SOE

by Fredric Boyce

  No further work had been done on the two-man Welman Mk II pending results of further trials. There seem to be no further references to progress on the Welman Mk II, so it is presumed that it was abandoned. At this time the other submersible project, Welfreighter No. 1, had been launched and had completed preliminary trials at Staines.

  The exchange of letters with FO(S) in late May concerning the comparison of the Welman and the Chariot had clearly worried CD. In June he wrote to Sporborg, his PPS to SO, saying that he had been disturbed by the FO(S) letter of 24 May. He had decided to read for himself the actual report before commenting. It then appeared to him that the Chariot might be superior in some respects but he felt there was a place for both craft.

  As training continued and the day of an actual operation approached, transportation of Welmans and the recruitment of crews were again under consideration. Vice Admiral L.V. Wells, ACOS, understood there was a shortage of volunteers for operations in Norwegian waters but, in his view, the crews should be predominantly British with some suitable Norwegians. In spite of this view, eventually it was decided to fill all six vacancies on the second Welman drivers’ course with Norwegians. CD had already said that Lt Sir George Pollock RN (ret’d) should go to Lyness on the Island of Hoy in the Orkneys to lend his experience to Welman attack plans which would, of course, include the transportation issue. Consideration was given to the use of Motor Gun Boats (MGB) with the submarines stowed on deck. The difficulty with towing them was the speed limitation of six to eight knots but with the Director of Navy Contracts (DNC) devising a different skid from SOE’s on the lines of a floating dock, it was hoped to be able to tow them at twenty knots.

  The suggestion that the Welman might be used for beach-marking work in connection with landing operations led to a decision to equip it with an anchor. Whether this was ever carried out and what form the anchor took has not been determined. The technical details of the carriage of the craft by air were with the Ministry of Aircraft Production who awaited the Air Ministry’s instructions to carry out the remaining experiments.

  On 4 June 1943 Wells wrote to Rear Admiral E.J.P. Brind that he and Barry had visited Station IX to see for themselves the progress on the Welman and had come away impressed by its possibilities. The craft were costing £700–800 to produce; so, even if each one was abandoned after an attack, they would prove economical compared to a torpedo. At that time they were being produced at a rate of two per week but this was anticipated to improve to one per day. The ACOS therefore wished to have twenty-five Welmans complete with crews for his command by the end of August, plus another ten to replace losses. This was clearly good news for Station IX.17

  Around this time (June 1943) seventeen inert Welman charges had been made for trial purposes and fifteen live charges were being manufactured to be fitted into the Pressed Steel Company’s containers. Fuses Section had devoted considerable time to the fuses and time delays on the Welman explosive charge. A demonstration warhead had been made which included manual safety gear, a detonator placer, an electrical anti-removal switch and a clockwork time fuse. It was approved on 15 June and test units were under construction.

  An associated device recently designed and fabricated was the Welman stores container, having seven sections, weighing 120 lb (54 kg) and being ready for user trials. Unfortunately, no description of this unit has been found and one is left to speculate whether this was capable of being floated ashore and how the Station IX engineers had solved the problems of making it watertight.

  By the end of June two Welmans needed repairs using the spares stock of internal equipment at HMS Titania. The latest craft, No. 17, had been delivered by the Pressed Steel Company on 26 June and was undergoing tests at Station IX.

  In July seven officers and men from NORIC (the Norwegian Independent Company) were selected for Welman training and this was started at Gosport Royal Navy Submarine Establishment the following month. This party later proceeded to HMS Titania for further instruction and operational training.

