HMS Traveller (N48): Lost Scouting the Way for Human Torpedoes

Laid Down at Greenock

HMS Traveller was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, laid down on 17 January 1940, launched in August 1941 and commissioned on 10 April 1942, a second-group T-class submarine that went on to serve almost entirely in the Mediterranean.

Almost entirely, and not for very long. She commissioned on 10 April 1942 and was dead on or about 4 December the same year: less than eight months, five patrols, and a crew who barely had time to become one. Everything described below happened inside a single summer and autumn.

A Frustrating Run of Near Misses

Traveller's combat record was marked more by effort than results. She attacked the Italian submarine Porfido and the merchant vessel Ezilda Croce in the Adriatic without success, and went on to make unsuccessful attacks on the Italian light cruiser Cattaro, the tanker Proserpina, and the torpedo boats Castore and Ciclone, along with unconfirmed attacks on two further submarines.

That list of failures deserves more sympathy than it usually gets, because it is a fair description of what submarine warfare was actually like. An attack in 1942 was a prediction: the captain estimated the target's course and speed through a periscope raised for a few seconds at a time, worked out where she would be when the torpedoes arrived, and fired at empty water in the hope that the two would coincide. Everything depended on estimates made under pressure, and torpedoes of the period ran deep, ran erratically, and sometimes failed to explode when they did hit.

A boat could do everything right and get nothing, over and over, which is corrosive in a way that is easy to underestimate. Traveller made attacks on a cruiser, a tanker, two torpedo boats and at least three submarines, and came away with a single merchant ship. That is not a comment on her people.

Her one clear success came against the Italian merchant Albachiara, torpedoed off the North African coast, and on that same patrol she also rescued Special Boat Section personnel from the shore, a valuable contribution even without a torpedo being fired.

It is worth being clear what recovering Special Boat Section men from a hostile beach involves. The submarine has to arrive at an agreed point on an agreed night, close a coast she cannot see properly, and wait on the surface or at periscope depth in shallow water while men she cannot contact paddle out to find her in the dark. If they are late she waits, getting more exposed by the minute. If they do not come she has to decide when to leave, knowing what that means for them.

A Final Reconnaissance

Traveller's fifth and final patrol, departing Malta on 28 November 1942, was a reconnaissance mission in support of planned Chariot manned-torpedo attacks on Taranto under Operation Principal, exactly the kind of quiet, dangerous groundwork that rarely made headlines but was essential to the success of more famous operations.

She failed to return and was declared overdue on 12 December 1942, most likely having struck an Italian mine around 4 December.

What Operation Principal Cost

Sixty-five men were lost with her, all hands. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Drummond St Clair-Ford, was thirty-four. That figure is rarely given and it ought to be, because it is the first instalment of a bill that had not finished being paid.

Operation Principal was an attack on Italian warships in harbour using Chariots, which were not torpedoes in any normal sense but slow electric machines that two men rode astride, in diving suits, sitting in the open water for hours. They carried a detachable explosive warhead in the nose, which the crew placed under the target by hand before riding away.

The Royal Navy had copied the idea, and it had copied it from the people who had just done it to them. On the night of 19 December 1941 Italian frogmen of the Decima MAS rode their own machines into Alexandria harbour and put charges under the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. Both settled on the bottom. In a single night, at almost no cost, Italy removed the Mediterranean Fleet's battle squadron from the war, and the Admiralty took the lesson and built Chariots of its own.

Because a Chariot is slow, short-ranged and utterly helpless if anything goes wrong, everything depends on knowing the harbour: where the booms are, where the nets hang, how the tide runs, and exactly where the target is lying. Somebody had to go and look. That was Traveller's job at Taranto, and she was mined doing it, and the operation lost its reconnaissance and sixty-five men before it had begun.

It got worse. When Principal went ahead in January 1943, HMS P311 sailed carrying two Chariots and their crews and was mined off Tavolara, near Sardinia. She was lost with seventy-one men aboard: sixty-one of her own company, the eight Chariot operators and two engineers. So one operation cost two submarines and a hundred and thirty-six lives, and much of that before anybody reached a target. HMS Thunderbolt and HMS Trooper carried the Chariots that did get through to Palermo.

P311 was found in 2016, lying off Tavolara with her entire ship's company still inside her, and the decision was taken to leave her exactly where she is as a war grave and a memorial. Traveller has never been found. Somewhere in the Gulf of Taranto she is still on patrol, as HMS Urge was for seventy-nine years before somebody finally located her.

Remembered by Leyton

HMS Traveller had been adopted by the Borough of Leyton during a wartime Warship Week fundraising drive, and the adoption plaque marking that connection is preserved today at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, a small but lasting link between a lost submarine and the community that had once helped fund her.

The dates on that make it harder to read than it first appears. Leyton Municipal Borough's Warship Week ran from 21 to 28 March 1942, and HMS Tudor explains how the scheme worked and what a week of collections could raise from an ordinary town. Traveller commissioned a fortnight after Leyton's week finished. She was dead in December.

So a borough in east London, being bombed itself, spent a week raising money and was given a submarine to be proud of, and had her for roughly eight months before she disappeared with every man aboard. The plaque they exchanged outlived the boat, the crew, the borough council and the scheme itself, and it is now in a museum case in Portsmouth. It is the only thing left of her above water anywhere.

The men are commemorated on the submarine memorial and nowhere else, because there is no grave and no wreck to visit. That is the ordinary condition of the submarine service in that war, and it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving as a euphemism: sixty-five people went out of Malta on 28 November 1942 and simply did not come back, and nobody has ever known exactly where or when. HMS Stygian shows what the same service could achieve when things went right.