"The four “human torpedoes”, dressing for action, left off only the foul-smelling shark-scare grease. Unsmeared, and trusting to luck, they donned thick rubber suits and the oxygen supply that with a slight knock could open at full pressure and burst their lungs. By the light of a brilliant moon they concealed cyanide pills in case of capture inside their helmets and waited ready to mount, two by two, the pair of two-seater “chariots”, 30ft long, two and a half feet wide, each nosed with a 1,100lb Torpex explosive-filled warhead. This, too, by a knock or a bump in the shallow coral-reefed waters of the Andaman Sea off Thailand, might go off and kill them. Sub-Lieutenant Tony “Lofty” Eldridge, skipper of the chariot they had named “Tiny”, shook the hand of his crewman, Petty Officer Sydney “Butch” Woollcott, and at 10pm on 27 October 1944 they slipped away from the sweltering control room of the submarine HMS Trenchant and climbed on to the craft. It bobbed in the phosphorescent, balmy sea, six and a half miles from the Thai island of Salanga, where they were to make for the harbour of Phuket. It took two and a half hours to reach their target, the 4,859-ton former Italian merchant ship Sumatra now controlled by the occupying Japanese. She lay, recently refloated, near the harbour entrance. Beyond her, still half-submerged, was the ex-merchantman Volpi, 5,272 tons, prey for Eldridge’s and Woollcott’s colleagues, Petty Officer WS Smith and Steward A Brown on the other craft. Targets like these were beyond the reach of ordinary submarines, and torpedoes fired had run into the sand. Eldridge’s underwater steed, developed at the behest of Winston Churchill from a mish-mash of pre-war ideas and observation of Italian successes at the beginning of the Second World War with just such primitive craft, was an extreme stop-gap measure to do the near-impossible. He was the son of a businessman who owned hairdressing ventures in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1943, where, having quickly demonstrated that he was officer material, he put himself forward for special service – soon revised as “special and hazardous service”. " http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/sublieutenant-anthony-eldridge-naval-officer-and-a-human-torpedo-who-helped-sink-two-vessels-controlled-by-the-japanese-10204802.html