  The question now arose as to where to set up a formal base to test Welmans in sea conditions as opposed to the relatively calm waters of the Queen Mary reservoir at Staines, where initial testing could still take place. Fishguard in south-west Wales was proposed but concerns were expressed by the Director of Local Defence because it was a search port for traffic to and from Eire and the Iberian peninsula which was known to harbour a considerable pro-German element. The Director of Naval Intelligence did not agree with the proposal, pointing out that Fishguard was not in a Regulated or Protected Area and cranes used to lift the craft into the water would be visible to the public. He suggested a Regulated Area such as the Helford estuary in southern Cornwall but the Head of Military Branch II said this port did not have accommodation and would be becoming busier with cross-channel operations. So the security objections were overruled and the second floor of the Great Western Hotel was taken over for fifteen officers, and existing Naval huts in the area were set aside to accommodate thirty-five men. Others were put in an annexe to the Great Western Hotel.18

  In August operational plans were developing and the codeword ‘Barbara’ was allotted to cover Welman missions undertaken in cooperation with ACOS off the coast of Norway. (This codeword seems to have been duplicated as it was also used for an operation to destroy part of the Norwegian railway network.)

  In September Lerwick informed London that the first two trained Welman drivers were expected in Shetland, from whence they would set out on their missions, on about the 20th of the month. They wanted to know when Howarth would be available for planning and were told he would be arriving around the 9th to act in a similar capacity for the forthcoming Barbara operations as Sir George Pollock had done for earlier ‘Vestige’ operations. This meant he would be attached to Maj Sclatter’s staff to advise Barbara parties on all Norwegian and SOE matters and to assist in the planning work.

  In October a Welman which had been under trials at HMS Varbel had received a highly critical report. Smoke laying was possible but was too slow to be of any practical use. Beaching for reconnaissance was hazardous. Not only did it take a long time (twelve hours in all between tides) but the craft tended to fall over on one side which caused the battery acid to spill and the trim to be upset. Firing from the Welman was said to be wildly inaccurate. Since it was not normally equipped with armament this presumably referred to firing a weapon from the open conning tower. Seven hours of operation in the cramped conditions was considered to be too onerous for the normal operator. There was little visibility at night and the crewman was unable to hear at all. The craft was unstable without its jettisonable keel so in an emergency when it was dropped one did not know which way up the craft would arrive at the surface.19 In the same month degaussing equipment, to protect the vessels from magnetic mines, had been installed at Staines. The three underwater coils each formed a rectangle 350 yards long by 25 yards wide and were wired to a hut on the breakwater.20

  On 20 November 1943 four Welmans set out on the craft’s first operation and what was to be its only contact with the enemy: details are given in Chapter 15. Here we simply note that the operation failed partly through bad luck. All the Welmans were scuttled as planned (although one was recovered by German forces before it sank) but the reports by the three men recovered after Operation Barbara indicate that only Welman 48 exhibited any mechanical defects. This was a leaking propeller shaft gland which eventually led to its abandoning the attack. Trials to confirm the craft’s endurance for the operation had revealed a slack propeller shaft bearing, a heavily scored shaft and the propeller boss rubbing on the tube. A complete new propeller shaft assembly was fitted but it appears that the bedding-down of the seal was to take longer than anticipated and leakage into the hull resulted during the operation. Despite this setback production of Welmans continued into 1944.

  SOE’s executive was strengthened at this time when a new second Vice Chief of SOE was appointed: Mr M.P. Murray from the Air Ministry was t
o have the designation V/CD.2.

  In the first quarter of 1944 Allied forces were gearing up for the invasion of Europe and it must have been obvious that the scope for the use of Welman and similar midget submarines was becoming strictly limited. Not only would resources be demanded at the main theatre of war, but the senior decision makers would have their attention diverted to that area also. It was decided that production was to cease after the manufacture of Welman No. 100. However, No. 88 was being fitted with remote controls, the idea being that the driver would disembark carrying a small air bottle attached to the craft by a light airline before submerging it out of sight. Having reconnoitred the shore he would return to the water’s edge, recover the air bottle and resurface the Welman for his getaway. A unit known as the Middle East Raiding Forces were interested and, subject to Naval approval, it was thought that there might be a demand for it.

