HMS Scorcher (P258): A Week Too Late for the War, A Decade Deep Into the Peace

Built at Birkenhead, Arriving Just in Time to Miss the War

HMS Scorcher was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 14 December 1943, launched in December 1944 and commissioned on 16 March 1945, an Improved S-class submarine whose timing proved almost cruelly precise.

After trials and anti submarine exercises in Scottish waters, she sailed out through Gibraltar, Malta and the Suez Canal, reaching Trincomalee in Ceylon on 8 August 1945, just one week before Japan's surrender brought the entire war to a close.

Her only operational task was a weather reporting patrol northwest of Sumatra, an useful but entirely non combat role, before returning to the United Kingdom that November, her war record consisting of no attacks, no sinkings and no enemy contact of any kind.

A Decade of Quiet Peacetime Service

Scorcher's real story lies in the years that followed. She joined the unsuccessful search for the lost submarine HMS Affray in April 1951, one of several boats combing British waters for a sister vessel that had disappeared with all hands, and stood among the assembled fleet at the Coronation Fleet Review for Queen Elizabeth II at Spithead in June 1953.

Her later peacetime service was not entirely without incident, suffering a collision in February 1956 and a fire during exercises that November, though no further detail on the causes or consequences of either incident could be established with confidence from the sources available.

Scrapped, Not Sold

Unlike several of her surviving S-class sisters, sold on to the navies of Israel, Portugal and other allied nations during this period, Scorcher was retained by the Royal Navy throughout her service, placed in the Reserve Fleet in 1958 and eventually broken up at Charlestown in Fife in September 1962, closing out the career of a submarine whose most notable achievement was, in the end, simply surviving a war she arrived at only a week too late to fight.