… By the beginning of August 1941, the German offensive in the Arctic was completely bogged down. At the cost of their lives, Soviet soldiers and sailors stabilized the front in the area of the river. Zapadnaya Litsa, repelling two enemy attacks on Murmansk. To resume the offensive against the ice-free port, the Germans began to urgently bring fresh reserves to the North. The main striking force in the upcoming operation was to be the elite 6th Mountain Rifle Division, staffed by the natives of the mountainous regions of Bavaria and the Austrian Alps.
By the beginning of the war, the division was stationed on about. Crete in the Mediterranean. Now the main task was the transfer of its units to Norway. On the morning of August 30, 1941, from the Norwegian Tromsø to the place of hostilities (Kirkenes), a convoy with the transports "Baya Laura" and "Donau II", packed with fascist evil spirits, left. To avoid any trouble on the way to the two transports, a powerful escort was assigned to the destroyers Hans Lodi and Karl Galster, the patrol ships Goethe and Franken, and the submarine hunter UJ-1708. A couple of hunters, UJ-1706 and UJ-1706, were on the course corners, clearing the way for the main forces of the convoy. From the air, the convoy was covered by He.115 anti-submarine patrol aircraft.
… The Zoldaty looked gloomily at the passing rocks of Narvik, not yet realizing that the "terminator" was moving in front of them.
The merciless T-type assassin abandoned the use of various ingenious methods and long-range sniper shots. Commander Slayden had only a couple of torpedoes left, and the course of the last attack was known in advance. Like a superhero from an action movie of the same name, the underwater “terminator” approached the target, identified it and opened fire at point-blank range.
It was impossible to miss from 700 meters. Two shots, two explosions. 1,600 brave German soldiers floundering in the water.
The attacked "Donau II" (2931 brt) disappeared under water in five minutes. The second, larger steamship "Baya Laura" (8561 brt) held out on the surface for 3.5 hours until it was finished off by German patrol ships. As a result of a powerful shipwreck, the Germans lost 342 mountain riflemen (according to other sources - 700) dead and missing. After an unforgettable swim in the icy sea, the loss of all weapons and equipment (along with the transports, all vehicles and almost 200 horses went to the bottom), the surviving soldiers also lost all combat capability. The fascist group in the Arctic was left without the promised reinforcements.
It is worth noting that the next convoy with units of the 6th division, conducted along the same route on September 6, also did not reach its goal. The ships ran into the British cruisers Nigeria and Aurora. And although the transports with the troops managed to take refuge in the fjord, the death of the minelayer (training cruiser) Bremse, coupled with the threat of losing the entire convoy, forced Admiral Raeder to sign on September 15 order on the complete cessation of maritime transport of l / s Wehrmacht and SS along the Norwegian coast … The remaining units of the beaten 6th division were forced to reach the Kola Peninsula through Finland, as a result of which their redeployment was hardly completed until the onset of cold weather. The threat of a third, decisive, offensive against Murmansk was eliminated.
And what happened next with the “terminator”?
Realizing that this is the end, the commander of the escort forces, captain zur see Schulze-Hinrichs, gave the order to take revenge on the damned submarine at all costs. During the next two hours after the torpedoing of Bayi Laura and Donau II, the Germans ironed the depths of the sea, dropping 56 depth charges onto the boat. Despite the pogrom in the compartments, flying fragments of plafonds and objects torn from their places, His Majesty's ship "Trident" nevertheless crawled away from the enemy, moving at a depth of 75 meters in a cunning zigzag towards the coast.
Four days later "Trident" (English "trident") returned to Polyarny, announcing the bay with a lingering howl of sirens - a traditional signal about the sinking of enemy ships. Having replenished the ammunition load, the British submarine, together with its colleague Tigris, again rushed along the Norwegian coast, attacking everyone in its path.
Commander of the Trident Submarine, Commander Slayden in the Arctic
British submarines of the "T" type operated in the Arctic until the late autumn of 1941, after which they were replaced by two submarines of the "S" type ("Sileon" and "Seawulf"). As a result, for three military campaigns "Trident" managed to send three German transports and a couple of hunters (UJ-1201 and UJ-1213) to the bottom. Another attacked steamer, "Levante", in spite of the damage received, managed to reach the coast.
Colleagues of "Trident" were less fortunate: in three military campaigns "Tygris" managed to sink only two transports. Silion also chalked up two trophies (the Norwegian steamer Iceland and the tanker Vesco with a cargo of aviation gasoline for the Luftwaffe). "Seawulf" was the only British boat that did not manage to sink a single ship. According to one of the naval legends, the unfortunate boat almost died when the fired torpedo ricocheted against the ice floe and almost fell into the "Seawulf" itself.
In general, the submarines of the Royal Navy have demonstrated high efficiency and effectiveness of attacks. For 10 military campaigns in the extreme conditions of the Far North, in 25 torpedo attacks, they destroyed 7 transports with a total displacement of 17,888 brt and two warships. Three times more than the total success of all SF submarines over the same period of time.
On January 23, 1942, the Trident tracked down another fascist bastard - the Prince Eugen heavy cruiser. A torpedo salvo tore off the cruiser's stern, knocking out the pride of the Kriegsmarine for the next year.
