Category Archives: for those lost at sea

Warship Wednesday, March 26, 2025: First of 65

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, March 26, 2025: First of 65

Photographed by Noggle. Naval History and Heritage Command Collection: NH 63259

Above we see the USS F-4 (Submarine No. 23) along with her three sisters, USS F-2 (SS-21), USS F-3 (SS-22), and USS F-1 (SS-20), proud and flying their “fish” flags and 13-star “boat” ensigns with their crackerjacks waiting either for a division inspection or shore leave– or both.

Taken in Pearl Harbor in 1914, these early boats were the first based in Hawaii, predating the construction of the submarine base, and as such were simply docked at Pier 5 at the end of Richards Street in Honolulu near where the Aloha Tower is today.

Less than a year later, on 25 March 1915– some 110 years ago this week– F-4 would take her final dive and a lot of those brave young men on her deck would vanish.

The F-class boats

The story of early American submarines was one of John Philip Holland’s Torpedo Boat Company which became the Electric Boat company in 1899.

Holland and his company would provide the Navy’s first steel boat, the 53-foot USS Holland (Submarine Torpedo Boat #1) in 1900, followed by the seven 63-foot USS Plunger (SS-2) or A-class boats, and three 82-foot B-class boats– all very small, basically midget submarines. EB’s five follow-on C-class boats, designed by Lawrence York Spear after Holland’s death, were steadily larger, at 105 feet, and used twin engines and twin motors, giving them a measure of reliability. Nonetheless, all these early boats, and those that immediately followed, were known as “pig boats” due to their downright foul living quarters and unusual and downright unship-like hull shapes, which tended to wallow and hog on the surface.

Then, as now, the U.S. Submarine arm is all-volunteer.

Spear’s D-class boats– the first American boats to run four torpedo tubes, were subcontracted out to Fore River and were the largest yet, at 134 feet. Spindle shaped and single-hulled with short sails, they would become the basis for Navy sub hull forms for the next decade.

“U.S. Submarines awaiting Orders,” halftone reproduction, printed on a postal card, of a photograph of five submarines nested together prior to World War I. The three boats on the right are (from center to right): USS D-2 (Submarine # 18); USS D-1 (Submarine # 17); and USS D-3 (Submarine # 19). The two left are probably (in no order) USS E-1 (Submarine # 24) and USS E-2 (Submarine # 25). Courtesy of Commander Donald J. Robinson, USN (Medical Service Corps), 1973. NH 78926

By 1909, less than a decade after the first Holland boat was bought by the Navy, Fore River began construction of a more modern pair of boats, dubbed the E-class, that were roughly the same size as the D-class that preceded them but, importantly, ditched the dangerous gasoline engines of the previous designs for a pair of NELSECO diesels. Importantly for maneuverability while diving, they were also the first U.S. submarines to have bow planes.

Further, they incorporated both a search and attack periscope along with a narrow-windowed conning tower, complete with deadlights.

USS E-1 (Submarine # 24) underway in New York Harbor during the October 1912 naval review. Note her diving planes and “chariot” style canvas and tubing open sea running platform erected over the narrow conning tower. NH 41946

This gives us the F-class, which are just improved Es, and were only the second group of American designed and built diesel-electric submarines.

F-class boats were the first U.S. Navy submarines built on the West Coast, with the first two, F-1 and F-2, constructed by Union Iron Works in San Francisco as Yard No. 94 and 95 using NELSECO diesels. The second pair, F-3 and F-4, were the first subs launched into Puget Sound, built as Yard No. 55 and 56 by The Moran Company, which soon after became Seattle Construction and Drydock Co. The latter pair used Craig diesels.

The D, E, and F classes were the first American submarines (and some of the first anywhere) to have permanently installed radios, and the latter class used telescoping aerials as well.

An improved version of the E-class subs, Fore River provided the design sheets to Union and Moran, which each respective company used in building their first submarines.

General plans prepared by the Fore River Shipbuilding Company, Quincy, Massachusetts, 18 June 1910. This sheet features inboard and outboard profile drawings. These submarines were constructed by the Union Iron Works, San Francisco, California. Initially named Carp (Submarine # 20), Barracuda (Submarine # 21), Pickerel (Submarine # 22), and Skate (Submarine # 23), they were renamed F-1 through F-4 in November 1911 while under construction. NH 84383

Same as the above. Note the three divided sections, fore, middle, and stern. NH 84382

Running some 142 feet overall and able to float on the surface in just 12 feet of water, the F-class were still designed more for coastal and harbor defense than blue water patrols. Just 330 tons when surfaced, they used two small 390 hp NELSECO or Craig diesels to make 13.5 knots on trials. Submerged, at 400 tons, they used a pair of 120 kW Electro Dynamic electric motors fed by two 60-cell steel-jar batteries to make 11.5 knots, a speed they could only maintain for about an hour or so before the batteries were drained.

Overall, they were designed for patrols lasting no more than a week and only carried 33 tons of diesel oil- enough to allow for a 2,300nm range at 11 knots.

Constructed of mild steel, riveted in place and depermed, they had a test dept of 200 feet and could submerge in just 45 feet– although the aerials would still betray them. While on trials in 1913, F-1 dived to 283 feet in tests, but after her hull groaned and she started taking on water within ten minutes, she quickly made it to the surface.

Armament was a four-pack of 18-inch torpedo tubes in the bow behind a rotating torpedo tube muzzle cap– a main battery pioneered just a few years earlier in the D-class– with one set of reloads, allowing for eight fish maximum if all spots were filled. There was no provision for a deck gun and the fairwater or conning tower was short and thin, prone to spray and wash while underway.

The F-class were, to be blunt, just an evolutionary step for the Navy, who soon after would order larger and more sophisticated G, H, K, L, and M-class boats– all before entering the Great War, accumulating 51 commissioned submarines by 1917.

American submarines, 1914 Janes

Meet F-4

Laid down on 21 August 1909 at Moran as the future USS Skate (Submarine No. 23)– the first American warship to carry that later storied name- our subject was renamed a more generic USS F-4 on 17 November 1911. Launched on 6 January 1912, sponsored by the wife of a shipyard executive, she was commissioned 3on  May 1913.

F-4. Note the tiny conning tower with the trunk between the two periscopes. It was thought the conning tower was the most likely part of the boat to be struck during a collision while submerged or carried away by a wave on the surface, so it was made as a separate watertight compartment that could, at least in theory, be wrenched off without breaking the integrity of the hull, provided the hatch was dogged tight. However, it was so small that it could not be used for much, and the skipper and XO had their duty stations, even in an attack run, standing by the diving controls and steering stations. First periscope for the skipper, the second for a lookout. NH 108789

USS F-4 (SS-23) Photographed between 1913-15. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1972. NH 74736

F4 via Bowfin museum. Note her diving planes

The four F-boats were assigned to the First Submarine Group, Pacific Torpedo Flotilla, based at San Pedro and operated on the West Coast as such until August 1914.

F-Class Submarines at the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, before World War I. This view shows the bows of USS F-1 (Submarine # 20), USS F-2 (Submarine # 21), and USS F-3 (Submarine # 22). Collection of Thomas P. Naughton, 1973. NH 92187

F Class Submarines and tender USS Alert (AS 4) in Dry Dock 2 at Mare Island, California 21 January 1913. Note the extensive awnings erected on the conning towers and the open torpedo cap on F1 to the right

Tender USS Alert and four F boats, San Diego, 1914. Alert, an iron-hulled steam sloop that entered the fleet in 1875, had been decommissioned in 1907 and lent to the California Naval Militia. The Navy recalled her in 1912 specifically for use as a submarine tender for the F-class. 

Then, with war in Europe and a German cruiser squadron roaming the Pacific pursued by British and Japanese fleets, our little F-boats were towed to Hawaii behind armored cruisers to provide presence in the islands.

The Final Dive

The early days of submarining were highlighted by the tendency for these submersibles to claim the lives of their crews. After all, the infamous Hunley sank three times during her seven-month career, on each occasion with a total loss of her complement.

The U.S. Navy was lucky for a time, while European powers and Japan suffered no less than 21 fatal submarine losses between 1903 and 1914, claiming over 200 lives. That luck ran out on the morning of 25 March 1915 when an accident occurred on F-4 while she was off Oahu on maneuvers, sinking to the sea floor 306 feet below with two officers and 19 enlisted aboard.

She had left her tender, the old gunboat USS Alert, at 0900 for a submerged run at a maximum depth of 30 fathoms (180 feet) for target runs but failed to return to the surface by noon. While her emergency buoy was not seen, a sheen of diesel oil appeared on the surface some 1.5 miles off Fort Armstrong between Diamond Head and Barber’s Point, about a mile and a quarter from the channel entrance.

As described by the Submarine Force Museum:

When the F-4 was at a depth of something less than 60 feet, chlorine gas began seeping into the middle, or control, compartment of the boat, indicating that somehow salt water had reached the batteries. F-4’s commanding officer, LT(JG) Alfred Ede, ordered the boat to return to the surface but soon the engines, straining to lift the weight of the sub plus tons of added seawater from what was obviously a substantial leak, overheated and quit. Before the Sailors in the control section retreated to the engine room—several already having passed out after breathing too much of the chlorine gas—they tripped the system that blew air from the high-pressure tank into the main ballast tanks.

But it was too late; water was pouring into the boat faster than the air could blow it out and soon the F-4 came to rest on the bottom, 300 feet below the surface, about 100 feet greater than her test depth. The pressure of the surrounding water soon overcame the rivets that held the torpedo hatch in place and the two forward compartments flooded quickly. Although the crew had secured the hatch behind them when they moved back to the engine room, the bulkhead around it couldn’t hold out against the weight of water and collapsed.

Rescue…turns to recovery

For two days, the Navy combed the waters near where F-4 had been lost and, using drags followed up by divers, was able to approximate her position on the sea bottom. Two Navy hard hat salvage divers attached from the submarine flotilla, GMCs John “Jack” Agraz and John Evans, descended rapidly to 190 feet without seeing the sub. Agraz attempted again and made it to 215 feet- a record at the time for open ocean work- in an unsuccessful attempt to reach the bubbling sub.

A hairy-chested hero, Agraz did the bounce under helmet only with no suit to save time, and somehow never suffered from the bends.

Divers working over the wreck of F-4 in March 1915

An experimental 54-inch diving bell owned by the Hawaiian Dredging Company was sent for, to be rented for $750 per diem.

On 27 March, two days after F4’s dive to the bottom, as the Alert stood by some 500 feet from the lost submarine in water just 160 feet deep, the tugs USS Navajo and Intrepid, accompanied by the 150-ton derrick dredge California, the latter towed by the steamer SS Claudine, arrived on scene with a plan to use a cable loop to lift F-4 and shift her close enough to the tender for divers to attach chains to her and bring her slowly to the surface via crane. The equipment involved amounted to two 110-fathom wire hawsers, with 45 fathoms of chain in the middle.

Heartache came as the clock ticked past 55 hours with F-4 submerged and the cable loop, which had reportedly managed to lift the boat from the bottom, slipped and the submarine careened back to the floor, bow first. The sweep brought to the surface a piece of brass from the submarine’s fairwater, believed to be a section of one of her periscopes.

With the desperate rescue making headlines across the country, SECNAV Josephus Daniels ordered a Navy-wide task force to head to Hawaii and join the effort. From the New York (Brooklyn) Navy Yard, one of the first dive medicine experts, Passed Asst. Surgeon George Reuben Williamson French, USN, (UPenn ’08) was dispatched by express train to Mare Island. French brought five of the Navy’s most experienced divers: Warrant Gunner George D. Stillson and GMCs Stephen J. Drellishak, Frank Crilley, Frederick Nielson, and William Loughman.

The men had spent the past 28 months in a program to evaluate diving tables based on English Dr. John S. Haldane’s theories on staged decompression. The divers had previously reached the amazing depth of 274 feet in experimental tests from the destroyer USS Walke (DD 34) in the relatively sheltered waters of Long Island Sound, developing the first U.S. Navy Diving Manual (the 252-page “Report on Deep Diving Tests”) in the process.

The team had developed a three-wire telephone connection for the divers to remain in constant contact topside the entire dive. It was dubbed the Stillson Phone for years.

USS Walke (Destroyer # 34) Diving support activities on the ship’s deck, while Gunner George D. Stillson, USN, was on the bottom, during deep diving tests conducted in Long Island Sound in late October and early November 1914. This photo may have been taken during Stillson’s 23 October dive, in which he reached the bottom in 88 1/2 feet of water. Note Chief Petty Officer holding diver’s air line, Passed Assistant Surgeon George R.W. French (wearing communications headset and microphone) talking to the diver by telephone, and recompression chamber (with hatch closed) in the background. GMC Frank Crilley is hatless to the left, looking at the camera. Courtesy of Jim Kazalis, 1981. NH 99832

Oh, yeah, and they also helped vet and design the iconic Mark V diving rig, adopted in 1916, based on the British Siebe-Gorman 6-bolt diving helmet but with significant improvements. Air was supplied to the divers from charged torpedo flasks, with pressure controlled through a reducing valve and by throttling.

