by Deborah Lake
Sir Maurice Hankey set straight the record in his diary entry for 29 April 1917. The Admiralty, he stated specifically, moved to the convoy scheme on its own initiative. As for Lloyd George’s fierce descent upon the Admiralty, Hankey laconically recorded that he and the Prime Minister spent a pleasant day, lunching with Jellicoe and his wife and four little girls. The Prime Minister, Hankey added, enjoyed flirting with a 3-year-old.
Lloyd George’s venom in his War Memoirs is understandable. Admiralty inaction could have cost the war. To convoy merchant ships was no new strategy. It was employed in previous wars. The Prime Minister, anxious to claim the credit, signally failed to mention his own lethargic progress on the matter. Hankey’s original memorandum was on his desk on 1 February 1917. The Admiralty may have been less than lightning-fast. The War Cabinet, chaired by Lloyd George, themselves showed no outstanding pace either.
On the high seas, men continued to die. As 30 April dawned, the Q-ship Prize, a three-masted schooner of 227 tons, sighed her way in a light wind some 150 miles south-west of Ireland. Her captain was Lieutenant Willie Sanders, RNR, the same lad who had gone to sea at the age of 16 in New Zealand.
He spent the early months of the war as first officer of the Union Steamship Company’s Moeraki of 4,392 tons. He took the opportunity to gain his Extra Master’s qualification in November 1914, as well as a compass adjuster’s certificate. Moeraki became a troopship. Willie volunteered for the Navy, only to find he had to wait.
In December 1914, Willie moved to another transport, SS Willochra, as third officer, sailing from New Zealand to Egypt. In June 1915, with the Gallipoli campaign well under way, an impatient Willie passed a letter to a friendly officer on his way to England. It was addressed to the Admiralty. He wanted to join the Royal Navy.
Willie Sanders went to SS Tofua, another transport. Like Willochra, she took soldiers to war; like Willochra, she brought back the maimed and injured.
At the end of 1915, Willie Sanders learned that if he presented himself to the Royal Navy in Britain, he would receive his commission. He promptly signed on as second mate of the Hebburn Jan. He reached Glasgow on 7 April 1916. Twelve days later, he became a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve.
After a gunnery course, Sanders first joined HMS Sabrina, then moved on to HMS Idaho. Neither went to sea, for both were depot ships. Sabrina, some forty years old, was a Medway Class gunboat. Idaho was a requisitioned steam yacht moored at Milford Haven, where she gave her name to an Auxiliary Patrol base.
By 6 September 1916, Sanders had finished his training and familiarisation with the ways of the regular Navy. As an officer with sailing ship experience, he was an excellent choice to join a twin-masted brigantine, the 182-ton Helgoland. Dutch-built and newly commissioned, Helgoland was an ideal decoy. Borne on the Admiralty list as Q17, she roamed the waters south-west of the Lizard under the names of Hoogezand II, Horley and Brig 10.
Sanders went as second in command and gunnery officer. His first two months of sea service attracted the attention of three U-boats in succession during Helgoland’s first cruise. She lay becalmed after the first attack; a torpedo skimmed close to her in the third. Sanders drew approval for his cool behaviour under fire, although the brigantine failed to destroy a submarine. Perhaps more importantly, three U-boats went back to base with the news that the ‘beefeaters’ now used sailing ships as decoys.
Promoted to lieutenant on 5 February 1917, Sanders took over his own decoy ship: Q21, or Prize. Built in 1901, the three-masted schooner carried three 12-pounder guns. Originally German-owned with the name Else, she had the misfortune to be en route from Germany to England when the war began. The first enemy ship to fall into British hands, her name chose itself. Sold to the Marine Navigation Company, she became First Prize. Requisitioned in November 1916, her name changed a fraction to, simply, Prize.
Sanders and his second in command, Lieutenant William Beaton, took special gunnery training while Falmouth fitted out their ship. On 26 April 1917, Prize set out to patrol the seas to the south of Ireland.
For four days they saw nothing. By 30 April, they neared the limit of their patrol area. Sanders decided that they would turn north at midnight. Frustration and inaction was the daily diet of Q-ship crews.
