HMS Upshot (P82): A Career Built Entirely on Training

Laid Down at Barrow

HMS Upshot was built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 3 May 1943, launched on 24 March 1944 and commissioned on 15 May 1944 under Lieutenant Hartley Withers Wilkinson, a V-class submarine of the second batch of eighteen boats ordered in May 1942, arriving too late in the war to see the kind of combat her earlier sisters had experienced.

A Single Patrol

Upshot's only recorded war patrol began on 2 August 1944, sending her into the North Sea, a mission that concluded on 21 August after rendezvousing with the escort vessel HMS Shikari, without the dramatic encounters that had defined so many earlier U and V-class patrols.

A Career of Quiet Usefulness

From her commissioning through to the end of 1945, Upshot's real contribution came through training rather than combat, taking part in anti-submarine drills, radar trials, snorkel tests and gunnery practice at Scottish naval bases including Holy Loch, Campbeltown and Tobermory, exactly the kind of unglamorous but essential work that kept the wider fleet sharp even as the war drew to its close.

The End of Her Service

HMS Upshot was decommissioned into reserve on 19 December 1945 and was scrapped at Preston on 22 November 1949, closing out a career built almost entirely on preparing others for a fight she herself never really got to join.