Chief Gunner’s Mate Stephen J. Drellishak on the deck of USS Walke (DD 34) after making a record dive to 274 feet on November 3, 1914. U.S. Naval Undersea Museum photo

Crew members of the destroyer USS Walke (DD 34) pose with a diving helmet, diving boots, and a recompression chamber installed on the ship’s deck to support deep diving tests in Long Island Sound in the fall of 1914. U.S. Naval Undersea Museum photo

Diver preparing to go over the side of Walke on 3 March 1914. Note the airline attached to the back of his helmet. NH 99836, courtesy of Jim Kazalis, 1981. Chief Gunner’s Mate Stephen J. Drellishak ascending unassisted from a ten-foot stage at the end of his record 274-foot dive from Walke to the sea floor on 3 November 1914. His ascent from the bottom occupied 1 hour and 20 minutes. This dive was one of a series of deep diving tests conducted in Long Island Sound in late October and early November 1914. NH 99838

The dive team traveled with 10,756 pounds of specialized equipment in 27 crates, including a large recompression tank and 1,450 feet of air hose. Another 700 feet of hose was rushed from Norfolk. Mare Island was able to scrounge an additional 500 feet. Daniels dutifully told the press in Washington that, using “special appliances,” he was confident they could reach F-4. This would be their first practical test of their experimental diving techniques and what could be accomplished under service conditions.

Still, Daniels noted, “The Department fears there is not room to hope for the lives of the crew but is determined to do all that is humanly possible to raise the vessel and is undertaking to send the Navy divers to an unprecedented depth if necessary to accomplish this.”

Arriving at Mare Island, they boarded the armored cruiser USS Maryland (ACR-8), which in the meantime had been filled with six lifting pontoons- capable of lifting 520 tons- to be used in the salvage attempt.

New York Navy Yard’s Recompression Chamber No. 1 used during the salvage of F-4 (SS-23). The chamber was shipped to Mare Island and then put aboard Maryland (ACR-8) for the trip to Pearl Harbor. Photo courtesy of Darryl L. Baker via Navsource.

View of the stern of Maryland (ACR-8) with salvage pontoons loaded at Mare Island Navy Yard. Maryland was in dry dock at the time. Photo courtesy of Darryl L. Baker via Navsource.

The cruiser, the experimental dive team, and their accumulation of gear arrived in Hawaii on 12 April, sadly 18 days after F-4 was lost.

In the meantime, back at Pearl, RADM Charles B. T. Moore (commandant of the naval station), LT. Charles E. Smith (1st SubGrp skipper) and Naval Constructor Julius “Dutchie” Furer had been working on a series of mechanical lifts and sweeps to try to secure F-4, with the tugs Navajo and Intrepid joined by the dredge Gaylord.

On 7 April, with the experimental dive team still a week away, dragging continued with the tugs Navajo and Intrepid.

Furer acquired two mud scows from the Hawaiian Dredging Company, each some 104 feet long by 36 feet beam by 13 feet deep, and rigged them with four slings “made from the heaviest cables procurable” attached to purpose-built windlasses on each vessel. The windlass drums were made from 16-inch diameter sugar mill shafts and spooled with 2.5-inch galvanized steel cables obtained from the Pacific Mail Steamship Company with the 10-inch by 14-inch steam engine, geared to 6 drums, on the dredge used to reel.

With the dive team from Brooklyn arriving on the scene on 14 April, GMC Frank Crilley was the first diver to reach the submarine, dropping to a new record of 288 feet of seawater, and walked along the boat’s upper deck. He found F-4 on a smooth sandy bottom with no coral growth to impede hoisting operations, and her bow pointed shoreward. He noted two parted lines from previous snagging and recovery efforts attached to the craft. The dive took two hours, with a five-minute descent, 12 minutes on the bottom, and the balance on the slow rise to the surface to decompress.

Stillson, following immediately after, reported the superstructure was caved in, and the hull under it was filled with water.

Salvage of USS F-4 (SS-23), April-August 1915. A hard hat diver descending to the sunken submarine. Purportedly photographed 90 feet below the surface via a sealed glass bottomed box. F-4 had sunk on 25 March 1915 off Honolulu, Hawaii, in over 300 feet of water. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1972. NH 74731

The salvage equipment devised and employed by Furer to lift F-4 to the surface was slowly attached to the vessel over the next several days, with the divers only able to work 15-20 minutes per dive due to the exertion of working at such depth and the prerequisite decompression time. At least 13 dives went past 275 feet in depth, with five reaching the sea floor at 306 feet, struggling with 10 atmospheres of pressure (130-140 pounds per sq. inch).

To say this was dangerous for the divers was an understatement.

On 17 April, one of the men, Loughman, almost perished, adding his soul to the 21 already lost on the submarine. Entangled in lines on his ascent, he was trapped more than 250 feet down and helpless. Chief Crilley, who had already dived that day, volunteered to don a helmet and return to the deep to help his shipmate return to the surface.

Loughman, who spent more four hours at depths over 200 feet, was brought to the surface in semi-conscious conditions and had to spend nine hours in the recompression chamber, then was waylaid for two weeks with severe pneumonia and Caisson’s disease (the Bends). He was only released from Mare Island Naval Hospital at the end of June.

Dr. French on Loughman, via the 1916 Naval Medical Bulletin:

Crilley would later (in 1929!) receive a rare peacetime MoH for his actions.

Medal of Honor citation of Chief Gunner’s Mate Frank W. Crilley (as printed in the official publication “Medal of Honor, 1861-1949, The Navy”, page 106):

“For display of extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession above and beyond the call of duty during the diving operations in connection with the sinking in a depth of water 304 feet, of the U.S.S. F-4 with all on board, as a result of loss of depth control, which occurred off Honolulu, T.H., on 25 March 1915. On 17 April 1915, William F. Loughman, chief gunner’s mate, United States Navy, who had descended to the wreck and had examined one of the wire hawsers attached to it, upon starting his ascent, and when at a depth of 250 feet beneath the surface of the water, had his life line and air hose so badly fouled by this hawser that he was unable to free himself; he could neither ascend nor descend. On account of the length of time that Loughman had already been subjected to the great pressure due to the depth of water, and the uncertainty of the additional time he would have to be subjected to this pressure before he could be brought to the surface, it was imperative that steps be taken at once to clear him. Instantly, realizing the desperate case of his comrade, Crilley volunteered to go to his aid, immediately donned a diving suit, and descended. After a lapse of time of 2 hours and 11 minutes, Crilley was brought to the surface, having by a superb exhibition of skill, coolness, endurance and fortitude, untangled the snarl of lines and cleared his imperiled comrade, so that he was brought, still alive, to the surface.”

Slowly, using manila reeving line, by 18 April, all four lifting hawsers had been placed and transferred to the scows, but F-4 remained stubbornly on the bottom, drawn closer to shore into a shallower 275 feet depth.

Re-rigging the lifting hawsers with lengths of Maryland’s 2⅝-inch stud-link anchor chain for extra strength and reinstalling them, the next lift was tried on 20 May. Over the next four days, through a complicated series of lifts and tows, with the tugs, scows, pontoons, and dredge all working together day and night, F-4 had been lifted to a depth of just 84 feet by 24 May and 50 feet by 25 May. The plan was to bring her into a flooded dry dock that allowed a depth of 25.5 feet.

Then came a three-day storm that buffeted the lifting vessels and translated down the hawsers to the suspended water-filled submarine below as diving and salvage operations were suspended. When Furer sent divers down on 29 May after the waters calmed, it was found that the top of the sub was caved in and torn almost halfway through to the keel.

With F-4 upside down, suspended 46 feet under the water by hawsers, it was decided to transfer the rest of the lift to the six submergible pontoons and bring the submarine to the surface before transfer to a dry dock. Twenty charged torpedo air flasks were installed on a coal barge, then linked by pipe and a dozen 150-foot lengths of hose to the pontoons to bring them to the surface, with F-4 along for the ride. This took until 29 August to set up.

Valve manifold and hose leads to submerged pontoons, on board a salvage vessel off Honolulu, Hawaii, in August 1915. Halftone photograph, copied from Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Volume 24, 1916, Figure 11. The tug in the left distance is probably the USS Navajo. NH 43497

Then the lift started, with the flasks charging the pontoons and F-4 rising slowly. Importantly for diving history, this segment saw one of the first uses of several divers connected to the surface via telephone line for communication to coordinate the careful rise as one pontoon, rising too slow or too fast or at the wrong angle, could upend the whole operation.

Bow salvage pontoons emerging from the depths, off Honolulu, Hawaii, circa 29 August 1915, during the final lifting of the sunken submarine. Halftone photograph, copied from Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Volume 24, 1916, Figure 12. NH 43498

All salvage pontoons on the surface, off Honolulu, Hawaii, circa 29 August 1915, with preparations under way to tow the sunken submarine into Honolulu Harbor. Halftone photograph, copied from Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Volume 24, 1916, Figure 13. The tug in the center is probably the USS Navajo. NH 43499

Salvage pontoons on the surface, off Honolulu, Hawaii, circa 29 August 1915, after the final lifting of the sunken submarine in preparation for towing her into Honolulu harbor. Note the wooden protective sheathing around the pontoons. The tug on the right is probably the USS Navajo. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1972. NH 74732

Towed into port with the pontoons surfaced, F-4 was finally transferred to the dry dock of the Island Steam Navigation Company at the Quarantine Station dock.

From Beneath the Surface: World War I Submarines Built in Seattle and Vancouver by Bill Lightfoot. Photo from Kerrick, Military & Naval America, via Navsource.

F-4 in drydock at Honolulu, Hawaii, on 1 September 1915, after she had been raised from over 300 feet of water and towed into port. Note the large implosion hole in her port side and the salvage pontoons used to support her during the final lift. This view shows the F-4’s port bow. She is upside down, rolled to starboard approximately 120 degrees from the vertical. Photographed by Kodagraph, Honolulu. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1972. NH 74733

Naval personnel examine the large implosion hole in F-4’s port side, in drydock at Honolulu, Hawaii, circa late August or early September 1915. She had been raised from over 300 feet of water and towed into port. This view was taken from off the port bow, showing the submarine’s port side diving plane in the center. She is upside down, rolled to starboard approximately 120 degrees from the vertical. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1972. NH 74734

View of F-4’s port side name plate, taken in drydock at Honolulu, Hawaii, circa late August or early September 1915, after she had been raised from over 300 feet of water and towed into port. These figures are mounted on the submarine’s port bow and are shown upside down, as she was drydocked rolled to starboard approximately 120 degrees from the vertical. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1972. NH 74735

It was determined that the loss occurred due to leaking battery acid that corroded F-4’s hull rivets in the port wall of the battery steel tank at Frame 51, which allowed progressive flooding, chlorine off gassing due to salt water interaction with the battery jars, loss of depth control, and eventual catastrophic hull failure. This led to design changes in future submarine classes.

The salvage of F-4 is well covered in more detail at PigBoats.com. 

Epilogue

Of the 21 members of F-4’s crew that went on her last dive, 18 were recovered from her wreckage.

A team of physicians assembled from the Maryland’s medical department led by Surgeon H. Curl and Asst. Dental Surgeon Halleck, joined by Asst Surgeon WW Cress of the Alert, and Surgeons Trotter and Seaman of the Marine Hospital in Honolulu combed through the wreckage for remains.

The interior of the submarine, having been submerged for six months in the tropics, was in bad shape.

Detailed by Seaman in the 1916 Naval Medical Bulletin:

Four sets of remains were found in the middle compartment of F-4, while the rest were found in the stern engine compartment. Of the four recovered that were identifiable, two, Ashcroft and Herzog, were identified due to dental records, while the other two, Wells and Mahan, were identified due to the contents of their pockets. The remains were wrapped in cotton, surrounded by oakum, and placed in caskets.

The four who were able to be identified were repatriated to their families for interment, sent to California, Utah, and Virginia.

The 14 unidentified sets of remains were arranged in four sealed metal coffins, marched in a somber funeral parade through Honolulu to the California-bound USS Supply, and were eventually buried with honors at Arlington.

The modern marker for the F-4 crew includes the 14 men buried and three missing

Her crew is remembered as the first of the American submarines listed on Eternal Patrol and appear on markers and monuments as such across the country.

She is the first of 65 still on Eternal Patrol. (Photo: Chris Eger)

Following the investigation of her doom and the removal of remains, the wreckage of F-4 was refloated on 15 September 1915– the dry dock was rented after all– and towed under the pontoons by Navajo into Magazine Loch until she grounded in the shallow inlet. There she sat in the shallows until 1940 when the area was turned into the Sierra submarine piers. She was rolled into a trench by the pier and buried.

In 1999, a magnetometer survey near pier Sierra 13/14 detected a large object, some 80 feet from the pier, under some 20 feet of sediment. A sign has since been erected to note this resting place.

Meanwhile, the small original headstone for her 17 crew members buried at Arlington was installed at the USS Bowfin Museum at Pearl.

USS Bowfin Executive Director Jerry Hofwolt and Richard Mendelson (Submarine Veterans) during F4 Headstone dedication to USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park, 2000.

