- The British HMS Trooper submarine was lost in 1943 with 64 men on board.
- A Greek-based underwater recovery team located the submarine 81 years later, finding it torn into three sections by a German mine.
- The recovery team used a combination of modern technology and historical archives to search a fresh location and discover the wreck 830 feet below the water’s surface.
Peppered with freshly strewn German mines in the fall of 1943, the Icarian Sea between Greece and Turkey proved a dangerous patrol for the British submarine HMS Trooper. After successfully dropping off three secret agents embarking on a mission in Greece on Oct. 1, 1943, the Trooper was never seen again. Now, 81 years later, a Greek underwater recovery team located the shipwreck of the Trooper 830 feet below the water’s surface, the final resting place for the 64 men on board.
It wasn’t that folks hadn’t searched for the Trooper, it was that they were looking in the wrong place, according to Kosta Thoctarides, owner of Planet Blue, a Greek-based underwater recovery company. Thoctarides successfully located the Trooper by combining modern sonar technology with archival accounts from World War II to search a fresh location in the Icarian Sea north of the central Aegean island of Donoussa.
Leaving Beirut in September 1943, the 17-torpedo HMS Trooper embarked on a secret mission to deposit three undercover agents and cargo at Kalamos. The sub arrived in the late hours of Sept. 30, and the three agents left the ship in the early hours of Oct. 1, not knowing they would be the last to see any of the crew alive. The mission, dubbed Eruption, included a Greek intelligence officer and two British special operations officers aiming to disrupt German-occupied Athens. While the three did their work on land, the Trooper was sent to patrol the surrounding mine-filled waters.
When the Trooper didn’t arrive back to Beirut on Oct. 17, 1943, as expected, it was deemed lost.
Thoctarides said the first recorded search for the Trooper occurred in 2000, and since then, 14 expeditions to the minefields of Leros, Kalymnos, and Kos were each unsuccessful.
But that’s because the previous efforts searched in the wrong location, Thoctarides said. The searches were all based on an Oct. 14, 1943, report from the captain of a British ship who said he saw the HMS Trooper in Alinda Bay and recognized the voice of the lieutenant when they exchanged greetings. The location of the sighting fit with the submarine’s order, so the account was generally accepted, and experts long believed the Trooper was lost in the Leros minefields.
As Thoctarides studied the archives, he discovered that it wasn’t the Trooper that the British captain saw, but instead the HMS Torbay, with a report from that submarine that matched the exact description of the Leros encounter.
To change up the failed search patterns, the Greek team then started searching the areas with the most recent German minelaying efforts, which included the 287 mines dropped north of Donoussa in late September 1943. Using ship-based sonar, Thoctarides said his team first located the 273-foot-long Trooper and then sent an unmanned ROV down to the wreckage in the difficult underwater currents.
“The 84-meter-long Trooper is broken into three distinct sections,” Thoactarides said in a statement, “bow section, midships section, and the stern section, which confirms a very violent sinking, due to a catastrophic mine explosion. The German EMF type mine contained 350 kilograms of hexane explosive. 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.”
Thoctarides said that the open hatch on the conning tower—also known as the command tower—points to the submarine sailing along the surface when it hit the mine. The tower was separated from the three main sections of the submarine.
“Knowing the location,” George Malcolmson, former archivist for the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, said in a statement, “of the last resting place of our submariners will help bring closure to surviving relatives and descendants and serve as a timely reminder of those special breed of men who made the ultimate sacrifice.”
Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
