HMS Statesman (P246): Firing the Very Last Torpedo of the War

Built on the Mersey

HMS Statesman was built by Cammell Laird on the Mersey, laid down on 2 November 1942, launched on 14 September 1943 and completed on 13 December 1943, a third-group S-class submarine that would go on to serve extensively with the Eastern Fleet against Japan.

Hunting in the Malacca Strait

Between August 1944 and August 1945, Statesman, commanded first by Lieutenant Robert George Pierson Bulkeley and later by Lieutenant Ronald Max Seaburne-May, accounted for around thirty Japanese vessels totalling some 5,000 tons in the Malacca Strait and surrounding waters, including the army cargo ship Sugi Maru No.5, a mix of cargo ships, sailing vessels, trawlers, coasters and landing craft destroyed by torpedo and gunfire.

Thirty vessels for five thousand tons is the arithmetic of that whole campaign in one line. It averages under a hundred and seventy tons a ship, which means almost everything on the list was a wooden coaster, a junk or a lighter, sunk on the surface with the three-inch gun or by a boarding party with demolition charges. HMS Thule sets out what that work was like and why the men doing it took no pleasure in it.

It was not pointless, though it often felt so. Japan had taken Malaya and the Indies for their tin, rubber and oil, and by 1945 the only way any of it moved was in exactly these small wooden craft creeping along the coast at night. Sinking thirty of them was a more effective attack on the Japanese war economy than sinking one freighter would have been.

Helping Corner the Haguro

Statesman played a part in the operation that led to the sinking of the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro on 16 May 1945, spotting and helping coordinate the interception of Haguro and the destroyer Kamikaze.

That operation deserves its full billing: it was the last major surface action of the Second World War, and the last time the Royal Navy fought a classic destroyer torpedo attack at night. The Haguro was a Japanese heavy cruiser trying to run supplies out of the Andamans, and five destroyers of the 26th Flotilla went in after her in the small hours of 16 May 1945 and sank her with torpedoes in the Malacca Strait.

Statesman's part was the unglamorous half and the reason it worked. A destroyer flotilla cannot intercept a cruiser it cannot find, and the submarines patrolling the strait were the eyes that found her and reported her course. It is a good illustration of what these boats were actually for by 1945, which was rather more about seeing than about sinking.

During this same period, her crew rescued Lieutenant Colonel Spencer Chapman, a British Army officer who had spent years operating behind Japanese lines since the 1942 invasion, a remarkable pickup for a submarine crew more used to sinking ships than saving stranded soldiers.

The Man Who Had Been in the Jungle for Three and a Half Years

That passenger deserves a great deal more than a clause, because Freddy Spencer Chapman is one of the most remarkable soldiers Britain produced in that war. When Malaya fell in early 1942 he did not surrender and he did not get out. He went into the jungle and stayed there for three and a half years, training and fighting alongside Chinese communist guerrillas against the Japanese occupation.

He very nearly did not survive it. He had blackwater fever, malaria repeatedly, and at one point lay unconscious for a fortnight. He was captured and escaped. For long stretches nobody in Ceylon knew whether he was alive, and by the time contact was re-established he had been written off more than once.

Getting him out was its own operation. Chapman spent about fifteen days working his way to the coast disguised as a Chinese labourer, moving in sampans and dodging Japanese patrols, until he reached Pangkor Laut, a small island off the Perak coast. On the night of 13 May 1945, he and Major Richard Broome went into the water at Emerald Bay and swam some fifty yards out into the dark, where Statesman was waiting.

Consider that from the submarine's side. She had to be at an exact point off an enemy-held island, on an exact night, close enough inshore to be found by two exhausted men swimming, and to stay there while they did it. HMS Stoic and HMS Storm were running the same kind of errand in the same months, and it went wrong at least as often as it went right.

Chapman wrote it all up afterwards as The Jungle Is Neutral, taking his title from his own central argument: that the jungle is neither hostile nor friendly, and that it kills the men who expect it to be one or the other. It has never been out of print for long, and it sits on the same shelf as One of Our Submarines, written by the captain of HMS Storm.

The dates are what make it. Statesman took Chapman off Pangkor Laut on 13 May and was reporting the Haguro's position on the 16th. Three days separate the two things she is remembered for, in the same stretch of water, on the same patrol.

The Last Shot of the War

On 18 August 1945, in the Strait of Malacca, Statesman is reputed to have fired the last torpedo of the Second World War, reportedly against a derelict wreck, a curious, almost anticlimactic footnote to close out nearly six years of submarine warfare.

The careful wording there is right and should stay. Reputed and reportedly are doing honest work, because a claim to the last anything in a global war is almost impossible to prove. What is certain is the date: 18 August 1945 is three days after Japan announced her surrender and a fortnight before the formal signing, so a British submarine was still firing torpedoes in the Malacca Strait after the war was effectively over.

That it was aimed at a derelict wreck makes it stranger and rather more human. Somebody had a torpedo that would otherwise be landed and written off, a target that could not be hurt, and a crew who had spent a year sinking wooden boats with a gun. The last torpedo of the Second World War, if that is what it was, appears to have been fired for the sake of firing it.

She was later converted into a high-speed target boat for anti-submarine training, loaned to the French Navy as Sultane from 1952 until her return on 5 November 1959, and sold for scrapping on 3 January 1961, though her conning tower survives, preserved at Fort Southwick in Portsmouth.

That is a better resting place than it sounds. Fort Southwick sits on Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth, one of the Victorian forts built to defend the dockyard from the landward side, and during the Second World War the tunnels beneath it housed the underground headquarters that ran the naval side of the D-Day landings. Signals for the Normandy invasion passed through that hill.

So the conning tower of a submarine that fought the last months of the war against Japan now stands above the tunnels from which the invasion of Europe was directed, looking down on the harbour she and HMS Spiteful and the rest of them sailed from. It is a great deal more than most submarines of her generation have left, which is usually nothing at all.