Subsmash: The Mysterious Disappearance of HM Submarine Affray

[Prof]

I've just finished reading this and I thought I'd post a brief review here.

The book details the story of the loss and subsequent search for HMS Affray, an 'A'-class submarine lost on excercise on 16th May 1951. The book draws heavily from the personal testimony of relatives of crewmembers, as well as those crewmembers who left the boat shortly before her final departure. The author has also reviewed Admiralty archives declassified in the 1980s.

First of all, the book does not appear to have been proof-read. There are frequent grammatical or typographical errors (confusion of 'there' vs 'their', swapping 'trial' for 'trail'), as well as formatting errors in the text. A description of Affray's movements during the late 1940's contradicts itself from paragraph to paragraph. There is a sentence which simply does not make sense, despite repeated attempts to interpret it. The errors are so frequent that I found myself questioning some of the author's statements simply because I had no confidence that I wasn't reading another typing error.

I felt that the book gave too much time to personal statements from relatives of crewmembers, especially as they rarely added much to the discussion. Hear-say and personal letters seem to be given more authority than statements from former Affray crewmembers taken from the Admiralty Board of Enquiry.

The descriptions of the search and rescue operations are detailed and contain good information which I have not found elsewhere. The illustrations are quite nice, some pictures being printed for the first time (models of the wreck site and photos of the broken snort mast). However, some of them are horrendously pixellated and others display very bad JPEG artifacts. In my view this is not acceptable in a printed work.

Finally, the author doesn't seem to come to any firm conclusions. He does not believe the official Board of Enquiry conclusion that a broken snort mast flooded the submarine, but rather believes that a battery explosion or some sort of human error caused the accident. He ends the book with a list of questions which remain 'unanswered', most of which are irrelevant or had been answered earlier in the book (so I thought...).

Perhaps I'm painting too poor a picture of this book, but I was looking forward to reading it and I've been left rather disappointed.

[Captain Nemo]

I knew the wife of one of the crewmen who went down on Affray. Even though you give this book a poor review, its in my local library so out of interest I'll borrow it and give it a read.

Nemo

[Captain Nemo]

I didn't think this book was too bad. It is difficult for the author to draw any firm conclusions as to why Affray sank to the bottom, because without actually salvaging the sub you just don't know. At the time, it was an easy option for the Admiralty to blame the broken snort mast as the cause, but further investigation would be necessary to confirm this, for example is the snort valve inside the sub open or shut. The author suggests divers using modern techniques to see inside the hull could establish whether or not the valve is shut or open. If it is shut then it is probably certain that it sank from another cause, battery explosion and human error seem to be the main alternatives suggested.

It was also interesting to read how the Admiralty treated close relatives of the dead sailors, not sympathetically is the view given. The amount of money left in the Trust Fund set up to help the families of the victims also seems to be shrouded in a mystery of it's own.

If your interested in subs then worth reading, especially if you can get it from your local library like I did.

Nemo