At 2030, the alarm sounded. In good visibility, on a calm sea, the lookouts sighted an unmistakable shape. A U-boat. She proved to be U 93, on her maiden war patrol, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Adolf Karl Georg Edgar, Freiherr von Spiegel und Peckelsheim. The boat had left Emden on a Friday, an omen that was bad enough. That it was also the 13th of the month made it ten times worse. Even now, on the homeward leg, many of the crew muttered that some terrible catastrophe lay in store. As sunset sneaked closer, Prize waited for action. It came quickly.
Already on the surface, U 93 did not dive. All but two torpedoes had gone, for von Spiegel was a remarkable U-boat captain. In the seventeen days since he had left Emden in his new boat, he sank twelve ships in twelve encounters. Five he could easily prove. Their masters sat as prisoners on board U 93. So much for superstition.
The tiny schooner, half the length of the U-boat’s 80m and a quarter of her tonnage, was hardly a worthwhile thirteenth victim. Von Spiegel, eating his evening meal in his cabin, was ready to let the windjammer go. His ‘Heinrich’, Oberleutnant zur See Wilhelm Ziegner, urged that they should sink her. Every vessel that went down was a blow against England.
She was not worth one of the two remaining torpedoes. U 93 surfaced. At 4,000m, von Spiegel fired a warning shot. It splashed some distance ahead of the target. A second shot dropped astern. The sailing ship was bracketed, a sure sign that the gunners had the range. Prize lowered her topsails. Seven men launched a lifeboat in full view of the U-boat.
Baron von Spiegel did not rush to battle. He knew about decoy ships. Sometimes they acted in concert with a submarine. Approach too closely, too carelessly, and the reward was a British torpedo.
‘Beide Maschinen halb Kraft voraus!’ The U-boat nudged forward.
The forward gun crew leisurely dropped more shells onto the schooner’s deck. One a minute. Every sixty seconds. The baron nodded approval. ‘Good shooting,’ he remarked to his two watch officers, Ziegner and Leutnant zur See Hans Leo von Usedom, beside him on the bridge.
Prize suffered. Sanders wrote later:
The ship’s head fell slowly away to the eastward and the enemy slowly followed us round, all the while approaching closer. He continued to fire at the ship in a deliberate manner until satisfied that she had been abandoned. Up to this time a total of sixteen rounds had been fired, two of which struck the water-line, exploded inside, and caused considerable damage. The motor was put out of action, the wireless room wrecked, the mainmast shot through in two places, and all the living rooms shattered. The lubricating oil tank was holed and the contents filtered on to the deck. The ship also began to make water at a fairly rapid rate.
U 93 closed. She circled the burning hulk. All three officers gazed through binoculars. Nothing moved on board. No sign of a British submarine. No danger of a crafty torpedo as they moved in. Satisfied, Spiegel ordered U 93 to approach her victim, dead astern. A final close look before the gun crews despatched her.
On Prize, tension nagged at every man. Sanders held his fire:
The enemy continued to approach from dead astern until she was within 150 yards. My anxiety was great, as the after gun would not bear right astern owing to the position of the wheel. Fortunately at this moment she altered course several points to clear our stern, and when about three points abaft the beam and distant 80 yards I considered that the critical moment had arrived. It was then 21.05, and the order was given to ‘down screens and open fire’ at point blank range. I may add that, from the moment of going to ‘stations’ until fire was opened on the submarine, sights had been carefully adjusted by the estimated range of the approaching enemy. Almost as soon as our screens were downed the enemy opened fire with both her guns. One shell struck the w
ater-line, passed through the side, and was deflected upwards through the deck. The other, as far as I could tell, hit the superstructure. As a result, three hands were wounded.
As the shell from U 93 smashed into Prize, the schooner fought back. Von Spiegel recalled:
There was a loud whistle aboard the schooner. The white war ensign of Great Britain ran up the mast. A movable gun platform slid into view. A roar and a rattling, and 7.5 cm guns opened at us, and machine guns, too. We offered a fair broadside target. One shell put our fore gun out of commission and wounded several of the gun crew. Another crashed into our hull.
‘Beide Maschinen äusserste voraus! U-boot-Falle! Voll nach Backbord!’
U 93 made a quarter-circle, showing her stern to Prize. More rounds crashed into her hull as she turned, but her aft gun now had a chance to even the score. Both engines stopped. The U-boat slowed, helpless, less than 500m from the schooner.
