On His Majesty’s Silent Service

Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines.

Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines. Sure, their losses weren’t quite as bad as the German U-boat fleet, where your chances of being killed were four in five. But in the course of the war about one third of British submariners lost their lives; and in the earlier years your chances of coming back from a mission alive were no more than 50/50.

Bomber crews, of course, had to face similarly grim odds. But at least they got back home to clean sheets, a hot shower, a beer and a fag or two. On subs a patrol meant at the very least a fortnight in a foetid, claustrophic hell of cramped, shared bunks and rank air sometimes poisoned with chlorine gas, your clothes perpetually damp and stained with oil, with no water to wash with, increasingly rotten food, and the constant, nagging fear that at any second you could die one of the most horrible deaths imaginable.