In 1939, the HMS Triumph submarine starred in one of the most celebrated British survival stories during World War II. Sailing through the Skagerrak Strait, between Germany and Denmark, she collided with a mine. The explosion ripped apart a twenty-foot-long bow section and tore a four-meter hole in the hull.
With no chance to submerge, the Royal Navy ship had 300 nautical miles (more than 555 kilometers) to go through waters infested with Nazi patrols to its base in Scotland. But Lt. Cmdr. John Wentworth McCoy was not nervous, the English media reported two years later, when the story broke.
The journey was extremely long, especially as the sub could only move at a maximum speed of 2.5 knots, leaving it exposed to German bombers. When the Scottish coast was already in sight, an enemy plane found HMS Triumph. But as luck would have it, being so close to home, the RAF fighters came to her aid.
Shortly after this heroism, the submarine returned to activity and was sent to carry out several top-secret missions in the Aegean Sea, where on January 9, 1942 it disappeared without a trace. Until now. A group of Greek divers have just found the ship south of Athens.
“It has been the most difficult mission I have carried out in my life,” says Kostas Thoctarides, head of the mission, in a Facebook post who has spent 25 years looking for the ship at the bottom of the sea and who had already managed to discover it. four other submarine wrecks in Greek waters.
HMS Triumph was launched in 1937 and soon after it carried out its first mission, in May 1939. In its short period in active service it carried out up to 21 war patrols and sank several Italian ships. In March 1941 she was sent to the Mediterranean to identify the coasts of the Dodecanese archipelago and land spies with canoes.
In her last act of duty, the submarine left Alexandria on December 26, 1941. The objective, before returning to England for a general repair, was to carry out two special operations, registered under the code name ‘Isinglass’ and ‘Coney Island’.
The first consisted of disembarking Lieutenant Atkinson, from the British intelligence service, and the Greek spy Arvanitopoulos Adamandios to financially help people who were still trapped in occupied Athens, as well as giving them two sets of radios to be able to communicate with the allied base in El Cairo.
The second was to take the New Zealand lieutenant of MI9 Graig to the island of Antiparos to coordinate the escape of 30 British refugees. During the night of December 29-30, HMS Triumph had already carried out the two missions and stopped at the nearby Despotiko Bay to disembark special equipment and fuel.
The submarine’s captain, Lt. John S. Huddart, grounded the refugees because he had to head quickly into the Aegean Sea for a dangerous patrol. The idea was to return for them on January 10, 1942 to take them to Alexandria. But that never happened.
Actually, everything went wrong. The submarine went to the coast of Sounion, south of Athens, to attack an Italian concrete barge. But Mussolini’s troops retaliated and bombarded the sub with depth charges. The entire crew, consisting of up to 64 people, died on board.
People left on the ground were arrested, including Atkinson, who was carrying a bulletin listing the names of as many as 37 Athens personalities with their aliases and real names whom the Greek government-in-exile asked for cooperation in fighting against the Axis Powers.
This classified information resulted in new arrests. People who ended up in military courts and some of whom were executed. Among the allied soldiers, only Lieutenant Atkinson was killed. The rest were transferred to concentration camps.
Kostas Thoctarides’ expedition has found three British Mk VIII torpedoes next to the wreckage of the submarine, which rests “tens of kilometers from the coast, at the bottom of the open sea, with eight degrees of right inclination.” “Her periscopes lowered and manholes closed indicate that she was in a deep dive during her last dramatic moments,” he adds.
“The elevator and rudders are in a straight line, so it was at a constant depth. In the turret you can see the wooden rudder, the compass and the four-inch gun, which is slightly raised upwards. In the front part of the bridge, the door leading to the canyon has been opened”, indicates the diver.
The ultimate cause of the sinking appears to have been a high-powered explosion in the forward section of HMS Triumph, which propelled this 84-metre-long, 8-metre-wide T-class ship (one of the largest British submarines) up to a depth of about 203 meters.
