Tides of War
By Elizabeth Wein
The Royal Navy is the oldest of the United Kingdom’s military services, with its origins in the English Navy of the 16th century. From the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to the chilling years of the 20th century’s Cold War, Britain’s navy was key to its success as an island nation, both in terms of defense and in terms of establishing and controlling its historical empire. The empire no longer exists, but the Royal Navy does, and perhaps at no time in its history has it had to prove itself so gallantly as it did during World War II. The British coast was the United Kingdom’s first and last line of defense throughout the dark days of Nazism, and the memory of that conflict exists in mute testimony through antique weaponry abandoned on Britain’s beaches and in her coastal waters.
I set out to find some of these reminders close to my home in Central Scotland, late on a June evening when the light lingered in the sky past eleven o’clock. As a historian and a writer, I get the same thrill of fascination from shipwrecks, beach finds that are too big to carry home, as I do from smaller pieces of debris. I’d heard of the remains of Royal Navy submarines in Aberlady Bay, not far from Edinburgh and close to the mouth of the Firth of Forth where it joins the North Sea, but I’d never seen them myself. A beautiful midsummer’s day seemed the perfect time for a seafood meal in nearby North Berwick and a submarine hunt at low tide in the Aberlady Bay Nature Reserve afterward.
Scottish Natural Heritage defines a Local Nature Reserve as a “protected area of land designated by a local authority because of its local special natural interest and/or educational value.” In 1952, the Aberlady Bay Nature Reserve became the very first of these areas to be designated in Scotland. It covers a surprising variety of habitats including sea, salt marsh, dunes, scrub, and woodland, and in addition to supporting indigenous wildlife, it’s a refuge for migrating birds. It’s also geologically intriguing, and you can find fossils on the rocky eastern shore (bryozoans, corals and shells, which you may only collect if they are already loose). It’s a beautiful, windswept place to walk, and seems incredibly remote, despite being less than twenty miles from the city of Edinburgh. Within its bounds there are eight historic shipwrecks listed as “maritime scheduled ancient monuments,” essentially protecting them from being dismantled or disturbed—and there are also two wrecked World War II “midget” submarines.
Built by the Royal Navy in 1943–1944, X-class midget submarines, or X-Craft, were less than 16 meters long (51 feet) and carried a crew of four: a commander, a pilot, an engineer, and a diver, whose terrifying and lonely job might have been to attach limpet mines to the hulls of German ships, or to make a secret survey under cover of darkness of a beach in enemy territory. X-Craft were diesel-powered on the water’s surface, but driven by an electric motor under water, and were used by the Royal Navy in the later years of World War II as stealth and spy vessels. A larger sub would tow a midget sub to a target site, where the daring crew of these insanely small subs would be transferred to the X-Craft via a dinghy; then they’d submerge to sneak below German U-boats and drop timed explosive devices on the seabed. X-Craft midget subs were also used to survey the Normandy landing beaches ahead of D-Day in 1944, and to safely guide Allied ships there during the actual D-Day invasion.
The two midget subs that still lie in Aberlady Bay were originally equipped as training vessels. They were used at a Royal Navy base on the Scottish island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides until the end of the war, and in 1946 they were towed to their present position on the tidal sands of Aberlady Bay and chained in place to a big block of concrete. At low tide they would have rested uncovered on the sand; but during a spring tide, between high and low water, there is a depth change here of more than three meters (ten feet), so at high tide the subs would have been completely submerged. Royal Air Force planes used them for target practice so that pilots in training could learn to spot the subs’ hulking shadows below the water’s surface.
No longer of any military use today, the subs are nevertheless still there. At low tide, their skeletons lie half-buried in the sand, but clearly visible. It’s a trek to get to them, and a somewhat dangerous one. First, there’s a two-mile walk through the nature reserve and over the dunes at Aberlady Bay, passing the occasional concrete “tank trap” left over from Britain’s World War II coastal defenses; then it’s another three-quarters of a mile across the tidal sands. It’s imperative that you pay attention to the tide times, and also that you stay out of the mud flats! The sun was setting, and the tide was already on the rise when I reached the first of the two hulks at about 10:00 p.m. (low tide was 9:45 p.m.), and I only snapped a couple of quick pictures before hurrying back to solid ground—I didn’t dare venture nearer to the wreck of the further sub. It was a long way back across the sand, looking over my shoulder every now and then at the dwindling relics of the Royal Navy’s finest hour. It was twilight by the time I got back to my car at 11:00 p.m.
Here’s the thing that shakes my foundations when I think about it: The Aberlady Bay midget submarines were towed into their final position by the Royal Navy in 1946, and the whole area was turned into a Local Nature Reserve in 1952. A mere six years changed the nature of the place. It is a wonderful thing to be able to understand the history of the landscape that we are part of, and equally wonderful that the wartime past of these mute and mysterious hulks has made way for a present that is centered around an extremely diverse sanctuary for wildlife. Aberlady Bay is a changing landscape with many stories still to tell.
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This article appeared in Beachcombing Magazine Volume 50 September/October 2025.
