by Deborah Lake
At that moment, I saw suddenly a light, a small light. For less than a second. I immediately took course on this light. It was the schooner. I thought someone had lit a pipe or opened a porthole.
It may have been a moment of carelessness or somebody possibly attempted to contact D6, some miles away.
Steinbauer would not let her escape again. At 0305hr, with rain squalls sweeping across a phosphorescent sea, Steinbauer tried a bow shot.
Now I made the first attack of my life on the surface during the night. During a dark night.
And I shot a torpedo and missed him. Made all the observation notes . . . one can shoot a torpedo on the surface but it is different – the distance, the speed, of the torpedo, speed of the attacked vessel – all this must be exactly observed by triangulation and one can’t see in the dark night. The observation is difficult and I failed.
. . . on a dark night when you approach a sailing ship, the sails are high and big and you have the impression you are very near . . . I thought I fired from about 400 metres – a distance for a sure hit. Impossible for the ship to turn away. Then I . . . went on the same course that he was going. I realised then that he was not sailing – he was using an engine and I suppose he was making 4 or 5 knots.
I began a new attack. We were parallel . . . and fired a bit nearer. I thought about 300 metres . . . I counted when the torpedo left the boat. My observation – about 300 metres, 20 seconds and nothing happened, 30 seconds – nothing. 40 – nothing. At 45 seconds, the torpedo blew up. That was a distance of 700 metres – and I thought 300! My first shot was at least 1,000 metres!
. . . he blew up with a terrible explosion – I suppose we hit his ammunition room because it was like a firework.
Well, it was late at night, just before dawn. I was cautious enough to zig-zag in case there was a submarine in the area. I worried the schooner wirelessed after the events in the afternoon. It was now many hours later, so it was very likely a submarine or other craft had come to help.
We didn’t see anything. The sea was calm and when light grew brighter we found wreckage where the ship sank. We went into the debris to search for survivors and we found in a lifebuoy, one sailor. We took him on our boat and tried to revive him. But he was dead. We committed his body overboard.
On the far side of Prize, about 3 miles distant, D6 heard two explosions. A cone of fire spiralled into the sky. When they reached the scene the next morning, they found no survivors, only the débris of destruction.
Steinbauer went on his way. His orders allowed him to sink ships on his journey. He took full advantage of the instructions. UB 48 sank two sailing vessels and the 3,270-ton collier Winlaton before she reached her new base.
Doubts in Germany about the U-boat war intensified. Bethman–Hollweg, the sceptical Chancellor, finally resigned. The German High Command, with a fine disdain for public opinion, planned to prolong the whole war into 1918. This was not something the politicians wanted. They anticipated revolution. Ordinary German citizens, promised that their U-boats were the bringers of victory, had little stomach for another winter of privation.
In Britain, Lloyd George continued his vendetta against the Admiralty. The Prime Minister believed that changes at the top were essential. He wanted Service chiefs who saw things his way. In August, he made his first move. Sir Edward Carson, the First Lord, supported Jellicoe. The Ulsterman had too much influence to be tossed aside, so Lloyd George booted him into the War Cabinet. This counted as a nominal promotion that could later be discarded. To replace him, Lloyd George appointed Sir Eric Geddes. Already a member of the Admiralty Board as Controller of the Navy, Geddes knew that Lloyd George wanted Jellicoe out of office. Lloyd George explained it simply. If Geddes found it impossible to work with the First Sea Lord, the Service chief must depart, not the civilian.
In a democracy, the military power must always subordinate itself to the civilian. Even so, Lloyd George began a process that courts disaster. The Prime Minister was not content simply to overrule Jellicoe, something that was his right. He wanted a more amenable admiral. Unchecked, this process leads to the appointment of generals, admirals and air marshals who agree with ministers at the expense of the men they command. Instead of standing up for their Service, they concur in the destruction of tradition and morale.
It is a sad truth that presidents, prime ministers, politicians and their assorted advisers rarely experience the dirty business of conflict. They never blister their hands to dig the graves of those who pay the price for their decisions.
Geddes had no qualms about wielding a blunt axe. His simple initial move created a new post of Deputy First Sea Lord. Geddes chose Sir Rosslyn Wemyss. When Jellicoe departed, a man stood ready to take post.
