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.

What a V class boat was is set out in HMS Voracious: a stretched, strengthened, partly welded development of the small U class, good for three hundred feet instead of two hundred and considerably quieter than either. Forty-two were ordered and twenty-two completed, and not one was lost in the war. Upshot came from the second batch of eighteen, ordered in May 1942 when the outcome was still genuinely in doubt and delivered into a war that had turned. Her sister HMS Urtica, launched the day before her at the same yard, had exactly the same experience of it.

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.

Nineteen days in the North Sea in August 1944 and nothing to report is not a wasted patrol, whatever it looks like on paper. By that summer the German surface fleet was mostly in Norwegian fjords or on the bottom, coastal traffic was hugging the shore under heavy escort, and the value of a British submarine off that coast lay in being there. A patrol line that sees nothing has still closed a route, and the boats that did find something only found it because others were watching everywhere else.

The ship that met her on the way home deserves more than the passing mention she gets. HMS Shikari was an Admiralty S class destroyer launched at Sunderland in July 1919, already twenty-five years old and long past any front-line role. On 4 June 1940 she had been the last Royal Navy ship to leave Dunkirk. She made seven trips across and brought out 3,349 men, and when she turned for Dover that final morning there was nothing British left behind her.

By 1944 she was doing something quieter and still necessary: escorting submarines in and out of home waters. That sounds redundant until you consider what a submarine on the surface off the British coast actually looks like from an aircraft. Coastal Command spent the war hunting anything submarine-shaped and had, more than once, attacked its own side. The swept channels through the defensive minefields also had to be navigated exactly, and a boat coming home after nineteen days had a tired ship's company and no certainty about her own position. So a destroyer went out, met her at a fixed point and time, and walked her in. Shikari passed into reserve within a few months of meeting Upshot, and was sold for breaking up in November 1945.

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.

Testing the Thing That Changed Submarines

Two words in that list are doing far more than the rest. Snorkel tests, in 1944 and 1945, means Upshot was working on the single most consequential piece of submarine equipment of the century.

The problem it solved had crippled every submarine ever built. A diesel-electric boat runs her engines on the surface, charging batteries, and runs on those batteries when dived. Which means she has to come up, every day, for hours, and by 1943 coming up in the Atlantic with aircraft radar overhead was a way of dying. The German answer was the schnorchel: a mast with an air intake and an exhaust and a float valve that shut when a wave went over it, so the engines could be run at periscope depth with nothing above water but a pipe. It was not a German invention, and the Dutch had it first, but the Germans put it to sea in numbers from 1944 and it made their boats extremely difficult to find again.

Britain took it apart and copied it. The design that resulted came out of a study of captured German documents and equipment, was fitted to HMS Truant for trials in 1944, and worked almost immediately, which is not usually how these things go. With the new A class already building, a snort was designed in a hurry and put into production for the whole of that class and for most other British submarines afterwards; the Admiralty specification that came out of the work governed the S, T and A classes alike. HMS Truncheon shows what the same thinking did to an existing boat a few years later.

A specification like that is not written from one boat. It is written from a great many hours of somebody running a mast up in a seaway and finding out what happens: whether the valve shuts fast enough, what it does to the men below when it shuts and the diesels keep pulling air out of the boat, how it behaves at speed, how visible the mast and its wake are. That is unpleasant, repetitive, faintly dangerous work, and it is what Upshot was for. The radar trials in the same list are the other half of the same argument, since the counter to a snorting submarine is a radar set that can see a pipe in a sea.

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.

She went into reserve four months after the Japanese surrender and lay there for four years, and Preston broke her up in November 1949 at the age of five. Warships built in a hurry at the end of a war rarely get old. The Royal Navy had far more submarines than it had any use for and kept the ones with the most life in them, and a boat that had spent her whole existence in home waters as a training target was not high on the list.

The right way to weigh her is against HMS Venturer, from the same class and the same programme, who on 9 February 1945 sank a German submarine while both boats were dived, the only time that has ever been done. Venturer's people managed it because they had practised the impossible until it was merely difficult, and everybody in that trade had practised against boats like Upshot. She never really got to join the fight herself. She spent five years making other people better at it, which is a real thing to have done even though nobody ever wrote it in a citation.