HMS Aurochs (P426): The Submarine Nobody Modernised, Shot At Over the Molucca Sea

Too Late for the War

HMS Aurochs was one of the A-class submarines, the Amphion class, designed in the middle of the Second World War for long patrols across the Pacific against Japan. The story of why they were built, and how few of them were finished, is told in HMS Andrew (P423).

She was laid down by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness on 21 June 1944, as yard number 906, and launched on 28 July 1945. The war in the Pacific ended a little over two weeks later, and she was not completed until 7 February 1947, by which time the enemy she had been designed to fight had been beaten for eighteen months.

She was named after the aurochs, the great wild ox of prehistoric Europe, which had been extinct since the seventeenth century, and her crews gave her an unofficial Latin motto to suit: Excreta Tauri Sapientam Fulgeat. It translates, roughly and respectably, as "the excrement of the bull makes wisdom shine", and less respectably as an old naval saying about what baffles brains.

One of her early crew remembered her colliding with what he believed was a trawler on the eve of the summer exercises in 1947, which is not the best start for a new boat, but no lasting harm seems to have been done.

Rotterdam, July 1948

The photograph at the top of this page was taken in the harbour at Rotterdam on 16 July 1948 by a photographer of the Dutch Anefo agency, and it shows Aurochs as she was built. A line of her ratings is fallen in on the forward casing, an officer stands alone nearer the bow, and her 4-inch deck gun sits at the front of her conning tower, with the jumping wires running fore and aft and an ensign at her stern.

Behind her, in the haze, are the cranes and warehouses of a port still rebuilding after the war. Visits like this one, to the ports of Britain's new allies, were a large part of the peacetime submarine's job.

In 1953 she took part in the Coronation Review of the Fleet at Spithead for Queen Elizabeth II, with her sisters, among them HMS Aeneas.

The One That Was Never Rebuilt

Through the 1950s the Navy rebuilt the A boats for the Cold War. The lesson of the German Type XXI U-boats was that the submarine of the future would fight underwater, not on the surface, and the A boats had their guns taken off and their casings and conning towers rebuilt to make them faster and quieter dived.

The work is described in Andrew's article. One by one, every surviving boat of the class went through it, except two. Affray had been lost with all hands in the Channel in 1951, a tragedy told in HMS Loch Fyne. The other was Aurochs.

She was never modernised, and she went through the rest of her career looking much as she does in the Rotterdam photograph, gun and all, the last of the A boats in her original wartime form.

Sydney

That did not make her useless. In 1949 the Royal Navy had set up the 4th Submarine Squadron at HMAS Penguin in Sydney, to give the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy submarines to practise against, since neither had any of its own.

The first boats there were three wartime T-class boats, among them Telemachus. In 1957 they were replaced by three A boats, Aurochs, Andrew and Anchorite.

A hunted submarine does not need to be the latest design, it needs to be there, day after day, so that the escorts and aircraft can learn their trade against it, and Aurochs spent the next few years doing exactly that. An Australian junior officer who spent time aboard her to learn the business remembered her motto with affection.

Shot At Over the Molucca Sea

In May 1958 Aurochs was on patrol in the Molucca Sea, in the waters of eastern Indonesia, at a time when that country was in the middle of a rebellion. On 17 May an unidentified aircraft, staying high, machine-gunned her. Nobody was hurt and the boat was not damaged.

One unofficial account says that at least one bomb was dropped as well and made her roll heavily, but that has never been confirmed.

The question was whose aircraft it had been. The Indonesian government of President Sukarno told the British that its forces had not made the attack, and the British accepted that and assumed it had been the rebels of North Celebes.

Those rebels, the Permesta movement, had a small air arm of their own, and it was later established that its aircraft, munitions and pilots had been supplied by the Nationalist Chinese air force and by the American CIA, which was secretly backing the rebellion. CIA pilots had been flying B-26 Invader bombers against Indonesian and foreign shipping in the area since April.

The day after Aurochs was attacked, one of them, the American Allen Pope, was shot down attacking an Indonesian Navy convoy and captured, and the American role came out. Nobody has ever established for certain who fired at Aurochs, but if the British assumption was right, a Royal Navy submarine on a peaceful patrol had been shot at by an aircraft supplied by her country's closest ally.

Halifax

From Sydney she went to the other side of the world. From June 1960 to January 1962 Aurochs was with the 6th Submarine Squadron at Halifax, Nova Scotia, under Commander Steve Jenner, doing for the Royal Canadian Navy what she had done for the Australians.

How that arrangement came about is told in Andrew's article and in HMS Alderney's. The Canadian naval magazine The Crowsnest recorded that in eighteen months there she had worked with the ships and aircraft of the Canadian Navy and other NATO navies, and taken part in anti-submarine demonstrations at sea with the Canadian carrier. In early January 1962 she sailed for home.

The End

By the mid-1960s an unmodernised boat of 1947 had nothing left to offer that the Oberons could not do better, and Aurochs was paid off in 1966. She arrived at Troon on the Firth of Clyde on 6 February 1967, and the breakers began work on her six days later. It took them until March 1968 to finish.

She had served for nearly twenty years without ever being changed from the boat she was built to be, which in the Cold War Submarine Service makes her almost unique.