HMS Stratagem was an S-class submarine

British S class submarine (1931)

The S-class submarines of the Royal Navy were originally designed and built during the modernisation of the submarine force in the early 1930s to meet the need for smaller boats to patrol the restricted waters of the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea replacing the British H class submarines...

 of the Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

, and part of the Third Group built of that class. She was built by Cammell Laird and launched on 21 June 1943. So far she has been the only ship to bear the name Stratagem.

Career

She served in the Pacific

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

 for most of her short career, where she sank the Japanese tanker Nichinan Maru and unsuccessfully attacked the German submarine U-181

Unterseeboot 181

German submarine U-181 was a Type IXD2 U-boat of the German Kriegsmarine during World War II. The submarine was laid down on 15 March 1941 at the AG Weser yard at Bremen, launched on 30 December 1941, and commissioned on 9 May 1942 under the command of Kapitänleutnant Wolfgang Lüth...

.

Sinking

Stratagem left Trincomalee

Trincomalee

Trincomalee is a port city in Eastern Province, Sri Lanka and lies on the east coast of the island, about 113 miles south of Jaffna. It has a population of approximately 100,000 . The city is built on a peninsula, which divides the inner and outer harbours. Overlooking the Kottiyar Bay,...

on 10 November 1944 to patrol in the vicinity of Malacca where it was believed the Japanese were loading ships with bauxite ore. On 19 November she attacked and sank the tanker Nichinan Maru, but on 22 November she was spotted by a Japanese aircraft. She attempted to dive and escape but the aircraft directed the sub-chaser CH 35 to where it had dived. CH 35 launched depth charges, the first of which caused the submarines bow to strike the bottom. The submarine was plunged into darkness and the forward part began to flood. Attempts to shut the watertight door to the forward compartment failed and the crew were forced to abandon the ship. Ten of her crew were taken prisoner, of whom only three survived captivity.