HMS Sleuth (P261): Rescuing Babies in the Java Sea

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Sleuth was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 6 July 1944 and commissioned on 8 October 1944, a third-batch S-class submarine that arrived in time to join the final, gruelling phase of the war against Japan in the Far East.

A Busy First Patrol

Sleuth's first war patrol, conducted in the Eastern Java Sea between April and May 1945 alongside her sister boat HMS Solent, combined hard fighting with an unexpected act of mercy.

On 26 April 1945 she and Solent together sank the Japanese auxiliary minesweeper Wa 3 by gunfire, and just three days later, on 29 April, her crew rescued a remarkable 51 people from a stricken merchant vessel, including nine women and six babies, a rescue that stands in sharp contrast to the destruction that otherwise filled her patrol reports.

Fifty-One People, and Six of Them Babies

The contrast is sharper than that, because the two things were not separate. Sleuth and HMS Solent sank the vessel themselves.

On 29 April 1945, in the Java Sea south of Borneo, the two submarines shelled a small Japanese-controlled coastal craft, the sort of thing the records call a sea truck: a shallow draught motor vessel used for moving cargo and people around the archipelago, of the kind that was the only worthwhile target left by 1945. They hit her and she began to go.

Then the people came off her, and it became apparent from the submarines that they were not troops. They were civilians, with their families. So Sleuth stopped shooting, closed the sinking vessel, and started picking them up. Fifty-one people were taken out of the water, and among them were nine women and six babies.

It is worth sitting with the arithmetic inside the submarine. An S-class boat carried a crew of about forty-eight in a hull two hundred and seventeen feet long where the bunks are slung between the torpedo tubes and there is no spare space anywhere. Taking fifty-one more aboard more than doubled the number of people in her. Somewhere in the fore ends of a Royal Navy submarine, in the Java Sea, in April 1945, there were six infants and their mothers.

Nobody had to do it. The submarine was on the surface, close to a Japanese-held coast, in daylight, having just announced her presence by firing a gun, and stopping is how submarines get caught. HMS Ultimatum made the same choice off Calabria three years earlier and it is the same instinct: having done the thing, you deal with what you have done.

There is a practical question hanging over it that the records do not answer, and it is worth admitting. Fifty-one people cannot stay in a submarine for the rest of a patrol without ending it, so they will have been transferred or landed somewhere within days, and the accounts do not say where. What is certain is that they were taken out of the sea, which in those waters in 1945 was the difference between living and not.

It also stands as a reminder of the other outcome. HMS Tradewind torpedoed a ship in these same waters five months earlier and could not see what was aboard her, and five thousand six hundred people died. Sleuth could see, at close range, in daylight, with the gun rather than a torpedo, and it made every difference.

Working together, Sleuth and Solent went on to account for fifteen Japanese sailing vessels between them.

Fifteen sailing vessels between two submarines is the ordinary business of that campaign and the reason the rescue is so striking. By 1945 Japanese shipping in the archipelago consisted of wooden coasters, junks and small motor craft, and the work was done on the surface with the three-inch gun and with boarding parties laying demolition charges. HMS Thule sets out what that was like for the men doing it, and none of them enjoyed it.

It is also why the two boats worked as a pair. Two submarines on the surface can cover each other, one watching for aircraft while the other deals with the target, which matters a great deal when the whole evolution takes place in plain view a few miles off an enemy coast.

Two More Patrols to War's End

Sleuth's second patrol took her off Banka Strait and east of Singapore in June and July 1945, where on 6 July she attacked a Japanese submarine without securing hits.

Her third patrol, in the Gulf of Siam that July and August, saw her sink numerous junks by gunfire and demolition charge before Japan's surrender brought her war to a close; on 13 August she also exchanged fire with an enemy aircraft without damage on either side.

That date is the one to notice. Japan announced her surrender on 15 August 1945, so on the 13th a British submarine was still trading fire with a Japanese aircraft in the Gulf of Siam with two days of the war left to run. Neither side hit anything, which is the best possible outcome of the last exchange of a six-year war.

Her whole war fits into four months. She commissioned in October 1944, reached the Far East, made three patrols and it was over. What she has to show for it is a shared minesweeper, a quantity of junks, and fifty-one people who were alive at the end of April 1945 who would otherwise not have been.

A Postwar Collision and the End of Her Story

Sleuth remained in service after the war, and on 13 June 1952 collided with the destroyer HMS Zephyr while manoeuvring astern out of Portland harbour, striking the destroyer's side.

She survived the mishap and continued in service for some years afterwards before arriving at Charlestown on 15 September 1958 to be broken up, closing out a career that had run from Java Sea rescues to a home-waters prang with a destroyer.

The Zephyr business deserves a moment because it illustrates something real. Sleuth was going astern out of Portland when she hit the destroyer's side, and a submarine handles badly in reverse: she has a single screw, a rudder that only bites when water is flowing over it the right way, an enormous amount of hull under water catching the tide, and a bridge from which the after end is largely invisible.

Manoeuvring one in a crowded harbour is genuinely difficult, and collisions of exactly this kind happened repeatedly to boats in that generation. It is worth remembering when reading about them that submarines spent far more of their lives in confined water surrounded by other people's ships than they ever did attacking anything.

She lasted another six years and went to Charlestown in September 1958, fourteen years old. For a boat whose entire war lasted a single spring and summer, being remembered for what she pulled out of the water rather than what she sank is a better outcome than most of her contemporaries managed.