Some of her construction notes endure in the National Archives. 

In November 1915, Dutchie Furer, who directed the recovery of F-4, largely with improvised equipment, submitted an extremely detailed article on the salvage operation to Proceedings. A 1901 Annapolis grad who fought against the Spanish in 1898 while still a midshipman, he was a proponent of small craft operations and campaigned successfully for the 110-foot subchasers in the Great War. Earning a Navy Cross, he later helped supervise the modernization of the battleships USS Pennsylvania and New Mexico in the 1930s and, still on duty in 1941, became Chief of Navy Research and helped coordinate new technology into the fleet in WWII. He retired in November 1945.

RADM Julius Augustus Furer, USNA ’01, passed in 1963, aged 82, and is buried at Arlington.

Likewise, Dr. French would publish “Diving Operations in Connection with the Salvage of the USS ‘F-4″ in the Naval Medical Bulletin in 1916. He retired from the navy as a commander in 1937, then returned to the colors during WWII, later passing at the Oakland Navy Hospital in May 1955. He is regarded as the Navy’s first Diving Medical Officer. 

The hard hat divers of the experimental team that set and repeatedly broke their own deep-sea records also kept at it.

When there was another accident in 1927, when the USS S-4 (SS-109) became disabled and was lost with all hands, a familiar face hit the news again, with now-Ensign Grilley again earning a peacetime decoration for bravery.

“Naval divers who worked hard and faithfully at the difficult task of raising the submarine S-4” (quoted from the original 1928 caption). Probably photographed at the Boston Navy Yard, Charlestown, Massachusetts, circa 19-20 March 1928, shortly after the salvaged S-4 entered dry dock there. Those present are identified in the original caption as (standing, left to right): Michaels, Eadie, Wilson, Carr, and Eissn. (Kneeling, left to right): Grilley, Mattox and Doherty. Michaels may be Chief Torpedoman Michels. Eadie is Chief Gunner’s Mate. Thomas Eadie, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for rescuing Michaels during salvage work. Grilley is probably Ensign Frank W. Crilley. NH 41836

Navy Cross citation of Ensign Frank W. Crilley (as printed in his official biography):

“For extraordinary heroism and fearless devotion to duty during the diving operations in connection with the salvage of the USS S-4, sunk as a result of a collision off Provincetown, Massachusetts, 17 December 1927. During the period 17 December 1927 to 17 March 1928, on which latter date the ill-fated vessel was raised, Crilley, under the most adverse weather conditions, at the risk of his life, descended many times into the icy waters and displayed throughout that period fortitude, skill, determination and courage which characterizes conduct above and beyond the call of duty.”

Ensign Frank William Crilley, who earned both the Navy Cross and MoH, the latter only presented in 1929 by Coolidge some 14 years after the fact, retired from the service at least twice and was called back to help salvage lost subs. He passed in 1947, aged 64, on dry land. He is buried at Arlington.

The current Navy Experimental Diving Unit was formally established in 1927 at the Washington Navy Yard and the equipment and procedures developed at NEDU, including the McCann Rescue Chamber and mixed gas diving, were essential to the rescue of the crewmen who survived the initial sinking of the submarine USS Squalus on the bottom off the Isle of Shoals near Portsmouth in 1939.

The disabled Squalus was located on the sea floor at a depth of 240 feet in 29°F water, and a rescue ship with a diving chamber came to the site. The 33 crew in the non-flooded compartments were transferred to the surface within 40 hours via four trips of the diving chamber.

Now moving towards its 100th year in operation, the NEDU, still under SUPSALV, continues its research to save lives in the worst-case scenario.

They retain the Mark V on their insignia.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO, has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I’m a member, so you should be!

Warship Wednesday, March 19, 2025: Bucoup Malchanceuse

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday, March 19, 2025: Bucoup Malchanceuse

Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 64442

Above, we see the unique cuirasse d’escadre Bouvet of the French Marine Nationale sitting quietly at anchor, likely in the Mediterranean in the 1900s. More a floating castle than a man-o-war, this tumblehome-hulled battlewagon would find herself very unlucky in the Dardanelles some 110 years ago this week.

The “Sample Fleet”

While France and Britain were at peace since 1815, there was still enough lingering animosity between the two traditional enemies that, when the Royal Navy began work on a series of eight new 1st rate warships that would become the Royal Sovereign-class battleship in 1888– vessels that hit 14,000 tons, carried four 13.5-inch guns, and were clad in as much as 18 inches of armor but could still make 17 knots or better– the French knew they needed a response.

This led the French naval ministry to order four, and later a fifth, new and experimental battleship around a series of mandatory specs: 14,000 tons or less, a “diamond” gun arrangement with turreted 12-inch guns fore and aft and 10.8-inch guns amidships, an armor plate topping out at 18 inches, and a speed of at least 17 knots. Dubbed the “flotte d’échantillons” (sample fleet), the idea would be that the ministry would pick and choose what worked best from these one-off prototypes and come up with the best design moving forward.

The first four ships were all designed by four different esteemed French naval architects and built at four different domestic yards at roughly the same time to cut down on the suspense:

  • Charles Martel, designed by Charles Ernest Huin, built at Arsenal de Brest 1891-1896
  • Jauréguiberry, designed by Amable Lagane, built by F et C de la Méditerranée, La Seyne-sur-Mer 1891-96
  • Carnot, designed by Victor Saglio, built at Arsenal de Toulon 1891-1896
  • Masséna, designed by Louis de Bussy, built at A et C de la Loire, Saint-Nazaire 1891-1897

French pre-dreadnought battleship Masséna, alongside one of her sisters

Before any of the above Echantillons had entered service, Charles Ernest Huin received the singular honor of drafting a fifth design that would begin construction at Arsenal de Lorient in January 1893. Regarded as a bit of a genius by the French, the 57-year-old Huin had graduated from the École Polytechnique during the Crimean War, sat on the Gavres Commission on artillery development, and became general director of the Gironde Shipyards in Lorient in 1881 where he designed the early battleships Hoche, Brennus, and Marceau before his Charles Martel design, picked as first of the Echantillons to be laid down, drew interest.

Hoche, seen operating in relatively flat waters along France’s Atlantic coast in 1890, was one of Huin’s babies

Huin’s swansong is our subject.

Meet Bouvet

Although a continuation of the sample fleet concept, our Bouvet would be a testbed for several new technologies. Whereas the other four Echantillons used Lagreafel d’Allest boilers, Bouvet would carry 32 (!) more modern Indret-Bellville boilers arranged on three engines driving three shafts (three of the four sample ships were twin shafters). She went a bit heavier than the preceding battleships, but with 15,000 shp available, she was designed to make 18 knots in theory and could steam 4,000nm on 10 knots with 980 tons of good coal in her bunkers.

While she carried a similar armor plan, Bouvet’s was improved Harvey nickel steel face-hardened armor with a higher tensile strength against incoming projectiles than that used on previous French ships. Further, while she had roughly the same hull type, it was not cut down to the main deck at the stem, and she carried a downsized superstructure with a pair of smaller military masts compared to the previous Echantillons, all of which suffered from dramatic stability issues in any sort of seas.

Her drawings on paper seem elegant.

She also had more modern guns, albeit of the same caliber as the four prior sample ships. Rather than two single Canon de 305 mm/45 (12″) Model 1887s as on Charles Martel, she had updated 305 mm/40 (12″) Model 1893s as her main armament. Capable of firing 770-pound AP shells to 13,000 yards at about one round per minute, these guns would later be mounted in two twin-gun turrets on the follow on the Gaulois, Iena, Suffren, Republique, and Liberte battleship classes.

Bouvet, bow shot, showing off her forward 12-inch gun

Note all the light guns in her superstructure

The secondary battery was a pair of 274 mm/45 (10.8″) Model 1887/1893s in amidship single gun turrets, an experimental model only carried on Bouvet and the sample ship Massena. Her sloping tumblehome hull form was largely to allow these “wing” guns a wider field of fire.

Battleship Bouvet beam turrets.

The tertiary armament was downright wild, with eight single 5.5″/45 M1891s, another eight 3.9″/45 M1891s, a dozen single 47mm/40 M1885 3-pounders, five single 37mm/20 M1885 1-pounders, and a pair of Hotchkiss 37mm 5-barreled Gatling-style guns. This was deemed more than enough to tackle incoming waves of enemy torpedo boats.

Bouvet, Janes 1914

Speaking of torpedoes, she maintained four separate 17.7-inch torpedo stations, two amidships above water with single tubes on trainable turnstiles, and another two submerged forward with fixed tubes that simply fired 90 degrees outward from the beam. Each station had its own magazine, and Bouvet could carry a dozen M1892 Whitehead-type fish, which had a 1,100-yard range and carried 220 pounds of guncotton.

Modern, she carried four dynamos that allowed for force ventilation belowdecks, electrical lighting, and six high-output searchlights. Heady stuff for 1892.

The Salad Days

Bouvet was ordered 8 April 1892 from Lorient Arsenal at a cost of £1.2 million, or 21 million French francs. Laid down to a completed design by Huin on 16 January 1893, she was launched 27 April 1896, her hull decorated with trees.

Named for the trio of famed 18th/19th century French navigator/admirals Bouvet, our battleship was at least the third to carry the name under the Tricolor, preceded by a steam aviso famously sunk off Haiti in 1871 in a storm just after she fought the German gunboat SMS Meteor off Havana (see: Warship Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020: A German and a Frenchman walk into a Cuban bar…).

Bouvet fitting out

Bouvet was completed and was commissioned in June 1898, amid the spectacular naval developments of the Spanish-American War.

Bouvet circa 1900, Symond & Co photograph, IWM Q 22256

She joined the Mediterranean squadron and visited the Italian sovereigns in 1900, before becoming flagship of the entire French fleet for a couple of years. She then participated in several diplomatic voyages to Spain, Italy, Greece, the exotic Ottoman ports, and other spots in the region before taking part in numerous maneuvers and exercises in the Med.

For a time, she was a favorite subject of naval postcards.

Notably, she participated in the large French naval review at Cherbourg in July 1900, suffered a minor collision with the battleship Gaulois in 1903, and assisted in the international response to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.

It was a quiet life.

By 1907, she was given an overhaul that included deleting her above-deck torpedo tubes and other minor efforts to help trim her top-heavy design. By the summer of 1908, with better battleships taking their place in the fleet’s 1st and 2nd Battleship Divisions, Bouvet was downgraded an assignment in the 3rd.

In and out of ordinary, her roles increasingly took on a more auxiliary tasking outside of the spotlight, no longer the proud flagship of her early career.

Battleship Bouvet in Toulon harbour 1912, BNF image

By 1913, the French Navy had a surplus of steel-sheathed, steel-hulled battlewagons, each class generally better than the last in an evolutionary sense, and all more advanced than Bouvet. Going past the Echantillons, they had three 11,000 ton Charlemagnes, the one-off 9,000-ton Henri IV, the 12,725-ton Suffren, two 15,000-ton Republiques, three 14,000-ton Democraties, six 18,000-ton “semi-dreadnought” Dantons, four modern 23,000-ton Courbets mounting a full dozen 12″/50 guns, three brand-new 24,000-ton Bretagnes with ten 13.5″/45s, and a class of five 25,000-ton Normandie class dreadnoughts under construction. With all that– including 13 legit dreadnoughts and six semi-dreadnoughts for the battle line and 10 still functional pre-dreadnoughts for expeditionary use– the need to keep the cranky and grossly obsolete Echantillons on the Navy List any longer was fading.

The four earlier sample ships were soon withdrawn. Charles Martel was placed in reserve in 1912 before being decommissioned outright in early 1914, permanently disarmed to become a floating barracks hulk at Brest. Carnot was placed in reserve in January 1913 and, disarmed, was used as an accommodation ship at Toulon. Massena, suffering an explosion in 1913, was withdrawn from service and hulked, pending scrapping.

Jaureguiberry and Bouvet were transferred to the Division de complément (Supplementary Division) and assigned to fire control development and gunnery training, respectively, surely the last stop before being laid up. These two ships were reportedly left in poor condition, with maintenance funds diverted to newer and more capable battleforce elements. After all, why waste money on ships earmarked for disposal?

War!

The Great War saved Bouvet and fellow sample battleship Jaureguiberry from the scrappers. Ordered to arm up and make ready for combat– with German and Austrian ally Italy thought ready to enter the conflict at any moment and German RADM Souchon’s Mediterranean Squadron at large– the two dated but still useful warships were soon escorting troopships in the Med. These included both French colonial troops heading to the Metropolitan Republic and British/Indian troops likewise headed to the Western Front.

Bouvet, May 1914, BNF

Once Souchon’s squadron, the battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the cruiser Breslau, had fled to the Dardanelles under the protection of Ottoman guns, and Italy gave assurances they had no immediate intention of honoring their pact with Berlin and Vienna, Bouvet soon shifted to Greek waters to join the force gathering there should the German ships attempt to break back out into the Med.

