HMS Tradewind
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 HMS Tradewind P329 |
|
| Career (UK) |  |
|---|---|
| Builder: | Chatham Dockyard |
| Laid down: | 11 February 1942 |
| Launched: | 11 December 1942 |
| Commissioned: | 18 October 1943 |
| Fate: | scrapped 14 December 1955 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | British T class submarine |
| Displacement: | 1,290 tons surfaced 1,560 tons submerged |
| Length: | 276 ft 6 in (84.3 m) |
| Beam: | 25 ft 6 in (7.8 m) |
| Draught: |
12 ft 9 in (3.9 m) forward |
| Propulsion: |
Two shafts |
| Speed: |
15.5 knots (28.7 km/h) surfaced |
| Range: | 4,500 nautical miles at 11 knots (8,330 km at 20 km/h) surfaced |
| Test depth: | 300 ft (91 m) max |
| Complement: | 61 |
| Armament: |
6 internal forward facing torpedo tubes |
HMS Tradewind was a British submarine of the third group of the T class. She was built as P329 at Chatham, and launched on 11 December 1942. So far she has been the only ship of the Royal Navy to be named Tradewind, after the Trade winds.
[edit] Service
She spent most of her wartime career operating against the Japanese in the Far East, attacking enemy shipping and laying mines. She sank nine Japanese sailing vessels, and two small unidentified Japanese vessels, a Japanese tug and the Japanese merchant tanker Takasago Maru. The Japanese merchant cargo vessel Kyokko Maru was sunk after hitting a mine laid by Tradewind.
Her most infamous sinking was of the Japanese army cargo ship Junyō Maru which was headed for Sumatra, on 18 September 1944. Unbeknown to the Commanding Officer of the submarine, the Japanese ship was carrying 4,200 Javanese slave labourers and 2,300 Allied prisoners of war from Batavia to Padang. 5,620 lives were lost in the sinking.[1]
She survived the war and was modified in July 1945-September 1946 to become an acoustic trials submarine and used for tests. The modifications included the removal of external torpedo tubes and guns, the bridge was faired, the hull streamlined and some internal torpedo tubes blanked over. Measurements made using Tradewind were used to overhaul several of the T class boats to increase their ability to act stealthily against Soviet submarines and surface ships.
Tradewind was eventually scrapped at Charlestown on 14 December 1955.
[edit] References
- ^ HMS Tradewind, Uboot.net
- Submarines, War Beneath The Waves, From 1776 To The Present Day, by Robert Hutchinson
- Colledge, J. J. and Warlow, Ben (2006). Ships of the Royal Navy: the complete record of all fighting ships of the Royal Navy, Rev. ed., London: Chatham. ISBN 9781861762818. OCLC 67375475.
[edit] External links
|
||||||||||||||||||||
