Port T — The Secret Fleet Anchorage.
After the fall of Singapore, the Royal Navy builds 'Port T' at Addu Atoll in complete secrecy — a fleet anchorage for the Eastern Fleet, coastal batteries on Gan, and Liberator bombers patrolling the Indian Ocean. In 1944, a German U-boat slips through the anti-submarine nets and torpedoes the tanker British Loyalty for the second time in its life.
In September 1941 — with Japanese forces advancing through Malaya and Singapore about to fall — a group of 150 Royal Marine engineers under Colonel Jones quietly landed on Villingili in Addu Atoll, the southernmost corner of the Maldives, to build a secret fleet anchorage. It was known only as 'Port T'. Its existence was not publicly revealed until long after the war.
Coastal batteries were installed on Gan. Deep-water jetties were dredged. The residents of Gan and Feydhoo were forcibly relocated to Hithadhoo to make way for an airstrip. By 1942, the base was hosting Liberator bombers of 160 Squadron on coastal reconnaissance flights and Short Sunderland Mk III flying boats of 230 Squadron patrolling the central Indian Ocean for German and Japanese submarines.
The most famous casualty of Port T was the 5,583-ton oil tanker British Loyalty. Originally torpedoed by a Japanese midget submarine off Madagascar in 1942, she was salvaged and towed to Gan in 1943 to serve as a floating fuel depot. In March 1944 a German U-boat — U-183 — slipped through the anti-submarine nets at Gan Kandu and torpedoed her a second time. She never sailed again, and was finally scuttled in the lagoon in January 1946. Her rusted hull is still there, now the largest shipwreck dive site in the Maldives.
Port T does not appear on any chart available to the public. Its existence is a matter of absolute secrecy.
- Admiralty War Diaries, UK National Archives (ADM 199)
- Maloney, Clarence. People of the Maldive Islands (1980), ch. 7