In fact, the Admiralty was moving ahead with some speed on convoys. More ships sailed with escorts. Sinkings fell. Not by much, it was true, but the maritime graveyard west of Ireland had less victims in August. For the first time since February, fewer ships fell to the U-boats in the Channel Approaches and the Bay of Biscay. The Mediterranean and the entrance to the English Channel remained highly dangerous. So, only the foolishly optimistic felt that the August total of 489,806 tons destroyed, minutely down from the July figures, showed that events had turned in the Allied favour. Pessimists pointed to a new and worrying development. The huge Deutschland Class U-cruisers, originally built as blockade runners, had become warships. At 2,000 tons displacement, they had phenomenal range and endurance. Able to stay at sea for three months or more, with remarkably good crew quarters, they carried two 105mm deck guns as well as eighteen torpedoes. The first patrol, by U 151, netted nineteen victims totalling 53,000 tons in a patrol of 105 days. With the ability to roam some 15,000 miles, the U-cruisers made the Atlantic around the Azores their fiefdom.
The fishing grounds of the North Sea continued to attract the killers of the Flanders Flotilla. As one RNVR officer explained:
Before the war, Lowestoft had a fine fishing fleet of about 250 smacks, of anything from 25 to 60 tons, besides a number of drifters. The latter were taken over by the Government on the outbreak of war, and nine of them were lost before it ended, but the sailing smacks went on fishing as usual about Smith’s Knoll, which is a sandbank 25 miles north-east of Lowestoft. At first all went well with them, but before very long the enemy started sending submarines over to sink them. These submarines used to come up in the middle of the fishing fleet, and order the crews of the nearest smacks to abandon ship. They then went alongside and sank the ships by putting bombs on board, after taking away anything they wanted in the shape of food or gear. The matter became serious. Smacks were being sunk at a great rate – 150 were lost during the war, the bulk being sunk by submarines – nor was it easy to see how they could be protected, as they were obliged to fish spread out over a fairly wide area. It was finally decided to try and discourage submarines from suddenly bobbing up, and sinking the nearest smacks, by arming a few of them, and sending these armed vessels out to fish with the others.
. . . the enemy very soon knew all about the armed smacks and avoided them. Quite a number of men in the submarines had fished out of Lowestoft before the war, and occasionally sent in messages to former acquaintances in the town. They also sent threatening and insulting messages addressed to the armed ships through the crews of the smacks which they had sunk.
. . . The ordinary smack when fishing carried five hands, but the armed smacks, on account of the gun and motor, had to carry nine, or ten if an officer were on board. Smacks without an officer or motor carried eight hands. The difficulty was to keep the extra hands out of sight during daylight.
Tom Crisp lost his sailing smack, George Borrow, to Oberleutnant zur See Otto Steinbrinck and UB 10 of the Flanders Flotilla on 11 August 1915. A determined man, he possessed skill, tenacity and a fierce desire to fight back. He took command of Nelson, a 61-ton smack armed with a 3-pounder gun. As the G&E, it exchanged fire in August 1915 with another Zeebrugge boat, UB 6, under the command of Ober
leutnant zur See Erich Haecke.
G&E went through a catalogue of names before she became Nelson. Bird, Extirpator, Foam Crest and I’ll Try. As I’ll Try, in company with another smack Boy Alfred, Tom Crisp, with his son as mate, fought another action against the prowling enemy, on 1 February 1917.
The two smacks sighted a pair of U-boats. One signalled Boy Alfred to approach her. As Skipper Wharton complied, a few small-arms rounds spattered his hull. An officer in the conning tower ordered the crew to abandon ship. Boy Alfred promptly opened fire at close range with her single 3-pounder. The U-boat hastily submerged.
It was now time for I’ll Try to fight. For two hours, the U-boat stayed at periscope depth. Each time Crisp sighted the periscope he would head straight for it. Finally, the U-boat disappeared. Tom Crisp decided to head home in the hope that the U-boat would surface. It did – at a mere 150yd on the starboard side of the fishing boat. According to Crisp’s son, the U-boat fired a torpedo that missed. In return, I’ll Try loosed off a shot at a range of 20yd. This hit, as Tom Crisp Junior recalled, ‘right between the conning tower and deck. It blew the whole part of the sub to pieces. The sub went down head first with her stern sticking up in the air and the sea now covered with oil.’
