Italy also lost several fine destroyers by attack from Austrian or German U-boats. The Impetuoso was submarined in the Straits of Otranto on the 10th July, 1916, with small loss of personnel, but the fate which befell the Nembo was more tragic and more romantic. The Nembo was escorting a transport to Valona. The submarine was sighted on board the destroyer, whose commander at once changed course so as to cover his charge, which had some 3000 soldiers on board. He succeeded in doing this, and the torpedo intended for the transport struck the Nembo with full force. She at once began to settle, but the indomitable officer swung his ship round with the intention of ramming his assailant. Loss of speed and gain of water on the part of the destroyer gave the U-boat time to submerge, but the commander still had another card to play. He ordered depth charges to be dropped overboard. There was a mammoth upheaval of water, followed by the reappearance of the enemy showing evident signs of distress. Shortly afterward destroyer and submarine went to a common grave, the Nembo carrying with her most of her gallant crew, while eleven men from U 16 managed to scramble into one of the destroyer’s boats that floated by without a solitary occupant.
Vienna newspapers, like those of Berlin, endeavoured to bolster up the naval cause of the Central Powers by deliberately manufacturing desirable news. In January 1915 the Austrians were told that their E 12 had sunk the French battleship Courbet, a Dreadnought armed with a dozen 12–in. guns. That was sufficiently wide of the mark in all conscience, for it was absolutely untrue, but the loss of the Jean Bart by colliding with her when going to her assistance was tagged on to make the victory still more complete. E 12 certainly did succeed in hitting the Jean Bart with a torpedo, but the material damage was of slight importance and was speedily repaired. At the time the Courbet was many miles away from the scene of the imaginary action—“in excellent trim,” as the French Ministry of Marine stated. On another occasion the French battleship Vérité was alleged to have been seriously damaged by a German submarine.
This tale of disaster, terrible in the loss of great ships and greater men, is at the worst only a record of what is legitimate in modern naval warfare. Those who thought, like Nobel, that the more violent the agencies to be employed in conflict the more likelihood of preserving peace had their fond delusions shattered in the saturnalia of the centuries. Likewise those who sow the wind often reap the whirlwind.
CHAPTER VI
Horton, E 9, and Others
“If the submarine had succeeded our Army in France would have withered away.”—D. Lloyd George.
Previous pages have had much to say about U-boats. The northern mists, from the obscurity of which the Grand Fleet occasionally emerged into the broad sunlight of publicity, were as nothing compared with the fog of war which veiled the hourly activities of British and Allied submarines. Scouting is notoriously hazardous and necessarily private. Our underseas craft had sufficient of it. In the performance of this task they also tackled much other business, tracked and sent to the bottom vessels of their own species though not of their own tribe, wormed their way through waters sealed to surface ships, ferreted a course through strings of floating mines, dodged unanchored infernal machines, convoyed in safety hundreds of thousands of troops, and stalked men-of-war. They proved themselves friends to all but the Ishmael of the seas; and when opportunity served they snatched him from a watery grave when he ought to have perished.
The first German warship to be sunk by a British submarine was the Hela. She fell to E 9 on the 13th September, 1914. Heaven knows it was not for lack of searching for legitimate prey that nothing had been secured by our underwater craft ere the second month of the war. Like Villeneuve’s ships before Trafalgar, if any German vessels occasionally took an airing they also took good care to keep near home. The Hela, a light cruiser of 2040 tons displacement, with a complement of 178, of little consequence for fighting purposes because her heaviest guns were 15½-pdrs., was only six miles south of Heligoland when she was torpedoed by Lieutenant-Commander Max K. Horton.
E 9, it may be well to note, had already won her spurs in the prelude to the battle of Heligoland Bight. Two torpedoes were fired, with an interval of fifteen seconds between. One hit. Greatly daring, about a quarter of an hour later Horton took just the suspicion of a glance in her direction through the periscope, and saw that she was heeling over to starboard. When he again ventured to use his ‘eye’ there was no Hela, and a trawler had gone to the rescue of her crew. “What we are so proud about is that it is the first torpedo fired from a [British] submarine that made a hit,” one of the crew wrote, “and it has been a great competition among all our boats to get first one in, and of course we consider ourselves ‘the cock of the submarine flotilla’ now.”
A number of German torpedo-boats hunted for E 9 during several hours after the destruction of the cruiser. Yet the following day saw her calmly at work examining the outer anchorage of the island fortress, “a service attended by considerable risk.” An exceptionally heavy westerly gale was blowing on the 14th and continued for a week. On a lee shore, with short, steep seas, the lot of the submarines in the Bight was both hazardous and unpleasant. “There was no rest to be obtained,” says the Commodore, “and when cruising at a depth of sixty feet the submarines were rolling considerably, and pumping—i.e. vertically moving about twenty feet.” Officers and men were granted prize bounty amounting to £1050 for sinking the Hela, an exploit which the crew regarded as avenging the Pathfinder.
Further insight into the hazardous life of those who operated in the Bight is afforded by the following extract from another official report: