HMS Trenchant: From Chatham to the Banka Strait

PREFACE

This is a true story about the Second World War. It has taken me over half a century to get round to the writing of it. I had always intended to take up my pen but it was not until I had reached the age of eighty-four that I finally finished it. This was a pity as a great deal of it is based on my recollections and these have inevitably faded a bit as time passed. It was originally my intention to tell the story from the point of view of others of the ship’s company as well as myself but, alas, I left it too late for most of them. Fortunately I kept copies of our patrol reports and the operations are based on them and so are accurate.

The book has been written principally for four main groups of people. The first of these is, of course, for the survivors of my old ship’s company and I hope it will bring back memories to them. The second group is composed of their friends and relations and I hope it will supply the answer to the question: ‘What did you do in the war, Grandpa?’. The third, and a very important, group is for modern present-day submariners, who will find our methods very different from those in use today and which, I hope, will interest them. Finally, it is for naval historians as a first-hand account of operations and the way we worked during the Second World War. Of course, the general reader is also welcome to read the yarn as a tale of human experience. For some of these groups it has been necessary to go into details of how we worked in those days which may prove tedious to my old ship’s company, but this is necessary and for it I make no apology.

My thanks are due to those members of my old ship’s company who have read through the drafts and have commented, and especially to Bob Read and Roy Broome, the latter also for his stories of life in a submarine in war.

I have used the spelling of place names as shown on Admiralty Charts of the period, though I am aware that some are now spelt differently.

CHAPTER I

CHATHAM

The train rumbled over the bridge across the River Medway and the great keep of Rochester Castle came into view in the evening light. It had been a miserable wartime journey from the north. It was winter, the train was unheated and it was cold. Refreshments, other than cups of almost undrinkable tea, were unobtainable. I had come from the Clyde as it was there that I had left my former submarine command when she needed substantial repairs to her main engines. Anyway I had never really felt at home in the Thrasher. She was not my submarine. She had gained fame in the Mediterranean with her captain, Rufus Mackenzie, and, to my mind, she belonged to him.

The train did not stop at Rochester but went straight on to Chatham. Here I alighted and, to my surprise, found a taxi which took me, with my green canvas suitcase which contained all my wartime possessions, to the Sun Hotel. I knew the Sun well as this was my fourth visit to the Chatham area during the war. I had joined my first command the elderly H44 at Sheerness late in 1940. I had brought the Ursula here to refit when I returned in her from the Mediterranean early in 1942 and I had come to Chatham to commission the Thrasher after her refit there in the spring of 1943.

However, in spite of the unheated trains, all was not gloom, indeed it was the opposite. First I had been promoted. After seven and a half long years as a Lieutenant, during which I had risen from being the junior officer and navigator of the Regulus in China before the war to the command of an operational submarine of the T class. Promotion had now come early as, before leaving the Thrasher, I was awarded eighteen months’ seniority and this made me instantaneously a Lieutenant Commander and a Lieutenant Commander of a year’s seniority at that. I had just had time to get my uniform altered before leaving the Holy Loch and now wore the two and a half stripes of my new rank, the half stripe looking slightly brighter than the other two. The second reason to be happy was that I had been appointed to command the brand new submarine Trenchant, then completing in Chatham Dockyard and destined to proceed to the Far East to fight the Japanese.

The Sun had a room for me and I moved in. I left my suitcase without unpacking it and repaired to the bar, which I knew well. In the six odd months I had been away it had changed little and the alcoholic refreshments available were still weak wartime beer and gin tasting like liquid fire. It was just as well that both were rationed and so my consumption was limited. After supper, for which I had to surrender my ration card, I went early to bed.

