Mervyn Wingfield
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Mervyn Wingfield DSO DSC |
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Captain Mervyn Wingfield RN
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| Born | 16 January 1911 |
| Died | 15 May 2005 (aged 94) |
| Allegiance |
 United Kingdom
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| Rank | Captain |
| Awards | |
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.
Wingfield was born in Rathgar, Ireland, youngest son of Colonel the Rev William Wingfield, Royal Field Artillery. His father had been awarded a DSO at Gallipoli. He was educated at Bedford School and Pangbourne College, entering Dartmouth Naval College as a cadet at the age of 14.
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.
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.
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