HMS Stonehenge (P232): Lost North of the Strait of Malacca

Laid Down at Birkenhead

HMS Stonehenge was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 4 April 1942 and launched on 23 March 1943. She departed Lerwick on 12 June 1943, arriving at Holy Loch where she was commissioned into the Royal Navy three days later under Lieutenant David S. M. Verschoyle-Campbell.

She was a third-group S class boat, and the S class is worth a sentence because it is the biggest thing the Royal Navy ever did in submarines. Sixty-two of them were built across fifteen years, more than any other British submarine class before or since, and they did the bulk of the fighting in the Mediterranean and then in the Far East. They were medium-sized boats, meant for enclosed and shallow seas rather than for oceans, which is exactly what the Mediterranean and the Malacca Strait turned out to require. HMS Saracen and HMS Stygian came from the same programme.

The man taking her over had come from a hard school. Verschoyle-Campbell joined the submarine branch in 1940 and served in HMS Torbay as her navigating officer, then her torpedo officer, then her first lieutenant, which is the whole apprenticeship of a submarine captain served in one boat. Torbay in those years was Anthony Miers's command, and Miers took her into Corfu harbour in March 1942 and came out again with a Victoria Cross. A photograph taken on Stonehenge's bridge at Wallasey on 12 June 1943 captions him as Lieutenant D. S. McN. Verschoyle-Campbell, DSC; he is recorded elsewhere with a DSO as well. He had taken command on 6 April 1943 and had had her ten months when she sailed for the last time.

The name is peculiar and hers alone. No other ship of the Royal Navy has ever been called Stonehenge, before or since, and the wartime S class collected a run of names that sit oddly in a fleet list: Stubborn, Sportsman, Strongbow, Syrtis, Stoic. It is often said that the Admiralty had simply run out of the conventional ones and started reaching, which sounds likely enough and is not something any reliable source actually states, so it is best left as an oddity rather than an explanation.

Two Patrols of Note

Stonehenge's first patrol, to Norwegian waters in September 1943, passed without contact with the enemy, but her second, in the Far East in February 1944, was considerably more productive: she destroyed the Koryo Maru No.2 by deck gun on 5 February and sank the minelayer Choko Maru by torpedo on 12 February, solid results against Japanese shipping in a theatre where British submarines were still finding their feet.

Two ships in a week from a boat on her first war patrol in those waters is a good return, and the two methods say something about the work. The Koryo Maru No.2 was destroyed by deck gun, which means Stonehenge surfaced and shot her, in daylight, close inshore. The Choko Maru was a minelayer and was worth a torpedo, and killing a minelayer is the sort of thing whose benefit nobody can ever measure: every mine she did not lay is a ship that did not sink somewhere else. HMS Thule shows what the same campaign looked like a few months later, by which time there was very little left afloat that was worth a torpedo at all.

Vanished on Her Third Patrol

HMS Stonehenge sailed from Trincomalee in Ceylon on her third war patrol on 25 February 1944, ordered to operate north of the Strait of Malacca and off the Nicobar Islands. She never returned, and was declared overdue on 20 March 1944.

She was declared lost on 22 March. Fifty men, and not one of them came back or was ever found. There was no signal, no sighting, no Japanese claim, and no wreck: she simply stopped existing somewhere between northern Sumatra and the Nicobars in the first fortnight of March 1944.

The most probable explanation is that she struck a naval mine, though an accident cannot be entirely ruled out, and her wreck has never been found.

A mine is the likeliest answer precisely because there is nothing else to go on. When a submarine is depth-charged to destruction somebody usually claims it, and Japanese records were captured in quantity after the war and contain no attack that fits her. When a boat is bombed from the air there is generally a report. A mine leaves no witness on either side: it is laid weeks earlier by somebody who never knows what it hit, and the only evidence it produces is a submarine that does not come home.

The northern approaches to the Malacca Strait were thoroughly mined, by both sides, and British boats laid a good deal of it themselves. There is no suggestion that Stonehenge ran into a British field, and no way to establish that she did not. The other possibility, an accident, covers a great deal of ground: a diving error, a mechanical failure at depth, a battery explosion. Any of them ends the same way and leaves the same amount of evidence, which is none. HMS Shalimar spent decades being wrongly listed among the boats lost in these waters, which is a measure of how thin the record for this theatre is.

Her entire crew was lost without a single survivor to explain what happened, and services of remembrance for her ship's company continue to be held to this day, a quiet reminder that some losses of the Second World War remain notably unresolved even now.

Eighty Years to the Day

That is worth being specific about, because it is not a general observation. On Friday 22 March 2024, eighty years to the day after she was declared lost, a service of prayer and remembrance for the ship's company of HMS Stonehenge was held at the Stonehenge World Heritage Site itself. It was organised by the veterans' charity Alabaré and led by the Rt Revd Stephen Lake, Bishop of Salisbury, and it drew people from across the military and civilian communities of Wiltshire.

There is something fitting in holding it there. Fifty men were lost in the Indian Ocean and have no grave, no wreck and no marker, and the only place on earth that carries their ship's name is a ring of stones on Salisbury Plain that was already four thousand years old when she was built. A submarine that vanished without trace is commemorated at the most permanent object in England. That is either an accident of naming or the best possible outcome of one.

She was not the last British submarine to disappear in that sea. HMS Porpoise was lost off Penang in January 1945, also with all hands and also without a wreck, and she remains the last Royal Navy submarine lost to enemy action. Between them they account for a hundred and nine men whose fate is a matter of inference.