HMS Tradewind (P329): A Torpedo Fired in Tragic Ignorance

Constructed at Chatham

HMS Tradewind was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 11 December 1942 and commissioned on 16 September 1943 under Lieutenant Commander Stephen Lynch Conway Maydon, a third-group T-class submarine that went on to spend most of her war fighting Japanese shipping across the Far East.

A Productive War

Across eight war patrols, Tradewind sank nine Japanese sailing vessels, several small craft, a tug and the merchant tanker Takasago Maru, and laid mines off the Mergui Archipelago that accounted for further losses, a solid and consistent record of anti-shipping work in a demanding theatre.

The Loss of the Junyo Maru

On 18 September 1944, Tradewind torpedoed and sank the Japanese army cargo ship Junyo Maru, a routine wartime attack on an enemy transport that turned into one of the great tragedies of the entire submarine war.

Unknown to Lieutenant Commander Maydon and his crew at the time, Junyo Maru was carrying some 4,200 Javanese forced labourers and 2,300 Allied prisoners of war from Batavia to Padang, packed aboard in conditions that were already appalling before the torpedo struck.

An estimated 5,620 people lost their lives in the sinking, one of the deadliest maritime disasters of the war and a particularly harrowing episode that Tradewind's crew could not have anticipated or intended, acting in good faith against what they believed to be a legitimate military target.

It remains a sober and important reminder of how the fog of war could turn a routine attack into an immense human tragedy through no direct fault of the men who fired the torpedo.

The End of Her Service

Tradewind survived the war and underwent acoustic modification trials in 1945 and 1946, later taking part in the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review, before being scrapped at Charlestown on 14 December 1955, closing the book on a career forever marked by the tragedy of September 1944.