The Admiralty rated both U-boats as ‘possibly destroyed’. Tom Crisp received the Distinguished Service Cross for a gallant action. The skipper of Boy Alfred, Walter Samuel Wharton, received a bar to his DSC.
The two U-boats involved in the action were UB 6, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Oskar Steckelberg, and UB 16 under Oberleutnant zur See Hans Ewald Niemer. Both boats came from the ageing UB I Class. They had no deck gun. They carried no mines. Their armament was limited to two torpedoes and an assortment of rifles, pistols and a machine gun. Laid down in November 1914, only four of the type still served with the Flanders Flotilla. Both captains were inexperienced.
The war diary of UB 6 basically corroborates the general outline of the fishing skippers’ reports. Without guns of their own, they both dived as soon as a shot was fired. Neither boat suffered noticeable damage. They continued their patrol and returned to Zeebrugge as planned, to tell the tale of trawlers with hidden guns.
On Wednesday 15 August 1917, the two smacks joined together again at the Jim Howe Bank fishing grounds, 40 miles north-east of Lowestoft. Boy Alfred now displayed the name Ethel & Millie. Her skipper, 45-year-old Charles William Manning, universally known as ‘Johnsey’, took command of his smack only a short while earlier. Nelson carried nine all told. Ethel & Millie had seven souls on board.
Well aware that U-boat captains inspected fishing boats with extreme care to ensure they were not decoys, the two skippers spent the morning genuinely fishing for herring. In the early afternoon, the smacks presented a picture of innocence. Crisp, with two men, Ross and Hale, both regular Royal Navy ratings who formed the gun crew, worked below deck. The cook, an 18-year-old, was on deck with two other hands, gutting fish.
At about 1430, Crisp took a break in the fresh air. A mere 100yd away, Ethel & Millie went about her work. On the horizon, Crisp saw a shape, north-west of the Jim Howe Buoy, some 3 or 4 miles distant. He focused his binoculars. A U-boat. It commanded the water between the two smacks and the English coast.
Crisp alerted his men. Not only did they have to fight. They had to manoeuvre round the U-boat to run for home.
A spout of water marked the U-boat’s opening round. It splashed into the sea 100yd from Nelson’s bow before the trawler’s crew reached their action stations. Oberleutnant zur See Karsten von Heydebreck, commander of the Zeebrugge-based UC 63, wasted no time. Heydebreck had, in fact, handed over command of UB 6 to Steckelberg six months earlier. In the closed world of the Flanders base, he probably heard enough to make him extremely wary of two Lowestoft boats in company, with not another fishing smack in sight. Q-boats or not, two English fishing boats, gobbled up on his way back to Zeebrugge, made a pleasing end to a successful patrol.
The second shot fell short. Crisp ordered the fishing gear cut away to help manoeuvre his smack. The next shell rocketed into Nelson, tearing through the bow just below the waterline.
Crisp turned the smack so the deck gun could bear. Ross and Hale did their best but von Heydebreck possessed cunning and skill. Having opened fire at 5,400 metres, he withdrew to between 6,000 and 7,000m. He could hit the trawlers. They fired short of the target. With her seventh shot, UC 63 cut Crisp, at the tiller, in two, causing damage only too familiar to the men in the trenches. The shell went through his left side, carried on across the deck and through the bulwark without detonating. Blood spurted over the planking. Disembowelled, with both legs roughly amputated at the thighs, Crisp somehow retained consciousness. His son took over the tiller. Crisp ordered the crew to dump the confidential books over the side. Finally, he dictated a message to be sent by pigeon. ‘Nelson being attacked by submarine,’ it read. ‘Skipper killed. Jim Howe Bank. Send assistance at once.’
All four birds on the smack took off. The first three circled the fishing boat until the final pigeon joined them. At last, they all flew towards land. Nelson had little left. The hungry sea started to claim the boat. The time had come to abandon her.
Crisp refused to go. ‘No,’ he said, ‘throw me overboard.’ His son refused. The crew left him to go down with his command.
At about 1630hr, Nelson sank. On UC 63, Heydebreck watched the carrier pigeons wing their way into the air. The crew took to their rowing boat.
UC 63 turned her attention to Ethel & Millie. Heydebreck was in no hurry. His boat sat squarely between the trawler and safety. After an interval, UC 63 continued the action.
Ethel & Millie received a direct hit that swiftly ended her resistance. At about 1820, Manning and his men abandoned the trawler. Her carrier pigeons flapped their way into the sky. U 63 closed in.
