HMS Trump (P333): The Last Royal Navy Submarine in Australia

Constructed at Barrow and Clydebank

HMS Trump's construction was shared between Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness and John Brown at Clydebank, launched on 25 March 1944 and commissioned on 8 July 1944, the only Royal Navy ship ever to carry the name Trump. She was a Group III T-class submarine featuring an all-welded hull for deeper diving and freon blowers to help her crew cope with tropical conditions.

Those freon blowers are worth explaining, because they were not a comfort fitting. A submarine in the tropics is an enclosed steel box full of running machinery under a sun that heats the sea itself to bath temperature, and the internal temperature on a boat dived off Sumatra could pass a hundred degrees with humidity to match. Men lost stones in weight on a single patrol, prickly heat became infected sores that would not close, and concentration went long before strength did. Cooling was the difference between a crew that could still work an attack at the end of a fortnight and one that could not, and the late T boats were the first British submarines built with it as standard.

A Productive Final Year of War

After deploying to Perth, Australia, in October 1944, Trump went on to sink the vessel Shosei Maru No.15 on 13 May 1945 and several further merchant vessels, and took part in joint operations with her sister boat HMS Tiptoe against Japanese cargo shipping in the Sunda Strait area that August, attacking a convoy on 3 August and sinking a cargo vessel on 9 August, and surviving an attack by Japanese aircraft along the way with only minor damage.

She arrived very late to a war that was nearly over, which is the common experience of the boats in this part of the queue. Perth in October 1944, and by the following August it was finished. What she got in those ten months was the tail end of the Far East campaign: individual merchantmen, a convoy attacked on 3 August 1945 in company with HMS Tiptoe, a cargo ship sunk on the 9th, and an aircraft that found her and did not quite do the job. Japan surrendered six days after her last sinking.

A Postwar Rebuild

Trump underwent a substantial Super T conversion, gaining a streamlined fin, the removal of her deck gun, more powerful diesel engines and an extended hull for additional battery capacity, keeping her relevant well into the Cold War era.

She was the last of them. Eight all-welded T boats were rebuilt at Chatham as Super Ts between 1948 and 1956, and HMS Truncheon sets out what the programme was for and why it mattered. Trump went in during February 1954 and came out in June 1956, closing the programme, and because she was last she got the fullest version of it: the longest new hull section of any of them, let in aft of the control room to carry the extra motors and batteries.

She and HMS Tabard also got something none of the others did. On the first six conversions the new fin was built around the existing conning tower; on Trump and Tabard the bridge itself was incorporated into the new fin structure, which is why photographs of those two look noticeably more modern than the rest of the class. Stand a 1956 Trump beside a 1944 Trump and they are barely recognisable as the same submarine.

The Last to Leave Sydney

Trump rejoined the 4th Submarine Squadron at Sydney in 1960, taking part in anti-submarine exercises for the Royal Australian Navy through 1966, before finally departing Australia on 10 January 1969, the last Royal Navy submarine stationed there, closing a long chapter of British submarine presence in Australian waters. She was scrapped at Newport, Wales, from 1 August 1971.

She was twenty-seven, which is a long life for a submarine laid down in the middle of a war, and she had spent rather more of it as a target than as a hunter. The name has never been used again by the Royal Navy, before or since, and a trump is simply the card that wins the trick, which was a reasonable thing to call a submarine in 1944. HMS Thorough, from the same class and the same programme, took the other route east and kept going all the way round.

Twenty Years in Sydney

The long chapter that closed deserves setting out. The Royal Navy's 4th Submarine Squadron was established at Sydney in 1949 and stayed for twenty years. It ran two or three boats at a time and it existed for one reason: the Australian and New Zealand navies needed a real submarine to practise against, and neither of them had one. The running costs were split between the two countries, which makes it one of the more quietly successful arrangements in Commonwealth naval history.

The reason Australia had none of her own is a story with a gap in the middle of it. She had started early: AE1 and AE2, launched in England in 1913, reached Sydney in May 1914 after what was then the longest submarine voyage ever made. Both were gone within a year. AE1 left Rabaul on 14 September 1914 to patrol off Cape Gazelle and never came back, and was not found until December 2017. AE2 forced the Dardanelles on the morning of 25 April 1915, the first submarine to get through, spent four days loose in the Sea of Marmara and was scuttled on the 30th after a Turkish torpedo boat shot her up. Australia lost both her submarines and most of a generation of submariners in eight months, and did not operate another for decades.

Trump rejoined it in 1960 along with Taciturn and Tabard, and spent most of the decade being hunted by Australian frigates and aircraft, with two long refits at Cockatoo Dockyard in Sydney, from January 1962 to April 1963 and again from August 1965 to October 1966. That is nine years of a British submarine and her crew living in Australia, and a great many of them stayed.

What ended it was arithmetic at the other end of the world. In the early 1960s Britain told Australia that the reductions in its conventional submarine force meant the squadron would have to come home. Australia's answer was to stop borrowing and buy: four HMS Oberon class boats were ordered in 1963, and Otway, Ovens and Onslow commissioned in 1968 and 1969, based at HMAS Platypus on Sydney Harbour. The 1st Australian Submarine Squadron formed, and the 4th was disbanded.

The handover had a better ending than most institutional changes get. When Trump left Sydney Harbour on 10 January 1969, the ship that escorted her out was HMAS Otway: one of the new Australian submarines, built in Britain, seeing the last British submarine off the station she had taken over. Twenty years of teaching, finished in the correct order.