This force soon made the logical transition to supporting the doomed Franco-British Gallipoli campaign in 1915 once the Turks found themselves in the war. By late February 1915, a force of 16 British battleships under VADM John de Robeck and four French ones (Suffren, Bouvet, Charlemagne, and Gaulors) under RADM Emile Guepratte, augmented by a host of cruisers (including a random Russian) and destroyers, began to try to force the straits.

Among the 230 artillery pieces that supported the Dardanelles, defenses were at least 10 aging Krupp 24 cm (9.4-inch) K L/35 fortress guns from a batch of 30 pieces shipped to the country in 1889. They could heave a 474-pound shell via bagged charges out to a range of 8.1 miles.

Ottoman 24 cm artillery at the Rumeli Medjidieh battery Bouvet. That shell hoist would dramatically fail on 18 March 1915

Relatively obsolete by the Great War, they could still be deadly should an enemy ship obligingly get close enough to find out. Four of these were installed in the masonry fort at Rumeli Mecidiye Tabyası (Fort No. 13) on the European shore of the peninsula, backing up a pair of larger but less capable 28cm L/22s.

Ottoman 24 cm artillery at the Rumeli Medjidieh battery, 1915. Shown are the battery commander, Captain Mehmet Hilmi (Şanlıtop) Bey, and 2LT Fahri Bey.

Beyond the guns, the Turks had sown almost 400 mines in 10 fields, most laid by the humble little Ottoman minelayer Nusret.

Turkish Minelayer Nusrat

On the morning of 18 March 1915, a three-part attack was launched to reduce the Ottoman’s central forts, with the four most powerful British battlewagons (HMS Queen Elizabeth, Lord Nelson, Agamemnon, and Inflexible) kicking off the assault with a heavy two-hour bombardment from 8 miles out, followed by a second prong– the four French ships– boldly sailing to within just 5,000 yards to destroy the fortifications at point blank range, relying on their heavy armor to shrug off any remaining Turkish guns. Meanwhile, the 12 remaining British battleships would line up in a third division in three groups to provide covering fire and then follow the French in.

The problem with that plan was that the first bombardment was nowhere near as effective as the British thought it would be, and Nusret had crept in to sow an 11th minefield that the British and French didn’t know about.

The day would prove very bad for the Allied forces.

Inflexible, Queen Elizabeth, and Agamemnon in the British first line, along with Irresistible and Ocean in the second line, started taking hits, most from the little Rumeli Mecidiye battery but also other guns at Dardanos and Sogandare.

The French, drawn point blank with the forts, got the worst of it, with Suffren, flagship of RADM Guepratte, receiving 14 hits in 14 minutes and set ablaze, effectively out of the fight. Gaulois was hit twice, with one lucky shell plunging and penetrating her hull under the waterline, forcing her to retreat and beach on Tavsan in the Rabbit Islands to keep from sinking, the wounded Charlemagne at her side.

Bouvet received at least eight hits from Rumeli Medjidieh’s 9.4-inch guns, riddling her masts and funnels and putting her forward turret out of action. Not grievously injured, she answered the signal to withdraw and promptly stumbled into one of Nusret’s mines at 13:58 just under her starboard 10.8-inch mount.

Never having an abundance of stability, she quickly started to roll and, with water pouring down her funnels, turned turtle and sank in less than a minute, taking a stunning 660 of her 710 crew down with her.

Bouvet sinking after being mined 18 March 1915. Note how close to shore she is. Photo via the Surgeon Parkes collection. IWM SP 682A

A handful of waterlogged and shocked survivors were plucked from the water by the battle-damaged Agamemnon.

Survivors from the French battleship Bouvet coming on board the battleship HMS Agamemnon on 18 March 1915 during the Anglo-French naval attempt to force the Dardanelles. The Bouvet struck a Turkish mine and sank with the loss of over 600 of her crew. IWM HU 103301

With Roebuck ordering his ships to withdraw from the failed effort to reduce the forts, Irresistible and Ocean likewise struck Turkish mines and quickly sank within sight of Bouvet’s watery grave. Irresistible sank with the loss of only 12 of her 780 crew and had her survivors rescued by Ocean then, following the holing by that ship, she slowly sank and the combined crews were taken off by the destroyers HMS Jed, Colne, and Chelmer which were able to come alongside. Of note, the British battleships, while similarly dated, were not tumblehome designs, and Ocean only lost a single crewman in the battle.

Epilogue

Both at the time of the sinking and in modern Turkey, the loss of Bouvet was widely celebrated and remembered.

Le Bouvet aux Dardanelles

Illustrated First World War, Sinking of Bouvet

German wartime postcard depicting the sinking of Bouvet

Sinking of Bouvet

“Bouvet’nin Çanakkale’de Batışı (The Sinking of Battleship Bouvet at the Dardanelles)” by Turkish maritime artist Diyarbakırlı Tahsin Bey

“Bouvet’nin Çanakkale’de Batışı (The Sinking of Battleship Bouvet at the Dardanelles)” by Turkish maritime artist Diyarbakırlı Tahsin Bey

Charles Huin didn’t live long enough to see his penultimate battleship fail so spectacularly. Retiring from the French navy in 1902 after almost 50 years of service as a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, he was struck by a car and killed on a Paris street at age 76 in December 1912 while on his way to collect his pension from the Ministry.

Charles Ernest Huin

RADM Guepratte, who commanded the French force on the fateful day that Bouvet was lost, was relegated to a desk job at Bizerte for the rest of the war and then retired. He passed in November 1939, gratefully missing out on the twin humiliations of Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940 and Toulon in November 1942. Post-war, historians rehabilitated his record and came to the conclusion he got a bad rap, and he is generally seen as a naval hero of sorts today in France, with a destroyer (D632) and frigate (F714) named after him. After all, he was ordered by Roebuck and Carden to take his four obsolete battleships right down the Turks’ throat and by all means should have lost all four.

The French Navy went on to recycle the Bouvet name twice- for a Free French auxiliary in WWII and a Cold War era Surcouf-class destroyer (D624) in operation between 1952 and 1981.

For years, it was believed that Bouvet sank only due to the 9.4-inch coastal artillery hits.

The Ottoman battery commander who landed the hits on Bouvet and several of the other ships, Capt. Mehmet Hilmi Şanlıtop, despite winning a series of decorations, including the Iron Cross, was cashiered post-war in the aftermath of the end of the empire. Welcomed into the ranks of the newly formed Turkish Army in 1920, he eventually retired as a colonel of artillery. He wrote a book about his service and passed in 1946. A statue of him stands near the location of the battery today, which is now a museum.

The Rumeli Medjidieh site, disarmed in 1919, today contains a single 9.4-inch Krupp fortress gun, albeit one moved from another fort. The site has bronze statues of Capt. Şanlıtop and his XO, along with Corporal Seyit Ali Cabuk, who famously hand-carried three 474-pound shells up to one of the 9.4s from the magazine to the breech after the shell hoist failed during the latter stages of the Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915, the rounds credited with hitting Ocean.

The story of Bouvet’s ultimate loss by mine strike caught up to the public.

The Ottoman minelayer Nusret, retired from naval service in 1955, was sold to commercial concerns and, derelict, sank in 1989.

Raised in 2002, she has been reconstructed on land at the Tarsus Çanakkale Park.

Nusrat Tarsus Çanakkale Park wiki commons

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO, has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I’m a member, so you should be!

Warship Wednesday, March 12, 2025: Spymaster Farm

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday, March 12, 2025: Spymaster Farm

“Received from Office of Naval Intelligence,” U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 64250

Above we see the beautiful new kleiner kreuzer SMS Dresden as she transits the Kiel Canal under the Levensau High Bridge in early 1908. Caught at sea in August 1914 in bad repair and already on her way back to Germany, she would end up being the last of the Kaiser’s cruisers at large on the high seas, sent to the bottom some 110 years ago this week.

The Dresden Class

The two Dresden-class light cruisers– our subject and the infamous SMS Emden— were ordered as part of the Kaiserliche Marine’s 1905-06 program to a modification of the earlier Königsberg class design and used the same hull form, armament, and armor plan but carried slightly different machinery. Some 388 feet long, they had a 44-foot beam and drew 18 feet of water under their hull.

Armament consisted of ten 4.1-inch SK L/40 naval guns— the standard weapon of almost all of Germany’s smaller cruisers and large colonial gunboats– in six single shielded pedestal mounts and four casemated, with 1,500 shells for these guns held in the magazine.

The German light cruiser SMS Dresden in a harbor. Note her forward 4.1-inch guns. IWM (Q 53072)

The secondary armament consisted of eight 2″/52 SK55 popguns with 4,000 rounds between them, backed up by a pair of submerged bow-mounted 17.7-inch torpedo tubes with space in the magazine for five fish. Landing party equipment included four Maxim machine guns and enough rifles, revolvers, and packs to outfit a company-sized force drawn from the 343-member crew. A light 6cm L/21 boat gun on a carriage along with 241 shells was also part of the ship’s bill.

When it came to armor, they carried a 3.1-inch belt of Krupp nickel steel along with 3.9 inches of protection over their conning towers and engines and about an inch over the deck. Meanwhile, the gun shields on the 4.1″/40s were two inches thick. Damage control was built into the design with 14 watertight compartments and a double-hulled bottom.

Dresden class cruiser diagrams Janes 1914

When it came to engineering, both used 12 coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft marine boilers with Dresden using four Parson’s steam turbines generating 15,000shp while Emden had two reciprocating VTE engines that produced a less powerful 13,500shp. Likewise, Dresden carried more coal bunkerage (860 tons) while Emden could only stow 790 under normal conditions. Speed was virtually the same (23.5 Emden, 24 Dresden) as was cruising range with Emden having a longer (3,760nm) endurance at 12 knots while Dresden could only steam 3,600 but at 14 knots. Äpfel zu Organen.

Meet Dresden

While sister Emden was constructed at KW in Danzig, Dresden was laid down at the same time as Yard No. 195 (Ersatz Comet as she was originally to be named to replace the 19th-century sloop of that name) at Blohm & Voss, Hamburg. Launched on 5 October 1907 with Lord Mayor of Dresden, Otto Beutler, as a sponsor, she was commissioned on 14 November 1908, beating Emden to the fleet by eight months.

Outfitting Dresden class cruiser in Stettin

Meeting some early disaster, while on her shakedown on 28 November, Dresden was involved in a collision with the two-masted Swedish sailing ship Cacilie, sinking the Swede and sending the cruiser back to Hamburg for six months of repair, which was followed by a turbine explosion on follow-up trails.

Dresden at Wilhelmshaven in 1909. Farenholt Collection NH 65782

Finally emerging ready to serve, Dresden set sail under Kapitän zur See Eduard Varrentrapp in a three-ship task force along with the 6,500-ton training cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, bound for New York, where they would join the 3,700-ton Ostamerikanischen station cruiser (stationskreuzer) Bremen. Of note on Bremen during this period was a young ensign, one multilingual Wilhelm Canaris, who at the time was planning to spend his career in torpedo boats.

Peacetime ship of intrigue

The four German ships, Dresden included, arrived in New York in late September 1909 to attend the international naval review as part of the 300th Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. The force, under the command of the white-bearded and well-mustached 65-year-old Grossadmiral Hans von Koester– the first German naval officer to hold the rank– would take in the sites and become one of the more celebrated contingents, with thousands of ethnic Teutons and recent emigres from the region in NYC at the time.

Dresden was extensively photographed in the fortnight she spent on the Hudson.

German cruiser SMS Dresden. Picture taken between 24.September and 9.October 1909 during the Hudson Fulton fleet parade in New York. Note protected cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, other units of the German Squadron, in the background. Bain News Service collection, LOC 04281.

Dresden during Hudson-Fulton. H. C. White Co. image. LC-DIG-stereo-1s43331

Dresden during Hudson Fulton with her glad rags flying. Detroit Publishing postcard. LOC LC-D4-22624

Dresden during Hudson Fulton. Detroit Publishing postcard. LC-D4-39223

Photographed before World War I, probably at New York. NH 43303

Returning to Germany, Dresden suffered another collision, this time with the light cruiser Konigsberg, and spent some time in the training division in the Baltic.

She was beautiful in all respects, as shown off in period postcards.

She was then along with the cruiser Strassburg, dispatched to join the Mittelmeer-division in the Med between April and September 1913 under the command of FKpt Fritz Ludecke, where she kept tabs on the Balkans as the region descended first into war with the Ottomans and then among themselves, giving birth to the new nation of Albania.

SMS Dresden at Swinemunde

In December 1913, with Ludecke swapped out for FKpt Erich Kohler so that Ludecke could take command of the new light cruiser SMS Karlsruhe, Dresden skipped a much-needed overhaul to hold down the Ostamerikanischen station for six months as Bremen returned home after spending nearly 10 years in the Americas. The plan would be that Karlsruhe, her shakedown finished, would arrive in the summer of 1914 to tap Dresden out and take over the station. Joining Dresden for this deployment, fresh off a year in the Baltic on torpedo boat duties, was a now Lt. Canaris, who had proven very capable when on the old Bremen of making and utilizing local contents across Latin America.

Bremen, fresh from evacuating 1,200 European civilians during the Mexican revolution along with the HAPAG steamers Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Bolivia, was relieved on 21 January 1914 and returned home to Germany, via Port-au-Prince, on 13 February, leaving the station in Dresden’s hands.

