Lionel Crabb
| Lionel Crabb | |
|---|---|
Crabb, April 1944
|
|
| Nickname(s) | Buster |
| Born |
28 January 1909 London, England |
| Died | 19 April 1956 (aged 47) (presumed dead) |
| Allegiance | United Kingdom |
| Service/branch | Royal Navy |
| Years of service | 1941–1947 |
| Rank | Lieutenant Commander |
| Battles/wars | Second World War |
| Awards |
Officer of the Order of the British Empire George Medal |
| Other work | MI6 diver |
Lionel Kenneth Phillip Crabb, OBE, GM (28 January 1909 – presumed dead 19 April 1956), known as Buster Crabb, was a Royal Navy frogman and MI6 diver who vanished during a reconnaissance mission around a Soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1956.
Lionel Crabb was born in 1909 to Hugh and Beatrice Crabb of Streatham, south-west London. They were a poor family. In his youth he held many jobs but after two years training for a career at sea in the school ship HMS Conway he joined the merchant navy and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve before the Second World War.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Crabb was first an army gunner. Then, in 1941, he joined the Royal Navy. The next year he was sent to Gibraltar where he worked in a mine and bomb disposal unit to remove the Italian limpet mines that enemy divers had attached to the hulls of Allied ships. Initially, Crabb's job was to disarm mines that British divers removed, but eventually he decided to learn to dive.
He was one of a group of underwater clearance divers who checked for limpet mines in Gibraltar harbour during the period of Italian frogman and manned torpedo attacks by the Decima Flottiglia MAS. They dived with oxygen rebreathers Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, which until then had not been used much if at all for swimming down from the surface. At first they swam by breaststroke without swimfins.
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