Author Description

This is a beautiful and informative guidebook and history of HMS Alliance. HMS Alliance was laid down at the Vickers Shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness on 13 March 1945. Allied forces had entered Germany and the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich was just weeks away. In the Far East, the war with Japan was at its height. HMS Alliance and the other A Class submarines under construction had been designed for the Pacific in World War Two. Following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August 1945, the Japanese surrendered and the war was finally at an end. When HMS Alliance entered service in 1947, Britain was still subject to economic austerity and wartime rationing. The first signs of tension between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were apparent and the British Empire was beginning to break up. Over the next three decades, Alliance performed many different roles in the post-war Cold War era. She operated all over the world and many hundreds of submariners served in her during the course of her 26 years in commission. In 1958, her familiar appearance as a World War Two-era submarine changed dramatically when she was comprehensively modernised to meet the demands of Cold War submarine operations. Alliance was streamlined and made quieter and faster underwater because her new role included countering the submarines of the Soviet Union. In 1973 Alliance was finally paid off at HMS Dolphin in Gosport, then the home of the Royal Navy Submarine Service. For a few years Alliance served as a static training submarine, but in 1979 the Navy embarked on the ambitious task of preserving Alliance as the last surviving submarine from World War Two. In 1982, HMS Alliance went on display to the public for the first time as an historic ship, and also as a memorial to more than 5,300 submariners who had given their lives serving in Royal Navy submarines.