With Germany backing Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, Dresden got involved with the local affairs at a ground level. Besides continuing to evacuate nearly 2,000 American and European non-combatants to HAPAG liners alongside British and U.S. warships during the occupation of Veracruz, the cruiser sent a detachment of armed sailors to guard the German embassy in Mexico City and helped the HAPAG steamer SS Ypiranga escape U.S. custody in April 1918, the latter filled with 30 train car loads of German-made Mauser rifles and cartridges bound for Huerta in violation of the American weapons embargo on the dictator. The German-flagged steamer SS Bavaria likewise arrived with another load of guns in May.

Canaris’ contacts and agents in the region, cultivated during his time on Bremen, often proved invaluable. The young officer had a reputation as a “fixer.”

Vera Cruz, Mexico, warships off Fort San Juan de Ulua near the time of the U.S. landing in April 1914. The three ships in the foreground from left to right are the German cruiser Dresden, the Mexican gunboat Nicolas Bravo, and the Spanish cruiser Carlos V. The ship behind the bow of Carlos V may be the Mexican Zaragoza as Bravo’s sister Morales was probably in the Pacific at this time. NH 42501

However, no matter how many guns the Germans sent, they arrived too late to help Huerta turn the tide against the Constitutionalists of Carranza, Obregon, and Villa in the north and the Zapatistas in the south. “El Chacal,” with his Federal Army soundly defeated at the Battle of Zacatecas in July 1914, resigned his office. His ride out of the country? Dresden, with Canaris as the general’s interpreter and handler, took him into exile as far as Kingston, Jamaica along with his vice president, Aureliano Blanquet, and their families.

The deposed dictator would later work with German naval spymaster Kapt. Franz von Rintelen during WWI on a series of anti-American and anti-Mexican for that matter initiatives until he passed under sketchy circumstances in Fort Bliss, Texas, with Von Rintelen writing after the war that, perhaps, Huerta was poisoned.

This brings us to…

War!

The fresh and brand-new Karlsruhe, finally complete and deployed to American waters on her maiden cruise, rendezvoused with the well-worn and homebound Dresden at Port-au-Prince, Haiti on 26 July 1914. The ships respective skippers changed places with Kohler, who was intimately aware of the current situation in the theatre, cross-decked from Dresden to Karlsruhe to take command of the new cruiser while Ludecke, who handled the vessel’s commissioning and shakedown, took up residence in his old cabin on Dresden for what he expected to be a ride back home. Likewise, Dresden transferred ordnance, spare parts, and even part of her small arms locker to Karlsruhe as the latter would need them more.

About that.

With the two cruisers departing Haiti on the evening of 26 July, they intercepted a radio message stating that diplomatic relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had been broken off and war in Europe was imminent. Karlsruhe made for Havana to top off her provisions and coal bunkers, then, instead of roaming West into the Caribbean, sortied East towards the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Ludecke in Dresden, heading back to Germany with not enough coal to make it there without stopping to refill her bunkers, was ordered to turn around and engage in independent cruiser warfare (Handelskrieg: commerce raiding) in the event of war– a suicide mission for a ship in Dresden’s condition some 4,800 miles away from home and in waters teaming with British warships.

Topping off at St. Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands on 31 July, Dresden made ready for war and sailed south in radio silence.

By 3 August war was at hand and Dresden turned wolf. Pairing up with the HAPAG steamer Corrientes out of Pernambuco which was placed at her disposal, the cruiser began stopping passing merchant ships off the coast of Brazil to inspect their papers. Encountering four British vessels, she let two go (SS Drumcliffe and SS Hostilius) on parole after deeming their cargo to be neutral and sank two whose cargo was considered contraband: SS Hyades (3,352 tons) on 14 August and SS Holmwood (4,223 tons) on 26 August.

A fictional depiction of SMS Dresden firing at Mauretania. Zeichnung von Paul Teschinsky, August 1914. Illustrierte Zeitung, 1915

Headed further into the South Atlantic, Dresden was joined by the HAPAG steamers Prussia, Baden, Persia, and Santa Isabel. The Admiralty then dispatched orders for her to proceed into the Pacific with her train to link up with the Bremen-class light cruiser SMS Leipzig which, after an eight-year tour in Chinese waters as part of VADM Maximilian von Spee’s East Asian Squadron (Ostasiengeschwaders zusammentreffen), had been dispatched to relieve the light cruiser SMS Nürnberg on the west coast of Mexico, where the latter had been protecting German residents during the revolution. Picking up coal and provisions at San Francisco in August just after the outbreak of the war, Leipzig melted into the Southeast Pacific, lurking between Baja and the Galapagos Islands, where she, like Dresden, soon picked up a train of coal-carrying German steamers (Anubis, Abyssinia, Amasis, and Karnak of the DDG Kosmos line).

After a stopover to effect repairs before rounding Cape Horn, Dresden transitioned to the Pacific.

Panic ripped through the Western seaboard of Canada as Dresden and Leipzig were believed in the area (they never got within 1,000 miles), with the Canadian government rushing the newly-formed Cobourg Heavy Battery from Quebec and its two new 60-pounder 5-inch BL guns for a transcontinental rail trip to establish an emergency coastal battery (at Point Grey– now the University of British Columbia) to protect Vancouver. Likewise, the Condor-class sloop HMCS Shearwater landed two QF 4-inch naval guns for positioning in Stanley Park, named for Lord Frederick Stanley, Governor General of Canada in 1888. The RCN’s largest warship, the old Apollo-class protected cruiser HMCS Rainbow, missed Leipzig by only a day at San Francisco in mid-August.

Following an invitation from the British Ambassador in Tokyo, the 9,500-ton Japanese armored cruiser Izumo was dispatched to Esquimalt as reinforcement. The Japanese cruiser Asama, battlecruisers Kurama and Tsukuba, and the patchwork battlewagon Hizen (former Russian Retvizan) later joined her in what the IJN referred to as the American Expeditionary Force (Amerika ensei-gun) under RADM Keizaburo Moriyama. A separate Japanese task force built around the battleship Satsuma and cruisers Hirado and Yahagi sailed as the Special Southern Expeditionary Force (Tokubetsu nanken shitai) to search the Philippines, Palau Islands, and East Indies area and after Coronel moved towards the South-Central Pacific with the battlecruiser Ibuki. Had Spee crashed into either of these forces, it would have no doubt been one of the most interesting naval clashes in history.

Linking up with Leipzig off the west coast of Chile on 3 October, the two cruisers and their train of makeshift supply tenders on 12 October joined Von Spee’s primary force– the big, armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the light cruiser Nürnberg— at Easter Island. The admiral’s squadron had been on the run from their homeport at Japanese-besieged Tsingtao since August and had stopped along the way to plaster French Tahiti (wasting 80 irreplaceable shells to level Papeete) and sweep the Marquesas Islands on the ever-present search for coal.

Besides her guns, Dresden’s very handy fixer, Canaris, was able to provide the admiral with intel, garnered via his carefully cultivated contacts around the continent. He was one of the first to pass the reports of a British cruiser force approaching from the Horn.

From 26–28 October the squadron coaled in Cumberland Bay of the volcanic and sparsely populated Isla Más a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe Island)– it’s as remote as it sounds, situated some 350 west of Chile– and made ready. There, the auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which had been raiding in Australian waters with little luck, arrived and took over reasonability for the collier train.

By 1 November, Von Spee’s force would mix it up in the lopsided sea battle of Coronel against British RADM Craddock’s 4th Cruiser Squadron. While recounting the whole engagement is beyond the scope of this blog post, suffice it to say that Dresden, unscathed, accounted well for herself, landing a reported five hits on the Town-class light cruiser HMS Glasgow and one on the armed merchant cruiser Otranto. However, she expended 102 shells she could not recover from magazines that were already depleted.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, on the evening of 4 November in deep water east of Trinidad, Karlsruhe mysteriously met her end at the hands of an explosion that has yet to be explained. She sank in just 27 minutes, taking two-thirds of her crew to the bottom with her. Until then, she had a successful raiding career, taking 17 prizes.

The same week, in the Indian Ocean, on 9 November, Dresden’s sister, SMS Emden, was defeated in a battle with the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney near the Cocos Islands, having collected 23 prizes. The number of German cruisers on the high seas was shrinking rapidly.

Back in the Pacific, Von Spee’s squadron sailed triumphantly into Valparaiso to coal and replenish, unafraid of the Royal Navy for a change.

German Vice Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee’s cruiser squadron, leaving Valparaiso, Chile, on November 3, 1914, following the Battle of Coronel. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph NH 59638

Dresden in Valparaiso, Chile, November 1914. Blickrichtung Backbord Richtung Bug

Dresden in Valparaiso, Chile, November, 1914

After replenishing at Valparaiso with the rest of the victorious squadron, Dresden was released to patrol the area and sank the British steamer North Wales (3,691 tons) on 16 November.

Crossing back into the Pacific, Von Spee anchored his force at remote Picton Island on 6 December and called a council of his skippers. Leaving Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the collier train hidden along the south coast of Argentina, he wanted to take his cruisers and raid the British coaling station at Port Stanley in the Falklands. His captains for the most part disagreed with only Capt. Schonberg of the Nürnberg sided with Von Spee and urged to break up the squadron to proceed on independent raiding sorties ending in either internment or a trip back home. The loss of Emden was sobering.

Von Spee, being the boss, went his way and on 8 December crashed headlong into British VADM Doveton Sturdee’s waiting force of two hulking battlecruisers (HMS Invincible and Inflexible along with the cruisers HMS Cornwall, Kent, Carnarvon, Glasgow, and Bristol; and the old battlewagon HMS Canopus.

It was over by late afternoon, with Strudee’s flotilla of bruisers chasing down Von Spee’s smaller cruisers and pounding them one by one beneath the sub-polar waves of the South Atlantic.

A German light cruiser in action, Dresden’s profile, probably at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914, by William Lionel Wyllie, RMG PV3152

The Splashes of Canopus’s Guns- Scharnhorst and Dresden at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914, about 13.30, William Lionel Wyllie, RMG PV1022

light cruiser Dresden at the Battle of the Falklands painting by Alexander Kircher

Of Von Spee’s cruisers off the Falklands that day, only the turbine-powered Dresden, with Ludecke pushing his stokers and boilers to the point of breaking– somehow hitting a record 26 knots on cranky engines– managed to gain a few miles on her pursuers and, with darkness falling, slip into the nameless fjords and inlets of Tierra del Fuego

Von Spee and four of his cruisers found themselves in the embrace of Poseidon that day along with 2,200 German sailors– including both of the admiral’s sons.

Sinking of the Scharnhorst painted by Admiral Thomas Jacques Somerscales currently on display at the Royal Museums Greenwich

Endgame

For a time, the world thought Dresden was dead, lost with the rest of Von Spee’s squadron.

However, she was still very much alive. She had suffered no damage in the clash. With the help of one of Canaris’ contacts, the German-Chilean mariner and harbor pilot Albert Pagels, Dresden was able to hide in the Punta Arena region, with Pagels guiding the cruiser into scarcely charted Quintupeu Fjord for safekeeping.

“SMS Dresden of the shores of Chile, 1914”

Eventually, the word got out and the British, along with the rest of the world that could do basic cruiser math, knew Dresden was still at large, a fleet in being if nothing else. Canaris provided constant reports on British fleet movements, and she was able to relocate a few times during this period, keeping one step ahead of the Royal Navy.

On 18 January 1915, Dresden was able to take on 1,600 tons of coal– twice her normal load– from the NDL freighter Sierra Cordoba. Ludecke nursed a plan to strike out across the remote Southern Pacific, skirting Antarctica until rising north to raid the Solomon Islands and, coaling at the Dutch East Indies, head into the Indian Ocean.

On 27 February, she sank the British barque Conway Castle (1,694 tons), her last prize, bringing her total to 12,927 tons of Allied merchant shipping.

German surface raiders– both actual cruisers and hilfkreuzers– captured or sunk an amazing 623,406 tons of Allied shipping in the Great War.

Nearly bumping into the cruiser HMS Kent at 11,000 yards on 8 March, Dresden lit all boilers and cranked almost 25 knots against Kent’s 22 to keep over the horizon successfully. However, this five-hour chase drained her bunkers dry– down to her last 80 tons– and a promised replenishment shipment on the NDL steamer Gotha, coming out of Montevideo with 3,000 tons of coal and spare parts for Dresden’s turbines, was likely not coming. It was clear the time came to end the race.

Ludecke ordered his ship to the closest neutral port, Robinson Crusoe Island, and made ready to intern Dresden under the safety of Chilean supervision, anchoring 500 yards offshore. Informing the Admiralty by coded wireless message of his status, he received “Seine Majestät der Kaiser stellt Ihnen frei, aufzulegen” (“His Majesty the Emperor gives you the freedom to hang up”) in reply.

