HMS Trinidad (46): Struck by Her Own Torpedo in the Arctic

Constructed at Devonport

HMS Trinidad was built at HM Dockyard Devonport, laid down on 21 April 1938, launched on 21 March 1940 and commissioned on 3 October 1941, a Fiji-class light cruiser sent almost immediately into the harshest and most physically punishing theatre of the entire naval war, the Arctic convoy route to northern Russia.

Her First Arctic Winter

She was in the ice within weeks of commissioning. Trinidad joined convoy PQ 8 at Hvalfjord in Iceland on 10 January 1942, took it through to Murmansk, and came back with QP 6, and on that return passage she carried 250 Polish nationals home to Greenock. They were part of the extraordinary movement of Poles out of the Soviet Union that followed the amnesty of 1941, when Stalin, having deported hundreds of thousands of them to camps and settlements in 1940, released the survivors so that they could be formed into an army to fight the Germans. Most went south towards Persia. A few hundred went the other way, north to the Arctic ports and out with a homeward convoy, which is how a brand-new cruiser came to be a passenger ship for a fortnight. What sort of cruiser she was, and why the Fiji class looks like a Town class that has been sat on, is explained in HMS Kenya (C14).

Struck by Her Own Torpedo

In March 1942, while escorting Convoy PQ 13, Trinidad engaged German destroyers in a fierce action, but one of her own torpedoes malfunctioned in the bitter Arctic cold, its gyroscope affected by the freezing conditions, causing it to travel at a drastically reduced speed and circle back to strike the very ship that had fired it.

What Actually Happened on 29 March

The fierce action deserves setting out, because the torpedo is only the end of it. Convoy PQ 13 had been taken apart by a gale before the Germans arrived at all: nineteen merchant ships scattered over something like 150 miles of the Barents Sea, an escort trying to round them up, and the whole thing visible to German reconnaissance. Three Narvik-class destroyers, Z24, Z25 and Z26, were sent out from Kirkenes to finish the job.

They found Trinidad instead. The fight that followed was conducted in snow squalls at ranges that closed to a few thousand yards, with visibility opening and shutting like a door, and it was Trinidad's six-inch guns that crippled Z26 and left her burning. She took a hit aft from the return fire. HMS Eclipse came up out of the murk and finished Z26 off. It was a clear tactical success, achieved by a cruiser and two destroyers against three modern German destroyers in appalling weather, and had it stopped there it would be remembered as one of the better small actions of the Arctic war.

The torpedo is what happened next. Trinidad fired to complete the destruction of Z26, and the weapon that left her tube had been sitting in sub-zero air long enough for its machinery to seize up. Instead of running at its designed forty-six knots it crawled, and instead of running straight it turned. A torpedo that runs slowly and in a circle will eventually cross the track of the ship that fired it, and Trinidad, zigzagging hard to avoid the enemy's fire, put herself in the way of her own. It struck her on the port side forward, between what her damage report calls 71 and 79 stations, ruptured a fuel oil tank, flooded and set fire to the forward boiler room, and took her speed down to eight knots. There is no more complete way for a weapon to fail.

The explosion killed thirty-two of her crew.

Why Nine of the Dead Were Bandsmen

Nine of the thirty-two men killed were Royal Marines bandsmen, and that is not a coincidence or an accident of where they happened to be standing. It is where the Royal Navy put its musicians when the guns were manned.

Every big-gun warship of the period had a Transmitting Station: a compartment containing the Admiralty Fire Control Table, a mechanical analogue computer of gears, cams and differentials that took the range and bearing from the director above, added the ship's own course and speed, the target's course and speed, the wind, the air temperature, the powder temperature and the wear on the gun barrels, and produced the numbers the turrets were laid on. Working it required a team who could read dials fast, wind handles accurately and keep in step with one another for hours. The Navy decided, sensibly enough, that the men who had those skills already were the ship's band, and so the Royal Marines band closed up in the Transmitting Station at action stations for most of the twentieth century.

The Transmitting Station was placed as deep in the hull as it would go, below the waterline and behind the armour, because it was the one compartment the ship could not fight without. That made it the safest place aboard against shellfire and very nearly the worst place aboard against anything that came in below the belt: one door, several decks of ladders, and no natural light. A torpedo in the forward boiler room, an oil fire and rising water is the exact circumstance that compartment was never going to survive, and the band did not.

Remarkably, Royal Marines bandsman George Lloyd, who had composed the ship's official march and would go on to become a significant British composer, survived the incident.

