HMS Storm (P233): The First RNVR Officer to Command a Submarine

The Build: Birkenhead

HMS Storm was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 18 May 1943 and commissioned on 23 August 1943. She holds a truly notable distinction: her first commanding officer, Edward Preston Young, was the first officer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to command an operational British submarine, going on to earn the DSO and a bar to his DSC for his service in her.

The Man Who Drew the Penguin

Edward Preston Young deserves rather more than a subordinate clause, because before the war he was not a naval officer of any description. He worked in publishing, and in 1935, as a young designer at a brand new firm called Penguin Books, he was asked to come up with a trademark. He went to London Zoo, sketched, and produced the penguin that has been on the spine of paperbacks ever since. He designed the colour scheme for the covers as well: orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography.

In 1940 he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the wartime amateurs, and volunteered for submarines. He passed the course top of his class and became the first executive branch RNVR officer to enter the Submarine Service at all, which mattered, because the trade had been an exclusively regular preserve and was not obviously keen to change.

Then, on the night of 19 July 1941, he found out what the job actually costs. He was serving in HMS Umpire when she was run down by an armed trawler in the North Sea and sank almost at once in eighty feet of water. Young was off watch. He ended up in the flooding conning tower with the First Lieutenant, an engine room artificer and an able seaman, and he got out of her. Most of those aboard did not.

Two years later he was given Storm and became the first volunteer reservist to command a British submarine on operations. It is worth being precise about that claim, because our own article on HMS Spiteful describes a volunteer reservist commanding a British submarine from a month earlier. The two do not collide: Fred Sherwood was RCNVR, the Canadian volunteer reserve, and Young's distinction is to the RNVR and to an operational boat. Between them, in the summer of 1943, the two reserves quietly ended the regulars' monopoly on submarine command.

He came out of it with a DSO and a DSC and Bar, went back to publishing, and in 1952 wrote the whole thing up as One of Our Submarines. It is one of the two or three best books anybody has written about submarine warfare, largely because he had been a civilian recently enough to remember what was strange about it.

And then Penguin did something rather lovely. In 1954 they issued the paperback as their thousandth title, and for that one book they printed his penguin, the one he had drawn nineteen years earlier as a young man in an office, surrounded by a laurel wreath. The firm's thousandth book was written by the man who had designed its trademark, about the war he had gone away and fought in between.

From the Arctic to the Far East

After an uneventful first patrol into the Norwegian Arctic, Storm deployed to Trincomalee in Ceylon from February 1944 and settled into the demanding rhythm of Far East operations, sinking merchant vessels by gunfire and torpedo across the Malacca Strait and Bay of Bengal, destroying the Japanese minesweeper W-7 and the auxiliary gunboat Eiko Maru, and attacking the German U-boat U-1062 on 20 June 1944 without success.

She also carried out a covert agent insertion mission at Pulau Weh in May 1944, though the intended recovery ran into a Japanese trap.

That last clause covers the thing every submarine doing this work dreaded. Landing agents is the straightforward half: close the coast at night, put men into a folding canoe, and go. The recovery is the part that goes wrong, because it requires the submarine to return to a fixed point at a fixed time days later, which is exactly the information an enemy will get out of anybody they have caught in the meantime.

A submarine arriving at a rendezvous that the other side knows about is in the worst position imaginable: close inshore, in shallow water, stopped, at a time and place chosen by somebody else. HMS Stoic was doing the same work off Sumatra in the same months and the risk was identical.

A Formidable Record of Endurance

Storm's patrol record speaks to just how gruelling this kind of warfare was: in January 1945 alone she covered 7,151 miles in a single 37-day patrol, and by the time she returned home on 8 April 1945 she had travelled some 71,000 miles since leaving her builders and spent over 1,400 hours underwater, a staggering cumulative effort for one small boat and her crew.

Those figures repay converting into daily terms. Seven thousand one hundred and fifty-one miles in thirty-seven days is an average of about a hundred and ninety-five miles every single day for over five weeks, in a boat of some two hundred and seventeen feet with fifty or so men in her, in equatorial heat, with no relief and nowhere to go.

Fourteen hundred hours submerged is the other way of looking at it: nearly sixty days of her life spent underwater, in the dark, breathing the same air. And the seventy-one thousand miles is almost three times round the world, done in under two years by a small boat that was never designed to leave European waters. HMS Thule and HMS Stratagem were working the same seas on the same terms, and the wear on the men was the real cost of it.

The End of Her Service

HMS Storm was sold in November 1949 and scrapped at Troon, having survived the war she had fought so hard through. A model of her is preserved today at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, a fitting tribute to a boat whose command history broke particularly new ground for the submarine service.

The model at Gosport is a decent memorial, and there is a neatness in where it sits. The Submarine Museum is at HMS Dolphin, the establishment that trained Young and every other submariner of his generation, and where the service he had to argue his way into eventually stopped caring whether a man was RNVR or RN and started asking only whether he could do the job.

Storm herself was sold in November 1949 and broken up at Troon, six years old and worn out. Her captain outlived her by a great deal, and the best thing about the whole business is that he wrote it down, so that a reader today can find out what a Far East patrol was actually like from somebody who was in the control room rather than from a file.