HMS Subtle (P251): Twice Firing at a Japanese Heavy Cruiser

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Subtle was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 1 February 1943, launched on 27 January 1944 and commissioned on 16 April 1944 under Lieutenant Bruce John Bevis Andrew, who would remain her commanding officer through to November 1945.

One captain for the whole of it, which was not the usual pattern. Lieutenant Bruce Andrew, DSC, had her from before she commissioned until after the war ended, seven war patrols and twenty-two months, and a boat that keeps the same man that long develops a way of doing things. HMS Stonehenge, from the same class and the same yard, had the same arrangement and it did not save her.

The name belongs to a peculiar little group. The wartime S boats were given adjectives where other classes got places or gods: Subtle, Stoic, Sturdy, Stubborn, Supreme, Statesman. It reads like a list of qualities the Admiralty hoped the crews would display, and Subtle is the best of them for a submarine, because subtlety is precisely the trade. A submarine that is noticed has already failed.

Seven Patrols in the Far East

Subtle completed seven war patrols between June 1944 and August 1945, chiefly in the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait, sinking a Japanese coaster and six sailing vessels by demolition charge and gunfire between December 1944 and March 1945, and in October 1944 attacking a Japanese minesweeper and its escorting convoy with mixed results.

In July 1945 she also carried out a weather-reporting mission northwest of Sumatra, unglamorous but truly useful work for the wider Allied campaign.

Useful for something specific. By the summer of 1945 the Allies were planning the return to Malaya, and every part of it, the carrier strikes, the bombing of Sumatra, and eventually the landings themselves, depended on knowing what the weather was going to do in a region with almost no reporting stations in Allied hands. Weather moves west to east across that part of the world, so the observations that matter come from upwind, which meant the sea off Sumatra, which meant somebody had to sit there and take readings.

A submarine is a poor weather station and the only one available. She has to surface to see the sky, take her readings, transmit them, and every transmission is a bearing somebody can take on her. Doing it on a schedule, from a fixed area, day after day, is the exact opposite of everything a submarine is supposed to do, and it was still worth a boat and forty-eight men to do it.

Engaging the Haguro

Subtle's most notable moments came in May 1945, when she twice fired torpedoes at the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro, helping in the tracking and eventual sinking of the warship alongside her sister boat HMS Statesman, a coordinated effort between British submarines against one of the larger prizes still available to hunt in the closing months of the Pacific war.

The Last Surface Battle of the War

Those sixty words cover the final fleet action of the Second World War, and they are worth unpacking, because Subtle's contribution to it was real and was not the torpedoes.

At half past ten on the night of 9 May 1945, Subtle and HMS Statesman, two of three British submarines patrolling the Malacca Strait, both reported the same thing: a Japanese heavy cruiser of the Nachi class with a single destroyer in company, steering north-west. The East Indies Fleet had been hunting for her for weeks under the name Operation Dukedom, and here she was.

Haguro was worth hunting. She was a Myoko-class heavy cruiser of about thirteen thousand tons with ten eight-inch guns, and by May 1945 she was the last major Japanese warship still operating in the Indian Ocean. What she was doing that night was carrying supplies to the garrisons in the Andamans and Nicobars, which is a measure of how far things had gone: a heavy cruiser reduced to running stores because nothing else could get through.

A sighting report is the single most valuable thing a submarine produces. Two independent boats reporting the same ship on the same heading converts a rumour into a fix, and a fix is something a fleet can act on. Subtle attacked her twice with torpedoes and did not sink her. It did not matter. She had already done the thing that killed Haguro, which was to tell somebody where she was going.

What came was the 26th Destroyer Flotilla under Captain Manley Power: HMS Venus, HMS Verulam, HMS Vigilant, Virago and Saumarez, five destroyers against a heavy cruiser that outgunned the lot of them put together. Venus picked her up on radar at thirty-four miles, in rain squalls and lightning, and Power did something old-fashioned and audacious with the information: he spread his ships into a crescent across the cruiser's track and let her sail into the middle of it, so that she would be attacked from several bearings at once and could not comb the torpedo tracks.

It worked. Haguro was hit repeatedly by torpedoes and then shelled for the better part of an hour, and she went down off Penang in the early hours of 16 May 1945. Around nine hundred men died with her, including a vice-admiral and a rear-admiral; some three hundred and twenty were picked up. No surface warships fought each other again before the war ended, which makes it the last surface battle of the Second World War, and it was fought at night with torpedoes in a way Nelson would have recognised and radar he would not.

The submarines get about a line in most accounts of it. That is roughly fair in terms of shells fired and roughly unfair in terms of what decided the thing. Five destroyers cannot ambush a cruiser they have not found.

A Long Peacetime Retirement

HMS Subtle returned to British waters in October 1945 and entered reserve, surviving the war intact before finally being sold off to be broken up at Charlestown in July 1959, bringing to a close a fifteen-year postwar existence for a boat whose war record had briefly put her in company with one of the Imperial Japanese Navy's larger warships.

Fifteen years in reserve is a long postscript, and it is the ordinary fate of a wartime submarine that was neither old enough to scrap immediately nor modern enough to be worth rebuilding. She lay at a buoy while the Navy she belonged to reorganised itself around hunting Soviet submarines, and went to the breakers at Charlestown in July 1959 without having fired anything in anger since 1945.

The rest of her record is the ordinary Malacca Strait war that HMS Thule describes: a coaster, six sailing vessels, demolition charges and the deck gun, small wooden things destroyed at close range because there was nothing else left to destroy. Then, for one week in May 1945, she was the reason a Japanese heavy cruiser did not reach the Andamans. Most submarines never get a night like that. Subtle got one and then went back to shooting at junks.