HMS Sea Devil (P244): Reaching Malta the Day the War Ended

Built on the Clyde for a War Nearly Over

HMS Sea Devil was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock, laid down on 5 May 1943, launched on 30 January 1945 and commissioned that May, an Improved S-class submarine that spent her first weeks of service on degaussing trials, torpedo discharge tests and anti submarine exercises in Scottish waters.

She sailed for the Mediterranean that August, reaching Gibraltar by the tenth of the month and Malta on 15 August 1945, the exact day Japan's surrender was announced, bringing her intended active deployment to an immediate and rather anticlimactic close before it had properly begun.

No record of any combat action, sinking or attack involving Sea Devil survives in any source consulted, a genuine and complete gap in her wartime record rather than any oversight.

A Quiet Decade in the Mediterranean

Refitted and recommissioned for a second time in April 1951, Sea Devil went on to spend much of the following decade based in the Mediterranean, her service there beginning around the mid 1950s.

She is also said to have taken part in trials of an early infrared system nicknamed Yellow Duckling, intended to help detect the wakes left by submerged submarines, an interesting if lightly documented footnote to her otherwise unremarkable peacetime career.

The End of Her Service

HMS Sea Devil was paid off at Portsmouth on 4 June 1962 and sold to a shipbreaker, arriving at Newhaven for scrapping that December, with the physical breaking up of the vessel apparently following in early 1966, some months after her arrival.

It is a quiet, workmanlike record for a submarine whose entire wartime story amounted to a single voyage cut short by the very peace she had been built and trained to help secure.