HMS Truculent (P315): A Distinguished War, A Devastating Peace

Funded by the People of Glossop

HMS Truculent was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow and launched on 12 September 1942, funded in part by the townspeople of Glossop in Derbyshire, who raised an extraordinary £175,000 during 1942 and 1943 in support of her construction, a truly striking example of civilian effort behind a fighting submarine.

The scheme behind that figure is worth explaining, because it was one of the odder pieces of wartime civic life. National Savings ran Warship Weeks, in which a town was invited to raise the notional cost of a particular warship, and if it hit the target the ship was formally adopted by the town. Plaques were exchanged, the mayor visited, and schoolchildren wrote to the crew for the rest of the war.

Glossop is a mill town in the Derbyshire hills with, at the time, perhaps twenty thousand people in it, a long way from the sea and with no particular connection to submarines. They raised a hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. The point of the exercise was never really the money, which the Treasury could have found in an afternoon; it was to give people somewhere to put their anxiety, and to give a submarine somewhere to belong.

Glossop still remembers her. That is what the scheme was for, and it is why the town's name is worth keeping at the top of her story rather than buried in a footnote.

A Strong Wartime Record

Truculent sank nine enemy vessels during the war, including the German submarine U-308 in the Norwegian Sea, and took part in Operation Source, towing the midget submarine X-6 towards Norway as part of the daring plan to attack the German battleship Tirpitz. In the Far East she sank the Japanese army cargo ship Yasushima Maru and the small vessel Mantai, along with five Japanese sailing vessels.

Her Operation Source tow is worth a sentence more, because X-6 was one of the two craft that got through. She was taken into Kaafjord, put her charges under Tirpitz and put the ship out of the war for months, and her commander was awarded the Victoria Cross. Truculent got her there. HMS Sceptre brought X-10 on the same passage, and the whole operation cost two midget submarines and their crews before a shot was fired.

U-308 is the other entry that stands out. She was caught in the Norwegian Sea in June 1943, and a submarine killing a submarine was uncommon enough that the boats which managed it are still listed by name.

One of her actions carries a particularly painful footnote: her sinking of the Japanese transport Harugiku Maru, a so-called hell ship, resulted in the deaths of 180 of the 720 Allied prisoners of war being transported aboard her, a tragedy of the kind that recurred all too often when submarines unknowingly attacked vessels carrying Allied captives.

It is worth being exact about what nobody could have known. A hell ship carried no marking of any kind. Japan did not declare these movements, did not route them separately, and did not notify the Red Cross, and the men below decks were battened down in cargo holds without lifejackets or any way out. From a periscope, at two miles, in the Malacca Strait, Harugiku Maru was a Japanese transport under escort and nothing else.

The number that survived says something too. Five hundred and forty of the seven hundred and twenty prisoners aboard got out of a sinking ship, which is a far better proportion than most of these disasters produced, and it happened because she went down slowly enough and close enough to land for boats to reach her. It does nothing for the hundred and eighty who did not.

The Thames Estuary Disaster

Truculent's story is forever marked by what happened after the war ended. On 12 January 1950, returning to Sheerness from post-refit sea trials out of Chatham with 61 crew and 18 dockyard workers aboard, a total of 79 men, she collided with the Swedish oil tanker Divina in the Thames Estuary after her watch officer mistakenly identified the tanker as stationary.

The Light That Should Not Have Been There

That mistake had a specific cause and it is worth setting out, because it makes the whole thing comprehensible rather than simply careless. Divina was carrying paraffin, and the Port of London regulations required a vessel with a dangerous cargo to show an extra all-round red light at the masthead.

A watchkeeper at night does not see a ship. He sees an arrangement of coloured lights, and the whole system depends on the arrangement being standard: a green light to starboard, a red to port, white masthead lights whose relative position tells you which way she is heading and roughly how far off she is. It is a code, learned by rote, read in a second. Divina was showing that code with an extra red light in the middle of it.

The lookout reported lights he could not identify. The officer of the watch could not identify them either and called the captain, who looked at them and concluded the vessel was stopped. She was not. She was under way and considerably closer than the lights suggested.

Then came the decision that mattered. The proper thing was to alter to starboard and pass her port to port, and Truculent could not, because the water on that side was too shallow for her. So she turned to port instead, across a moving ship. By the time anybody realised, the two were closing. The captain ordered hard to port and full astern and shut the watertight doors. Divina's master thought he had run down a Thames lighter.

