Shipwreck Hunters Find Lost World War II-Era Submarine That Vanished With 64 Crew Members Onboard

In late 1943, the British submarine HMS Trooper was patrolling the Aegean Sea with 64 men onboard. It was scheduled to arrive in Beirut on October 17—but it never showed up there. The vessel and its crew were never seen or heard from again.

For eight decades, the disappearance of the Trooper remained an enduring World War II mystery. Now, however, shipwreck hunters think they’ve discovered what happened to the submarine—and the location of its final resting place.

A team led by diver Κostas Thoctarides used sonar to locate the wreck of the Trooper on the seafloor near the Greek island of Donoussa. Later, they used remotely operated underwater vehicles to explore the vessel, which is resting 830 feet beneath the surface of the Icarian Sea.

“The Icarian Sea is one of the most difficult seas with strong winds, waves and strong underwater currents,” Thoctarides tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. “However, constant and persistent research paid off.”

The submarine is broken into three pieces: the bow, the midship and the stern. To researchers, this damage suggests the vessel suffered a “very violent sinking,” likely caused by an underwater German mine, as Thoctarides says in a statement. This theory is further supported by historical records, which indicate that a German minelayer had laid 287 mines in the same area shortly before the Trooper arrived, according to Dive magazine.

“The scene is quite eerie,” Thoctarides adds.

HMS TROOPER comes to light after 81 years

Watch on

The Trooper was under the command of John S. Wraith, a lieutenant with the British Royal Navy. The ship departed from Beirut in September 1943 to patrol near the Dodecanese, a group of islands off the coast of Turkey. The islands, which are now part of Greece, were occupied by Italy at the time.

While patrolling in this area, the Trooper also fulfilled another important mission. The submarine sailed to the island of Evia, where it dropped off three secret agents and a trove of supplies. Afterward, the Trooper returned to patrol in the Aegean.

From here, the timeline starts to get murky. On October 5, 1943, the submarine was sent to patrol between the islands of Naxos and Ikaria, and it was scheduled to return to Beirut by October 17.

When the Trooper failed to show up—or respond to radio calls—the British Royal Navy considered the submarine lost.

In recent decades, many researchers have tried and failed to find the Trooper. These missions often focused on underwater minefields near the islands of Leros, Kalymnos and Kos. They focused on that area because of a passage in a book, War in the Islands, written by Lieutenant Commander Adrian Seligman, who’d participated in a British military operation in the Aegean in the fall of 1943.

In the book, Seligman described an October 14, 1943, encounter in Alinda Bay, Leros, with a submarine. He believed the submarine was the Trooper because he thought he recognized Wraith’s loud voice.

However, based on historical logbooks, researchers now think that Seligman was mistaken about the submarine’s identity. As a result, searchers had been looking in the wrong place for decades.

Thoctarides and his team decided to take a different approach. While researching the locations of all the German minefields in the Aegean, they learned that the Germans had laid five minefields north of Donoussa just a few days before the Trooper was sent to patrol there. When they went looking in that area, they found the missing submarine.

The Trooper is also a war grave for all 64 men who were onboard at the time of the sinking. Researchers say they will not disturb the wreck site, and they hope the discovery brings some degree of closure to the victims’ descendants.

One of those descendants is Richard Wraith, a captain in the British Royal Navy and the son of the Trooper’s commander. As he says in the statement, “I hope that any family members of those lost with my father may be able to use the definitive location of Trooper as a focal point to help lay to rest any memories of their loved ones.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.