XE-class submarine
1944 class of British midget submarines
The XE-class submarines were a series of twelve midget submarines that were built for the Royal Navy during 1944; four more to a slightly different design were built 1954–5 as the Stickleback class.
Design
The XE had a crew of four, one lieutenant acting as the commander, a sub-lieutenant acting as the deputy, an engineer in charge of the mechanical aspects of the sub, as well as a seaman/leading seaman. Each submarine also contained at minimum one certified diver.
Each were armed with 2 side-charges, each with 2 tons (4,400 pounds) of Amatol explosives. Each also contained up to six 20-pound limpet mines. These were to be attached targets by a diver.
They and their depot ship HMS Bonaventure arrived at Labuan in July 1945. Four of them managed to take part in operations before the war ended.
Operational history
Sabre and Foil
These operations, carried out in July 1945, were intended to cut the undersea telephone cables connecting Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong and Tokyo. The intention was to oblige the Japanese to use radio and render themselves open to message interception.
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This entry incorporates text from “XE-class submarine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.