My bed was comfortable and I slept well. I got up early and, after breakfast, set off for the Dockyard. I arrived at the submarine offices sharp at 0900 to be greeted by my Officers. When the Thrasher’s engines broke down and it was clear that extensive repairs would be necessary, it was decided that I should transfer to the Trenchant with my whole crew. We would therefore be able to cut down the working-up time substantially as we would already be trained as a team to work together. Inevitably there were some changes in the crew. I had left my First Lieutenant behind in Thrasher and now met a new one, a Lieutenant Edge, who seemed a nice enough fellow who had been standing by Trenchant for a month or two. Like me, he was a regular naval officer. The Engineer Officer of Thrasher also remained in her as he knew all about her engine defects which were to be put right. Mike Chambers, Trenchant’s Engineer Officer, remained in post and he had been with her for a considerable time. Mike had entered the Navy when war broke out and he had a degree in Engineering. He was therefore given a temporary commission in the Royal Navy as a Lieutenant(E) and wore the straight stripes of a regular officer. He was a pleasant person with a slightly hesitant way of talking and was what I would call a theoretical or ‘thermo-dynamic’ engineer rather than a ‘wheel-spanner’ engineer with a practical knowledge of submarines. He was a confirmed bachelor with a wry sense of humour. The other two Officers had come with me from Thrasher. The first was Bob Read, a Temporary Lieutenant RNVR, who had been trained at the King Alfred Training Establishment at Hove and whose job before joining the Navy was with a Municipal Gas Company. He was our Navigating Officer and was also responsible for Signals and Official Correspondence. The last officer was Peter Cullen, a Temporary Sub-Lieutenant RNVR who came from a family of businessmen who owned a large chain of grocery stores. He had, however, started training for a career in medicine. On the outbreak of war he enlisted in the Navy and, after some adventures as an Ordinary Seaman, was also selected for a commission and was trained at King Alfred. He was our Torpedo Officer, was also the Gunnery Officer and looked after the Asdics.

Although I knew all about T-class submarines as I had been First Lieutenant and subsequently Captain of the Trident and had also commanded the Thrasher, I was keen to seen the Trenchant without delay and to note what improvements had been made to the design. We therefore set off for the basin in Chatham Dockyard where she was lying and I will ask our reader to accompany us on a tour of the ship, which I will try and describe in detail as we go. (See plan 1). I had already been to a library to look up the exact connotation of the name ‘Trenchant’. The Oxford Dictionary noted under ‘Trenchant’ that it meant ‘sharp, decisive, to the point’. This seemed to me to be a very satisfactory name for a submarine and I hoped to be able, as her Captain, to live up to it. The Trenchant had been ordered in August 1941 and had been laid down on one of the old slipways where Nelson’s Victory had been built two hundred years before. She was actually launched when I was in Thrasher refitting in Chatham in March 1943, but I only heard of the event after it had happened. She was launched by Lady Danby, the wife of the Admiral Superintendent of the yard. Of course, at the time I did not know that I might one day be her Captain

So we set off from the Submarine Office to walk to the Trenchant and on the way we may take a little time to consider the T-class submarines and their origins and characteristics. In the early thirties new British submarines had failed to reach their designed performance and had suffered from leaks in the external fuel tanks. The T-class were designed to remedy these failings, but were only given the performance that the older submarines had achieved in service. They were, above all, to be reliable. Nevertheless their speed and diving depth were less than was desirable. They were to carry all their fuel internally and this would ensure that they would not leak. The British had, prewar, attempted to have attacks by submarines on merchant ships made illegal in International law. The T-class were therefore designed to attack warships and were given a heavy torpedo armament. The early T-boats had a bow salvo of ten torpedoes which was the most powerful of any submarine in any navy. The hulls of the early T-boats, such as the Trident were constructed with rivets. The later boats, such as the Trenchant, still had riveted plates, but the frames were welded. The Trenchant was actually laid down on 9 May 1942, so she had now been building for twenty months and was nearly finished.

When we reached the Trenchant, afloat and berthed in the Dockyard basin, she looked anything but finished. Indeed it did not seem possible that the completion date of 26 February could conceivably be met. There was scaffolding all over the place, pipes through all the hatches, duckboards covered the decks and numbers of dockyard maties with their tool chests were hanging about. The submarine itself was floating high in the water as she had no fuel, lubricating oil or fresh water on board and the electric storage batteries had still not been installed. Down below there was still greater chaos: engineers fitting pipes, electricians working on wiring and many others busy on everything except clearing up the mess. However, when one took a closer look one could see that all the main machinery, pumps and equipment were installed and even the periscopes were in place.

The Trenchant was 273 feet 6 inches in length and she had a beam of 26 feet 7 inches. The pressure hull was a steel cylinder of 16 feet 5½ inches in diameter and this was slightly flattened in the vertical plane forward and tapered aft. On either side of the pressure hull were the main ballast tanks built in the shape of blisters in what was known as the saddle tank design. On top of the pressure hull was a free-flooding structure known as the casing which made a deck for the crew when entering harbour and stowage for wires, hawsers, anchors, the engine exhaust system and many other things. It also housed the external torpedo tubes and provided a streamlined structure to enclose all these protuberances. The weight of the Trenchant on the surface was 1417 tons and when the main ballast tanks were flooded and the submarine was submerged this went up to 1571 tons. The draught of the submarine on the surface was 15 feet 2½ inches and when submerged at periscope depth was 47 feet 5½ inches. The main cylinder of the pressure hull was divided into six compartments by vertical pressure tight bulkheads through which there were watertight doors. We will now, ignoring the mess, make a tour through these compartments from forward to aft and study what each contains.