The Bandsman Who Became a Symphonist

George Lloyd was in that compartment and was the last man to get out of it. He was twenty-eight, already the composer of two operas that had been staged at Penzance and at Covent Garden, and the author of the march the band played when Trinidad entered harbour. He came out through burning fuel oil, and what came out was not the same man.

He spent months in the naval hospital at Newmachar outside Aberdeen with what was then called shell shock and is now called post-traumatic stress disorder: nightmares, an inability to speak, and a shaking of the limbs he could not stop. It lasted, in a diminishing form, for about twenty years. In 1951 his health collapsed again and he gave up music as a career altogether, bought a market garden in Dorset and grew mushrooms and carnations for two decades, composing between half past four and half past seven each morning before the day's work started. He was writing tonal, melodic, unfashionably tuneful symphonies at a moment when the musical establishment had no use for any of those things, and almost nobody would perform or broadcast them.

He sold the nursery in 1972. In 1977 the conductor Edward Downes talked the BBC into broadcasting his Eighth Symphony, listeners wrote in by the hundred, and George Lloyd spent the last twenty years of his life as a working composer with an audience. His march for HMS Trinidad was played at the Last Night of the Proms on 7 September 2013, with the last surviving member of her ship's company in the hall to hear it, seventy-one years after nine of the men who first played it were killed three decks below the waterline.

Limping to Murmansk

Trinidad made her way under her own power to Murmansk for partial repairs, a desperate and difficult journey given the extent of her damage, before setting out to return home on 13 May 1942, escorted by the destroyers Foresight, Forester, Somali and Matchless.

What Repairs at Murmansk Meant

Partial repairs is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Trinidad reached Murmansk on 30 March and was docked on 7 April, and when the flooded compartments were pumped out the thirty-two bodies were recovered. The yard at Rosta, up the Kola inlet, was a repair facility for trawlers and small warships that had been bombed repeatedly and had almost none of the plate, machinery or skilled hands a cruiser with a torpedo hole in her needed; much of the work was done by the ship's own company and a party sent out from Britain, in a port under regular air attack, in a Russian spring. A patch was got on by 2 May and she was declared fit for twenty knots, which is not a repair so much as a permission slip.

She was not going home to be mended, either. The intention was that she would reach Britain and then cross to a yard in the United States for the real work, because no British yard had the room. And she had acquired a passenger of some importance: Rear-Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter, whose flagship HMS Edinburgh had been torpedoed, fought under tow and finally sunk on 2 May. He shifted his flag to Trinidad. He would be looking for a third ship within a fortnight.

Finished Off by German Bombers

On 14 May, over twenty German Ju 88 bombers attacked the still-damaged cruiser, and a bomb striking near her earlier torpedo damage started a serious fire, killing sixty-three men, including twenty survivors from HMS Edinburgh who had been rescued and were aboard Trinidad at the time, a further, heavy loss of life that compounded the tragedy of the earlier torpedo strike.

The Four Czechoslovak Airmen

The airmen are worth naming, because they very nearly vanish from the record: Sergeant Vratislav Lastovicka and Corporals Jan Ferak, Josef Navesnik and Bohuslav Zikmund, four Czechoslovaks who had embarked at Murmansk the day before, trying to get to Britain to fly against the Germans. They had taken a long way round. Ferak was a fighter pilot who had flown for the Spanish Republic and shot down seven aircraft over Spain before the Republic fell, after which he retreated into the Soviet Union with the rest of the international volunteers and spent the next three years trying to get out of it. He was twenty-eight.

The bomb that killed them burst in the compartment where the passengers had been berthed, which is why the casualty list is so heavily weighted towards men who were not part of the ship's company: the twenty survivors from Edinburgh who had been given somewhere to sleep, and four airmen who had crossed a continent to be there. Ferak was awarded the Czechoslovak War Cross in memoriam that August. His grave is the Barents Sea.

With the fire beyond control, the decision was made to scuttle the ship, and on 15 May 1942 she was torpedoed by HMS Matchless and sank in the Arctic Ocean north of North Cape. Four Czechoslovak airmen also died in the sinking.

The scuttling has its own account from the other side. HMS Matchless (G52) fired three torpedoes into a ship she had spent two days escorting, at twenty past one in the morning, and then went back to work.

Remembering Trinidad's Crew

HMS Trinidad's loss, coming through a cruel accident followed by sustained enemy attack, stands as one of the harder stories of the entire Arctic convoy campaign, a reminder of just how unforgiving those waters were to the men who served there, whether the danger came from the enemy or, tragically, from their own equipment failing in conditions it was never designed to withstand.