  Those concerned with the transportation of Welmans had turned their radical thinking to the idea of dropping Welmans into water by parachute. For this they were considering a Mark V special craft whose details have not been discovered, one of which was nearing completion and was to be sent to Fishguard for proofing by mid-February 1944. This dropping technique required the development of a release gear to detach the parachutes once the Welman was in the water. The record in the PRO states that ‘the stores previously dropped on land would be dropped on water’ from which one could deduce that initial trials of the release gear, perhaps with only ballast, had been carried out over land where recovery was assured. Provided the results were satisfactory the experiment would be written up and accompanied by a film illustration for FO(S), COS and any others who might be interested. A satisfactory drop of a dummy Welman (whether this was the Mark V special craft is not known) was made from a Lancaster into the water off the Suffolk coast at Orford Ness on 26 April. The system used four 96-feet diameter parachutes giving it a gentle descent and immersing the craft into the water in a satisfactory manner. One of the parachute releases worked perfectly but the second was rather late in releasing due, it was surmised, to the tight tolerances in the new mechanism. Viewed from a position of comfort and safety over fifty years after the event it is difficult to imagine how it was thought possible, let alone economical, to clandestinely introduce a small submarine beneath four huge parachute canopies. Unless it was intended to drop the submarine close to a mother ship which had the driver on board, the hapless crewman would have to sit in the cold and claustrophobic craft in the bomb bay of a bomber until he heard the doors open and was suddenly falling towards the sea. Welman crews were brave men but such a prospect must have made even them blanch.

  When Mountbatten moved from CCO to the Far East, the Welman project lost an influential supporter. Gen Robert Laycock, who took over the post, had no interest in midget submarines and told the Admiralty on 15 February that CCO had no further use for Welmans. Furthermore, Rear Admiral Barry was not keen to find other uses for them. But in the Far East Mountbatten’s enthusiasm for the craft was still evident as late as November 1944. A report into the facilities and training system at the Careening Bay Camp at Garden Island in Cockburn Sound near Fremantle, Western Australia states that it was intended to provide a base for ten Welmans and ten Sleeping Beauties. The camp also had a degaussing coil for Welmans.21 In October the first Welman arrived from England. They had no Welman operations in mind so it was used for preliminary training for the Welfreighter. The Australians found the one-man craft difficult to manage so they later designed a periscope for it, a feature which, ironically, might have reversed the outcome of its only operation.22

  On 17 April 1944 the order had been given by the Head of M11 that ‘production of Welman and associated equipment was to stop forthwith’. The Staines station was to become a Naval establishment, the Admiralty Testing Station, but its Commanding Officer was to be Maj H.Q.A. Reeves, RASC, the acoustics expert and inventor of the Sleeping Beauty. When the war drew to a close the facilities at Staines were taken over by the Ministry of Aircraft Production at the end of August 1945. ISRB had taken over the United Dairies Co. Ltd premises at 487 Western Avenue, Park Royal, London W3 for storage of Welmans, Welfreighters and Sleeping Beauties and its Commanding Officer was Capt A. Lane. On 13 September 1945 the store held 60 Welmans in the process of cannibalisation and nineteen Welfreighters as well as quantities of spare parts. By 6 October they were all gone.23

  So ended the short operational life of this unusual craft. Conceived and built in the depths of Hertfordshire many miles from the nearest sea, three of them ended up at the bottom of a Norwegian fjord. Sixty days of hard weather in the autumn of 1944 and the fact that Norwegian operations were, in any case, suspended between mid-May and early August because the nights were too light to provide cover, meant that perhaps the Welman was denied the opportunities to demonstrate its potential.

  At least six Welmans were delivered to Australia, eventually to be declared surplus to requirements, loaded onto LST 3014 and dumped off Rottnest Island in 1946.

  In retrospect several commentators have suggested that the design of the Welman was seriously flawed from the start. However, the records seem to suggest that it was strongly supported by FO(S) in the form of Admiral Sir Max Horton, an experienced submariner who had been involved with conventional submarine design since 1918. He, if anyone, would have been in a position to make a critical assessment of the Welman, but there is no record of his having done so. On the other hand it may well be that criticism of the design was ignored or suppressed – for it is well established that Dolphin was not one to accept and respond willingly to opposing views.

