The fearsome underwater weaponry of the Royal Navy submarine HMS Trenchant lays exposed on a slipway at Fremantle Australia in the final months of the World War II. Trenchant and her ‘Chatham twin’ HMS Tradewind were to have active and largely parallel careers in the Far East, each marked by a single incident of lasting naval significance.
The 53 units if the T-Class built between 1936 and 1945 were considerably larger than the preceding S and succeeding U-Class submarines, with which they made up the bulk of the Royal Navy’s wartime submarine fleet. At 1,500 tons, and with a range of up to 11,000 nautical miles, they were designed with Far Eastern theatres in mind, but their size also represented a compromise based on the construction quotas imposed by the London Treaty, the need for stealth, and pre-war budgetary constraints.
The T-Class carried an unprecedented armament of up to eleven torpedo tubes. Eight of these tubes were fitted in the bow, the upper pair in an external casing that ran the entire length of the ship. Two more external tubes were situated amidships firing forward with a final tube in the stern. The rationale for having such a large torpedo salvo was partly the development of radar technology, which it was predicted would increase the likelihood that submarine attacks would be launched from greater and less accurate ranges. Another factor was the British government’s mistaken pre-war belief that unrestricted submarine warfare against unarmed ships, which had been a feature of WWI, would be unacceptable in any future war. Against a potentially heavily-armed warship, a submarine would need to hit the enemy fast and very hard. When the brutal realities of WWII became clear, some T-Class submarines were redesigned so that their amidships tubes faced astern, giving them a multidirectional firepower more suited to attacking merchant convoys. In addition, some T-boats were given mine-laying capabilities.
Chatham Royal Dockyard was one of the Royal Navy’s specialist submarine builders. A total of 57 submarines were built there between 1906 and 1968, including six units of the T-Class. Tradewind and Trenchant were the third and fourth of these and both were laid down in the 300ft-long Slipway 7. This was the last of four covered slipways in the dockyard completed in the mid-18th century, after the discovery that constructing ships under roofs helped preserve their wooden hulls. The advent of iron-hulled steam ships soon made these slipways suitable only for the construction of smaller warships. The hull of Tradewind, known initially as P329 was begun in February 1942. Trenchant (P331) followed onto the stocks beside her three months later. In essence, both vessels took shape in the same dockyard womb. The two ships had a similar building time of around 20 months, Tradewind being commissioned in October 1943, and Trenchant at the end of February the following year. Both vessels underwent trials at the Royal Navy submarine base in Scotland’s Holy Loch before starting their wartime patrols.
The parallels in the submarines themselves were mirrored in their respective commanding officers. In command of Tradewind was Lt. Cmdr. Lynch Maydon, while the Trenchant was skippered by Lt. Cmdr. Arthur Hezlet. As well as being the same rank, Maydon and Hezlet had other commonalities. Both had South African origins, Maydon having been born in Pietermaritzburg, where his father was a member of the Natal Legislative Assembly, and Hezlet having grown up in Pretoria, where his father was serving in the British Army. The two men were of a similar age, Maydon being the older by five months. However, it was Hezlet who first signed up with the RN at the age of 13. Both were cadets at Dartmouth Naval College, which at the time of Hezlet’s enrolment in 1928 was headed by the WWI submarine hero Captain Martin Dunbar Nasmith.[1] Both men served with distinction in the Mediterranean aboard U-Class boats of the ‘Fighting Tenth’ Flotilla; Hezlet in command of HMS Unique, Maydon as CO of HMS Umbra. Hezlet had been decorated for sinking the 11,000t Italian troopship Esperia, while Maydon and his crew had completed the destruction of the crippled heavy cruiser Trento.[2]
Bow Creek to Anatahan 