Right forward, the first compartment in the bow was the tube space. This space was practically filled by the breech ends of the six internal bow torpedo tubes. These were 25 feet long and 21 inches in diameter and passed through a rimming tank and a main ballast tank to the sea. the outer end was closed by a hydraulically operated bow cap. Under the tubes were tanks needed to fill the tubes with water round the torpedoes before firing and for compensating for the weight of the torpedoes after firing. At the sides were the compressed air cylinders which fired the torpedoes when required. Under the floor of the tube space was the Type 129 asdic set and its rotating mechanism. The watertight doors leading aft out of this compartment were large so that the torpedoes could be loaded through them into the tubes.

The next compartment abaft the tube space was officially known as the Torpedo Reload Compartment, but unofficially it was called the fore-ends by the ship’s company. Here six reload torpedoes were stowed in racks, four above deck level and two in ‘trenches’ below. The two torpedoes stowed in the trenches were already in line with the two bottom tubes for loading, but the four top torpedoes had to be traversed across to line up with their tubes. Below the deck level in the fore-ends were a torpedo compensating tank and two fuel tanks with a stowage for high pressure air bottles and also a small store. The fore-ends were also used by some of the junior ratings for sleeping and they could either sling their hammocks there or spread their bedding on the deck.

The next watertight compartment aft was devoted to accommodation for the crew in the upper half of the hull and two sections of the electric storage batteries in the lower half. The accommodation space was divided longitudinally into four; beginning forward, it provided the living quarters for the Seamen, the Petty Officers, the Engine Room Artificers and the Officers respectively. The main passageway ran along the starboard side and the various messes were open to it. The messes had to be used for both eating and sleeping. There was a table in the middle of each mess and folding bunks three tiers high wherever they could be worked in. There were also tiers of bunks on the far side of the passageway. There were not enough bunks for all the junior ratings and some had to sleep, as already told, in the fore-ends or else use what was known as the ‘hot bunk’ system, that is to sleep in a bunk which someone had just got out of. The Wardroom which was the aftermost mess, was slightly larger and each officer had his own bunk. There was some machinery on the other side of the passage and the main refrigerator locker was opposite the Wardroom. In the lower half of the hull, under the accommodation compartment, two hundred and twenty-four accumulators were stowed. These were huge battery cells each being about five feet high and eighteen inches square. To install or maintain these cells, the deck of the accommodation space had to be lifted. At the fore end of the battery in the lower half of the hull was an auxiliary machinery space which contained a ballast pump. At the after end of the battery was the magazine, containing one hundred rounds of four-inch gun ammunition. Underneath the batteries were more fuel tanks, fresh water tanks and an auxiliary ballast tank.

We now come, on our way aft, to the control room compartment and this was amidships and half-way between bow and stern. It was, in the same way as in the accommodation compartment, divided by a deck into upper and lower halves. Immediately in the upper half abaft the watertight bulkhead was the Officers’ bathroom and loo on the port side and the Steward’s pantry, in which there was just room for one man, on the starboard side. Next, on the port side, was the Captain’s cabin and this was rather smaller than a first class sleeping compartment in a train. It was one bunk-length wide and had a small desk and wash basin. Underneath this area, on the lower level, was a provision store. We now come to the control room proper, which was the nerve centre of the submarine when submerged, the contents of which we will describe in the next paragraph. Under the deck in the control room was the third section of the battery consisting of another 112 cells. Underneath the battery were more fuel tanks. At the after end of the control room compartment, on the upper level, were the wireless and radar offices and they were closed in. Finally, on the starboard side, was the electric galley through which the main passageway of the submarine passed. Opposite it, on the port side, was a small store used by the Coxwain as an office and in which there was just room for him to sit at a small desk. Underneath this area were four deep oil fuel tanks.

Before continuing aft on our tour we will dwell a short while in the control room area to describe briefly the controls which emanated from it. The first set of controls were those for diving and surfacing and for keeping the submarine at the required depth when submerged. These consisted of a centralized set of valves to fill or empty the main ballast tanks which were empty when on the surface and full when submerged. The trim of the submarine, to allow for changes in weight such as the consumption of fuel, fresh water, lubricating oil and provisions or the changes of balance fore and aft due to the crew walking