King Charles Presents President Trump With HMS Trump's Bell
At a state dinner given in his honor, King Charles III has presented President Trump with a personal gift, the bell of the decommissioned HMS Trump (P533).
HMS Trump was a T-class submarine launched in Barrow (where Britain’s nuclear submarines are still built) in March 1944. The boat, with a crew of 63 hands, was originally fitted out with 11 torpedo tubes, a 103mm deck gun and three anti-aircraft machine guns. Deployed to the Pacific Theater, HMS Trump operated as a long-range raider and sank six ships - with a claim on a seventh - before the end of the war in 1945.
T-class submarines were optimized for deepwater, long-duration patrols. After the war HMS Trump remained in the Pacific until 1969, based in Sydney as part of the Royal Navy’s 4th Submarine Squadron and later as a Royal Navy boat under the command of Australia’s 1st Submarine Squadron.
HMS Trump was the only Royal Navy vessel to bear the name, which - until now - has had no connection to the Trump family.
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With the boat’s history, HMS Trump has strong antecedents as a forerunner to the AUKUS agreement, and indeed this may have been part of the rationale behind the gift. The way a British boat operated as part of an Australian flotilla in an area overseen and coordinated by the US Pacific Command mirrors the way in which AUKUS-generated submarines might well operate in the future, sharing boats, crews and bases.
With a split developing between the United States and Europe, with both questioning whether the NATO mutual aid system is still credible, AUKUS ties the interests of three useful like-minded allies together in the Pacific for many decades to come. This interpretation is given credibility by King Charles’ words to President Trump as he presented the bell: "Should you ever need to get a hold of us, just give it a ring."
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