It was late 1943 when the HMS Trooper, a British submarine, was patrolling the Aegean Sea with a crew of 64 men onboard. The submarine was due to arrive in Beirut on October 17th of that year, but it never made it to its final destination. The mystery of this vanished WW2 submarine lasted eight decades, as no one ever heard back from the crew again or spotted the submarine.
Now, experts believe they might have figured out what happened to the submarine and where it has been resting since the height of the Second World War.
Locating the HMS Trooper wreck
Kostas Thoctarides, the Greek underwater search team leader of Planet Blue, led a team of researchers in locating the WW2 HMS Trooper wreck. The team used a shipboard sonar in mapping the seafloor and investigated the area with the help of a vehicle that was remotely operated.
The HMS Trooper was then identified on the seafloor just off Greece’s island of Donoussa. The wreckage was compared to original building plans for the submarine to ascertain that it was in fact the missing WW2 Trooper. The team further investigated the remains of the submarine remotely using the underwater vehicle.
The HMS Trooper is resting 830 feet beneath the surface of the Icarian Sea. In an interview with Live Science, Thotctarides said, “The Icarian Sea is one of the most difficult seas with strong winds, waves, and strong underwater currents, However, constant and persistent research paid off.”
The wreckage of the WW2 submarine is broken in three
When a shipwreck is found, it is often challenging to make sense of just exactly what it is experts are looking at. However, Thotctarides and his team were able to determine that the site of the HMS Trooper has been broken into three sections: the bow, the midship, and the stern.
Researchers familiar with these types of wreckages have said the damage looks as if the submarine endured “a very violent sinking, which was more likely than not caused by a German mine.”
Historical records indicate that at the time, a German minelayer had laid 287 mines in the same area, which would explain the nature of the submarine’s violent demise.
Experts previously failed to locate the HMS Trooper
Finding the vanished WW2 submarine was not an easy task. The missions that had previously attempted to locate the submarine had focused on war-time underwater minefields near three islands: Leros, Kalymnos, and Kos.
These had been the focus of previous efforts due to a passage in the book War in the Islands, written by Adrian Seligman, a lieutenant commander in British operations at the time the Trooper went missing.
In the book, the commander revealed that on October 14, 1943, just days before the trooper disappeared, he believed he had recognized the voice of the Trooper’s commander. Many historical logbooks now show Seligman was likely mistaken about this, and, thus, researchers had been searching in the wrong area for decades.
