HMS Stratagem (P234): One Victory, Then Lost Days Later

The Build: Birkenhead

HMS Stratagem was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 15 April 1942, launched on 21 June 1943 and commissioned on 9 October 1943, a third-batch S-class submarine that went on to serve in the Far East against Japan.

The S class were the workhorses, and the third batch were the best of them: about 217 feet, a crew of around fifty, six bow tubes and one aft, built in numbers because they were quick to build and small enough to be useful in the confined seas Britain kept having to fight in. By 1944 that meant the Malacca Strait, which is shallow, narrow, muddy and hemmed in by Japanese-held coastline on both sides. It is worth holding on to the word shallow. It comes back at the end of this.

Three Quiet Patrols

Stratagem's first three Far East patrols brought little in the way of results. Her first, off the Andaman Islands in June and July 1944, saw her attack three Japanese merchant vessels without a confirmed kill.

Her second, west of Siam in July and August 1944, found no targets at all, and her third, in the same area that September and October, was limited to shelling warehouses and buildings on Great Coco Island rather than any ship action.

Those three read like failure and were nothing of the kind. By the middle of 1944 the Japanese merchant fleet in those waters had largely stopped existing, partly because American submarines in the South China Sea had sunk it and partly because what was left moved at night, in shallow water, hugging the coast. A patrol that finds nothing is not a patrol that did nothing: it is five or six weeks of a boat sitting in the heat off an enemy coast with the air going stale, looking. HMS Thule describes what that campaign had come down to.

Shelling warehouses on Great Coco Island is the same story in miniature. A submarine surfaces off an island, shoots up whatever storage the enemy has put there with a three-inch gun, and goes away again, because there is genuinely nothing better to do with the ammunition. Others were doing more interesting work in the same water: HMS Stoic was landing men on the Sumatran coast, and HMS Telemachus found a Japanese submarine in the Strait that July.

A Single Success in the Malacca Strait

On her fourth Far East patrol, and her sixth of the war, in the Strait of Malacca in November 1944, Stratagem finally found her mark: on 19 November she torpedoed and sank the Japanese tanker Nichinan Maru, a vessel of 1,945 tons, the only confirmed victory of her entire career.

One confirmed sinking in six patrols sounds thin until you look at what she sank. The Nichinan Maru was a tanker. Japan had taken the oil of the Dutch East Indies in 1942 and the entire point of holding Malaya and Sumatra was to move that oil north to Japan, so a tanker in the Malacca Strait was not just another ship. Nineteen hundred tons is small, but small tankers were what was left by late 1944, and they were being sunk faster than they could be replaced.

Lost Days Later

That success proved short-lived. Just three days later, on 22 November 1944, Stratagem was detected by Japanese aircraft and subjected to a depth-charge attack by the submarine chaser CH 35. Attempts to bring her back to the surface failed, and she sank to the bottom of the Strait with most of her company still aboard.

Fourteen Men in the Fore Ends

That sentence covers the part worth telling. Stratagem was hit hard, and the sea came in, and the boat went to the bottom. What happened next happened inside her, on the seabed, in the dark, and it is the reason anybody remembers her at all.

Fourteen men got themselves into the forward torpedo compartment, the fore ends, and shut the door behind them. That is the compartment a submarine escapes from, because it has an escape hatch and because it is the furthest point from where the damage usually is. The torpedo officer, Lieutenant Douglas, was with them and took charge. The rest of the ship's company were already gone.

Then they had to do the thing that every submariner is trained for and almost none ever has to do. To escape you flood your own compartment deliberately, up to your chest and then up to your chin, until the pressure inside matches the sea outside, because the hatch will not open until it does. You stand in rising black water in a sealed steel room and wait for it to reach your face. Then somebody opens the hatch and you go up.

The one piece of luck they had was the Malacca Strait itself. It is shallow, and a shallow wreck is a survivable one; from any real depth none of them would have got out at all, and coming up too fast from deep water kills you a different way. Ten men made it out of the boat. Accounts differ on how many were still alive when they reached the surface, some saying all ten and some saying eight. The Royal Navy spent decades afterwards working out how to do this better, and HMS Orpheus carries the record they eventually set doing it.

Ten of her men were taken prisoner, and of those, only three survived the remainder of the war, a notably painful loss ratio that stands as a sober reminder of just how unforgiving captivity in Japanese hands could be for Allied submariners.

It is worth setting out what those men actually went through, because "taken prisoner" covers a great deal. They had just escaped a sunken submarine, and they were pulled out of the water by the people who had sunk it and beaten. They were taken to Singapore and then shipped to Japan, and they were interrogated, repeatedly, because submarine crews were assumed to know about codes, minefields and patrol areas and were treated accordingly.

Submariners were a special case in Japanese captivity for exactly that reason. They were intelligence sources first and prisoners second, and many were never registered as prisoners of war at all, which meant the Red Cross did not know they existed and nobody at home knew they were alive. Most of those taken did not come back. One account says the men who died were executed by their captors; that is a serious charge and the record does not settle it, so it is set down here as what one source says rather than as established fact.

The full cost is on the memorial: forty-five men of Stratagem's company died on 22 November 1944, in the boat or getting out of her. Only a handful more died afterwards, in Japanese hands, over the following nine months.

The three who did come home were freed on 26 August 1945, eleven days after the surrender and nine months after they had stood chest-deep in cold water in the dark waiting for a hatch to open. Stratagem herself is still on the bottom of the Malacca Strait with most of her crew aboard, and the boat that sank one tanker in six patrols has an ending that rather outweighs her tally.