"Of all the branches of men in the Forces, there is none which shows more devotion and faces grimmer perils than the submariner. Great deeds are done in the air and on the land; nevertheless, nothing surpasses your exploits."

Winston Churchill

The Silent Service

To the popular media, the term "Wartime Submarines" generally only recounts the exploits of the US Navy's war-winning submarines in the Pacific and, to a lesser degree, the German U-Boats in the Atlantic. Their undoubted courage and skill have been recounted many times at the cinema, in books, on TV and now, on the 'web' and in computer games.

Very little is heard of the British, Dutch, Polish, Norwegian, Greek and Free French submarines - or indeed of Italian or Japanese. Only two films were made about British wartime submarines (one. "Above Us the Waves", about X-Craft and the other, "We Dive at Dawn". made in wartime with a heavy touch of propaganda).

The efforts and exploits of these submarines have generally been forgotten. However, seventy-eight British submarines, plus more boats of the other Allies, and in most cases their entire crews, were lost in the Second World War.

This Site

tells the story of British submarines in the Second World War - their exploits, tactics, life at sea, theatres of operation and much more. There are some references to the submarines of other Allied nations (those listed above with their submarines attached to British Flotillas), but I will leave their history to their own countrymen.

How to find your way around

If you are new to the subject, I recommend going to the Historical Review as your introduction. From that page, you can go to the other general areas, by using each page's drop-down menus. Of course, you may wish to return to this Home page to find all the contents.

The links under that are to pages about the submarine types and a few selected stories of individual submarines. All these pages are accessible from any page on the site.

The 'core' of the site comprises 34 pages of alphabetically listed submarines, accessible from the drop-down boxes at the top of every page and on each page of the list. There is now a 'forward' and 'back' link on the bottom of each list page.

You can also use the links above to get to any submarine you are looking for, and you will find that you can hop to just about any page from wherever you are, in less than 3 'clicks'.

Models

I occasionally get questions about where to get drawings and designs for modelmakers. I am very pleased to advise anybody interested to take a look at Mike Caswell's Submarine Models - build submarines that really dive! Excellent products.

This site is dedicated to a distant relative I never even knew - Able Seaman Reginald J. Chalcraft. Lost in HMS/M Thorn, August 1942.