The British Second World War submarine, HMS Trooper, which disappeared in October 1943 while on a top-secret mission in the Aegean Sea, has been located by a team of underwater researchers led by Kostas Thoctarides.
After Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the German military sought to prevent Allied forces from taking control of the Dodecanese, a group of islands off the coast of Türkiye which are now part of modern-day Greece, but which at the time had been occupied by Italy since 1912.
In late September 1943, British Intelligence received reports that the Germans were preparing to mount an assault on the Dodecanese. Trooper, a British T-class submarine with a crew of 64 men under the command of Lieutenant John S Wraith, sailed from Beirut on 26 September with orders to patrol in the Aegean Sea.
Lieutenant Wraith had been tasked with landing three secret agents and a valuable cargo at the port of Kalamos, on the island of Evia. She arrived late in the evening of 30 September, disembarking Major Georgios Diamantopoulos of the Greek intelligence service; and Lieutenant Emmanuel Vais and his radio operator – codenamed ‘Thomas’ – together with 400 kilos of supplies.
Trooper returned to her patrol in the Aegean, but was never seen again.
On 5 October 1943, the British received information about a possible German operation targeting the island of Leros. Trooper was ordered to patrol between the islands of Naxos and Ikaria, but made no further contact. When she did not return to Beirut by 17 October as expected, and with no response to Admiralty signalling, HMS Trooper was officially reported as lost on 20 October.
The search for records relating to HMS Trooper began in England in 1998, and the first underwater search carried out in 2000. There have since been a further 14 expeditions to the Dodecanese, but without success.
For more than 20 years, the search for HMS Trooper had focused on the underwater minefields around Leros, Kalymnos and Kos. Ten minefields were searched without finding any sign of the submarine, until a new theory about her disappearance surfaced in 2023, based on the report of an encounter from October 1943.
Between 1942 and 1945 the British Royal Navy ran covert military operations in the Aegean using a small squadron of boats named the Levant Schooner Flotilla, comprised of small wooden schooners known as caïques that had been requisitioned from local fishermen.
On 14 October 1943, a British-manned boat designated Caique LS8 reported an encounter with a British T-class submarine that surfaced alongside it in Alinda Bay, Leros.
Following the war, the captain of the caique, Lieutenant Commander Adrian Seligman, wrote a book, War in the Islands, in which he detailed his encounter with the submarine, writing that he believed it to be HMS Trooper as he recognised Lieutenant Wraith’s ‘loud voice’.
The story was generally accepted as it coincided with Trooper’s orders – she was scheduled to be off Leros at that time – and subsequent discovery that the area had been heavily mined.
While studying the logs of other British submarines in the area, however, Thoctarides and fellow researcher Spyros Vougidis found a report from the captain of a different submarine, HMS Torbay, referencing the encounter Seligman had recorded in his book.
Seligman appears to have been mistaken about the identity of the submarine and HMS Trooper, it seems, was not in the area where she had last been reportedly sighted.
Using information from British, Greek and German archives, Vougidis and Thoctarides undertook a detailed study of the locations of all the minefields the Germans had laid in the Aegean.
They found that a German minelayer, Drache, had laid five minefields with a total of 287 mines north of the island of Donousa on the 26 September 1943 – the very same day that HMS Trooper sailed from Beirut, and in the same area that Trooper had been ordered to patrol between 6 and 9 October 1943, before her scheduled move to Leros.
With this newfound theory as to Trooper’s location, in 2023 the search for the missing submarine was redirected to the north of Donousa, where Thoctarides’ team finally located the wreck at a depth of 253 metres in a stretch of water known as the Icarian Sea, north of the Dodecanese Islands.
The team’s research has shown that the submarine entered one of five minefields laid by the German minelayer Drache and was sunk ‘due to a catastrophic mine explosion’ early on 7 October 1943 with the loss of all 64 officers and men.
‘The 84-meter-long Trooper is broken into three distinct sections, bow, midships and stern, which confirms a very violent sinking,’ said Thoctarides. ‘The German EMF type mine contained 350 kg of hexane explosives.
‘The result of the explosion was the immediate and rapid sinking, with the submarine breaking into three separate pieces: First the bow went down, then the stern and lastly the midship section, which had remained on the surface for a few minutes.
‘The bow and stern lie on the seabed in close proximity,’ said Thoctarides, ‘while the submarine’s conning tower has broken away and is located a little further away,’ adding, ‘The scene is quite eerie…’
HMS Trooper – bow section
The bow is laid on the seabed at an angle of 5 degrees forward, separated from the rest of the submarine where the crew accommodation compartment was located.
The bow planes are folded in, an indication that – in combination with the lowered periscopes, the engine room telegraph on the bridge in the ‘half ahead’ position and the open hatch in the conning tower – the submarine was sailing at the surface at the time of the explosion.
Midship section
The midship section has a starboard list of 7 degrees. The periscope standards are lowered as well as the radar antenna. The conning tower hatch is open and the upper deck telegraphs are in the half-ahead position.
The inner door leading to the engine room is open and the midship section has broken off where the engine room’s watertight door is located. The sight of the accommodation compartment which has been completely swept away by the explosion is shocking.
The hatches leading to the gun are closed, and the entire gun is missing from its position on the deck.
Stern section
The stern section has suffered the least damage and shows a heavy starboard list of 43 degrees. The Direction Finder (DF) antenna is visible on the deck, in excellent condition. The stern planes are in the normal position.
The initial location of the wreck was achieved using CHIRP technology sonar before being identified by comparing footage from an unmanned ROV with the shipbuilding plans of the submarine. The team were keen not to conduct any exploration that might disturb the wreck itself, as it remains a war grave for the 64 men who were lost in the sinking.
‘I am very pleased to learn that the renowned Greek explorer Kostas Thoctarides and his team, have solved an 81-year-old mystery and have discovered the whereabouts of the wreck of the British submarine HMS Trooper,’ said George Malcolmson, a former archivist at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum. ‘The only information previously known was that the submarine was believed to have been mined in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1943 during WWII.
‘Knowing the location of the last resting place of our submariners will help bring closure to surviving relatives and descendants and serves as a timely reminder of those special breed of men who made the ultimate sacrifice. “Resurgam“.’
Lieutenant John S Wraith’s son, Captain Richard S Wraith CBE, Royal Navy, has also paid tribute to the team that has located his father’s lost submarine.
‘I have been aware for many years of the strenuous effort by the Greek research team to locate the wreck of the submarine and am now very pleased and excited that their endeavours have been rewarded,’ said Captain Wraith.
‘I hope that any family members of those lost with my father may be able to use the definitive location of Trooper as a focal point to help lay to rest any memories of their loved ones.’
