HMS Shalimar (P242): A Survivor, Not a Loss, in the Malacca Strait

Correcting the Record

It is worth stating plainly from the outset that HMS Shalimar was never lost with all hands, a fate sometimes mistakenly attached to her name, quite possibly through confusion with one of several other Royal Navy submarines notably lost in the Far East during the same period, such as HMS Stonehenge or HMS Porpoise.

Every source consulted, without exception, confirms that Shalimar survived the war intact and returned safely home, and it is important to set that straight before telling her actual, rather more successful story.

It is worth explaining how a myth like that takes hold, because simply denying it is less useful than showing where it comes from. The Far East submarine campaign lost boats in a particular way: they went out and did not come back, and in most cases nobody ever established why. There is no wreck, no survivor and no action report, and a name simply stops appearing in the records.

That leaves a set of very similar-sounding S-class names attached to a set of very similar stories, several of which end in silence. HMS Stonehenge sailed from Trincomalee in March 1944 and was never heard from again, and to this day nobody knows what happened to her. Once a reader has half a memory of an S boat that vanished in those waters, any S boat can end up wearing it.

Shalimar did not vanish. She came home, went into reserve at Harwich, and was cut up at Troon in 1950 with everybody who had served in her still alive to read about it.

Built at Chatham

HMS Shalimar was built at Chatham Dockyard, laid down in April 1942, launched in April 1943 and commissioned exactly a year later at Holy Loch, an Improved S-class submarine that sailed for the Far East that August, reaching Trincomalee in Ceylon by September 1944 to join the East Indies Fleet.

A Remarkably Successful War in South East Asia

Over the following year, Shalimar fought an active and effective campaign against Japanese shipping and installations, damaging landing craft and small vessels off Car Nicobar that autumn, before her clearest single success, the sinking of the Japanese auxiliary minesweeper Choun Maru No. 7 in the Strait of Malacca that November, alongside a number of smaller sailing vessels destroyed across her patrols.

Her captain deserves naming, since the record never does. Acting Lieutenant Commander W. G. Meeke, DSC, MBE, took her out to the East Indies Fleet and commanded her through the whole of that campaign.

The Choun Maru is the entry that reads best on paper and the sailing vessels are the ones that actually describe the war she fought. By late 1944 there was almost nothing of size left moving in those waters, so the work was done on the surface with a three-inch gun against wooden coasters and junks. HMS Thule sets out what that was like and why the men doing it took no pleasure in it at all.

The waters themselves explain a good deal about the war she had. The Malacca Strait is the sea road between Singapore and Rangoon, and it was how the Japanese army in Burma was fed. It is also narrow, shallow, heavily mined and flown over constantly, which for a submarine means very little room to go deep and very little room to run. The Nicobars and Andamans, occupied since 1942, sat across the western approaches as a chain of enemy airfields.

Cutting that route did not require sinking liners, because there were none left to sink. It required stopping the small stuff, patiently, boat by boat, in water where a submarine had almost nowhere to hide. That is the whole of the Far East campaign in a sentence, and it is why the tally sheets from those patrols look so unimpressive next to the Mediterranean ones.

An auxiliary minesweeper is a slightly different matter and worth the distinction. She is a converted craft whose job is clearing British mines, so sinking one keeps a channel closed that somebody else has already gone to the trouble of mining. It is the sort of success that never gets into a headline and quietly does more damage than a merchant ship.

She survived a minor bombing attack that August, and in her final patrol that summer operated jointly with HMS Seadog, sinking a Japanese landing ship and further small craft together.

Two Submarines, One Target

That joint attack can be dated and placed. On 27 July 1945, off Cape Rachado on the Malayan coast, Shalimar and HMS Seadog destroyed a Japanese tank landing ship between them.

Two submarines working as a pair is less common than it sounds, and it is not done for extra firepower. The reason is that these attacks happened on the surface, in daylight, with the gun, a few miles off an enemy-held coast, and a submarine on the surface is blind upwards and defenceless. So one boat fights the target while the other lies off and watches the sky, and they swap. It roughly halves the chance of being caught by an aircraft nobody saw coming.

A tank landing ship is also a better target than the name suggests. By mid-1945 the Japanese were using landing craft as ordinary coastal transports, because they were shallow-draught, could beach anywhere and did not need a port. Sinking one removed a vessel that could deliver supplies to places nothing else could reach. HMS Sleuth and her sister were doing exactly the same paired work in the Java Sea that spring.

Home Safely, and Quietly Scrapped

Shalimar left Trincomalee for the United Kingdom in September 1945 and reached Portsmouth that October, being placed into reserve at Harwich soon afterwards.

She was sold for scrap in the summer of 1950 and broken up at Troon on the Ayrshire coast by the end of that year, a quiet, unremarkable end for a submarine whose properly solid combat record deserves to be remembered accurately, rather than confused with the tragic fate of other boats that never came home at all.

One small distinction is worth recording: she is the only ship in the entire history of the Royal Navy to have borne the name Shalimar. It comes from the Shalimar gardens of Kashmir and Lahore, laid out by the Mughal emperors, and by the 1940s it was familiar to British ears largely through Indian Love Lyrics and the line about the pale hands beside the Shalimar, which was sung in a great many drawing rooms.

Quite how that ended up on a submarine is anybody's guess. Churchill had insisted that submarines be given names rather than numbers, the Admiralty then needed a very large supply of words beginning with S, and somebody clearly reached for whatever was to hand. The result is that a boat named after a Mughal garden spent her war shelling wooden coasters in the Malacca Strait, which is not a connection anybody planned.

Five years in reserve at Harwich and then Troon. It is an unremarkable ending, and that is rather the point of her. The notable thing about Shalimar is precisely that nothing dramatic happened to her, in a campaign where a great many boats simply stopped sending signals.