Qualla: HMS Vandal

HMS Vandal: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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HMS Vandal: Built, Renamed, Lost

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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HMS Vandal: The Working-Up Exercise

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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HMS Vandal: The Trawlermen Were Right

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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HMS Vandal: A Pier at Lochranza

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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;...

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