Tom Crisp Junior told the Court of Inquiry, convened at Lowestoft’s depot ship, on 18 August 1917, what happened next:
The submarine left off firing at the Ethel & Millie and picked her crew up. We saw the submarine’s crew line the Ethel & Millie’s crew up on the submarine foredeck. They tied the smack’s boat up astern. . . . The wind being from the south-south-east was blowing the Ethel & Millie away from us . . . we rowed into the south-east as hard as we could, the opposite direction in which the smack and the submarine were going.
Mist crept over the water. Crisp and his comrades rowed away as hard as they could until both the abandoned Ethel & Millie and U 63 disappeared into the haze. Minutes later, Crisp and his men saw black smoke billow from that direction but heard nothing. They presumed the smack had been sunk.
It had. Before they scuttled the trawler with an explosive charge, Heydebreck’s men collected a trophy of war from her. With much effort and some choice curses, they brought the deck gun on board. They also collected letters and lists from the Admiralty and the naval authorities at Lowestoft that made it clear Ethel & Millie was a decoy.
Heydebreck’s report states that both trawlers fought under the Red Ensign, yet some of their crew were undeniably regular Navy men in civilian clothing. Both boats had carrier pigeons. On the trawler, his men found hand guns and a Very pistol and he had brought back to Zeebrugge the deck gun and some ammunition.
Manning and his six crew never returned to Lowestoft. The war diary of UC 63 does not mention their fate. In all probability, they were put in their dinghy to row home, a standard procedure among the U-boats of the High Seas Fleet and the Flanders Flotilla.
Heydebreck clearly thought his prisoners had not played by the rules. Trawlers with a hidden gun aroused little affection among the men of the Flanders Flotilla. Yet wilful murder is unlikely. To dump prisoners in their lifeboat with 60 miles to row was another matter. Even in August, the North Sea is a dangerous place for a small craft. It becomes back-breaking to row against the prevailing contrary wind. Exhaustion and exposure would end their efforts.
Concerned that the U-boat might return, Crisp and the crew rowed out to
sea rather than towards land. At midnight, in the darkness and cold, they turned about to head for England. By daybreak, a freshening wind blew them further out to sea.
One pigeon delivered its message. At 1120 on 16 August, HMS Dryad, a Lowestoft-based Victorian-era gunboat still giving good service wirelessed its base: ‘smack Friendship picked up pigeon 10pm last night from Ethel & Millie with message attacked by submarine Jim Howe 2/10. I have patrolled area since 4.30 am but have not met Ethel & Millie.’
Dryad, with a group of minesweepers, continued to patrol the Jim Howe Bank. They narrowly missed sighting the Nelson survivors on the afternoon of 16 August, despite the frantic waving of a large piece of oilskin and a pair of trousers tied on two oars.
The fishermen spent another night at sea. A rising wind frustrated their efforts to pull to land. At daybreak, they saw boats in the distance but made no progress. Finally, they spotted the Jim Howe Bank Buoy in the distance. It was 1030. Almost two days of struggle in an open boat had brought them back virtually to where they began. With a last determined effort at the oars, they reached the buoy. Tied to it, they hoped for a quick rescue. At 1300, Dryad appeared once more. Crisp scrambled to the top of the buoy and waved his handkerchief frantically.
At 1419 on Friday 17 August, Dryad signalled Lowestoft: ‘Picked up crew of Nelson at Jim Howe. Skipper killed remainder all right. Crew of Ethel & Millie reported aboard submarine.’
On 29 October 1917, Lloyd George proposed a vote of thanks in the House of Commons to the nation’s armed forces. It took only moments for the lilting voice to reach full flow. A crowded Chamber murmured agreement as the Prime Minister used every oratorical trick at his command. The soldiers, the airmen, the sailors received sweeping praise. Then, Lloyd George turned his attention to the merchant marine. The House listened, spellbound, as the Welsh Wizard wove his spell with a tale of a humble trawler skipper who fought a U-boat:
Though armed only with a 3-pounder gun and out-ranged by her opponents, she refused to haul down her flag, even when the skipper had both legs shot off, and most of the crew were killed or injured. ‘Throw the confidential books overboard, and throw me after them,’ said the skipper, and refusing to leave his ship when the few survivors took to the boat, he went down with his trawler.