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.

That is the ordinary shape of a Far East patrol by 1944 and it is worth understanding before the rest. Nine sailing vessels, some small craft, a tug and one tanker is a year of work, and most of it was done on the surface with the gun, because by then there was almost nothing left afloat in those waters big enough to justify a torpedo. HMS Thule sets out what that campaign was actually like.

The mining off the Mergui Archipelago is the quiet entry that kept working after she had gone. A minefield laid in a shallow channel goes on sinking ships for months without anybody aboard the submarine knowing what it has done, and it is the most efficient thing a boat of that period could do with a night's work.

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.

What Was Actually Aboard, and What Happened Afterwards

There are three things about that day that rarely get told, and each of them makes it worse.

The first is the ship herself. The Junyo Maru was not Japanese-built. She was launched on the Clyde in 1913 by Robert Duncan and Company of Glasgow, as the SS Ardgorm, for owners in Greenock, and had passed through several hands before ending up under the Japanese flag. So a British submarine torpedoed a Scottish-built ship carrying British, Australian, American and Dutch prisoners, which is about as complete a circle as the war ever drew.

The second is that nobody aboard Tradewind had any means of knowing. Japan did not mark ships carrying prisoners of war. There were no red crosses, no agreed routes, no notification, nothing whatever to distinguish such a vessel from an ordinary army transport through a periscope at three thousand yards. That was a deliberate policy, and it is the reason this happened repeatedly across the Far East: thousands of Allied prisoners were killed by Allied submarines and aircraft attacking unmarked Japanese shipping. Maydon did what any submarine captain would have done with the information available, which was a grey merchant ship in enemy waters.

The third is what happened to the people who lived. Around six hundred and eighty were pulled out of the water, and it would be a comfort to leave the story there. They were taken to Sumatra and put to work building the railway from Pakan Baru to Muaro, a project of the same kind as the far better known Burma railway and fought under the same conditions. A great many of them died there. Surviving the worst maritime disaster in the world at that date bought them a place on a death railway.

The numbers themselves are not entirely settled. Accounts differ on how many prisoners were aboard as against Javanese labourers, and detailed prisoner records list smaller nationality totals than the figure usually quoted. What nobody disputes is the total: something in the order of five thousand six hundred people died in a few minutes, and the overwhelming majority of them were Javanese romusha, conscripted labourers whose names in most cases were never recorded at all.

That last point deserves stating plainly. The prisoners of war are counted because armies keep lists. The four thousand two hundred Javanese are a round number because nobody thought them worth counting individually, and they make up three-quarters of the dead.

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.

The acoustic modification trials of 1945 and 1946 are a footnote with a point to them. The moment the war ended the Royal Navy began working on how to make submarines quieter, because the next opponent was going to be Soviet and the contest was going to be fought on sound. Tradewind, a boat of 1942, spent her last useful years being measured and modified so that the generation after her could be built properly.

Her captain is worth following, because his life afterwards was public and it is not the life anybody would predict. Stephen Lynch Conway Maydon, DSO and Bar, DSC, had commanded the old L26 and then HMS Umbra in the Mediterranean before he was given Tradewind. In her he torpedoed fourteen Japanese vessels, and it is worth recording that not one of them was a warship. His entire war as a submarine captain in the Far East was fought against merchant shipping, which is what the campaign had become and is also how the Junyo Maru came to be in his periscope.

He left the Navy and went into politics. After the 1959 election he chaired the Conservative parliamentary defence committee for two years, and in July 1962 Harold Macmillan brought him into government as a junior minister at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, where one of his colleagues was Margaret Thatcher. He stood down at the 1970 election and died the following March, at fifty-seven.

There is something quietly striking in that trajectory. The man who fired the torpedo that killed more people than any other single act by a British submarine spent the 1960s administering pensions and national insurance, in public life, where anybody could ask him about it. Nothing in the record suggests he ever pretended it had not happened.

It is worth keeping some perspective on the boat as against the event. Tradewind fought a competent, unremarkable war of the kind HMS Tigris and HMS Stratagem fought, and on one afternoon in September 1944 she was the instrument of a catastrophe she could not see and did not choose. Both of those things are true at once, and the honest course is to hold them together rather than choose between them.