01/09/2026
Not a poem and a tribute to my Granddad
15 Seconds
They call it the fog of war, don’t they?
Like it’s just some natural drifting mist that rolls in over the water. Like it’s an act of God. Something blameless you can point to when fifty-three men are turned into a casualty statistic before the ink on the declaration of war is even dry.
But it isn’t a mist. It’s a choice. War isn’t a force of nature. It is a factory. It is an industrial process designed by the ruling class to convert working class bodies into geopolitical leverage. It is fifteen seconds of silence in a pitch black sea, followed by a cover up that the state kept in its back pocket for half a century.
My grandfather was lost down there.
Edward William Landers. An unknown hero who went out into the dark to fight against the fascists. Just another working class lad from a lost generation, chewed up and spat out by the imperial machinery that treats men like disposable gears in a machine they don’t own and didn’t ask for.
I didn’t know his face. I didn’t know hers either. My grandmother’s life was not a memory passed down to me. It is still a blank piece of paper. I know nothing about her, not even her name. She is just a stranger who couldn’t face the wreckage of what the state did to her family, a woman who gave up her child because the grief was too heavy to carry.
There were no family stories in my house as I grew. No one told me what Edward William Landers looked like when he laughed, or how he drank his tea, or how my grandmother must have felt when the postman walked up the path that fateful day. I grew up in total ignorance, completely cut off from the people whose blood I carry. I didn’t even know my own father until I was sixteen years old, and by then, silence had already done its work. Told me nothing of his life, if I had any other siblings, scared I may know to come his truth. I wouldn’t have known about my grandfather if he hadn’t dropped it into a conversation. HMS Oxley, your granddad died on that. That was it just a name, nothing more.
My father was called Edward too, but to me he doesn’t deserve the name and will always be just Eddie. I didn’t know the significance of Edward until much later in my life, when I started uncovering facts about the submarine. My middle name is Edward. I grew up only knowing that it was after a dad who didn’t want to know me. I hated it with a passion. I hated the name Edward because of the association to a father who didn’t really give a s**t about me or my family. Only recently have I started accepting it. Only recently have I come to acknowledge that it isn’t a scar left by Eddie but a tribute to the grandfather who went down in the freezing dark.
That side of my bloodline isn’t a family to me. They were just ghosts in a cage of secrets, one lost under the waves, while the war department wrote a script to cover the blood on their hands.
The historical truth of that submarine is much uglier than any myth.
By 1939, the Oxley was an old, tired piece of junk. Built back in 1925 by Vickers Armstrong, she had made the journey to Australia, broke down in the Bay of Biscay, and spent months in Malta before the Royal Australian Navy realised they couldn’t afford her. A luxury they didn’t need when the Great Depression hit. So they wrapped her up and gifted her back to the British.
She was scrap metal waiting for a furnace, side-lined in the Plymouth reserves. But when the drum beats for war, the state doesn’t care about old iron or the men inside it. They mobilised everything. They dug out the old hulls, loaded the torpedo tubes, and pulled men like my grandad back from their civilian lives. Men who thought their parents had ended this madness in the war to end all wars, the Great War.
They sent them up to Dundee to form the Second Submarine Flotilla. Their job was to patrol the freezing, rolling currents off the coast of Norway and look for German U-Boats.
This is the mentality of the state at war.
Absolute mathematical coldness disguised as patriotism. To the Admiralty, Edward William Landers wasn’t a man with a pregnant wife waiting in a cold terrace house. He was a unit of labour. C JX 138235, just a service number. That was his name as far as the bureaucracy was concerned. He was the Leading Telegraphist. The man whose job it was to handle the signals, the wireless communications, the messages passing back and forth through the ether. An expandable component sent out in a reconditioned white elephant because the British Empire was caught short, caught pretending its old global hegemony could be maintained on a shoe string budget funded by the exploitation of the dockworkers and miners back home.
He was twenty-three years old, TWENTY-THREE.
It is far too young to die. It was then, and it still is now. Yet still nothing has been learned about the total futility of war. We still keep feeding the furnace of capitalism.
My granddad went out there to push back against the growing tide of fascism, a young man sacrificing everything to stop a dark poison from spreading across Europe.
And the sickening irony of it is that if he and the service men who died alongside him could see this country now, they would be utterly disgusted. They would look at the rise of the far right, the fascism creeping back into the mainstream of the very nation they set out to defend, and they would ask what the hell was it all for?
They died to stop it, only for it to walk the streets again, dressed as patriotism.
One week into the war, September 10th 1939. That is all it took for the machine to break, to feel the first tremors in the gears.
The North Sea is a graveyard even before you add the steel hulls. It is an unyielding, freezing expanse of black water that chews up ships for breakfast.
That night, the weather was heavy, the currents were running deep and invisible, dragging everything sideways while the men on the bridge thought they were holding their line.
In a submarine like the Oxley, you are running blind on the surface, salt spray blinding, the hull shuddering as the massive swell slams against the old casing. The wind was howling, a freezing gale ripping straight of the Norwegian coast, turning the spray into ice as soon as it hits the metal.