In May 1942, the boat was redirected to Iceland in order to cover the transports from the Arctic convoys being formed. In the same month, "Trident" once again visited Polyarny, as part of the security forces of the convoy PQ-16. Another raid to the Norwegian fjords ended in vain, and the boat, after spending another week at the Soviet base, departed for the shores of the metropolis. From there, she made another, 29th in a row, raid into the Norwegian Sea (and this time to no avail), after which she was redirected to a new duty station in Gibraltar.
Over the next years, "Trident" changed many locations (Algeria, Malta, Lebanon, Ceylon, Indonesia), but could no longer break its records. The glory of the legendary "Trident" has forever remained in the polar seas.
It is interesting that just a year before the events described at the beginning of the article, "Trident" came to these harsh lands with the task of acting against the Soviet fleet! In March 1940, HMS Trident was supposed to cover the landing of British troops in Norway in order to help Finland in the war with the USSR. However, just a day after the "Trailent" went out to sea, on March 13, 1940, the Soviet-Finnish peace treaty was concluded, and the "Trailent" was forced to turn back.
Another mysterious story relates to the unusually high performance of the HMS Traident during her service with the Northern Fleet. After all, the boat and its crew were no longer newcomers: by the time it arrived in the Arctic, “Trident” had already completed 18 military campaigns, however, most of them ended in vain. And the overwhelming majority of the fired torpedoes missed their targets. According to British instructions, submarine commanders were not required to "rush" at every oncoming transport. It was recommended to exercise caution and assess the situation soberly. Deliberate evasion of an attack could not threaten a tribunal.
Perhaps it was the desire “not to lose face” in front of the Soviet sailors that spurred Commander Slayden to daring displays of initiative, which ultimately made HMS Trident the most productive of all submarines operating in the Northern Fleet.
However, according to the memoirs of the commander of the Northern Fleet, Commander Slayden himself showed himself to be by no means an idiot. Before the first approach to the position, the Englishman demanded to provide complete data on hydrology, anti-aircraft defense system and enemy transport routes, the location of objects on the coast, but finally struck down our sailors with a request to conduct training torpedo firing 3 days before going on a military campaign.
Why did the crew of the boat, which has been continuously fighting at sea for a year already, need to conduct such "exercises"?
In total, during the war years, the Trident submarine completed 36 military campaigns. In torpedo attacks 123 torpedoes were fired, of which 15 hit the target (18% of hits achieved). During the entire period of combat service, "Trident" sank and damaged 22 targets, incl. a heavy cruiser with a full weight / and 19 thousand tons, a U-31 submarine, 3 submarine hunters, a landing boat and 14 transports with a total tonnage of 52 455 brt. The total tonnage of targets hit was over 70 thousand tons.
It was a decent result.
The crew of the submarine "Trident", 1945
The technical aspect
The British submarines that arrived at Polar aroused considerable interest among the command of the Northern Fleet. Of the Soviet submarines, only the cruising “Katyushas” of the project XIV could compare with them (1500/2117 tons versus 1090/1575 tons for the British “terminators”). Our boats were absolutely superior to the Trident in surface speed (22 knots versus 15 knots) and artillery power (2x100 mm and 2x45 mm semi-automatic anti-aircraft guns against just one British “four-inch”).
“Englishwoman” surprised with her torpedo armament: ten (!) Torpedo tubes for firing straight ahead (six of them were located in a solid hull and had six spare torpedoes, four more torpedo tubes were in a permeable superstructure). As a result, the British "Terminators" possessed monstrous firepower, not attainable by all of their peers. Fired in a wide “fan”, 10 torpedoes would leave no chance for an enemy convoy. However, in real conditions, British submariners rarely managed to take advantage of their advantage. Affected by the difficulty of keeping the boat at a given depth, whose nose suddenly "lightened" by a couple of tens of tons, as well as considerations related to the economy of torpedoes.
Due to the unfortunate mistake of the crew, “Trident” did not manage to fire a 7-torpedo salvo at the German cruiser “Prince Eugen” (only three were able to reach the target). The sinking of the Japanese cruiser Ashigara at the end of the war was the only vivid episode with the shooting of full ammunition. The submarine "Trenchant" fired 8 torpedoes in one salvo, of which five hit the target.
The Soviet "Katyusha" also carried 10 torpedo tubes (with 24 torpedo ammunition), but their number was partially offset by the fact that out of ten TA four were intended for firing at aft corners.
The Soviet submariners liked the British Mk. VIII torpedoes: despite the similar travel speed, firing modes and launch range, foreign torpedoes used a vapor-gas mixture enriched with oxygen. This gave less trace and made it difficult for the enemy to detect the boat at the time of the attack.
And, of course, the main thing is ASDIK. A primitive sonar by today's standards, capable of detecting large objects on the surface and underwater, even if they were moving at low speed in the water column and were not detected by conventional sound direction finders.
Our boat was more in line with the idea of a universal submarine cruiser with pronounced squadron features, while the Allies concentrated the efforts of their designers on creating powerful torpedo submarine focused on action from a submerged position … Moreover, these efforts were not limited to purely working out the design of boats, but included the development of a whole complex of modern means of detection, communication and weapon control, which were practically absent on our ships.
- M. Morozov, “British submarines in the waters of the Soviet Arctic”.
