The French cargo ship Rhin was sailed by her crew to Britain in 1940 and offered to the Admiralty, bypassing the Free French naval forces. She was commissioned as HMS Fidelity, to operate as a clandestine special forces ship, carrying out various missions under different neutral ship disguises. Her commander, Lieutenant Peri, was commissioned into the Royal Navy under the fictitious name of Lt Cdr ‘Jack Langlais’, RNVR.
In 1942 Fidelity was rearmed with four 4in antiaircraft guns with radar fire control and four 21in torpedo tubes. She also carried two OS2U Kingfisher floatplanes, two landing craft LCV 752 and LCV 754, plus MTB 105, one of the experimental MTBs numbered 104–107 built by Thornycroft in 1941. These were 45-footers (9m), displacing just 9 tons.
At the end of December 1942 Fidelity joined Convoy ONS154. Her mission was to carry fifty-one Royal Marine commandos for special operations in the Far East. Passing the Azores the convoy came under ferocious attack by U-boats, and the escorts were overwhelmed. No less than fifteen merchant ships, including Fidelity, were torpedoed. Her crew and passengers took to life rafts, but in the heavy winter weather not one survived. However, MTB 105 had been detached from the ship to carry out an antisubmarine patrol, and lost sight of her mother ship. Her crew of eight were rescued by HMCS Woodstock, and the crew of one of the Kingfisher aircraft, which had previously crashed on take-off, were picked up by HMCS St Laurent. In all 325 officers and men, including all the Marine commandos, perished in the disaster. This was the convoy attack which caused the Admiralty to form the special U-boat hunting groups which were to become so successful under Captain Walker and his successors.
KAITEN CARRIERS
Although not strictly torpedo-boat carriers, these Imperial Japanese navy conversions were designed to fulfil a similar role. Towards the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese began reconstructing surface warships to act as Kaiten carriers and launchers. It is hard to see how these ships could ever have survived to come within launching range of the US fleet, given the Americans’ command of the skies. Several destroyers were earmarked for conversion, usually older slower vessels, plus the ex-torpedo cruiser Kitakami. It was felt that the hull sponsons fitted for her banks of torpedo tubes could be utilised to carry Kaiten.
The following photos show her test launching Kaiten on 18 February 1945.
CHAPTER 11
Above-water Torpedo Tubes
FIXED TUBES
At the end of the Great War, during a period when battleship designers, particularly those in the United States, were seriously considering omitting torpedo tubes from future dreadnought projects and ultimately removing them from existing ships, the Royal Navy persisted in fitting them to its latest capital ships, the Hood class, and subsequently in the Nelson and Rodney completed in the 1920s.
Hood herself was the only ship of her class to be completed, and she was fitted with two 21in underwater tubes ahead of ‘A’ turret (see Chapter 12), and four fixed 21in torpedo tubes on her main deck aft, in place of the eight fixed tubes of her original design. From the very start, Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, the director of naval construction (DNC), had expressed his concerns over mounting these above-water tubes. They had been required in order to help her fulfil a basic function of the battlecruisers, pulling out ahead of the main battle line to launch attacks aimed at weakening the enemy battle line, prior to the clash of the battleships.
On 2 September 1918 the DNC warned that if the torpedo tubes were struck by a heavy shell and exploded, Hood would probably be cut in half, since the tubes were mounted just over the main strength girders running the length of the ship. However, the Admiralty insisted on retaining the aft pairs of tubes, and as a palliative measure the outboard ends of the tubes were surrounded by thin armour boxes of 3in plate, intended to protect the warheads once torpedoes were loaded. The hinged mantlet was the same thickness as the upper belt it pierced, that is to say, 5in.
The positions for the forward two pairs of tubes were left in place, the openings in the upper belt being covered by 5in thick armour plates. It was always intended that in time of war these tubes could be installed and the covering plates converted to hinging mantlets. However, the provisions of the Washington Treaty prohibited this measure, which was never implemented.
When Hood sailed to her date with destiny, the tubes and their torpedoes were still on board. During the court of inquiry into her dramatic loss, questions were raised as to whether the explosion of her torpedoes, struck by a shell from Bismarck or from Prinz Eugen, could have initiated the explosion of the nearby 4in magazines, followed in turn by the aft main 15in magazines. Opinion was divided, with the majority favouring direct penetration of a main magazine by a 15in shell from Bismarck, but a minority opinion continued in favour of the torpedo explosion theory. The discovery of the shattered wreck of HMS Hood in June 2001 by David Mearns seemed to have laid the torpedo theory to rest. One of the colour photos from the seabed clearly showed the intact torpedo mantlets on Hood’s port side, and even one of her torpedoes lying in the debris.
These ships, when first built, featured large torpedo batteries. The lead designs Kako and Furataka were planned with 24in torpedo tubes mounted on the centreline as in destroyers, but fears of launching from such a high position with the risk of a torpedo striking the deck edge led to them being armed with fixed pairs of tubes on the main deck, with six tubes on each broadside.
Italian heavy cruisers of the Trento class had an unusual arrangement: four sets of twin tubes which did not rotate, but were not strictly ‘fixed’ either. In fact, each twin tube set retracted into the forward and after torpedo rooms. This kept the weight of the torpedoes over the centre-line, and also withdrew the warheads from proximity with the ship’s side.