  In the 1970s a rusted and encrusted Welman was recovered by HMS Reclaim from the seabed in Rothesay Bay off the Isle of Bute and another was recovered from the former training area in Scapa Flow in 1980, the crewmen having apparently escaped. Whether their limited use had any connection with the story that Admiral Mountbatten as Chief of Combined Operations had narrowly escaped drowning while testing one in the Welsh Harp reservoir in north-west London and arrived late and wet for a meeting at Chequers will perhaps never be known. A glass port had failed and it was necessary for him to jettison the heavy keel in order to regain the surface.

  However well-meaning the project, it cannot be denied that the design was carried out by a team of enthusiastic amateurs in the environment of a research establishment, albeit in wartime. The first examples were constructed in what was little more than a sheet metal workshop set up in a hangar building. One cannot help feeling that it was the Royal Navy who had the experience of submarine design and operation and closer cooperation between them and SOE in the conceptual stages might have resulted in a more effective weapon. Nevertheless, the craft that went into action showed that SOE had produced a practical vessel.

  THE WELFREIGHTER

  The Welman had developed initially from ideas for infiltrating agents when other means had been denied to SOE. The provision of stores to agents also faced the same problems in the early years and therefore it was natural that a seaborne means of supply should be considered. While trials on the first two Welman one-man submarines got under way in November 1942, tests started on a quarter-scale model of the Welfreighter in Vickers’ experimental tank at St Albans. The Welfreighter is often misleadingly referred to as the Welman’s big brother. It was certainly not a two- or three-man version of the midget submarine, with a detachable explosive charge on its nose. As the name implied, it was intended for transport and was designed to carry a ton (1,018 kg) of stores in seven drums on the freight deck close in to a secluded enemy-held shore. On arrival at its destination the drums were to be floated off to the reception committee. The prototype Welfreighter was an incredibly ugly vessel with three rectangular ports facing forward in a raised section near the bow and the remainder of the superstructure sloping down to the rear. The design must have been radically altered because photographs of a model show a much more aesthetically pleasing craft with a conning tower amidships. Subsequently th
e Welfreighter had quite an elegant hull with a sharp bow and a deck which swept downwards and outwards about a third of the way back. The superstructure appeared rather crude, though no doubt functional, and included rising rails which looked as if they were intended to deflect underwater obstacles above the ‘bridge’ or ‘conning tower’, but were in fact exhaust pipes from the diesel engine used for propulsion on the surface. Behind this ‘bridge’ on early models was a large, box-like feature used during surface trials. The vessel was 37 ft 3 in long, 7 ft 1 in wide and had an operating depth of 50 ft. It weighed 13 tons 5 cwt (13,439 kg) and, powered by a 42 hp Gardiner 4LK diesel engine, could reach a surface speed of 6 knots. On the surface the diesel engine drove a single large propeller but, when submerged, NiFe batteries drove two small propellers. The vessel would normally travel low on the surface where it was reasonably out of view of the casual lookout. On approaching an enemy-held shore or in an emergency, however, it was capable of submerging out of sight. Compressed air cylinders for use when under water were strapped in a well behind the conning tower.

  By the end of 1942, further research into the Welfreighter had taken place using the quarter-scale model and the surface performance was promising enough for manufacture of the full-scale keel and keel bracings to take place. The experiments continued but revealed problems and the quarter-scale model had to be redesigned, making it highly stable when towed at 10– 15 knots. By February 1943, alongside the one-man submarines, production of a full-scale model of the Welfreighter was under way and purchase of the engine, pumps and controls was proceeding. In March Station IX was being pressed with the urgency of the work to develop the submersibles and had half completed the outer skin of the Welfreighter. A month later satisfactory progress had been made, the motor and shaft having been lined up, but another gearbox was awaited from Messrs Vospers. It was to be 8 May 1943 before the first of these vessels was launched for preliminary trials at Staines.24