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, a 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.

The One Job That Required Her to Break Radio Silence

That weather patrol is described as non-combat, which is true, and as though it were therefore safe, which it was not. It is worth explaining, because it is the strangest task a submarine can be given.

Weather in that part of the world moves broadly from the south-west, so anybody planning an air raid on Malaya or an amphibious landing on the Sumatran coast needed to know what the atmosphere was doing hundreds of miles upwind. In peacetime that comes from a network of reporting stations and merchant ships. In 1945 all of that territory was in Japanese hands and there were no observers of any kind. So a submarine was sent to sit off the coast and be the weather station.

Which means she had to transmit. A submarine's entire survival rests on never radiating anything, because a transmission can be intercepted and direction-found and turned into a position on somebody's chart. A weather boat breaks that rule deliberately and on a timetable, from roughly the same area, day after day. Every submariner aboard knew exactly what they were doing and how it would end if anybody on the other side was listening properly.

So the least warlike entry in her record is arguably the most exposed thing she ever did. And the purpose behind it was the invasion of Malaya, which was being prepared for that autumn and which the atomic bombs made unnecessary. Scorcher was gathering the data for a landing that never happened, for a war that ended the week after she arrived.

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 part in the Affray search is worth a little more than a clause, and it is covered from the other side in HMS Sirdar. Scorcher was one of several sister boats sent out to comb the Channel, and they searched flying oversized white flags from their masts. The reason was grimly practical: with every ship in those waters hunting a missing submarine, a submarine on the surface was liable to be reported as the missing one, and every false alarm cost hours that Affray's people did not have.

Sirdar went further and lay on the bottom for six hours so that the Asdic operators could learn what a bottomed submarine sounds like, having never had the chance to practise on one. It made no difference in the end. Affray was found in June 1951 by HMS Reclaim, using an underwater television camera that was close to experimental, with all seventy-five of her company aboard.

For the crews doing the searching it will have been a bleak fortnight. They were hunting for a boat exactly like their own, crewed by men they knew, in the certain knowledge that whoever found her would be finding a tomb.

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.

That admission is worth defending rather than apologising for. Peacetime naval incidents that hurt nobody generated a board of inquiry, a file, and no publicity whatever, and a great many of those files have never been digitised or have simply not survived. A collision and a fire in the same year sounds like a bad year, and it may have been nothing more than a scraped casing and a smouldering switchboard.

What can be said is that neither ended her career. She went on for another two years before reserve, which suggests both were dealt with and neither was serious enough to be worth writing up.

It is also worth remembering that neither is trivial in a submarine. A collision threatens the pressure hull, and the pressure hull is the one component that has to be perfect, so damage a surface ship would shrug off can mean months alongside. A fire is worse again, because there is nowhere for the smoke to go and nowhere for the men to go either, and the fumes from burning insulation will kill long before the flames arrive.

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.

Scrapped rather than sold puts a finger on something real. Scorcher is the exception rather than the rule, because a very large number of her sisters did not end up in a British scrapyard at all. The S class was the most numerous Britain ever built, there were far more of them than anybody wanted after 1945, and they became the founding stock of other navies. HMS Saga went to Portugal in 1948, HMS Sanguine and her sister to Israel in 1958, and others to France, Greece, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union.

Why one boat was sold and another cut up came down to condition, timing and whether anybody happened to be asking in the year she became surplus. There is no reflection on the boat in it. Scorcher simply reached the end of her usefulness at a moment when no buyer was in the market.

Seventeen years, one weather patrol, one fleet review, a search for a lost sister and a bad year in 1956. HMS Sea Devil had almost exactly the same career and reached Malta the day the war ended rather than a week before. Between them they are a fair picture of what a great many British submarines actually did, which was to be ready for something that never came.