Transcription
There's a beach in Scotland. It's a nature reserve.
At low tide, two rusting submarines emerge from the sand. They've been there since 1946. Nobody moved them. Nobody salvaged them. Nobody even really talks about them. They just sit there. Twice a day the tide covers them. Twice a day it pulls back, and there they are again.
Two submarines on a public beach that you can walk to. How does that happen? And here's the thing, these weren't just some forgotten training boats. The submarines that inspired these two crawled into one of the most heavily defended anchorages in the world. Four men, 52 feet of steel, no torpedoes, just a pair of bombs strapped to the hull, and they paralyzed the most feared battleship in the German Navy. Stick around because this story is genuinely insane.
First, what exactly are you looking at if you walk out to Aberlady Bay? These are X-Craft, British submarines built by Vickers-Armstrong in 1943 and 1944. They are tiny, 52 feet long, about 5 feet in diameter. The interior, where four men had to live and work, was 5 ft 8 high, 5 feet wide, and barely 8 feet long. That's smaller than most garden sheds. They ran on the surface using a Gardner diesel engine, the same engine that powered a London bus, and they could dive to 300 feet. The two at Aberlady are most likely XT craft. The T stands for training, a slightly simpler version built to prepare crews for the real thing. The periscope wasn't retractable. It sat fixed in a fin on top. Six XT craft were built in total. The two at Aberlady are most likely XT1 and XT2, though nobody's ever confirmed that for certain.
Three of the six were scrapped before the war even ended. One is now in a museum, and two ended up on a sandbar in East Lothian. But to understand how that happened, you need to know what the X-Craft were actually built to do. Cuz this story starts with a problem that was keeping Winston Churchill up at night.
There was a German battleship sitting in a Norwegian fjord. She hadn't fired a shot in months. She wasn't attacking anyone. And she was tying down a huge chunk of the entire Allied fleet just by existing. Her name was Tirpitz. And she was a monster. By 1942, Tirpitz was the largest battleship Germany ever built, sister ship to the Bismarck, over 50,000 tons, eight 15-in guns, heavily armored. She sat in Altenfjord, Norway, hidden deep in a fjord ringed with anti-submarine nets, minefields, gun positions, and constant patrols. She wasn't out raiding convoys. She didn't need to be. Just her presence meant the Allies had to keep capital ships on standby at all times in case she moved. She paralyzed British naval strategy without firing a single shell.
Churchill was furious. He pointed out that the Italians had used human torpedoes to attack British ships in harbor and demanded to know why Britain couldn't do the same. The X-Craft were the answer. The plan was Operation Source. Six X-Craft would be towed across a thousand miles of North Sea by conventional submarines. Near Norway, crews would transfer over by dinghy, take the controls, and go the rest of the way alone. The weapon was not torpedoes. Each X-Craft carried two massive explosive charges, two tons of amatol each, strapped to the sides of the hull. You would crawl under the target, drop the charges on a time fuse, then try to get out. Everyone understood the odds of getting home were poor. They went anyway.
September 11th, 1943. Six X-craft left Loch Canborn in Scotland, each under tow behind a full-size submarine. Destination, Norway. It started going wrong almost immediately. X9 was lost at sea when the tow line broke. All three crew on board killed. X8 developed leaks in her explosive charges. One detonated prematurely. She was scuttled. Six boats became four before the attack even started.
On September 20th, the remaining X-craft slipped their tows. Three were assigned to Tirpitz, X5, X6, and X7. X10, targeting the Scharnhorst, suffered mechanical failures and had to abort. Three boats left. Three crews of four men each heading into a fjord lined with guns, nets, and listening posts. We are about to find out what happened when those charges went off under the Tirpitz. But just think about this first. The crew of X7 surfaced and surrendered to German sailors reaching down from above. They did it knowing the bombs were already set on a timer. They did it knowing they would be standing right there when it happened.
X5 vanished, most likely hit by Tirpitz's own guns before she could even drop her charges. X6, commanded by Lieutenant Donald Cameron, slipped past the outer nets by tucking in behind a passing coaster. His periscope was broken. His gyroscope had failed. He was navigating half blind. He still got under the Tirpitz and dropped both charges. X7, under Lieutenant Basil Place, got tangled in the torpedo nets twice, got free twice, hit the Tirpitz's hull directly on the approach, still dropped both charges underneath her, then could not escape. Lieutenant Basil Place surfaced, surrendered, and was hauled out of the water moments before the charges went off.
And then the bombs exploded. Tirpitz took on over 1,400 tons of water. Main turrets were damaged, propulsion systems wrecked. She could not leave her anchorage until April 1944. Cameron and Place were both awarded the Victoria Cross. Tirpitz never fully recovered. She was eventually sunk in November the 1944 by RAF Lancasters dropping 13,000-lb Tallboy bombs. Four men in a boat the size of a bus engine had helped end the career of the most feared battleship in the German Navy.
So, where did the training submarines come in? The XT craft were built specifically because of how Operation Source went. Four of the six operational X craft were lost. Part of the problem was that the boats had been worn down by months of training before the mission. They weren't in condition for an operation that demanding. The solution was dedicated training variants. The XT craft meant real X craft could be kept fresh for operations while new crews learned the hard way on the simpler versions. Through 1944, crews trained in all six XT craft at Loch Striven. Then the war ended.
By June 1945, all six XT craft had been sent to the Naval Construction and Research Establishment at Rosyth. The war was over. The training boats were no longer needed. Some were scrapped, but two had one last job to do. In spring 1946, two XT craft were towed into Aberlady Bay on the Firth of Forth, and moored to a concrete anti-tank block on a sandbar at low tide.
Then they were used as targets. Over two days in early May, aircraft Mosquitoes and Seafires, the naval version of the Spitfire, fired 20-mm rounds at them from low passes. The Navy wanted to know armor-piercing shells or high explosive which was more effective against submarine hulls. The answer was high explosive. The holes were plugged after the first round so they could be shot at again. When the trials were done, nobody came back for the submarines. Golf course greenkeepers at nearby Gullane were still turning up spent shell cartridges in the turf decades later.
So, why are they still there now? Nearly 80 years on because they're not worth moving. These are training variants, not the operational boats that attacked Turpitz. The only complete surviving X-Craft in the world is X24 at the Royal Submarine Museum in Gosport. These two aren't that. They're simpler, less significant, and already half-buried in sand and silt. They sit inside a tidal nature reserve, Scotland's first, designated 1952. Any serious salvage operation would be a significant environmental undertaking. And they're not a war grave. Nobody died on them. No one has an active claim on them. There's no legal pressure to act. So, nothing happens.
Today, you can visit them for free. Park Aberlady Bay Nature Reserve off the A198 east of Aberlady village. Walk 40 minutes out across the bay. Check the tide times first. The water comes back fast and the path disappears. Most people who stumble across them assume they're rocks.
And here's the thing that stays with me. The operational X-Craft, the real ones, the ones that went to Norway, that got under Turpitz, that two men steered blind with broken instruments into the most defended anchorage in Europe, almost all of those are gone, lost in fjords, scrapped, one section in a museum case. But these two, the training boats, the ones that never left Scottish waters, the ones that spent their last months being strafed by Spitfires so the navy could figure out which bullets work best. They're still here. Twice a day the tide covers them. Twice a day they come back up.
Drop a comment if you've been to Aberlady Bay or if you're planning to go now. Subscribe if you're new and I'll see you in the next one.