Spiegel swore, shouted orders. He joined the three gunners. They had hardly got a single shot away when a shellburst took off the head of the petty officer gunlayer. The body smacked into von Spiegel, who went into the water precisely as U 93 fell away beneath his feet. ‘I could’, he recalled, ‘see her black shadow vanish into the depths of the ocean. A pang of anguish shot through me at the thought of my fine new boat and my crew going down to their last port on the cold silent bottom of the sea.’
Luckily for the baron, the panic party rowed as fast as they could towards him and two other crewmen who struggled in the water. Spiegel remembered little as he went under, dragged down by the weight of his leather jacket and thick clothing. His U-boat-crew-issue boots of leather with wooden soles behaved like concrete blocks.
On board the badly damaged Prize, Sanders knew he had sunk the U-boat:
The submarine finally came to a standstill at about 500 to 600 yards away, slewed broadside on, heading in an opposite direction to mine. The after gun continued to find the target. Time after time a hit was registered, and out of a total of 14 rounds fired from this gun 12 appeared to find a billet. The forward gun was not so successful, and only scored an occasional hit which did not materially affect the result of the action. Altogether 36 rounds were fired before the submarine disappeared from sight. She settled down stern first, ablaze internally, the fire being distinctly visible through the wreckage. As she sank the jagged end of the conning-tower came into view for a moment and was lost to sight. Previous to sinking a white vapour was emitted from the hull.
Spiegel spluttered back to life on a deck ‘knocked into kindling wood’. Prize had lost her auxiliary engines. Water raced in through shot holes. Despite frantic efforts to stuff the leaks with hammocks, mattresses, even hatch covers, the sea gained steadily.
Pulled from a watery end, Spiegel and his crew were well treated. In dry clothes provided by one of the officers, the baron drank cocoa and smoked a contemplative cigarette. Aware that Prize herself was close to sinking, Spiegel decided that Friday the 13th had been a bad omen after all:
I couldn’t forget my crew, my friends going down out there, drowned like rats in a trap, with some perhaps left to die of slow suffocation . . . some might even now be alive in the strong torpedo compartments, lying in the darkness, hopeless, waiting for the air to thicken and finally smother them. No, they were not rapping on the iron hull. They knew no help could ever reach them.
Sanders, well experienced with sailing ships, decided to list the ship so that the holes made by U 93 rose clear of the water. To do this, he explained, ‘the small boat which was swung out on the davits was filled with water . . . coal shifted from port to starboard side and port fresh water tanks emptied. The vessel was also put on port tack. These measures were instrumental in relieving the pressure, and the shot holes were left almost clear of the water.’
Prize was fortunate. The sea was flat. Almost any swell would take her under within minutes. Even with the holes plugged, the schooner was in a bad way. No wireless meant that she could not cry for help. Without engines, she could not move, for the evening calm did not fill the sails. Neither Sanders nor his engineer could fix the damage. So Willie Sanders asked Kapitänleutnant Adolf Karl Georg Edgar, Freiherr von Spiegel und Peckelsheim for help. He got it.
Obermachinistenmaat Deppe came to the rescue. Prize was a German ship with German engines. Deppe knew diesels ‘as a parson knows his Bible’. He swiftly coaxed the surviving engine into action.
Sanders, indefatigable, and Prize began the long journey home. With shot-holes fractions above the waterline, the crew bailed steadily for the next forty-eight hours until Prize reached Kinsale.
April 1917 was a bloody month on the sea lanes. U-boats and mines destroyed 834,549 tons of British, Allied and neutral shipping – 354 ships in all. The Kaiserliche Marine bore the loss of two boats. One went down in a minefield; the other apparently failed to reach her patrol area.
The Royal Navy made no sinking claims for the whole month. Not a single boat apparently fell to the hunters – except for U 93, claimed by Prize.
Disaster beckoned.
TWELVE
FORTITUDE. VALOUR. DUTY. DETERMINATION
U 93 WAS NOT an iron coffin at the bottom of the Atlantic. An enemy shell burst in front of Ziegner’s face as he stood in the conning tower. After brief, dazed moments, he picked himself up to find U 93 apparently out of control. Usedom had fallen down the tower. Ziegner, unable to see the captain, took command. The boat’s war diary elaborated:
Boat takes on a heavy 14 degree list to starboard because of hit forward on the starboard side in compressor set 5, bursting of no. 2 starboard bunker, and one hit that penetrated starboard dive tanks 5–3. We turn away hard to port at full speed. Coxswain seems to be trying to man the after gun, which stopped firing under No. 3 after two shots. Apparently due to an airburst shell, Captain, coxswain and petty officer engineer Deppe thrown overboard between the tower and the after gun. Captain and pilot were slightly wounded in the legs earlier by machine-gun fire on the bridge. Forward gun [crew?] overboard due to explosion of compressed air cylinders forward on the starboard side and hit on the mounting of the sighting mechanism. Gun can no longer fire due to turning of the boat. As the boat turns too far, I become aware that no-one is in command, so I take command and head away from the sailing ship on a zigzag course.