Last Cruise of Dresden, via Canaris, by Heinz Hohne

On 9 March, Ludecke reported to the local governor at Robinson Crusoe of his intentions, who simply shrugged– he had no police or soldiers to take the cruiser into custody on an island with 45 inhabitants– and said he would send a letter by sail coaster to the mainland for orders how to proceed. In the meantime, Ludecke ordered Dresden’s guns elevated and pointed harmlessly at the island’s dormant volcano, with her steam punt tied to her stern ready to pull her around to face an incoming threat in extremis. With coal so low, shore parties were landed to retrieve wood to burn in the boilers for heat and auxiliary power.

While the Chilean navy three days later dispatched the protected cruisers Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno to accept Dresden’s passage into internment, it was the British who found her first.

On the foggy morning of 14 March 1915, with many of the German cruiser’s complement ashore, a squadron made up of the cruisers HMS Kent and Glasgow along with the auxiliary cruiser Orama, appeared on the horizon– bird-dogged there by a decrypted wireless signal. Any question of the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The three British man-o-wars carried a total of 34 6- and 4-inch guns against Dresden’s 10. Nonetheless, as her pinnacle turned Dresden’s scarcely manned battery seaward, her fate was sealed.

SMS Dresden at Juan Fernandez Island, 14 March 1915. The white flag of surrender is flying from the foremast. IWM Q 46021

Capt. John Luce, Glasgow’s skipper, opened fire on Dresden at 3,000 yards despite the fact both ships were inside Chilean territorial waters. He had orders to destroy the German and, having faced off with her unsuccessfully at Coronel and the Falklands, took them seriously. Four minutes into the battle, with Dresden firing all of three rounds, she raised the white flag and struck her colors. Canaris motored out in the pinnacle for parley while Ludecke ordered her scuttled via a mix of open sea valves and torpedo warheads in her magazine.

Within a half hour of Glasgow’s first shot, Dresden capsized to port at 1115 and sank in 230 feet of water. Seven members of her crew were killed, three outright and four from wounds. Another 14 were seriously injured. The British suffered no casualties.

German cruiser Dresden surrendered and on fire after engagement with Royal Navy cruisers at the Battle of Mas a Teierra, March 14, 1915. Library of Congress Lot 9609-20

Sinking off the coast of Chile, 1915. NH 528

Sinking of Dresden, British postcard

Epilogue

Strongly worded notes of protest flew between London, Santiago, and Berlin over the sinking and violation of neutrality.

Most of Dresden’s crew survived the ship’s final battle.

As they were on Chilean territory, they were not picked up by the British as PWs and instead were, awkwardly, interned. After waiting five days on Robinson Caruso Island as guests of the local governor, existing on a cargo of 1,000 lobsters, they were picked up by the tardy Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno then were deposited on Quinquirina Island, adjacent to Coronel.

The crew from German cruiser Dresden Aboard Chilean Cruiser Esmeralda, German war newspaper, May 1915

Settling into an easy life, funded by the German embassy in Santiago, the men kept chickens and cows, and tended neat gardens. The city of Dresden took up a public subscription for gifts sent to the crew for the Christmas of 1915. Two men died while in exile, one in 1916, and the other in 1917.

Allowed flexible leave periods, many men simply released themselves from their gilded cage, aided by the German naval attaché, KKpt August Moller. Kplts Kurt Nieden and Friedrich Burchardi, along with ObltzS Kurt Hartwig were among the first to leave, the latter arriving in Germany just three months after Dresden’s sinking and, switching to submarine duty, earned a Blue Max as the skipper of SM U-32, sending 44 enemy ships to the bottom including the battleship HMS Cornwallis.

Canaris followed suit. Traveling under a Chilean passport arranged by Moller, “Senior Reed Rosas” arrived in Europe on a Dutch steamer in October 1915, including a stopover at Plymouth. Within a few months, Canaris would be reassigned from the surface fleet to Directorate N, naval intelligence, and, still traveling as Rosas, would proceed to Spain to set up a spy network before joining the U-boat arm himself.

Canaris was a good surface sailor and a better submariner but proved most suited to the role of spymaster, running the Abwehr from 1935-45. Turning against his boss in the end, he perished just before the war was over at the hands of his own countrymen.

Another officer, Lt. Lothar Witzke, his leg broken in the sinking of Dresden, escaped Chilean confinement in early 1916 and, proceeding to California, joined German intelligence and was named as part of the munitions explosions at Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in 1916 and Mare Island in 1917. Subsequently arrested by U.S Army counterintelligence, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not conducted due to the Armistice, and ordered released by President Coolidge in 1923. He was welcomed with an Iron Cross when he returned home. He later, without a shock here, worked for the Abwehr.

The largest group of Dresden sailors to leave Chile, six officers and 45 men led by Lt. Karl Richarz, escaped an old three-master barque, Tinto (137 feet, launched in 1852). They arrived some four months and 12,000 miles later in Germany via Iceland and Norway. This feat was accomplished despite inadequate charts and condemned sails, with a stop (and release) by the British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur as a cherry on top. One of the officers aboard, a young ensign Friedrich Wilhelm Fleischer, would go on to become a vice admiral during WWII only to end that war in a British PW camp. Jack Higgins would borrow the story for the basis of “Storm Warning” albeit changing the date to 1944.

As for Ludecke, Dresden’s final skipper, he remained in exile, reportedly untethered after the loss of his proud ship. He did not return to Germany until the end of 1919. Retained by the Reichsmarine briefly until March 1920, he was the operations officer for the fleet’s sole remaining cruiser squadron’ until he retired at the rank of rear admiral. He passed in 1931, aged 58, having only written briefly of his wartime experience, a chapter in a forgotten 1920s German text.

Ludecke served 30 years in the German Navy. He is seen to the left of Von Spee during the council of the admiral’s skippers at Picton Island on 6 December 1914.

Of Dresden’s other skippers, her Hudson-Fulton commander, Varrentrapp, went on to command the battleships SMS Schleswig Holstein and Konig Albert during WWI, ending the conflict as a rear admiral in charge of the defenses of Wilhelmshaven. He was discharged in 1919 and passed in 1928, aged 60. Erich Köhler, who Lüdecke relieved in July 1914, perished at age 41 aboard Karlsruhe when the ship went down.

One other Dresden crewmember deserves mention. Immediately after the sinking. A rating on Glasgow noticed a pig swimming in the water and succeeded in rescuing him. The crew named said swine “Able Seapig Tirpitz” and he served as their mascot for a year before being transferred for shoreside duty at the Whale Island Gunnery School at Portsmouth.

Late in the war, he was auctioned off for charity but his “trotters” were turned into a carving set delivered to Glasgow while the head was mounted.

Both relics made their way to the Imperial War Museum, where the head is now on display, as Catalog No. EPH 9032 in the First World War Galleries. IWM Q 47559 IWM (Q 20554)

It seemed that almost all of the German cruisers that Dresden sailed with died in battle, the ship something of an albatross for the Kaiserliche Marine.

Besides Karlsruhe, Dresden’s own sister Emden, and the other four cruisers of Von Spee’s squadron, Konigsberg, who she literally bumped into in 1910, would scuttle up the Rufiji River in Africa in July 1915, her crew eventually captured by the British in 1917. Likewise, the old Bremen was sunk in the Baltic by a mine in December 1915. Strassburg, who she patrolled the Balkans with back in 1913, would be sunk at least twice in WWII.

The Japanese only disbanded the Amerika ensei-gun patrol force in May 1915, after Asama was recovered from being grounded off Baja in shallow water. The secondary Tokubetsu nanken shitai had been ordered back to Japan in January 1915 following Von Spee’s death off the Falklands. It was the beginning of the Combined Fleet’s experimentation with squadron operations outside of home waters. It would not be the last.

As for Dresden herself, as Robinson Crusoe gets little traffic, her hull is still there, as are 6-inch shells from Glasgow— the latter embedded in the cliffs behind her final anchorage. Dresden was illegally salvaged several times, likely by “treasure” hunters. Legal expeditions in 1965 and 2006 recovered numerous relics including her binnacle, flags, and her 340-pound ship’s bell. After display in Chile, the latter was sent “home” to a place of honor at the Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr (MHM) in Dresden, unveiled in 2008 on the ship’s 100th birthday.

Schiffsglocke des Kleinen Kreuzers SMS Dresden, Leihgabe der Republik Chile, Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden, via Wiki commons

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

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That’s going to buff out…

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80 years ago, the “long hulled” Essex-class fleet carrier USS Randolph (CV-15) is seen with damage to her aft flight deck as the result of a Japanese Yokosuka P1Y Ginga “Frances” kamikaze attack crashing into her at Ulithi Atoll, 11 March 1945, as photographed from a USS Miami (CL-89) floatplane. The vessel alongside is the “heavy-hulled” Vulcan class repair ship USS Jason (ARH-1), a remarkable class of vessel that kept the fleet in action.

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-344531

USS Randolph (CV 15), damage to her after flight deck resulting from a kamikaze hit on 11 March 1945. Note, the burned aircraft. 80-G-274104

If you are curious how big that hole is, it measured 56 feet fore and aft and 58 feet athwartships.

From her 66-page report on the attack and damage, which beyond the structural damage, left 26 killed, 3 missing, and 105 wounded:

Incredibly, between the efforts of Jason’s and Randolph’s crew, the carrier was ready to resume combat operations just 16 days later and on 26 March became the flagship of CarDivFour and by 8 April was sending up combat air patrols from CVG-12 over Tokuna and Kikai Islands off Okinawa, where she would remain well into May before heading to plaster the Japanese Home Islands with CVG-16 for the rest of the war.

USS Randolph (CV-15), a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat fighter of VF-12 parked on the port catapult, March 1945. Note the plane’s tail markings, unique to this ship. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-K-5339

Randolph earned three battle stars for World War II service and, after reclassifying as CVA-15 (1952), was given first a SCB-27A and then a SCB-125 modernization, then reclassified again as CVS-15 (1959), she served well into the Cold War, recovering Astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Glenn in 1962.

She was inactivated in 1969 to help pay for operations in Vietnam, stricken in 1973, and subsequently scrapped just after the fall of Saigon.

Hr.Ms. K XI, found

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Dutch Onderzeeboot Hr.Ms. K XI at Satonda, Nederlands-Indië, March 1931. She was the class leader of a trio of 218-foot 800-ton “colonial” submarines of the Royal Netherlands Navy, so-called as they were based out of Soerabaja on Java. (NIMH 2158_007091)

Western Australia-based non-profit WreckSploration reports having recently discovered the final resting place of the WWII-era Dutch submarine Hr.Ms K XI (N 53) off the coast of Rottnest Island.
Launched in April 1924, HNLMS K XI served in the Dutch East Indies during WWII, patrolling the waters of what is now Indonesia from its base in Surabaya.
In 1942, the submarine played a heroic role, rescuing 18 survivors of the lost sloop HMAS Yarra (U77), the British depot ship HMS Anking, and the KPM steamer Parigi after they were sunk by an overwhelming Japanese force.
In all, she completed seven war patrols in the Pacific and, perhaps more importantly, spent months working out of Bombay and Colombo as a “tame submarine” for Allied ASW forces to hone their skill on.
After being decommissioned in Fremantle in 1945, K XI was scuttled in 1946, its final resting place lost to time – until now.

Warship Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025: Scary Freddy

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025: Scary Freddy

U.S. Army Signal Corps image 111-SC-41480-ac by Enrique Muller, National Archives Identifier 55242086.

Above we see the 16,000-ton Norddeutscher Lloyd liner SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich, in her 1918 dazzle camouflage warpaint as USS DeKalb (ID-3010), steaming with a bone in her teeth with what appears to be the New York City skyline behind her. At this time in her career, she carried a decent armament worthy of a cruiser.

Just three years earlier, she actually was a German (Hilfs) cruiser and had just claimed the first American ship lost during the Great War.

Meet the Prinz

Our subject is the second liner named for Prince Wilhelm Eitel Friedrich Christian Karl of Prussia, the second son of Emperor Wilhelm II, a generally unhappy and unsuccessful man whose career is beyond the scope of this post.

Of note, HAPAG had already named a smaller (4650 GRT) single-funnel steamer after him in 1902.

Ours was much more grand.

Ordered in 1901 from the fine Teutonic shipbuilding firm of Aktien-Gesellschaft Vulcan, Stettin, the NDL-owned and operated Reich postal steamer (Reichspostdampfer) Prinz Eitel Friedrich was completed in September 1904. She was constructed alongside the Deutschland-class battleship SMS Pommern and Bremen-class cruisers SMS Hamburg and SMS Lübeck.

A larger version of the preceding Feldherren class of liners– eleven 469-foot/9,000 GRT ships built between 1903 and 1908 for NDL, each with 107 1st class, 103 2nd class, 130 3rd class, and 2,040 steerage spaces– our Freddy had space for 158 1st, 156 2nd, 48 3rd, and 706 steerage in a hull some 35 feet longer and an engineering suite with about 1,500 extra shp.

Capable of maintaining a steady 15 knots on a pair of quadruple-expansion steam engines generating 7,500 shp, Eitel Friedrich’s route was to be from Germany to Shanghai and the recently-acquired Imperial treaty port of Tsingtao, hence the focus on more luxurious cabins rather than steerage passengers.

Likewise, Eitel Friedrich was slower and smaller than the 660-foot NDL express steamers SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Kronprinz Wilhelm, which were capable of making 23 knots on a 33,000shp plant and carried no steerage accommodations at all, offering cabins to just 1,761 passengers in the 1st-3rd classes.

Nonetheless, Eitel Friedrich was finely appointed.

But she also was bred to fight.

Following the government subsidy provided by the Imperial Postal Steamer agreement (Reichspostdampfervertrages), the Reich could use these steamers in the event of mobilization, and ships built for the service had to pass a Kaiserliche Marine inspection, to include weight and space for deck guns and magazines.

Eitel Friedrich could accommodate as many as 10 deck guns of up to 17 cm/40 (6.75-inch) in size.

The agreement further stipulated that the ships’ officers and deck and engine crews had to either be Imperial Navy reservists or had signed contracts to volunteer for the service in the event of mobilization.

The SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich left on her maiden voyage to Tsingtao on 13 October 1904 and would continue this peaceful trade for a decade.

It was the stuff of postcards.

War!

When the lamps went out across Europe in August 1914, the Germans had several potential auxiliary cruisers at sea including Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Cap Trafalgar, and our Freddie.

It didn’t go well for most.

The 18,000-ton, 613-foot-long Cap Trafalgar was disguised to look like a similar British Cunard line passenger liner called the 19,524-ton, 650-foot-long RMS Carmania-– then had the bad luck to meet the likewise armed actual Carmania and was promptly sunk in a 90-minute gun fight off the coast of Brazil just six weeks into the war.

The rakish four-funneled Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse had an even shorter career, sent to the bottom by the old British cruiser HMS Highflyer while being resupplied at Rio de Oro in late August 1914.

Other potential raiders were bagged by the Royal Navy early in the war before they could be armed including Tabora, Zieten, Kleist, Derfflinger, and Sudmark in the Med and Red Seas; while Princess Alice was interned in the Philippines.

Lucky enough to be at German-held Tsingtao in early August 1914 was our Freddie, along with the steamer Yorck. Realizing that the gig was shortly to be up for the colony as Japan moved to enter the war, German East Asian Squadron commander VADM von Spee made an effort to grab his five cruisers and leave that doomed port.

With that, the decision was made to convert Freddie as best possible for service as a commerce raider.

She received four 10.5 cm/40 (4.1″) SK L/40 rapid-fire guns and 12 revolving 37mm Hotckiss from the Iltis-class gunboats (kanonenboot) SMS Tiger and Luchs, which were to be scuttled and left behind at Tsingtao. She would also take aboard six 88mm L/40 guns that could be used to equip other raiders.

Just 213 feet overall, the 750-ton Iltis-class gunboats, such as SMS Luchs and Tiger, above, were constructed at the turn of the century largely for overseas colonial service and were both slow and lightly armed, with two SK 10.5 cm L/40s and six revolving 37mm Hotchkiss guns each. The bulk of these gunboats’ crews and guns were rushed aboard Prinz Eitel Friedrich.

A view of her just after conversion, with her starboard side still carrying much of her prewar livery. Note the 4-inch gun on her bow under a tarp. LC-DIG-hec-03478

She also fleshed out her 222-member crew with men from the two gunboats as well as their sister SMS Jaguar and the station ship SMS Titania until she had a total of 34 officers, and 368 ratings under 40-year-old Berlin-born Korvettenkapitän Max Friedrich Euard Thierichens, late of the Luchs. Only 54 of the retained crew were reservists or new volunteers, and many of the NDL mariners were released– often to fill slots on German steamers in the port and at Shanghai. The previous captain of the Prinz Eitel in her life as a liner, NDL Capt. Karl Mundt, remained on board as the navigation and executive officer.

In command of the Imperial German Navy Raider Prinz Eitel Friederich Left to right: Captain Karl Mundt, XO; Korvettenkapitän Max Therichens, skipper, and LT Brunner, aide to Captain Thierichens. Thierichens, who joined the German Navy in 1893, was a regular with over 20 years of service under his belt although his largest command had only been a 700-ton gunboat.

A breakdown of Eitel Friedrich’s wartime officers via a Tsingtao history site shows that just 15 officers out of 34 came from the liner’s commercial crew, with the rest coming from Tiger (8), Luchs (9), and Titania (2):

Ready for war, she slipped out of Tsingtao on 6 August, just after Von Spee left with his cruiser force and, meeting up with the cruiser SMS Emden and her tender SS Markomannia, arrived at Pagan Island in the Marianas on the 12th where she would remain with a growing set of colliers until the 30th.

Setting out for Majuro in the Marshall Islands via Eniwetok to drop off Von Spee’s collier train (eight ships including the steamers Seydlitz, Baden, Santa Maria, and Santa Isabel) she then joined up with the hilfkruezer Cormoran (manned by the crew of the old SMS Cormoran about the captured 3,400-ton Russian freighter SS Ryazan) for two weeks to raid Australian waters with the object, so the crews were told, of misleading the British Admirals and facilitating Von Spee’s main squadron’s escape to South American waters.

Without much luck, the two vessels parted on 15 September, with Eitel Friedrich headed for the west coast of the Americas, and Cormoran for the Western Carolines, with Cormoran eventually putting into Guam for internment after her bunkers ran out.

Freddie crossed the Southern Pacific on an uneventful patrol for the next five weeks, not taking any prizes.

Eventually, she rejoined Von Spee’s squadron at Mas a Tierra by the end of October as a collier escort, and, chasing contacts off Chile, she ran the British steamer SS Colusa, so close into Valparaiso that a Chilean gunboat had to come out to intervene.

Serving as an over-the-horizon escort to Von Spee’s collier train, she adjacent to the Battle of Coronel in November.

With Von Spee electing to take the fight to the Atlantic, he left Freddie behind once again on 29 November, with the auxiliary cruiser sent out to hunt alone. As Von Spee sailed to his death and his squadron’s defeat at the Falklands, Eitel Friedrich set off up the Chilean coast and captured the British steamer SS Charcas (5067 GRT) off the coast of Corral on 5 December, landing her crew at Papudo.

On 11 December, she captured the French barque Jean (2207 GRT) with 3,500 tons of badly needed coal, steaming with her as a prize to Easter Island. On the way, she sank the British barque Kidalton (1784 GRT) the next day.

Unloading Jean and sinking her near Easter Island on the 23rd, while at the same time sending a landing party ashore to slaughter a herd of oxen for meat, Freddie left the captured French and British crews voluntarily behind and made for the Atlantic on New Year’s Eve via Cape Horn.

Once in the South Atlantic, she found more victims.

On 26 January 1915 she captured the Russian barque Isabela Browne (1315 BRT) with a cargo of saltpeter the spotted a pair of windjammers that she trailed overnight until she could try for the capture. Once stopped, the two clippers, French barque Pierre Loti (2196 BRT) and the American-flagged four-masted steel barque William P. Frye (3605 BRT) turned out to be carrying wheat to Britain.

William P. Frye

While Frye was flying the flag of what was then a neutral country, her Plymouth-bound grain was seen as contraband, and Thierichens, sinking the Pierre Boti, ordered Frye’s crew to toss her 186,950 bushels of wheat over the side before allowing them to continue. Still finding the American ship partially laden the next morning, he removed the ship’s crew and passengers and scuttled the ship on January 28, 1915.

Frye was the first American ship lost in the Great War and the loss kicked off a series of increasingly salty diplomatic notes between Washington and Berlin that never helped put weight on the scale of neutrality.

Newspaper coverage helped sway public opinion in the States.

Three ships were sunk by Imperial German Naval raider SMS Prinz Eitel: French Friedrich Jacobsen (Top) – British Mary Ada Scott (Middle) – American William P Frye (Bottom).

Chasing down further Allied merchantmen in the remoteness of the South Atlantic, Thierichens kept stacking captured crews in the converted liner’s old passenger cabins– sorting by class, with officers and passengers getting 1st class cabins, while mates got 2nd, crews 3rd. 

She bagged the Europe-bound French barque Jacobsen (2195 BRT) on 28 January and the British barque Invercoe (1421 BRT) on 12 February– 80 years ago this week, both sunk with their grain cargos.

Over three days from 18 to 20 February, she took three additional ships out of trade: the British steamer SS Mary Ada Short (3605 BRT) with a cargo of corn, the French steamer SS Floride (6629 BRT) with 86 passengers and a cargo of mail, and the British steamer SS Willerby (3630 BRT), the latter sailing in ballast to La Plata. The skipper of the Willerby, one Capt. Wedgewood, having no guns to fight back, attempted to use his steamer as a ram, ordering “full speed astern” as the German closed.

With this, the game was done.

Low on food, low on coal, and high on mouths to feed between his 403 crew and more than 350 “guests,” Thierichens made for Hampton Roads where he sought sanctuary on humanitarian grounds.

The Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friederich was placed under the eyes of the U.S. Navy at Newport News on 11 March, near but not alongside the interned German tanker Jupiter. She reportedly exchanged salutes with the fleet, whose “bands played the German national anthem.”

Even though she had captured and sunk 11 ships across her 218-day/30,000-nm war cruise, she had never fired a “war shot” round in anger, lost a member of her crew, nor taken a life. She arrived in the U.S. with every soul she had found on the sea.

The gentlemanly early days of WWI indeed.

German Ambassador Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff negotiated for Eitel Friederich to land her Allied prisoners– including over 30 Americans– while provisions and enough coal (1,000 tons) were sold to the embassy allowing the possibility that Freddie could somehow sail the Atlantic to Bremen. This was as French, Russian, and British diplomats bombarded Washington with calls to arrest or expel the pirate ship into their waiting arms.

The ship, her discharged 350 guests, her grinning skipper, and her crew were the subject of much media attention.

Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friedrich riding high with nearly empty bunkers and no stores left, at Newport News, March 1915. Note she has been partially repainted. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-DIG-hec-05587

Her stern, note the quickly applied paint to her white areas and her name has been painted over. Also, note the two bow guns. 165-WW-272C-33

Survivors of crews and passengers of ships captured by Eitel Friedrich, March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LOC LC-H261- 5002-B

Survivors being offloaded onto the waiting Chesapeake and Ohio RR lines tug Alice. March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LOC LC-DIG-hec-06346

Smiling gangway guards to Eitel Friedrich, snapped by a Harris & Ewing, photographer. March 1915. Note the curious women and children on the promenade deck. LC-DIG-hec-05593

Crew of Eitel Friedrich, March 1915. These guys were just happy not to be at the bottom of the ocean or in an English or Japanese prison camp. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-DIG-hec-05584

Crew of Eitel Friedrich, March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-H261- 5000-B

Mascots are being shown off by the crew of Eitel Freidrich while a rating plays the harmonica, in March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-DIG-hec-05589

With the cruiser watched by the battleship USS Alabama and the big 12-inch guns at Fort Monroe, a detachment sent from the Fort set up camp at the end of her dock, watched by a sandbagged machine gun emplacement.

The stalemate endured for nearly a month as deadlines were set, and then passed. The cruisers HMS Cumberland and HMCS Niobe were just outside American waters at the tip of the Virginia Capes. While old, each was an easy overmatch for Eitel Freidrich.

Painted into a corner, Thierichens agreed in writing to pass his ship peacefully into internment at Norfolk at 3:00 p.m., on 9 April 1915.

The next day, she was joined by her old NDL fleet member Kronprinz Wilhelm, who had amazingly been armed at sea with two 3.4-inch guns and 50 rifles hoisted on board the liner, from the old cruiser SMS Karlsruhe. With the scant armament and sailing under Karlsruhe’s skipper, Kvtlnt Wolfgang Thierfelder, Kronprinz Wilhelm chalked up 14 prizes– some 58,201 tons of British, French, and Norwegian shipping— in the North Atlantic.

Officers and crew of German cruiser Kronprinz Wilhelm. This boat arrived at Newport News, on April 11, 1915. 165-WW-274A-7

The two would spend the next two years side by side, in the weird limbo of never really being fully in, nor fully out of, the war. Neither free to leave nor directly under custody.

Of the nearly 20 German commerce raiders made from converted steamers and windjammers (see Seeadler), Eitel Fredrich was in the “top scorers” club, only surpassed by her aforementioned cousin Kronprinz Wilhelm and the much more famous late-war hilfskreuzers SMS Wolf (14 captured/sunk directly plus another 14 enemy ships claimed by her mines), Seeadler (15), and Mowe (40 ships).

German surface raiders– both actual cruisers and hilfkreuzers– captured or sunk an amazing 623,406 tons of Allied shipping in the Great War.

Interned

Eitel Friederich’s propelling machinery, radio, and armament were immobilized with components removed to shore.

With provisions paid for by the German embassy, her crew was to live aboard, with a party of as many as 50 of her sailors allowed shore liberties at a time while officers could freely travel to nearby cities.

With such liberal parole, naturally, several of Freddie’s crew released themselves under their own recognizance. Her third surgeon, Dr. Richard A. Nolte, who was the ship’s doctor when she was a liner back in 1914, vanished after buying “civilian clothing and a big trunk” in June 1915. Other men just wandered off with less fanfare.

