by Deborah Lake
Two thousand sea miles to run at less than 8 miles an hour. The boat needed every drop of fuel. The mechanics drained 400 litres from the starboard supply tank to drip-feed the engines directly through a funnel. An attempt to recover oil from the port side failed. It had already leaked through a shell-hole in dive tank number 5. The crew managed to make a large patch to bolt over the hole. Once that was secure, they managed to blow the starboard dive tanks to reduce the list.
With a final flourish of wood and canvas to patch the damage to the bridge, U 93 dug her way through the waves. The weather worsened. With the stern already under water and a rising wind, Ziegner ordered everything possible overboard. The holes, patched with anything to hand, continually let in the sea. Every thirty minutes, the starboard tanks filled. Every thirty minutes, the engineers blew it back out. The pumps worked frantically, day in, day out.
Short water rations hardly helped. The sea had contaminated some fresh water tanks. The U-boat carried on. Day after day. A fleet of armed trawlers failed to see U 93, low in the water, grey as the waves surrounding her, as they scoured the ocean for U-boats.
Wilhelmshaven, once a dream, came nearer. After a close encounter with a hungry destroyer that lost U 93 in a rain squall, Ziegner reached the Danish coast. He ignored the 3-mile limit, creeping along so close to the beach that his men heard the tinkling bells on the wether sheep among the flocks grazing in the meadows.
Nine days after Prize met U 93, two German fishing steamers responded to Ziegner’s signal. They accompanied the boat to Sylt. At 0500 the next morning, her oil tanks empty, U 93 returned to Wilhelmshaven under tow.
Prize. U 93. Lieutenant William Sanders. Oberleutnant zur See Wilhelm Ziegner. Neither knew when he was beaten. Fortitude. Valour. Duty. Determination. The two lieutenants had much in common.
On Friday 22 June 1917, the Second Supplement to the London Gazette carried a brief notice at the very beginning of the first of its six pages. It stated simply that the King had approved the award of the Victoria Cross to William Edward Sanders ‘in recognition of his conspicuous gallantry, consummate coolness, and skill in command of one of HM ships in action’. The remainder of his crew were not ignored. Every one received a decoration.
Recognition came as well to Wilhelm Ziegner. Not, perhaps, as much as he deserved. The Iron Cross First Class, a normal perquisite of the first watch officer on a U-boat, arrived earlier than normal.
May offered some faint hope to the Allied cause. Convoys were still few and far between. The Scandinavian routes benefited from the new system in April but Atlantic routes were another matter. It was not simply a question of organising convoys, although that was complicated enough. In practice, the Admiralty remained unconvinced that they worked. Many admirals continued to believe that the older methods countered the U-boat more effectively.
One change did occur without any prompting. Aware that the concept of the Q-ship was known to the enemy, the designation changed. The men and the vessels were allocated to ‘Special Service’, a bland term that implied much but revealed little.
Lloyd George clenched the bit firmly between his Welsh teeth when it came to convoys. Prudence alone at the Admiralty suggested that the system should be tried as soon as practicable. On 10 May 1917, sixteen merchantmen left Gibraltar for Britain. Two decoys and three armed yachts escorted them.
At a speed a shade under 7 knots, they chugged across the Bay of Biscay without incident. After eight days, they came within 100 miles of the Irish coast. Six destroyers from Devonport met them. An RNAS flying boat from the Scilly Isles searched the ocean ahead. The convoy arrived safely at the Smalls, one of two tiny clusters of rock lying close together in the Irish Sea, 21 miles due west of Milford Haven. There it split, each ship making its way to its individual destination, each one accompanied by an armed drifter.
No ship was lost. The motley collection of vessels had kept station reasonably well. Dog-leg manoeuvres caused no great problems. Ships’ engines had managed without breaking down.
While the Gibraltar convoy was on its way, a ‘protected sailing’ of ten ships left Virginia on 24 May. A U-boat picked off the one straggler as the group reached the Western Approaches. Otherwise, every ship made port safely.
Casual analysis of the figures apparently shows that the tide had turned. A total of 596,629 tons of shipping went to the sea floor. The Allies claimed to have sunk six boats. None fell to decoys.
