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.

The V class was not really a new design and the Admiralty never pretended otherwise: on paper it was the U-Class Long Hull 1941-42 programme, which is to say a stretched and strengthened version of the small U boats that had been fighting in the Mediterranean since 1940. The changes were worth having. The pressure hull went from half an inch of plating to three-quarters and was partly welded rather than riveted throughout, which took her safe diving depth from about two hundred feet to three hundred. The stern was lengthened so that water reached the propellers at an easier angle, and the bows were fined. Both changes were about noise, which by 1943 was understood to be the thing that killed submarines.

Forty-two were ordered, all of them from Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow or at Walker on the Tyne, and twenty-two were finished before the orders were cut back. The statistic that matters is at the other end: not one V class boat was lost during the war. For a submarine class that served in the North Sea, the Mediterranean and the Far East that is close to remarkable, and it is a reasonable verdict on the design. HMS Untiring, of the U class she was developed from, shows what the earlier boats were like.

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.

The dates are worth having in full, because they show how much of a submarine's war was spent getting somewhere. She ran her acceptance trials in the Clyde in March 1944 and commissioned at Holy Loch. Her first patrol ran from 30 June to 18 July 1944 in the northern North Sea. She then went south with convoy KMS 85 to Gibraltar between 1 and 13 August, and on to Malta with convoy UGS 51 between 29 August and 3 September. Her second patrol, and her first in the Mediterranean, ran from 7 to 22 September. The third followed in October and November. That is four and a half months of war, of which perhaps seven weeks were spent on patrol.

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.

That second attack has a date and a count. On 17 September she fired four torpedoes at a merchant vessel north of the Skopelos Channel and hit nothing with those either. Seven torpedoes in three days, two targets, no result. It is a poor return by any measure and it is worth being fair about why.

The Aegean in the autumn of 1944 was not a target-rich sea in the way the phrase usually implies. The Germans were pulling out of Greece and the islands, quitting Athens in the middle of October, and the traffic Voracious was hunting was an evacuation: caiques, small coasters and the armed trawlers escorting them. A submarine chaser like UJ 2110 was a converted fishing vessel of a few hundred tons drawing very little water. Firing a twenty-one inch torpedo set to run at a sensible depth at something like that is close to a coin toss, because the torpedo will very often pass underneath it, and a shallower setting risks the weapon broaching and running wild.

The water did not help either. The Aegean is shallow, clear and full of islands, which means a submarine has less room to manoeuvre, less depth to hide in and a real chance of being seen from the air while at periscope depth. Boats of this size carried four bow tubes and a handful of reloads, so a commanding officer who fired seven torpedoes in three days had spent most of what he had. Voracious was doing a difficult job in bad conditions against targets her weapons were not designed for.

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.

That work deserves more than the passing mention it usually gets, because the German hospital ships in the Aegean that autumn were effectively the published timetable of the evacuation. A German signal of 22 October 1944 disclosed that the troops at Thessaloniki were not to move until twenty-four hours after the hospital ship Gradisca, due in on the 26th, had sailed again. Knowing where the hospital ships were and when they moved told the Allies when everything else was going to move. A submarine sitting off an island writing down what she sees is not a wasted submarine, even if nothing she reports is ever attributed to her. That patrol also included survey work on the minefields, which is another job nobody gets a medal for.

Halfway Round the World, and Then Nothing

What happened next takes up most of her commissioned life and almost none of her reputation. She left Malta on 21 November 1944 and reached Colombo on 18 December, going by way of Port Said and Aden. In December she was exercising off Colombo against Indian naval vessels, playing the enemy for ships learning to hunt submarines. On 15 January 1945 she sailed for Australia, refuelled at Exmouth Gulf, and arrived at Fremantle on 5 February.

Fremantle was the great Allied submarine base of the southern hemisphere and boats went from there into the Java Sea and the approaches to Singapore. Voracious did not. She went on to Melbourne and then Sydney between 14 February and 2 March, and from 2 March to 29 June 1945 she exercised off Sydney and Brisbane. Four months of it. On 14 May her commanding officer changed: Lieutenant Frederick Challis, who had had her since before she commissioned, was relieved by Lieutenant Donald Rupert Wilson of the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve, who held her until 22 October.

Being a training target sounds like a demotion and was not treated as one. Anti-submarine forces cannot learn their trade without a real submarine to hunt, handled by people trying not to be found, and in 1945 the Royal Australian Navy and the British Pacific Fleet needed a great deal of that practice. It is unglamorous, it produces no tonnage and it appears in no citation, and a fair number of the escorts that got convoys through owed something to a boat like this one letting them practise.

The End of Her Service

Voracious remained in Australian waters after June 1945, with nothing further recorded of her movements, 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.

She was two years old when she was broken up, and it is worth putting her next to a boat of her own class before deciding what to make of her. HMS Venturer came from the same programme and the same yards, went to Norwegian waters instead of the Aegean, and on 9 February 1945 sank the German submarine U-864 while both boats were submerged, which had never been done before and has not been done since. Voracious fired seven torpedoes at small craft among the Greek islands and hit nothing.

The difference between those two careers is very largely a matter of where each boat was sent and what happened to swim past her. Both were well-built boats with competent crews doing what they were told. One of them got a chance that comes along once in the history of submarine warfare and took it. The other spent her war watching hospital ships, surveying minefields and letting Australian escorts practise, which is what most submarines actually did and what almost nobody writes down.