The collision caused catastrophic flooding and Truculent sank bow-first in 60 feet of water. Between fifty and sixty men initially survived the sinking and made their way out through escape hatches into the freezing January water, but the great majority died of exposure before they could be rescued; only fifteen were picked up alive, ten by a boat from Divina and five more by the Dutch ship Almdijk.

The Escape Worked. The Sea Did Not Care.

What happened inside the boat deserves telling, because it is the part usually skipped and it is a considerable feat. Truculent was on the bottom in sixty feet of water, down by the bows, with the carbon dioxide climbing. The first lieutenant decided to get everybody out immediately rather than wait for a rescue that would arrive too late.

That meant rigging the twill trunks, which are canvas tubes hung below the escape hatches. The compartment is deliberately flooded until the pressure inside equals the pressure outside, which is the only way the hatch will open, and the trunk hangs down into the water so that men can duck under its lower edge and go up through the hatch one at a time while everybody else waits in the trapped air above the water line. It requires every man to stand in rising freezing water in the dark and wait his turn.

There were not enough Davis escape sets. She was carrying her full complement plus a third again in spares, which had always been thought generous, and with seventy-nine men aboard it was not enough. The sets were given to the men who could not swim.

And it worked. Nearly everybody got out. Something between fifty and sixty-seven men left a sunken submarine alive and reached the surface, which is the escape system doing exactly what it was designed to do and better than anybody had reason to expect.

Then the tide took them. It was ebbing hard, in the dark, in January, and it carried them straight out of the estuary into the North Sea, spread over miles of water, with no lights and nothing to hold on to. Ten were found by a boat from Divina. About forty-five minutes after the sinking the Dutch ship Almdijk heard shouting in the water, stopped, found a group of men and picked up five more, among them Truculent's captain and her officer of the watch, who had been swept off the bridge at the moment of the collision. Fifteen men in all.

The lesson the submarine service drew from it was not that the escape had failed. It was that getting out is only half of the problem, and that men who surface separately in a tideway at night will not be found. Escape drill afterwards emphasised getting everybody up together, and lifejackets with lights became standard.

Sixty-four men lost their lives that night, the worst peacetime submarine disaster suffered by the Royal Navy since the loss of HMS Thetis in 1939.

The comparison is exact and it is worth following up. Thetis went down on her acceptance trials in Liverpool Bay in June 1939 with 103 men aboard, in water shallow enough that her stern stood out of the sea for hours while rescue ships lay alongside. Four men got themselves out and ninety-nine died. She was raised, refitted and sent back to sea under a different name, and our account of the rest of her is in HMS Thunderbolt.

Between the two of them they wrote most of British submarine escape doctrine. Thetis proved that men trapped in a boat cannot wait to be rescued and must get themselves out. Truculent proved that getting out is not enough. HMS Sidon would add a third lesson at Portland five years later, about what a torpedo can do to the submarine carrying it.

A Lasting Legacy

A Court of Inquiry found Truculent three-quarters responsible for the collision, and an emergency fund raised some £20,000, equivalent to over half a million pounds today, for the families of those killed.

The tragedy directly led to the introduction of what became known as the Truculent light, an additional navigation light fitted to submarines to make them more visible to surface vessels at night, a safety measure born directly from this disaster that has likely prevented further tragedies ever since.

The light exists because of the specific failure that night. A surfaced submarine sits very low in the water with a small fin and her lights close together and close to the sea, and to anybody looking from a merchant ship's bridge she looks smaller, further away and slower than she is. The extra light was fitted to break that impression and to say, unmistakably, that the low dark thing out there is a submarine and is moving.

The film about a stranded submarine that reached cinemas five weeks later has its own strange place in this. Morning Departure had finished shooting days before the collision, using HMS Tiptoe as the fictional boat, and the producers came close to shelving it before deciding to release it with a caption offering it as a tribute to the officers and men of His Majesty's submarines.

The wreck was salvaged in March 1950 and sold for scrap that May.

The salvage was not done for the submarine. She was eight years old, badly damaged and worth nothing, and she went to a breaker within eight weeks of coming up. She was raised because men were still inside her and their families were waiting, and because a Court of Inquiry needed to see the damage to work out what had happened.

The inquiry put three-quarters of the blame on Truculent, which is a hard finding against officers who had already been through it and were still alive to read it. It is also, on the evidence, about right: she made the alteration that closed the distance. The other quarter belongs to a red light that a tanker was legally obliged to show and that nobody on a submarine bridge had been trained to expect.