The truth was less encouraging. The reduction in ship losses resulted from a drop in the number of boats on patrol. In April, U-boats were at sea for 660 days. In May, this dropped to 535 cruise days.
The Gibraltar convoy did not meet a U-boat for most of its journey. A protective guard of eleven ships surrounded the sixteen merchant steamers when they reached the most dangerous part of the route, enough to deter most U-boat captains. The true sign of things to come was the air patrol. Attacks from the air did not concern U-boat commanders especially. The small bombs used by the airmen were lethal only if they went directly into the conning tower. What worried them was that a sighting from the air could bring speeding destroyers hurrying to the spot. At 2,000ft, in clear air, pilots and observers could scan the oceans for 40 miles in every direction. To loiter on the surface could bring harm to a U-boat.
The RNAS flew both aeroplanes and airships on patrol. By April 1917, regular flights spied on the ocean all the way from the north of Britain to the Channel and the southern entrance to the Irish Sea.
Only the south coast of Ireland, where so many U-boats sank so many ships, had no air cover. Sir Lewis Bayly did not believe in aeroplanes. He felt that his ships were better employed hunting U-boats than rescuing naval aviators from the sea when their machines crashed. He did not grasp the simple fact that eyes in the sky made life more difficult for the U-boats. Further, they could warn shipping of lurking danger.
Like many admirals, Bayly thought hunting U-boats was akin to chasing the fox. Killing the fox saved the chickens from attack. The real answer to the U-boat problem, and the one that the convoy eventually provided, was to protect the chickens. The Kaiserliche Marine could send as many boats to sea as it wished. They were of little use if they could not find victims.
This philosophy directly contradicted the traditions of the Royal Navy. Training emphasised the importance of seeking the enemy and bringing him to battle. Nelson’s final signal at Trafalgar, ‘Engage the enemy more closely’, was dear to British naval hearts. The U-boat, with its ability to vanish from sight, caused bitterness and chagrin. All anti-submarine warfare until April 1917 was rooted in the belief that the U-boat must be hunted to destruction. Every suggestion, every weapon, every measure, was judged by its ability to do that.
The statistics for the war up until the end of March 1917, available to the Admiralty, pointed up the truth. The Official History later recorded: ‘There had been one hundred and forty-two actions between German submarines and British destroyers, and the destroyers had only sunk their opponent in six of them.’ In simple terms, the odds against the hunters were 24 to 1, even when they found their quarry.
In May, as the convoy from Gibraltar steamed towards Britain, Jellicoe formed a committee to consider convoy operations in detail. A Royal Navy captain chaired the group of five serving officers and a civilian adviser from the Ministry of Shipping.
They worked quickly. In less than one month, on 6 June 1917, they produced their report. They proposed a system of eight outward and eight inward convoys, every eight days. They chose four ports as collection points for British-bound vessels. Gibraltar would be the rendezvous for Mediterranean traffic. Vessels from North American ports would congregate at New York. On their way to Britain, ships from Canada would join them. Hampton Roads would be the starting point for ships from southern American ports, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and Panama. Dakar, on the west African coast, would cover the South Atlantic trade as well as act as the marshalling port for ships travelling round the Cape of Good Hope to the Far Eas
t and Australasia. Each port would provide a convoy for Britain every eight days.
In the opposite direction, vessels from Britain gathered at Lamlash on the Isle of Arran, Queenstown and Plymouth for the Atlantic run. Milford Haven and Falmouth were the assembly points for Gibraltar and Dakar.
The Admiralty agreed. A formidable organisation quickly came about. In June 1917, four convoys, a total of sixty ships, crossed from Virginia to Britain. Only one was sunk. The incoming Atlantic convoys enjoyed the company of an aged battleship or cruiser until just outside the U-boat danger zone. There, destroyers took over. They shepherded the convoy until it reached a dispersal point, where the ships went their separate ways under the watchful eyes of coastal escorts.
Despite the introduction of convoys, the Admiralty still believed in the tactics of the fox hunt. During June, no less than thirty-one destroyers, supported by ten submarines, patrolled the North Sea and Atlantic either side of Fair Isle, where the U-boats made their way out and back from patrol. Twelve attacks yielded not a single kill.
