Life aboard a submarine in the Med during WW2

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Though first invented in the 19th century, submarines didn’t really come into their own as a weapon of war until World War Two, when they saw widespread use by all parties in all theatres. Able to hide underwater and strike whenever they wanted, they were feared by friend and foe alike, but what was life like for the men that crewed these small underwater craft?

By Fergus O’Sullivan

Like many of the articles in our series on Australians in the Med during WW II we went to the Australians at War Film Archive, a collection of eyewitness accounts of Australian veterans, to see if we could find any answers. We stumbled on the interview with Francis Selby, a British born submariner who moved to Western Australia in the 60s and thus was interviewed for the Archive.

Mr. Selby served aboard several surface vessels in the Royal Navy in the 30s, before volunteering for submarine duty around the time of the Munich crisis, emphasising that he did so for the extra pay. He served aboard a number of submarines in the North Sea and the Mediterranean. He also has an amazing memory, recalling very precisely all the details of how specific classes of submarine worked. In this article we’ll try to give an overview of what the submariner’s life was like based on his recollections.

Life on board a WW2-era submarine

Once he joined the submarine service, Mr. Selby went to the port of Gosport, the main submarine base for the Royal Navy, to train on the HMS Dolphin. He quickly realized that things were done very differently when under the surface of the sea.

To me, the biggest shock I got when I went to Dolphin was that […] we dressed up in overall suits. That was the rig of the day, all the days of the week, overall suits. The discipline as I’d seen it in the gunnery school was very much relaxed. There was discipline there but a different kind of discipline. It was more self-discipline than anything else. You didn’t need people shouting at you from morning to night. People knew what they were supposed to do or had a jolly good idea what they were supposed to do and just did it.

This kind of attitude, where people are supposed to know what they’re doing without being told isn’t for everybody, but Mr. Selby was the type to thrive in this kind of environment. Before the war was over, he would get several promotions and win more than one award for his service.

The other reason the atmosphere was relatively relaxed aboard a submarine was the close quarters. With your shipmates constantly around, you likely developed a pretty tolerant attitude. Mr. Selby explains the layout of the HMS Oberon, an Odin-class submarine.

In Oberon, which was my first submarine, there are one, two, three, four, five, six compartments, each separated from one another by a watertight bulkhead with watertight doors which are normally kept open at sea and the forward of those is the tube space where the torpedo tubes are.
Immediately behind that is what is known as the fore ends which is where the spare torpedoes are kept and also part of the crew live. Beyond that is what is known as the accommodation space which is where the ward room, the officers’ and the chief petty officers’ and the [engineer’s] messes and usually the galley are.

Then you come through the next bulkhead to the control room where the main controls of the submarine are for diving and surfacing and navigating and depth keeping etc. and also at the far end, at the after end of that is the wireless office and the radar and ASDIC [a detection system based on sound] control. Then you come through another bulkhead into what is known as the engine room where you have your diesel engines and your main ballast pump. At the after end of that is the motor room where the main motors are controlled from and beyond the bulkhead there again you come to the after ends and that is where the stokers were [living].

Sleeping & eating

Though Mr. Selby makes light of it, the sleeping arrangements sound rough, too:

[…] certainly some of the people slept on the deck, others managed to sling a hammock in the fore ends. For the chiefs and petty officers, [engineers] etc. in the ward room there were bunks which were hot bunks, you probably shared two bunks between three people. The stokers back aft were the same as the seamen, some managed to sleep in hammocks, some on the deck and some on the mess stools.

When it was time to eat, the crew would have to take down the hammocks and make space between the equipment. This was a pretty roomy sub, too: Mr. Selby’s next posting was on an H-class vessel, which was more cramped:

Well, the H-class submarines were not built for creature comforts at all, full stop. You ate wherever you could. You ate whatever was available which wasn’t very much bearing in mind it was rationing in those days as well. You depended very much on the ability of whoever was deputed to be the cook of the boat and he was not a qualified cook, he was a seaman or a stoker and accommodation itself is very, very primitive. The lucky blokes slept on the deck. The problem was finding space in which to sleep. I’m now talking about the troops of course and not necessarily the ward room or the chiefs and POs.

