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Abstract

In July 1945 the book His Majesty’s Submarines was published for the Admiralty by the Ministry of Information (MOI). The reading public were given accounts of the war exploits of British submarines and their crews together with high quality photographic images to assist the narrative. The press presented extracts from the book under catchy headlines such as “Valiant Work of Britain’s Submarines”, “Undersea Epics” and “Thrills of Undersea Warfare”. The Guardian welcomed revelations about “the most silent section of the ‘Silent Service’” observing that “we hear almost more about the depredations of enemy submarines than about the achievements of our own.” Indeed, the book claimed that “to the layman the submarine is still a novelty, strange and little understood, and the Submarine Branch of the Navy is cloaked in mystery.” The Times disagreed: “even before the war… books by various authors had done much to dispel the mystery.” During the war, another similar Admiralty approved book, Up Periscope, had been published in 1942. Certainly, older members of the population in 1945 had witnessed, in one way or another, the evolution of the submarine from a weapon of unproven potential in 1900 to one demonstrably capable of influencing the nature and course of naval warfare and the outcome of two global wars.

The above contemporary suggestions, that in 1945 a high degree of opaqueness still surrounded all facets of the Royal Navy (RN) submarine service during the Second World War (WW2), drives the core questions to be addressed in this research: Was it indeed the case that the British public were better informed about the effectiveness of enemy submarine operations? What aspects of RN submarine warfare technology were actually enigmatic? Were submariners and the conditions in which they served truly mysterious? Newspapers provided the public with a major source of information about the conduct of the war, so this research seeks to provide answers to the above questions using them as a contemporary primary source. Specifically, how RN submarines were portrayed to the public will be examined through a systematic and in depth analysis of articles published in Britain’s foremost weekly illustrated newspaper of the time, The Illustrated London News(ILN). In using this source to address the above questions, issues of format, comprehensiveness and veracity of reporting become important issues that can be validated using extant official records and secondary sources. The research is important because what was portrayed would educate the public and influence their understanding and attitudes towards the contribution of RN submarines to the war effort. In addition, the research sheds valuable light on the practicalities and utility of using newspapers for historical research.

The remainder of this chapter presents a review of the literature pertaining to British submarine warfare and briefly describes the approach used to analyse articles retrieved from the ILN. This is followed by three chapters that consider how the ILN covered and portrayed each of the three aspects of RN submarine warfare indicated by the research questions: RN submarine technology; RN submariners; RN Submarine Operations. The final chapter presents a brief summary of the principal findings.

Course: Naval History - MA - C2457P

Date Deposited: 2023-11-01

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14247.html