The drift had them completely. It had swept them four nautical miles off their course, pushing them directly into the sector belonging to their sister submarine HMS Triton.
Two British hunters, breathing the same freezing air, completely blind to each other in the swell.
When the Triton spotted the low, black silhouette riding the waves, panic took over. And that is the psychological trick of war. It strips away human empathy and replaces it with pure, unadulterated paranoia. In the paranoia of war, anything you do not expect is an enemy. The state spends millions training young men to see monsters in the dark, to shoot first and ask questions later, because hesitating means a court martial or a grave.
The Triton flashed her signal lights.
Who goes there?
Silence from the Oxley, the lights swallowed by the spray and the dark.
They flashed again, Identify yourself?
More silence.
On the bridge of the Oxley, under the strain. Panic sets in. Lieutenant Manley reaches for the signal flare to tell Triton, wait, it is us, we are brothers.
He pulls the trigger.
A click, a dud.
A tiny mechanical failure that decides the fate of fifty-three souls.
A piece of faulty equipment issued by a government that always pinches pennies on the lives of its service men while the profits of the arms manufacturers remain untouchable. Cold salt water had probably already seeped into the ready use locker, ruining the seals on the fireworks.
Edward William Landers was the Leading Telegraphist on that boat, the man responsible for communications, but no wireless signal or flashed code could bridge the gap of that mechanical breakdown or the paranoia raging outside the hull.
Over on the Triton, the commander slowly counts to fifteen in his head.
Can you picture that?
15 seconds.
Count it.
15 seconds.
The difference between life and a watery grave, tic king away in the mind of an officer who thinks he is protecting his crew from a N**i torpedo while the sub rolls heavily in the trough of the waves.
That fifteen second countdown is the distillation of the entire war machine.
It is a moment where human intellect is completely hijacked by the logic of the state of survival.
The countdown ends.
Fire tubes seven and eight.
The torpedoes rush through the icy black water, leaving a trail of bubbles.
The explosion didn’t just rip the Oxley apart; it tore a hole straight through a history I have spent over twenty years of my life slowly unearthing.
The impact broke the back of the boat, and the North Sea, deadly and unforgiving rushed into the hull to claim what was left.
It took less than sixty seconds for the sea to swallow her up. The Captain and one Able Seaman were blown into the water and saved, pulled shivering from the black swell. The rest, including my grandfather went straight to the bottom on September 10th 1939.
But the real betrayal didn’t happen in the water. It happened in the warm wood panelled rooms of Whitehall. Winston Churchill and the Admiralty looked at the calendar, only seven days into the war, and decided the truth was too expensive. They couldn’t admit that a British submarine had sank another British submarine and destroyed British lives because of incompetent navigation and a faulty flare.
The state cannot afford to look foolish. It relies on the myth of its own infallible authority to keep the workers lining up for the slaughter. So to keep up morale they lied to the public. They buried the truth under a mountain of classified paperwork, leaving the ghosts of the Oxley to sit in the dark, unacknowledged and betrayed by the very flag they died for.
They call it the fog of war.
But my grandad didn’t die in a fog. He died in an exploding cage of secrets, underneath the waves, while the years rolled on and the Admiralty wrote scripts to cover the blood on their hands.
And that is how trauma travels down the line. It cascades. One state sanctioned disaster on a Sunday night in 1939 doesn’t just end fifty-three lives in the North Sea. It fractures generations before they are even born.
War doesn’t stop when the torpedo detonates. It stays in the blood, a slow acting poison passed from parent to child.
My grandmother was already carrying Eddie, when that torpedo hit. Imagine that level of grief? You are young, you are pregnant, the country has just plunged into global slaughter, and the Admiralty sends a cold lie to wrap it up, no truth, no closure, still to this day I have no knowledge of what they actually told her. One thing we do know; it wasn’t the truth. The weight of it broker her. It tore her apart until she simply couldn’t bear to look at the child who carried his blood.
She gave him away, orphaned originally and then found and raised by his paternal grandparents, still no truth and conditioned by silence. The trauma became genetic. It turned into a closed book. He lived his whole life with that hallowing absence, giving me nothing but a name dropped into a conversation like a stray piece of shrapnel, Oxley.
He didn’t know the truth growing up. My grandmother probably died never knowing the truth, the state made sure of that. They starved them of the facts and left nothing but hungry questions and ravenous doubt. Because to the establishment, the psychological collapse of a working class family is just collateral damage.
It was down to me to unearth it. To dig through archives, learning more as they slowly appeared and files were declassified. To piece together the wreckage of a history that was systematically dismantled by the Royal Navy.
I had to become the detective for family names that were forgotten, names that the state wanted to dissolve in the sea.
They call it the fog of war. But it isn’t. It is an inheritance of secrets. It is the ruling class laundering their incompetence through the quiet devastation of our lives.
I am the one who had to go back down into the darkness to bring Edward William Landers back to the surface, so his name takes it rightful place in our family.
