Stubborn in the Deep: A WWII Survival Story

Retold by his great‑grandson, age 12.

On February 13, 1944, my great‑grandfather, Stoker Robert Saines, was deep inside H.M. Submarine STUBBORN when she was hit by depth charges and forced down to almost 580 feet, far beyond what she was built for. In the typed story he wrote after the war, he described the crew trying everything to free the submarine. They ran to the back and jumped up and down, then rushed forward and back again to shift the weight, all while breathing the last of the oxygen. He wrote about the terrifying clatter as gear “fell off the casing to clatter on the boat side,” and how the compressors roared “like a train suddenly clattering into a station.”

When nothing worked, they used their final 3,000 pounds of air and the motors together. The bows suddenly lifted at an angle so steep they were “almost standing on each other’s shoulders.” Someone shouted, “We’re going up!” as the depth gauge raced from 350 to 25 feet. They burst through the surface in the dark, exhausted but alive.

But they were still far from home. With a shattered radio, a missing rudder, bent propeller shafts, and a gale pushing them back toward enemy waters, they drifted for days before destroyers finally found them. STUBBORN limped more than 300 miles before being towed to safety.

This story reminds me that bravery isn’t loud, sometimes it’s just doing your job when everything feels impossible.

This is the story of one Canadian sailor's stubborn refusal to give in to the deep.