HMS Voracious (P78): A Quiet War in the Aegean

Built at Newcastle

HMS Voracious was built by Vickers Armstrong at Newcastle-on-Tyne, her keel laid on 27 October 1942, launched on 11 November 1943 and commissioned on 13 April 1944 under Lieutenant Frederick Danford Gordon Challis, a V-class submarine that saw only a brief and comparatively quiet spell of wartime service.

Three Patrols Without a Kill

Voracious completed just three war patrols, her first in the northern North Sea in June and July 1944, followed by two in the Aegean that September and again in October and November.

On 15 September 1944, she attacked the German auxiliary submarine chaser UJ 2110 north of Skopelos Island with three torpedoes, all of which missed, and made a further unsuccessful attack on an unidentified merchant vessel during the same patrol.

Her final patrol focused largely on monitoring the movements of German hospital ships, valuable intelligence work even without a single confirmed sinking to her name.

The End of Her Service

Voracious remained in Australian waters following June 1945 with no further recorded activity, before finally being scrapped at Cochin in India on 19 May 1946, closing out the career of a submarine whose war, while active, never quite delivered the decisive strike so many of her sisters managed to land.