The Story of the Submarine - Farnham Bishop

Sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue.

Because the overwhelming strength of the Allied fleet has kept the German and Austrian battleships safely locked up behind shore batteries, mine-fields and nettings, the Allies’ submarines have had comparatively few targets to try their skill on. The activity of the British submarines in the North Sea at the outbreak of the war has already been referred to, and a year later they found another opportunity in the Baltic. There the German fleet had the same preponderance over the Russian as the English had over the German battleships in the North Sea, but the British dreadnoughts could not be sent through the long tortuous passage of the Skagerrack and Cattegat, thick-sown with German mines, without cutting the British fleet in half and giving the Germans a splendid chance to defeat either half and then slip back through the Kiel Canal and destroy the other. So England sent some of her submarines instead. One of these joined the Russian squadron defending the Gulf of Riga against a German fleet and decided the fight by disabling the great battle-cruiser Moltke. Another, the E-13, ran ashore on the Danish island of Saltholm on August 19, 1915, and was warned by the commander of a Danish torpedo-boat that she would be allowed twenty-four hours to get off. Before the time-limit had expired and while three Danish torpedo-boats were standing by, two German destroyers steamed up, torpedoed the E-13, and killed half her crew by gun-fire: an outrageous violation of Denmark’s neutrality.[24]

Daredevil deeds have been done by the submarines of both sides in the Dardanelles. The little B-11 swam up the straits, threading her way through mine-field after mine-field, her captain keeping his course by “dead-reckoning” with map and compass and stop watch. To have exposed his periscope would have drawn the fire of the many shore batteries, to have dived a few feet too far in those shallow waters would have meant running aground, to have misjudged the swirling, changing currents might have meant annihilation. But Commander Holbrook brought his vessel safely through, torpedoed and sank the guard-ship Messudieh, a Turkish ironclad of the vintage of 1874, and returned to receive the Victoria Cross from his king and a gigantic “Iron Cross” from his brother officers. The E-11 went up even to Constantinople, torpedoed a Turkish transport within sight of the city and threw the whole waterfront into a panic. More transports and store-ships were sunk or driven on shore in the Sea of Marmora, a gunboat was torpedoed, and then the Kheyr-el-din, an old 10,000 ton battleship that had been the Kurfürst Freiderich Wilhelm before the kaiser sold her to Turkey, was sent to the bottom of the same waters by British submarines. One of them the E-15 ran aground in the Dardanelles and was forced to surrender to the Turks, but before they could float her off and make use of her, two steam launches dashed upstream through the fire of the shore batteries and torpedoed the stranded submarine as Cushing blew up the Albemarle.

But on the same day as the E-11’s first exploit—May 25, 1915, the British battleship Triumph went down with most of her crew off Gallipoli, torpedoed by a German submarine. The U-51 had made the 2400 mile trip from the North Sea, using as tenders a number of small tank steamers flying the Spanish flag. These vessels intentionally drew the attention of the cordon of British destroyers drawn across the Straits of Gibraltar and were captured, while the submarine swam safely through and traversed the Mediterranean to the Dardanelles. Two days after her first exploit, the U-51 or perhaps one of her Austrian consorts, sank another British battleship, the Majestic, off Gallipoli. The U-51 has been reported sunk by Russian warships in the Black Sea.

Tiny target afforded by Periscopes in rough weather.