The Kaiserliche Marine replaced its losses in May with new vessels. They had 150 U-boats in commission. About fifty stalked the waters around the British Isles. A mere dozen or so patrolled the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Aegean together with Austro-Hungarian boats.
On 7 June, Commander Gordon Campbell, VC, DSO, entered the war once more. Farnborough was replaced by a new decoy, the 2,817-gross-tonnage Vittoria. Campbell found her at Cardiff Docks in March 1917. She acquired a new name: HMS Pargust. Rapidly requisitioned, she steamed to Devonport for fitting out as a decoy. Despite an ongoing shortage of weaponry, she emerged with one 4in gun mounted aft, fitted inside a hatch with collapsible sides. Two 12-pounder guns, suitably disguised, took position each side of the ship’s deck cabins. Two more sat amidships so that they could fire to either side. Two 14in torpedoes and four depth charges completed the hidden armament.
To enhance the impression that Pargust was a genuine tramp steamer, a conspicuous dummy gun dominated the after deck. Armed merchantmen were no longer a rarity. A highly visible gun would do much to convince a sceptical U-boat commander that the genuine article sat in his cross-hairs. As a final flourish, Campbell had two uniformed bluejackets to man the dummy. Their task was to point it at the enemy with much bravado but to scamper away without attempting to fire.
Most of Farnborough’s old crew joined him in his new command. Lieutenant Ronald Stuart remained as Number One. Extra guns meant more gun crews. More volunteers joined Campbell, among them Lieutenant Walter Henry Frame. He wore the ribbon of the Military Medal he won with the Anzacs. To show it was no fluke, he added a bar before he received his commission in the Royal Naval Reserve.
Campbell had kept himself informed of U-boat behaviour. He realised that torpedoes were far more likely than leisurely shellfire. He introduced two ideas to fool a suspicious U-boat commander. One was an electric bell to recall the panic party after an hour or so. If the apparent crew returned, the U-boat might surface to finish off the attack. His second idea was to have a second panic party. He thought that once the torpedo had struck and the panic party abandoned ship, the U-boat might realise it had attacked a decoy. As Campbell explained in My Mystery Ships:
. . . our disguise might be disclosed, possibly through the torpedo having caused the guns to be unmasked or through some other mishap. In the event of this happening, the idea was to have a second, or as we called it ‘“Q” abandon ship.’ For this purpose, we were to pretend the game was up, and leaving the White Ensign up and our guns disclosed, the remainder of the men who had been left on board were to abandon ship! The boats were to be called back to collect more men, any spare boats were to be lowered, and we carried a Carley float (or raft) which was to be launched specially for this purpose, being things normally only carried by men-of-war. This we hoped would convince the enemy that we were really all out of it – in fact, two guns’ crews only were to remain on board, together with the necessary people on the bridge and a couple of men at the tubes.
After working up, Pargust sailed to Queenstown. By 31 May 1917, she was in Campbell’s favourite territory, off the south-west of Ireland. Each night, Pargust cruised west, heading for America. Each day, she steered east, a British-bound cargo ship.
On 7 June 1917, Pargust ploughed through a choppy sea. Raindrops bounced off the deck, tarpaulins, hatch covers, driven by a stiff southerly breeze in an ill-tempered display of early summer weather. Well after dawn, at 0800hr on a gloomy morning, 50 miles from Ireland, a torpedo slammed into Pargust, plumb on the waterline. The decoy shivered with the impact. The torpedo struck precisely at the engine room, ripping a 40ft hole in the ship’s side. The after bulkhead collapsed. Water avalanched into the engine room, the boiler room and number 5 hold. The starboard lifeboat disintegrated into splinters. Blast rattled every loose fitting as well as freeing the weights that held the starboard gun port in place. Seaman William Williams, the man from Amlwch, moved quickly. He took the whole weight of the port on himself so it could not fall to reveal the gun that lurked behind it.
Pargust’s helm slammed over to provide a lee for the remaining lifeboat and the two dinghies. The panic party went over the side, finally joined by Lieutenant Francis Hereford, with a gold-brimmed cap, as the master. He clutched a cage with a stuffed parrot inside. The dummy gun crew ran from sight. At the last moment, pretend stokers crawled out to join the escapers.
