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.

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.

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.

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.