Prize continued the fight. Her shots smashed into U 93. As Ziegner tried to escape, a shell exploded in the conning tower. Another blew up in the hatch that led to the captain’s quarters. It caused savage damage to number 4 port dive tank. Ziegner carried on his zigzag course, a trail of oil like a snail’s track behind him. Dusk and smoke finally helped hide the wounded boat from the schooner.
Engineer and wireless petty officers both badly wounded. . . . As a result of this hit, the boat is not fit to dive. In control area, a hit on the periscope housing produces hazardous smoke, which is cleared with extractors. Starboard trim tanks are blown and port trim tanks partly flooded. Control area reports ‘All compartments clear’. Boat is now under cover of darkness and no longer under fire. Boat is drawing about 5 metres of water, listing to starboard and losing much oil. As we are likely to be pursued by the sailing ship or a destroyer, I decide to head west all night and the next day until noon . . . assess damage and oil loss and then contrive another plan. If possible, we must make the boat fit to dive. During the night we look for internal damage: several rivets are leaking in the bow compartment, control area, diesel engine compartment and engine room and none of the starboard bunkers deliver fuel. Badly wounded men bandaged and given morphine.
No. 3 . . . Bay dies in the night.
As dawn broke the next morning, the cook boosted morale. He produced hot coffee. As the light grew stronger, U 93 delicately changed course to avoid a three-masted sailing ship in the distance. Ziegner took stock. Externally, U 93 was a disaster. Damage on the outside showed eight shell-holes in the deck. The bridge superstructure was all but destroyed. A hit on the base of the conning tower on the port s
ide had wrecked valves and piping. On the starboard side of the tower, a shell had taken out both periscopes, although as U 93 could not dive, this was of minor importance. Another round from Prize had shattered the instruments inside the tower. Some 10m of the deck itself were nothing but gashed and mangled metal. Both fore and aft guns were damaged.
Hopes of returning the boat to diving trim vanished as Ziegner and Usedom considered the destruction. Starboard dive tank number 5 had an enormous hole and was full of water. The shell that caused it passed through and exploded in dive tank number 4, smacking against the pressure hull and rupturing dive tank 3.
Like Sanders, busy with his own problems on Prize, Ziegner was not a man who gave in. Strained rivets throughout U 93 were a minor problem; that the starboard fuel lines failed to work, no more than an irritation. Worse was the damage to the command compartment. The pressure hatch was buckled and stove in. The wireless was out of commission. Venting pipes to the port and starboard number 6 dive tanks were damaged.
One shot had hit number 5 compressed air cylinder set. The cylinders exploded. That, in turn, holed number 2 starboard fuel tank. The pressure hull had a few dents in it. If U 93 ever managed to submerge, she had every chance of permanently going to the bottom of the sea.
Ziegner decided. A brief service and the body of Bootsmannsmaat Bay, dignified by the Imperial German Navy Ensign, slipped overboard into the chill water. Then the Oberleutnant spoke to the crew. He would take them home to Germany.
While the crew deafened themselves with the sounds of hammering, cutting, riveting and metal-bending, Ziegner and the senior engineer calculated how they could manage on the remaining fuel. The war diary entry was terse:
Worked out that 27.425 tonnes of fuel had been lost and 24.166 t remained. Calculated this was sufficient, at 7.5 knots on the diesel electric motors, burning 2.2–2.3 tonnes per day and allowing a reserve for emergency high-speed evasive action, if needed, to get the boat home round the Shetlands, providing a torpedo boat escort could be arranged from the Skagerrak by wireless. Boat rigged with explosives in case of need to scuttle and kept primed throughout return voyage. As the watertight hatch could not be sealed for diving, I decide to remain on the surface and blow torpedo tubes, torpedo tanks and forward trim tanks to lighten the boat, make it ride higher in the water and thus make better headway. List to starboard corrected by blowing the relevant tanks every 1–3 hours, depending on sea state.
