Larry Gaines did not sail that morning. He was the submarine's most experienced crewman, but on 24 February 1943 an ear infection kept him in his bunk at Lochranza, and a younger sailor took his place aboard HMS Vandal as she slipped her anchorage in the north of Arran. She never came back. Thirty-seven men went down with her - the entire crew - in waters off Inchmarnock, on the fourth day of her existence as a commissioned warship. For sixty years Gaines blamed himself; he believed his replacement had failed to secure a hatch that should have been one of his own final checks. He was wrong. It took half a century for the wreck to be found and for the truth to be more or less established. By then almost everyone who had loved the men of the Vandal was also gone.
HMS Vandal was a British U-class submarine, yard number 838, built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness. Her original name was HMS Unbridled. Before taking command of what would prove to be his first and last boat, Lieutenant James S. Bridger assembled the crew on the jetty at Barrow and told them she was now to be called Vandal. Submariners have long held that to rename a ship is to invite bad luck. Bridger, his crew, and the boat under their feet were about to become the shortest-lived submarine career in Royal Navy history. Vandal had only just joined the Third Submarine Flotilla at Holy Loch, a major submarine base used throughout the Second World War for training and exercises. She was four days into commissioning when she was lost.
She had been at anchor in Lochranza, on Arran's northern shore in the Firth of Clyde, the night before. The exercise that morning was to be a three-day working-up - the routine sequence of drills new submarines run through after commissioning, including a deep dive scheduled for that day. She left her anchorage and was never seen again. Reports trickled in over the following hours. One submarine reported a smoke candle about two and a half miles north of Inchmarnock; another reported hearing hull tapping in roughly the same area. A spotter plane saw a large oil slick about two miles north of Arran - fifteen kilometres from Inchmarnock. The inquiry of the time set the spotter pilot's evidence aside and concluded that Vandal had sunk during her deep dive somewhere off Inchmarnock, where the water was thought to be too deep for salvage. Prime Minister Winston Churchill demanded a full report and asked whether the submarine could be recovered. The reply from Flag Officer Submarines repeated the assumption that recovery was impossible.
Decades passed. Trawlermen working the waters north of Arran kept reporting their nets snagging on something hard, something the right size and shape to be a submarine. The Scottish Branch of the Submariners Association took up the cause, and in 1994 they persuaded the Royal Navy to look. That June, a Navy expedition aboard HMS Hurworth located the wreck three kilometres northwest of Loch Ranza, three hundred feet down on a muddy slope - roughly where the spotter pilot had reported the oil slick fifty-one years earlier. Vandal lies in pitch darkness with a thirty-five-degree list to port. Her twelve-pounder forward gun is still covered with a trawler's net. The brass letters VANDAL are clearly visible. Subsequent dives showed that the aft engine room hatch - the one Larry Gaines had spent decades blaming himself for - was closed. The submarine was on the surface, not diving, when whatever happened, happened. The actual cause remains uncertain.
In 1997, HM Submarines Old Comrades Association erected a memorial to those lost aboard HMS Vandal beside the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry terminal at Lochranza Pier, a few miles south of where she went down. The wreck is protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986; she is a war grave, and divers may not interfere. The men named on the memorial were mostly young - submariners typically were - and many had families who spent the rest of their lives not knowing what had happened, who waited for news that did not come, and who watched the war end and the years pass without ever being able to mark a place. The pier where the ferry now docks is the same shore from which Vandal slipped her anchor. The ferries to Claonaig and Tarbert run past the wreck site every day.
Wreck site located at approximately 55.717°N, 5.333°W, in the Firth of Clyde about 1.5 nm northwest of Lochranza Pier on the north coast of Arran. From altitude the area shows as deep blue water between Arran (south) and the Kintyre peninsula (west). Best visible from 2,000-4,000 ft on clear days; the Lochranza memorial sits at the head of Loch Ranza on Arran's north coast. Nearest aerodromes: Campbeltown (EGEC) approximately 30 nm southwest on Kintyre, Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) about 35 nm to the east-southeast.