The next two victims of this sort of warfare were the steamships Flaminian and the Crown of Castile, one of which was sunk by the U-28, and the other by an unidentified submarine on April 1, 1915. They went down off the west coast of England with no loss of life, though the Crown of Castile was torpedoed before her crew could get off. The Flaminian had tried to get away, but had to stop under fire from deck guns on the submarine. The shells did not hit her in vital spots, however, and it was necessary to send a torpedo into her hull to sink her.
The ease with which submarines had been able to bob up in unexpected places and to sink British merchantmen, in spite of the patrols maintained by British warships, caused the captains of merchant vessels to petition the British Government to be allowed to arm their vessels on April 1, 1915. This was not granted, because their being armed would have made the steamship legitimate prey for the submarines, nor was any attention paid to the demand made by the British press that the crews and officers of captured German submarines be treated, not as prisoners of war, but as pirates. Reprisals on the part of the Germans was feared.
Beachy Head on the 1st of April, 1915, was again the scene of two successful attacks on merchantmen by submarines. On that day the French steamship Emma, after being torpedoed, went to the bottom with all of the nineteen men in her crew. The same submarine sank the British steamer Seven Seas, causing the deaths of eleven of her men.
In order to indicate the amount of harm which the submarine warfare caused British shipping, the admiralty on April 1, 1915, announced that though five merchantmen had been sent to the bottom and one had been only partially damaged by submarines during the week ending March 31, 1915, some 1,559 vessels entered and sailed from British ports during the same period.
Efforts were made to damage the base, from which many of the German submarines had been putting out at Zeebrugge, with aircraft. On the 1st of April, 1915, the British Government's press bureau announced that bombs had been dropped, with unknown success, on two German submarines lying there, and that on the same day a British airman had flown over Hoboken and had seen submarines in building there.
The steamship Lockwood, while off Start Point in Devonshire, was hit abaft the engine room by a German torpedo on the morning of April 2, 1915, and though she went down almost immediately, her crew was able to get off in small boats and were picked up by fishing trawlers.
The U-28, which had done such effective work for the Germans during the month of March, 1915, was relieved of duty near the British Isles during the first week of April by the U-31, which sank the Russian bark Hermes and the British steamship Olivine off the coast of Wales on April 5, 1915.
The British admiralty decided in April, 1915, to use some other means besides the employment of torpedo boats and destroyers to keep watch for German submarines, and innocent-looking fishing trawlers were used for the purpose. While these could give no fight against a submarine, it was intended that they would carefully make for land to report after sighting one of the hostile craft. The Germans, discovering this strategy, then began to sink trawlers when they found them. On the morning of April 5, 1915, one of these small craft was sighted and chased by the U-20. After a pursuit of an hour or more the German ship was near enough for members of her crew to fire on the trawler with rifles. Her crew got into the small boat and were picked up later by a steamer. The trawler was sent to the bottom.
The U-20 still kept up her raiding. On the 5th of April, 1915, she overtook the steamer Northland, a 2,000-ton ship, and torpedoed her off Beachy Head. The crew of the steamer were able to escape, although their ship went down only ten minutes after the submarine caught up with it.
The use of nets to catch submarines was vindicated, when on the 6th of April, 1915, one of these vessels became entangled in a steel net near Dover and was held fast. The loss of the U-29, which was commanded by the famous Otto von Weddigen, who commanded the U-9 when she sank the Hogue, Cressy, and Aboukir in September, 1914, was confirmed by a report issued by the German admiralty on April 7, 1915, after rumors of her loss had circulated throughout England and France for a number of weeks.