The Royal Navy has released a remembrance film marking 125 years of the Submarine Service, made in memory of the nearly 6,000 submariners and more than 150 submarines that never came home.
The film, called The Echo, follows a Cold War era submarine beneath the waves alongside a submarine veteran volunteering at his local museum, and was shot aboard HMS Alliance at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport.
The Royal Navy has released a remembrance film marking 125 years of the Submarine Service, made in memory of the nearly 6,000 submariners and more than 150 submarines that never came home pic.twitter.com/Px0fGbrhe0
— UK Defence Journal (@UKDefJournal) October 30, 2026
Rear Admiral Andrew Perks, Director Submarines and head of the Submarine Service, said: “This year being the 125th anniversary of the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service makes it an even more poignant Remembrance for us. As we stand at the Westminster Garden of Remembrance and name aloud every submarine that did not return, we remember those we have lost in the last 125 years.
“This film, for me, encapsulates the experience of being a submariner. Whilst it’s set in the Cold War and is significantly different from the cutting-edge technology, we use today it still captures the jeopardy of being under the waves perfectly.”
Petty Officer James Clark, head of the Royal Navy’s video production branch, said: “We wanted to capture people’s imaginations and leave them with questions unanswered. We wanted audiences to think about what they’d seen and wonder what really happened.
“The film’s ambiguous ending reflects the reality that, for many submarines lost at sea, the circumstances of their disappearance remain a mystery.”
The ambiguity points at a particular boat, because Alliance’s sister HMS Affray sailed from Portsmouth in April 1951 and was lost in the English Channel with seventy five men aboard, the last British submarine lost at sea, and although the wreck was found two months later the cause was never established beyond doubt. Among the theories was a fractured snort mast, the induction pipe that lets a diesel submarine run its engines while submerged.
Alliance herself is an A-class boat ordered for the war in the Pacific and completed after it ended, serving through the early Cold War before becoming a memorial to submariners lost in service. She has been on display at Gosport since 1981 and was restored at a cost of several million pounds in the last decade.
The Submarine Service dates its existence from the launch of Holland 1 in October 1901, a five-man boat bought against the opposition of admirals who regarded the submarine as underhand, and the service spent its first decades proving otherwise. Its losses include the 1950s accidents that followed the war, the men of HMS Thetis who died in Liverpool Bay before commissioning in 1939, and the seventy four boats lost in the Second World War.
Britain has maintained continuous at sea deterrence for fifty seven years, and the Dreadnought class now being built at Barrow will take that task on from the Vanguard boats in the early 2030s.
