Save wartime chariot!

[gordonartist]

Mission to save Navy frogman's wartime chariot

By Russell Jenkins. The Times.



THE Japanese said that any “human torpedoes” captured would be blinded and castrated.

So it is hardly surprising that Anthony “Lofty” Eldridge, the last surviving frogman on mission CSO51, can recall every detail of the last chariot operation of the Second World War.



On October 27, 1944, he took part in a daring sortie in Phuket harbour, Thailand. The mission was to sink the 5,000-tonne Sumatra and 5,272-tonne Volpi with 1,100lb warheads.

It was a stunning success apart from one detail. When the Royal Navy commandos returned to their submarine, HMS Trenchant, the chariots, codenamed Tiny and Slasher, were scuttled for fear that the enemy was approaching.

More than 60 years later a diving team has found the chariots on the seabed near Koh Dok Mai in the Andaman Sea.

Chris Parton, a marine engineer from New Zealand, hopes that the Royal Thai Navy will assist in a four-day salvage operation. Sub-Lieutenant Eldridge, 82, now lives in Watford after many years in South Africa. He told The Times: “I would dearly love to see them on public display after all these years.”

Mr Eldridge, who was awarded the DSC, said: “All sorts of grisly stories were coming out along the lines that if you were captured you didn’t last long.Our orders, however, went into quite a bit of detail about the recovery afterwards. It wasn’t a suicide mission and I have to say we were all terribly keen on that aspect.”

He climbed on board Tiny ahead of his No 1 Petty Officer, “Butch” Woolcott. Petty Officer Bill Smith and his No 1, Ordinary Seaman Brown, were on Slasher. Each had a .38 revolver, some Siam dollars, 25 gold sovereigns, a silk map, a dagger, a needle and thread for wounds, compasses, blades, a watch and a cyanide capsule. “It was a moonlit night,” Mr Eldridge said. “We knew when we were under the hull of Sumatra because it went black.”

He recalls Woolcott peeling off to clamp the warhead to the bilge keel. Job done, and the timer set to blast in six hours, the men murmured congratulations and turned for home.

Their colleagues, however, found the Volpi so entrenched in the seabed that they could not get underneath her. Brown boarded the ship and put the explosive in the engine room.

The “human torpedoes” were an Italian invention. Winston Churchill had been so impressed by an attack on two British battleships in Alexandria harbour in 1941 that he demanded one of his own.

Take care,

Gordon.