HMS Andrew (P423): The First Submarine to Cross the Atlantic Fully Submerged

Built by Vickers Armstrong

HMS Andrew was built by Vickers Armstrong, launched on 6 April 1946, an Amphion-class submarine displacing 1,360 tons on the surface, armed with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes, a 4-inch deck gun and a 20mm Oerlikon cannon, and capable of 18.5 knots on the surface.

She was one of the sixteen A-class boats finished out of forty-six ordered, designed for long Pacific patrols against Japan and completed after that war had ended. The gun in that specification needs a note, because it does not sit easily with what happened later. The A boats were completed with a 4-inch gun on the casing and it was taken off again during the streamlining programme of the 1950s, when the whole class was rebuilt for underwater speed and everything that caused drag or noise was removed. Andrew is the exception in the class and very nearly the exception in the navy: hers went back on.

She is also a boat who confuses photograph captions, because she wore three different pennant numbers in her lifetime. She was completed as P423, became S23 when the Royal Navy dropped the wartime P-series for submarines, and later carried S63. All three appear on prints and in records and all three are correct; the change is explained more fully in HMS Alderney, who went through the same renumbering. A print captioned P423 and one captioned S63 are the same submarine, photographed either side of a paperwork change.

Training With the Royal Canadian Navy

Andrew deployed to Canada for training with the Royal Canadian Navy in September 1950, returning in February 1953 to exercise alongside Canadian vessels including the cruiser Quebec, part of the same broad pattern of Commonwealth submarine cooperation that saw several of her Amphion-class sisters based in Nova Scotia during the 1950s.

She was doing that before there was a formal arrangement for it. The Royal Canadian Navy had a large anti-submarine fleet and no submarines of its own to practise against, so through the early 1950s it borrowed two Royal Navy boats a year at Halifax. Andrew's two and a half years there were part of that improvised system, which was only regularised in March 1955 when the 6th Submarine Squadron was formed. What that became is set out in HMS Alderney, who did three commissions in it.

A Genuine First: Submerged Across the Atlantic

Andrew's most significant achievement came in June 1953, when she became the first submarine in history to cross the Atlantic Ocean submerged for the entire voyage, departing Bermuda and arriving in the English Channel on 15 June, overcoming engine trouble and a periscope fault that her crew had to fix while still submerged, a landmark achievement that demonstrated just how far submarine endurance and technology had progressed since the Second World War.

The figures are worth having: about two thousand five hundred nautical miles from Bermuda, fifteen days, and a world record for continuous submerged operation. And the phrase "fully submerged" deserves unpacking, because it means something precise. She was not running deep for a fortnight. She was snorting, which means sitting at periscope depth with a mast raised above the surface, drawing air down it to run her diesel engines and charge her batteries while the hull stayed under. She never surfaced. That is the record, and it is a different and harder thing than simply staying deep, because a boat at periscope depth in an Atlantic swell is being pushed about constantly and the mast has a valve that shuts the instant a wave covers it, at which point the engines start trying to breathe the air inside the submarine and the crew's ears let them know about it.

The reason it mattered is that it answered a question the Royal Navy was arguing about. The snort had been copied from the German schnorkel at the end of the war, and nobody was sure how much it really bought: whether a conventional submarine could genuinely operate for weeks without ever showing herself, or whether it was a trick good for a few days. Andrew crossed an ocean on it, fixing an engine defect and a broken periscope on the way without coming up, and settled the argument. Within a decade the question had been overtaken anyway by HMS Dreadnought, whose reactor made the snort irrelevant, but for the boats that were not nuclear, and would not be for another forty years, this was the technique that kept them useful.

A Second Career on Film

In 1959, Andrew took on an unusual supporting role, portraying a fictional United States nuclear submarine in the film On the Beach, a small but memorable diversion from her regular naval duties. She was fitted with a 4-inch deck gun in 1964 for service during the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation, and fired that gun for the last time in December 1974.

The reason behind that casting is the best part of it. On the Beach is a film about the end of the world by nuclear war, in which the last surviving American submarine sails to a dying Australia. The United States Department of Defense read the script, disliked it intensely and refused to cooperate, which meant no American nuclear submarine would be made available to the production. So the crew went to the Royal Navy instead, and the USS Sawfish, nuclear-powered flagship of a vanished United States Navy, was played on screen by a British diesel-electric boat built at Barrow in 1946. HMS Aeneas would be borrowed for a rather less serious film a decade later.

The End of the Line

HMS Andrew was sold off on 5 May 1977 and broken up for scrap at Plymouth, closing the career of a submarine that had truly earned her place in the history books with that pioneering fully submerged Atlantic crossing.

The gun is the detail that ought to be better known. It went back on in 1964 for the Indonesian confrontation, where the useful targets were small wooden craft running men and supplies between islands, and a torpedo costing more than the target is no way to deal with a junk. She fired it for the last time in December 1974. Because she was by then the only submarine in the Royal Navy still carrying one, that was the last time a British submarine fired a deck gun at all, ending a practice that went back to the First World War. The gun itself was taken off and preserved when she went to the breakers.

Between them those three things make a decent summary of what the A boats were: a class designed for one war, finished too late for it, rebuilt in the 1950s for a completely different one, and then used for whatever turned up, including proving a technology, shelling junks off Borneo and standing in for an American submarine in a film about the end of the world. HMS Otus would be doing much the same sort of miscellaneous work in the Gulf twenty years later.