Mervyn Wingfield

Wingfield wrote his memoirs in the 1980s and these were published in edited form by Whittles in 2012 as Wingfield at War. In his foreword, Admiral Lord Boyce wrote:

Wingfield was appointed second-in-command of the cruiser Euryalus, the flagship of Admiral Earl Mountbatten. This was followed by staff appointments in Washington DC and Norfolk, Virginia, then in NATO, Paris. Promoted to Captain in 1953, his first role was at HMS Jupiter on the Gare Loch, West Scotland, before appointment as Naval Attaché in Athens and Tel Aviv during the Suez crisis. His final command, after three years as Director of Underwater Weapons at the Admiralty, was the Royal Naval Air Station at Abbotsinch, Scotland, before retirement in 1963. He died at Hindhead, Surrey, in 2005, aged 94, survived by his wife Sheila, their daughter and their two sons.

Transferring to Trincomalee, Taurus was occupied in mine-laying off Penang and attacking Japanese shipping. In May 1944, she departed the Indian Ocean and Wingfield took the submarine home via Aden, Port Said, Malta and Gibraltar to Holy Loch, Scotland for a refit after twelve war patrols in two years.

Taurus then sailed to Colombo, patrolling the Andaman Sea and Malacca Straits, and on 13 November 1943 torpedoed and sank the Japanese submarine I-34. This was the first Japanese submarine to be sunk by a Royal Navy submarine. In the ensuing counterattack Taurus was damaged by depth charges but surfaced and the well-trained 4-inch gun crew surprised and disabled the Japanese submarine chaser. Wingfield was awarded a bar to the DSC he had earned in the Mediterranean. See Action of 13 November 1943.

From September 1942 Wingfield commanded the submarine Taurus which, after a patrol to Norway, was based first in Algiers, enforcing a blockade of Marseilles, then in Malta, operating in the Aegean, and finally in Beirut, attacking enemy shipping and landing agents on Greek islands. While sinking caiques in one Greek harbour, the submarine came under attack from horse-mounted Bulgars and returned to sea under a hail of machine-gun fire.

His first command was a World War I submarine, the H28, in which he patrolled off the coast of the Netherlands. This was followed by the newly built but ill-fated Umpire which sank in the North Sea after a night time collision in July 1941 with an armed British trawler, the Peter Hendriks. Wingfield, picked up semi-conscious from the North Sea forty minutes later, was the only survivor of the four men who had been on the bridge. Of those men trapped in the hull who escaped, one was Edward Young who described the incident in his book ‘One of Our Submarines’. Wingfield was then given command of the submarine Sturgeon which made two Arctic patrols. In one of these he penetrated Trondheim fjord submerged, despite the presence of mines, and sunk a merchant ship, for which he received a DSO. Between these patrols Sturgeon acted as a navigating beacon for the raid on St. Nazaire in March 1942.

As a midshipman he trained in battleships Benbow, Warspite and Valiant before joining the submarine service in 1934. He spent five years in the submarine HMS Odin, cruising all over South East Asia and training his crew in gunnery. When war broke out Odin sailed to Colombo and then Malta, from which Wingfield returned home in May 1940 through France to take the training course for a submarine command.

Captain Mervyn Robert George Wingfield DSO DSC (16 January 1911–15 March 2005) was a Royal Navy officer who served in submarines throughout World War II, narrowly surviving a sinking after a collision in the North Sea, and was the first British submarine commander to sink a Japanese submarine.