HMS Solent (P262): Sister in Arms in the Java Sea

The Build: Birkenhead

HMS Solent was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and launched on 8 June 1944, a third-batch S-class submarine displacing 814 tons on the surface and 990 tons submerged, measuring 217 feet overall, armed with six 21-inch torpedo tubes and six reload torpedoes, a 4-inch deck gun, and capable of carrying twelve mines in place of her torpedo load, with a crew of 48 and a diving depth of 350 feet.

Forty-eight men in eight hundred tons, and 350 feet is not very deep. HMS Stonehenge sets out what the S class was built for: enclosed, shallow, awkward seas rather than oceans, which is why so many of them ended up in the Mediterranean and then in the archipelagos of the East Indies. Her commanding officer from September 1944 was Lieutenant J. D. Martin, DSC, and she took his name and her gun a very long way east.

One line in that specification never gets used again and is worth a moment: twelve mines in place of her torpedoes. S boats could be fitted to lay mines from their torpedo tubes, which turned a submarine into something that could close a shallow channel without ever being seen doing it. In the East Indies, where everything moved through a handful of narrow passages, that was a serious threat, and it cut both ways: HMS Stonehenge was almost certainly lost to a mine in exactly that sort of water.

The name is a local one. The Solent is the strait between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, a few miles of water that almost every Royal Navy warship of the last two centuries has passed through on the way to somewhere worse. It is a slightly domestic thing to call a submarine that spent her war off Java, and there is something appropriate in it, because the Solent is exactly the kind of narrow, busy, shallow passage she was designed to fight in.

Hunting Alongside Her Sister

Solent operated primarily in the Pacific theatre during the final year of the war, frequently working in company with her sister boat HMS Sleuth. Together the two submarines accounted for fifteen Japanese sailing vessels and, on 26 April 1945, the Japanese auxiliary minesweeper Wa 3, a notably productive partnership between two boats built at the same yard within weeks of each other.

Why Two Boats at Once

That partnership is more unusual than it sounds. The Royal Navy did not do wolf packs. The German practice of concentrating boats onto a convoy, and the American habit of working three-boat groups in the Pacific, were both deliberately avoided: British submarines were given individual billets, patrol areas assigned on a chart, and were expected to work them alone. Two submarines in company risk shooting at each other, and a submarine cannot easily tell a friend from an enemy through a periscope.

What changed it in the Java Sea in 1945 was the nature of the target. By then there was very little left worth a torpedo, and the traffic was small wooden craft moving in groups close inshore, which have to be dealt with by gunfire on the surface. HMS Thule describes what that work was like. One submarine that surfaces among a scattering of junks can engage one of them at a time while the rest disperse. Two submarines can cover both ends of the problem, keep a lookout for each other while their gun crews are exposed on deck, and get through the business considerably faster.

The two boats were well matched for it. Both were third-batch S boats from Cammell Laird, launched a month apart in the summer of 1944, with identical guns, identical handling and crews trained the same way. Sleuth sailed from Fremantle on 14 April 1945 with orders to patrol in company with Solent in the eastern Java Sea, and the fifteen sailing vessels they accounted for between them were the result.

The Wa 3, sunk by the pair of them with gunfire on 26 April 1945, was an auxiliary minesweeper of two hundred and fifteen tons. That is a very small ship, about the size of a large trawler, and it took two submarines to shoot it, which tells you as much about the state of Japanese shipping by that spring as any tonnage table. Three days later Sleuth took fifty-one people out of a stricken merchant ship, including nine women and six babies, and HMS Sleuth tells that part properly.

Successes of Her Own

Beyond her joint operations with Sleuth, Solent independently sank a Japanese patrol vessel and a landing craft, and damaged a further vessel, adding to the substantial tally of Japanese shipping destroyed by British S-class boats operating at considerable range from their bases in that theatre.

Considerable range is putting it mildly. The boats working the Java Sea in 1945 were running out of Fremantle, on the far south-western corner of Australia, which is the better part of two thousand miles from the patrol areas. A submarine leaving there faced a fortnight of passage before she reached anywhere worth being, then a patrol, then a fortnight home, in tropical heat, in a boat with no air conditioning and eight hundred tons of displacement to share between forty-eight men and the machinery. HMS Stoic was working the same water from Ceylon at the other end of the same problem.

The End of Her Service

HMS Solent survived the Second World War intact and remained in service for well over a decade afterwards before being sold off, arriving at Troon on 28 August 1961 to be broken up, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose story is inseparable from that of the sister ship she so often hunted alongside.

Sixteen Years as the Enemy

Remained in service for well over a decade is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence, because what she remained in service as was not a warship in any ordinary sense. Solent was rebuilt into a high-speed target submarine. Her hull and casing were streamlined, her 4-inch gun was taken off, and higher-capacity batteries went in, all of it to make her faster and quieter underwater and give her the endurance to be hunted properly.

The reason is the same one that drove the far more drastic rebuilding of the T boats set out in HMS Truncheon. In January 1948 the Royal Navy formally accepted that its submarines now existed to hunt Soviet submarines rather than merchant ships, and the surface fleet had to learn to catch a fast submerged target it had never faced. Somebody had to be that target. Stripping the gun off a wartime S boat and giving her better batteries was the cheap way of producing one.

So she spent sixteen years, many times longer than her war, being chased around the exercise areas by frigates and aircraft learning their trade, and every escort crew that got better at it did so partly at her expense. She reached Troon on 28 August 1961 to be broken up, seventeen years old, having fired her gun in anger in the Java Sea and spent the rest of her life without one.