That’s what I call rough living, bloody rough living and added to that of course you were in a small vessel in the North Sea which would get very rough at times so you can imagine the crockery sliding around all over the place etc. and you were rolling or pitching and tossing. Not particularly pleasant.

Eating and sleeping were cramped, and as a result “cleanliness was not really something that you had to bother about. It wasn’t a major important factor,” says Mr. Selby. When asked about the smell on board, he says all you could really smell was diesel, which overpowered all other smells. Even food taken off board would smell like it.

Toilet training

Mr. Selby also goes into detail on how the toilets worked, which was primitive, to say the least.

[On the HMS Oberon the toilet was] very much the same as you have at home, at least I imagine you have at home, except of course you discharge the contents of the toilet pan by air pressure […] You open a couple of hole valves, one which is a non-return valve and put air pressure into the holding tank underneath and just blow it overboard. What you have to remember to do of course is to not leave the valves open otherwise somebody blows and it doesn’t go overboard it comes in board.

Oberon was unusual in that it had, the crew had two toilets at the after end of the motor room and they were for whatever reason sited alongside one another so that if you were using the inboard of the two toilets the contents of the tank had to pass the outboard toilet before it went out through the pressure hull. So if you happened to be in the outboard toilet with the flap valve open while somebody was blowing the inboard one, you got his.

He smiles when he says it, but makes clear that the cleanup was very, very unpleasant. Besides the risk of covering yourself and your crewmates in excrement, privacy was also not a priority.

In an ‘H’ boat which was a very small one there was only one toilet for the crew and that was sited right after, the very after place of the submarine right in the middle so if all the water tight doors were open as they normally were, when you were sitting on the throne everybody from the fore ends right through the submarine could see you there.

Action in the Med

As uncomfortable as things were, they would be kicked up a notch when it was time for action. As a rule, submarines would be submerged during daylight hours and come up at night to recharge. The idea was to patrol until a target was spotted, fire off torpedoes, and then get away.

As Mr. Selby explains, you don’t want to stick around waiting for the depth charges to go off, not only is a near-miss as loud as a “gunshot in your ear,” a single hit could sink a sub and kill all the men aboard.

Mr. Selby tells one riveting tale about being on patrol in the HMS Upholder, trying to find and sink ships carrying supplies from Italy to Rommel’s troops in North Africa (read all about Australians that fought for Malta’s survival to find out more about that).

I suppose the most publicized one happened on May 24th 1941 when we’d been patrolling close to Messina which is the strait between Italy and Sicily and at dusk on that night we sighted three large ships putting out to sea escorted by. I think it was four destroyers and at that stage we had no ASDIC so we couldn’t listen to the screw beat or anything of that nature, everything had to be done by eye through a periscope.

Our captain decided he had to get very close to these ships to make sure of hitting one and he edged himself through the escorting destroyers got to within about seven hundred yards before he fired his torpedoes […] Both torpedoes hit, sank the Conte Rosso, which was of 19,500 tons and had over 3,000 Italian troops on board. Fortunately the destroyers [escorting the ship] dropped their initial depth charges and[…] decided their main aim was to pick up the survivors so we managed to get out of it and our captain got the Victoria Cross for it.

A further illustration of the hit-and-run nature of submarine warfare comes from another story Mr. Selby tells, which takes place a few month later.

This convoy came in sight and it was three large ships escorted by, I think six destroyers and the captain stayed on the surface because it was dark, fired his torpedoes by eye because the ship was weaving backwards and forwards, spread his torpedoes by eye and we hit two ships one of which sank almost immediately, the other one was badly damaged and stopped […]

We’d fired all four torpedoes to do this so we went deep and reloaded our torpedo tubes and then the captain decided he would go underneath the track of the hit, but not sunk, ship, come up the other side and fire again which we did and the second salvo sank it and the escorting destroyers were so busy getting one back to Tripoli and picking up survivors from the others that we didn’t get one depth charge at all. The two ships we sank were both twenty thousand tons, both loaded with troops and equipment.

Though it may not always have been seen as honourable, this method of warfare cost the Axis dearly, and likely contributed greatly to the eventual success of the North African campaigns. There’s no doubt that the hard service of submariners was a huge contribution to the war effort.

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