In February 1940, Eric Ravilious (1903–42), became, with Paul Nash, one of the first artists to be appointed by the WAAC. He was assigned to the Admiralty and given the rank of Captain. His first assignments took him to the Royal Naval Barracks in Chatham, Sheerness, Grimsby and Scapa Flow, sailing to the Arctic Circle on HMS ‘Highlander’. Ravilious moved on to Portsmouth, and, in August 1940, to HMS ‘Dolphin’, the Royal Navy shore base at Gosport. He spent time on board L-class submarines (which, largely decommissioned by the time of the Second World War, were used for training), drawing interiors of these extraordinary environments. From this experience, came the ‘Submarines' series, a group of lithographic prints produced in 1941, and perhaps his most coherent group of wartime works. The preparatory sketches, acquired by the WAAC, are in the National Maritime Museum.
In 1942, Ravilious was reassigned to the RAF. That summer, he went to Iceland, to never return: his aircraft was lost during a rescue operation on 2 September. Ravilious was the first of three official war artists killed on active duty during the Second World War.

Ravilious found the conditions aboard submarines challenging for his work, complaining that, ‘it is awfully hot below when they dive and every compartment small and full of people at work’. He was fascinated by the interiors, however, which he described as, ‘extraordinarily good in a gloomy way. There are small coloured lights about the place and the complexity of a Swiss clock’. Annotations to the side of the drawing indicate how he intended to translate this atmosphere into the final lithograph (see object nos. PAD8083 and PAD8084 in the NMM collection)