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas in his 1979 work The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945, the incident was one of several instances of the Royal Navy sinking Greek ships believed to be transporting German soldiers and then firing on survivors in the water or in lifeboats. All reports of such incidents were investigated by the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, which collected depositions from surviving German and Greek witnesses supporting Kennedy's claims regarding the incident. By now, Miers had carried out nine successful patrols in HMS Torbay in the Mediterranean theatre, had received the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, and had been promoted to commander in December 1941. The citation in the London Gazette read: His VC is on display in the Lord Ashcroft Gallery at the Imperial War Museum, London. From July 1944 he was Commander (Submarines) of the 8th Submarine Flotilla in the Far East based at Trincomalee, Sri Lanka and later Fremantle, Australia. ==Post war==

Miers remained in the navy after the war, and was promoted to captain in December 1946. He was commanding officer of the naval establishments and then HMS Blackcap, a Fleet Air Arm station (1948–50), and the 1st submarine squadron (1950–52), and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich (1952–4). He commanded the aircraft carrier for a year from 9 December 1954. He was promoted to rear admiral in January 1956, and became Flag Officer, Middle East, until his retirement in August 1959. and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 1959. Miers served for many years as the national president of the Submarine Old Comrades' Association. He died at his home in Roehampton, London, on 30 June 1985. Scotland, in the Roman Catholic Section. ==Notes==