X3 to X54 - The History of the British Midget Submarine

Midget submarines are usually associated with the heroic and desperate attempts to disable or sink the giant German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord in 1942 and 1943, and the equally audacious and successful attack by the Italian Navy’s manned SLC (slow-speed torpedo) on HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant in Alexandria harbour in December 1942. Wisely, Keith Hall chooses briefly to summarise these familiar events at the start of his book, together with an equally succinct resumé of the earlier history of these craft. Thus the bulk of X3 to X54 deals with the much less familiar post-war building and deployment of British midget submarines during a fairly short period in the early years of the Cold War. This was against a background where Britain was seeking to harness rapid developments in military science and technology - embracing nuclear weapons, guided missiles and a burgeoning electronics industry - while coping with severe austerity at home and a deepening divide between the capitalist and communist worlds. One solution was a progressive, long-term programme of midget submarine construction. This seemed to offer both defensive and offensive options in a world where the cataclysmic outcomes stemming from the use of nuclear weapons was an ever-present danger. X-Craft could be used to train harbour defences against a possible offensive by the Russian Navy while, conversely, could be employed to do the same to the enemy. From 1952 onwards, the possibility of fitting what became the four-boat Stickleback Class or its successors with atomic bombs in order to penetrate inside the Soviet bases on the Kola Peninsula or at Kronstadt, became an actively discussed though highly secret proposition. Hall covers the history of the construction of the Stickleback Class at Barrow-in-Furness in the early fifties. The layout of these tiny submarines, displacing just 35.2 tons on the surface and 39.27 submerged, is described in minute detail with the aid of a large number of excellent close-up photographs both of the exterior, but particularly of the interior of the craft. To describe the conditions for the five-man crew on board as spartan would be a gross understatement but, as the author points out, these boats were never intended ‘to loiter at sea’ waiting for a suitable target. The future midget submarine programme was brought to an abrupt halt in mid-1956 so the Stickleback Class, only completed 1954-55, enjoyed the briefest of service lives. However, HMS Stickleback itself was transferred to the Swedish Navy in 1958 and by a circuitous route is now the central exhibit at the innovative Scottish Submarine Centre at Helensburgh near the current RN submarine base at Faslane. The last section of Keith Hall’s book concentrates on this part of the story, which is again supported by a fine series of photographs. Although the author somewhat loses his way with a convoluted explanation of the state of Britain and its naval forces in the early Cold War years, this history of British midget submarines is a straightforward and readable introduction to an interesting and over-looked subject.