HMS Vandal: Lost Four Days Into Her Career

Barrow-Built

HMS Vandal was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down in March 1942 and launched in November that year, one of a batch of four sister U-class submarines ordered in the summer of 1941. She was commissioned on 20 February 1943 and left Barrow that same day bound for the Clyde, arriving at Holy Loch to join the 3rd Submarine Flotilla for working up.

Working up sounds administrative and it is the most dangerous month in a submarine's life. A newly commissioned boat is a hull full of machinery that has been tested by the builder and never used in earnest, crewed by men who have mostly never sailed together, and the whole point of the exercise is to find out what does not work by doing it.

The deep dive is the sharp end of that. Everything about a submarine that keeps the sea out is fine at periscope depth and progressively less forgiving further down, because the pressure on every gland, valve, joint and hull fitting roughly doubles every hundred feet or so. A fitting that seeps at fifty feet floods at two hundred. So the first deep dive is the moment the boat is asked, all at once, whether the yard got everything right.

Vandal had passed her acceptance trials in the Gareloch without difficulty and was on her way to do exactly that.

The Shortest Career of Any Royal Navy Submarine

What followed was, by most accounts, the shortest career of any submarine in the Royal Navy. Vandal underwent acceptance trials in the Gareloch, reportedly passing them without difficulty, before moving to Kilbrannan Sound between Arran and the Kintyre peninsula for a short working up programme that was to include a deep dive to two hundred feet.

She was seen getting under way from her anchorage off Lochranza on the morning of 24 February 1943, four days after commissioning, and was due back at Holy Loch that evening. She never returned, and had not yet completed a single war patrol.

A Cause That Remains Particularly Unknown

Thirty seven men were lost, four officers and thirty three ratings, and it must be said plainly that the cause of Vandal's loss has never been established. This is not a case where one explanation has simply faded from popular memory in favour of another, every serious source on the subject, from specialist submarine historians to the divers who later examined the wreck, states that the cause remains undetermined.

Early theories pointed to human error, an open hatch during a dive, but underwater inspection later showed the boat was on the surface rather than diving when whatever happened, happened, which undercuts that explanation.

A further theory, put forward by one expedition leader who examined the wreck, suggests that maintenance work on an instrument called the Ottway log may have led to flooding, and that the forward escape hatch, found open on the wreck while others were shut, may point to a desperate escape attempt after the boat began to founder.

The Same Failure Killed Another Boat Twelve Weeks Later

It is worth knowing what a log is, because the word sounds harmless and the thing is not. A log measures a ship's speed through the water, and it does it with a small sensor that projects through the bottom of the hull into the sea. Which means it is a hole in the pressure hull, with a valve on the inboard end of it, and anybody working on the instrument is working on a fitting that is all that stands between the compartment and the Firth of Clyde.

And that is not a theoretical worry. It killed another U-class submarine three months later, in the same waters, on the same sort of programme, and in that case the cause was established beyond doubt.

On 30 May 1943, off Campbeltown, HMS Untamed finished an anti-submarine exercise and did not come up. She was salvaged, and the reason was found: the forward part of the boat had flooded through the sluice valve of the ship's log, which had been installed incorrectly.

What happened after that is the part that stays with you. The men who were still alive tried to escape from the engine room, and the attempt failed because a second valve had also been installed the wrong way round. When she was raised, the body of her Chief Engine Room Artificer was found in the escape chamber, beneath the escape hatch. He is buried at Campbeltown and the rest of her company at Dunoon.

Untamed was reconditioned, renamed HMS Vitality and served until 1946.

None of that tells us what happened to Vandal, and it would be wrong to pretend that it does. What it does mean is that the log theory is not speculation about something that has never been known to happen. It is a documented failure mode that destroyed a sister boat, twelve weeks later, a few miles away, during working up. And Vandal's forward escape hatch was found open when others were shut.

None of this amounts to a confirmed answer, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.

Confusion Over Where She Lay

There was, for decades, real uncertainty about where Vandal actually came to rest. Wartime search efforts were hampered by conflicting evidence, an aircraft reported an oil slick near Lochranza but the search was directed instead further south around Inchmarnock, and it is this early, mistaken assumption that has sometimes attached itself to her story since.

The wreck was eventually located in Kilbrannan Sound, close to where that original oil slick had in fact been sighted, and roughly a mile and a half north west of Lochranza, not off Inchmarnock at all.

Found at Last, Half a Century On

The wreck was located around 1994, following renewed investigative work that cross referenced fishermen's reports of nets snagging on an obstruction with Vandal's likely track; HMS Hurworth located the wreck in June 1994. Royal Navy vessels surveyed and confirmed the find, and she was formally declared a war grave in 1995, now protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

That protection is worth explaining because it is stronger than most people assume. A vessel designated under the Act is a controlled site, which means diving on it, entering it or disturbing anything on or in it is a criminal offence without a licence, and that applies whether the wreck is in British waters or not.

The reasoning is straightforward. Thirty-seven men are still inside her, they were never recovered, and the boat is their grave in the plainest sense of the word. Divers may look and may not touch or enter, and every year a certain number of British submarine wrecks are damaged or stripped elsewhere in the world by people who take the view that a war grave in international water is nobody's business.

She lies largely intact with no external damage that explains anything, which is why she is both a war grave and an unsolved question, and why nobody is going to open her to find out.

She lies largely intact, with no visible external damage that would explain her loss, a quiet, undisturbed resting place for the men still aboard her.

The ship that found her deserves her name in the story. HMS Hurworth is a Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel, and finding a fifty-year-old submarine in Kilbrannan Sound is exactly what a minehunter is built to do: her sonar is designed to pick a mine the size of an oil drum out of a cluttered seabed, so a two-hundred-foot submarine is a large and obvious target once she is looking in the right square.

Which is the whole difficulty, and the reason it took fifty-one years. Nobody had been looking in the right square. The 1943 search went south towards Inchmarnock while the oil slick that actually mattered had been reported off Lochranza, and it took somebody cross-referencing fishermen's reports of nets snagging on an obstruction against Vandal's likely track to work out where to send a ship at all.

Remembered at Lochranza

A memorial to Vandal and her crew stands on the shore at Lochranza on Arran, a black granite monolith bearing all thirty seven names, unveiled in May 1997 by the Submarine Old Comrades Association.

Fifty-four years between the sinking and the memorial, and fifty-one between the sinking and anybody knowing where she was. For the families that is two generations of not being told anything, and it is why the black granite at Lochranza with all thirty-seven names on it matters as much as it does. It is the first thing anybody was ever able to point at.

She is not alone in the category. HMS Thunderbolt, as Thetis, went down on trials in Liverpool Bay in 1939 with ninety-nine men aboard and was raised, rebuilt and sent back to sea. Untamed went down off Campbeltown three months after Vandal and was raised too. HMS Untiring was expended as a target long after her war was over. British submarines were lost to the enemy in considerable numbers, and a surprising proportion of the rest were lost to the sea, to the yard, or to a valve fitted the wrong way round.

Four days in commission, no patrol, no enemy, and thirty-seven men. It is the shortest career in the Royal Navy submarine service and there is still nobody who can say why it ended.

A second memorial in Castle Gardens, Dunoon, jointly commemorates Vandal alongside HMS Untamed, another Clyde based submarine lost with all hands that same year, and an annual remembrance service is still held at Lochranza, attended by relatives, submariners' associations and sea cadets.

Eighty years on, this remains a loss that is actively and personally remembered, not simply a line in a wartime casualty list.