Petty Officer Isaac Radford died when the torpedo hit. One engineer, Sub-Lieutenant John Smith, soaked through, his body peppered with bits of coal, shards of steel and other fragments, apparently went through the engine-room hatch with the blast wave. Less than a minute later, he staggered towards his boat station. He was quickly hidden but remembered nothing other than that he ‘was swimming in the water for hours’.
At 0815, the last boat cleared the Pargust. Four hundred yards distant on the port side, the slender stalk of a periscope gazed at the scene. Minutes later, it moved closer. By 0825, it was 50yd distant. Then it retracted.
On board the decoy, nobody moved. Even breathing seemed too noisy. The periscope reappeared, this time close astern, passing to Pargust’s right. Round the decoy to the port side once more, close to the lifeboat and dinghies. Back to the starboard side. Finally, the U-boat surfaced, this time back on the left of the ship, a mere 50yd away.
The conning tower hatch stayed firmly shut. On Pargust, Campbell fought the temptation to open fire. Unless the first shot hit true, the U-boat would simply dive to freedom. She lay almost parallel to the ship, her bow pointing at the stern. The wind and waves had caused the boats to drift there. Hereford, in his captain’s masquerade, stood upright. He realised that the 4in gun could not depress sufficiently if Pargust did open fire at such close range. The lifeboat carefully pulled towards the right of the decoy. The U-boat followed in a wide circle.
The lifeboat reached the starboard side, clear of the decoy’s stern. Hereford moved the boat towards clear water. The U-boat went after it. It passed close to Pargust’s stern before it pulled clear, far enough away for the 4in gun to bear. An officer with a megaphone stood on top of the now-open hatch. He shouted orders to the boat. Hereford ordered his men to row back towards Pargust. This apparently annoyed the man with the megaphone, who began to signal at the recalcitrant lifeboat. An armed crewman joined him.
The U-boat sidled along Pargust’s right flank. Thirty-six minutes had passed since the torpedo struck. Seaman William Williams had been holding the starboard gun port closed for all but a few seconds of them.
At 0836, Campbell opened fire. The U-boat was sideways on at less than 50yd range. The first shot hit the conning tower. Several more followed. Almost at once, the U-boat listed to port. Oil leaked into the sea. Pargust fired a torpedo. It raced away into the distance, never to be seen again. The U-boat’s after hatch flew open. Several crew climbed out. More came through the conning tower. Some raised their hands. Others waved. Pargust ceased firing.
The
U-boat, her stern under water, surged ahead. The men on the after deck splashed into the sea. Campbell, thinking that her captain was making a desperate escape bid into the mist that hung over the ocean, resumed the action.
Pargust’s forecastle gun barked. For some thirty seconds, it was the only gun that could see the target. With no engine power, Campbell could not turn his ship. Only when the U-boat herself cleared the decoy’s bow could the other guns join the fight. After a few shots, the submarine’s front end exploded. She rolled over onto her side, bow a few feet above the waves, then vanished from sight.
The panic party rescued two men. One officer, Leutnant zur See Hans Bruhn and one rating, Obermachinistenmaat Stelan. Kapitänleutnant Ernst Rosenow and twenty-two of the crew of UC 29, a minelayer from I Flottille, joined the lengthening list of the Imperial German Navy’s casualties in the U-boat arm. Four days earlier, UC 29 had despatched the Q-ship Mavis, south of Wolf Rock, killing four men.
Unable to move, Pargust wirelessed for help. Sir Lewis Bayly, confirmed once more in his belief that the best way to protect civilian ships was to hunt down U-boats, sent congratulations. At 1230, almost four hours later, the sloop HMS Crocus arrived to take Pargust in tow. Shortly afterwards, USS Cushing, one of the first six destroyers from America, bustled up in company with HMS Zinnia to escort the conqueror to port.
The Admiralty coughed up another £1,000 in bounty. More problematic was the question of awards and decorations. To soldiers on the Western Front, the haul would have seemed lavish indeed for an action that lasted only a little over thirty minutes. Campbell himself received a bar to his Distinguished Service Order and advancement to the rank of captain, a promotion that leapfrogged him over 500 others. Hereford, the fake master, received a DSO to add to his DSC. Two other DSCs and eight Distinguished Service Medals received royal approval. Eleven members of Campbell’s crew received a Mention in Despatches.