The crew was further reduced in size, as she suffered her first loss of the war, one Seaman Prei, killed on 8 April 1915 when he fell down a companionway. Another sailor, one W.S. Wisneweki, was jailed in Norfolk in July 1915 for assorted “rowdyism” while ashore and, receiving a year sentence from the local magistrate, was drummed out of the crew and surrendered to the authorities for punishment.

Meanwhile, a two-acre overgrown plot, cleared for port expansion years prior but never used for that purpose, was turned over to the care of her crew, which included several men from farming families. Soon, it was filled with cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, beets and turnips.

Those handy enough to craft toys and curios did so and soon a market was open. With no shortage of cabins, the crew spread out and made themselves at home, and could entertain visitors. Some of the sailors married local American girls and later became citizens themselves.

With paint purchased from the Navy, her crew restored her topside appearance to something approaching her pre-war livery. 

Biergartens were set up aboard– with some of the men having been Braumeisters at Tsingtao— and locals were soon able to avail themselves of a nice stein of authentic German beer for 2 cents, a bargain! That was until controversy hit.

As reported in the June 27 1915 NYT:

At first, these ship beer gardens were open to all. But a local clergyman and an ex-chaplain of the navy, with several friends, one Sunday went aboard one of the ships, enjoyed the hospitality of the Germans, and drank beer. Then the clergyman fired a bombshell at his congregation. It was the story of how the law was being violated each Sunday on the German cruisers by the sale of intoxicants. It was the sensation of a day, but local police officials found themselves helpless, inasmuch as the alleged violations were committed on a Federal reservation and on a foreign warship.

The Navy Department ruled that it had no jurisdiction, further than a request to the German commanders not to permit the indiscriminate sale of intoxicants on Sunday. Such a request was made, and as a result, the sale of beer and other drinks to Americans was discontinued.

Besides homebrew, there was a brisk underground trade in selling uniform items such as caps and medals along with pocketable souvenirs from the elegant ocean liner-turned-pirate to locals. I’m sure there are likely forgotten trinkets from Eitel Friedrich and her crew in dozens of heirloom boxes across Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Why Pennsylvania?

By September 1916 the combined crews of the two commerce raiders had shrunk from slightly over 800 to just 744 officers and men and it was thought that they could be better isolated at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Plus, with the ongoing expansion by the Navy, the space they were taking up at Norfolk was needed for the construction of new maintenance shops.

On, 1 October, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinz Eitel Friedrich arrived at PNSY, towed at 8 knots by a task force of 12 U.S. warships led by the Great White Fleet battlewagons USS Minnesota (BB-22) and Vermont (BB-20) just in case either German raider attempted to make for the open ocean– or a British force aimed to bushwhack them. The force sailed in a tight box that was kept as much inside the three-mile limit as possible. Certainly one of the more curious convoys of 1916.

Original caption: transferring the S. S. Kronprinz Wilhelm from the Norfolk Navy Yard to Philadelphia. This boat was one of several interned German sea raiders similarly transferred from Norfolk to Philadelphia. Photographer: Western Newspaper Union. 165-WW-272C-38

Once at League Island, moored some 150 yards from the foot of Broad Street with the ships’ stern pointed at the city, the German sailors had their movements curtailed, only allowed monitored shore leave twice a week in small groups, with regular daily roll calls taken. Even this was revoked at the end of January 1917, with the men confined to their ships.

A portion of the crew of the Eitel Frederich photographed after the arrival of their vessel at the League Island Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the lattice masts of battleships seen in the distance. Also, note the Asian man with the bowler hat who no doubt has an amazing backstory that has been lost to history. Underwood Press photo. LOC 165-WW-163E-18

On 3 February 1917, still some two months before Congress would vote for War, SECNAV Josephus Daniels, acting on orders from the White House, sent in Navy, Marine, and Coast Guardsmen to remove the crews from the German and Austrian ships interned in American ports.

This included the German-seized British steamship SS Appam in Newport News– impounded by the USCGC Yamacraw with a U.S. Marshal aboard– the massive four-funneled NDL liner SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie in Boston (seized with the help of 120 Boston policemen), two German and three Austrian steamers in New Orleans, and four Hamburg-American Line ships in Cristobal in the Canal Zone (Prinz Sigismund, Fazoia, Sachenwald, and Grunewald). SS Vaterland, the largest German liner, was seized at Hoboken.

Naturally, Eitel Frederich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were also visited.

With the NYTs noting that “The local navy yard virtually has been placed upon a war basis,” the two auxiliary cruisers were seized and their crews moved ashore to barracks which were placed in isolation with a strict “no visitors” policy enforced for the first time since they came to America. A wire stockade, watched by billy club-armed sailors, was built around the barracks. Armed Marines suddenly appeared on patrol of the landside boundary to the Government preserve while “Motorboats and other light craft with machineguns aboard patrolled the river and prevented vessels from entering a prescribed area.”

The scout cruiser USS Salem (CL-3) was moored to where her main guns could rake the vessels if needed. 

German Passenger Liners Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinz Eitel Friedrich (left) Interned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 26 March 1917, shortly before they were seized by the United States. They are still flying the German flag, and German guns are visible on Prinz Eitel Friedrich’s stern. NH 42416

German Passenger Liners Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm (left) Interned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 26 March 1917, shortly before they were seized by the United States. Photographed from onboard USS Salem. NH 42417

Prinz Eitel Friedrich interned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 28 March 1917. Behind her is the liner Kronprinz Wilhelm. NH 54659

On 10 March 1917, Eitel Frederich’s skipper, Max Thierichens, was charged in U.S. federal court along with his wife and a naturalized U.S. citizen, Henry K. Rohner, with various conspiracy charges, primarily that of moving 19 ship’s valuable chronometers from the raider to shore. These charges later beefed up to include violating the Mann Act for “bringing a woman from Ithaca New York to Philadelphia for immoral purposes.” These allegations reported salaciously on both sides of the Atlantic, would follow him to Germany.

In early April, John Sickel, a former Eitel Friedrich sailor who had previously escaped the interned cruiser, was arrested by federal officials, suspected of being involved in an explosion at the Eddystone munitions plant in Chester, Pennsylvania that blew 133 workers “to bits.”

Once the U.S. entered the war on April 6, 1917, U.S. Customs officials seized the Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm on paper, then, in the same motion, swiftly transferred them to the U.S. Navy. A Government tug was sent to pull and noticed a cork float in the water behind the vessels about 50 feet from the stern.

Inspecting divers found mines.

NH 42252 Explosive Torpedoes Found under the interned German ships Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm after they were seized by the United States in April 1917 scuttling charge

Explosive “torpedoes” were found under the interned German ships Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm after they were seized by the United States in April 1917. Photographed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 12 April 1919. These devices, shown here disassembled with components labeled, were placed by the ships’ German crewmembers in anticipation of the seizure, in hopes of disabling the ships and thus rendering them useless to the U.S. NH 42252

Meanwhile, with their status changed from merely “interned” to that of full-on POWs, the crews of Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were moved by the Army under guard by train from their isolation barracks at Philadelphia Naval Yard to newly established POW camps at Forts Oglethorpe and McPherson in Georgia for the next 30 months.

There, they continued their arts and crafts work, helped plant and harvest crops, and fielded some pretty mean baseball teams.

German crews Fort McPherson, Georgia 165-ww-161AA-063 and 57

165-ww-161AA-026 and 28

American Service

Prinz Eitel Friedrich was swiftly refitted for U.S. Navy service as a troop transport at the Philadelphia Navy Yard renamed USS DeKalb— after Maj. Gen. Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb, the Bavarian-born Revolutionary War hero, who was killed in battle in South Carolina in 1780– and commissioned on 12 May 1917. A Civil War-era casemate gunboat had previously carried the name. 

Similarly, Kronprinz Wilhelm became the USS Von Steuben, Vaterland became the USS Leviathan, and Kronprinzessin Cecilie became the USS Mount Vernon.

Immediate modifications were the removal of the German armament and the detritus of their two-year inhabitation, including a mountain of beer barrels and wine bottles.

“Putting off the Dutch junk” Prinz Eitel Friedrich (ex-German Passenger Liner, 1904) Sailors pose with empty beer barrels removed from the ship’s hold, 20 April 1917, soon after she was seized by the United States. NH 54657

Prinz Eitel Friedrich (ex-German Passenger Liner, 1904) Sailors on the pier at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, with items removed from the ship’s hold, 20 April 1917, soon after she was seized by the United States. Empty wine bottles are specifically identified, in the left center. NH 54658

She received a thick coat of haze grey paint, minesweeping paravanes, and a bow skeg to help control them, as well as her most heavy armament yet: eight 5″/51 mounts, four 3″/50 low-angle mounts, two 3″/50 high-angle AA mounts, four 1-pounders, and two machine guns. She also received several tall “bandstand” searchlight platforms.

USS DeKalb (later ID # 3010) moored at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 11 June 1917, the day before she sailed to transport U.S. troops to the European war zone. NH 54654

USS DeKalb taking U.S. Marines on board for transportation to Europe, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 6:00 A.M., 12 June 1917. Note the 5″/51 swung out by the gangway and another two as stingers over her bow. NH 54652

USS DeKalb’s paravane skeg fitted to the ship’s forefoot, photographed in drydock at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 26 September 1918. NH 54656

USS DeKalb (ID # 3010) Scene on the ship’s fire control bridge, 18 May 1918. Note the officer and Sailor with binoculars, a telescope at right, and the officer’s holstered M1911 pistol. NH 54661

USS DeKalb (ID # 3010) Officer “firing” a saluting gun while a Sailor observes, 18 May 1918. The gun appears to be a 1-pounder Hotchkiss. NH 41702

Freddie/DeKalb was described by the NHHC as being one of only three commissioned Navy vessels ready to carry troops to England in June 1917, with the other two being the transports USS Hancock and Henderson, the first very old and the second very new– still with workmen from the yard on board when she sailed for France.

These transports were tasked with joining the first convoy carrying 14,000 soldiers and Marines and their weapons. of Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to France.

Specifically, DeKalb carried 816 men of the 2nd Bn/5th Marines to St. Nazaire, France in a 12-day run.

USS DeKalb leaving the pier at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 6:09 A.M., 12 June 1917, en route to the European war zone with U.S. troops on board. NH 54653

A haze grey USS DeKalb tied up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, after returning from France, in 1917. Note the sign on the lamp post in the foreground, marking the intersection of 2nd Street West and Preble Avenue. NH 54655

Sometime in early 1918, she picked up a striking dazzle camouflage scheme.

USS DeKalb (later ID # 3010). Tied up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 18 February 1918. Note her camouflage scheme, ice in the Delaware River, and battleships in the left background. NH 54662

Note this inset of the above, showing off two 5″/51s and a 3″/50 as well as her extensive searchlight platforms.

She continued her trips across the Atlantic to France including:

  • 821 Army Troops from New York to St. Nazaire in September 1917.
  • 588 Marines of the 73rd Machine Gun Company and the Headquarters & Supply Companies, 6th Marine Regiment along with 230 sailors from Philadelphia to St. Nazaire in October 1917.
  • 750 Marines of the 1st Machine Gun Battalion– including Capt. Allen Melancthon Sumner (MoH)– along with the 12th and 26th Replacement Units from Philadelphia to St. Nazaire in December 1917.
  • 480 Army troops and 300 Sailors from Philadelphia to France in February 1918.
  • 803 Army troops from Newport News to France in April 1918.
  • 769 Army troops from Hoboken to Brest in June 1918.
  • Headquarters Company and Squadrons A, B, and C of the First Marine Aviation Force from Hoboken to Brest in July 1918.
  • 1,559 Army troops from Hoboken to Brest in August 1918.
  • 1,593 Army troops from Philadelphia to Brest in October 1918.

US Naval Air Station, crew assembling an H-16, 1917-19. US Naval Air Station, Brest, France: Of note, the Headquarters Company and Squadrons A, B, and C of the First Marine Aviation Force arrived at Brest, France, on board DeKalb and upon disembarking proceeded to airdromes between Calais and Dunkirk for operations as the Day Wing, Northern Bombing Group. With the arrival, the squadrons were re-designated 7, 8, and 9 respectively.

In all, she would transport no less than 11,334 men to France in 11 voyages, more than wiping out the stain of the bloodless sinking of the William P. Frye three years prior.

Once the Armistice was signed, DeKalb carried 20,332 troops back home from “Over There,” making 8 ecstatic voyages back to East Coast ports from France by 5 September 1919.

Wounded and sick boarding USS DeKalb for return home. Army Transport Service. American Docks, Bassens, Bordeaux, Gironde, France. DeKalb carried troops from 23rd Ordnance Company, 311th Field Hospital (78th Division), Bordo Special Casual Cos #363, #563 and #564.” 111-SC-158664

10 May 1919. “USS DeKalb with troops for return home. Army Transport Service. American Docks, Bassens, Bordeaux, Gironde, France. DeKalb carried troops from 23rd Ordnance Company, 311th Field Hospital (78th Division), Bordo Special Casual Cos #363, #563 and #564.” 111-SC-158665

Decommissioned on 22 September 1919, DeKalb was transferred to the U.S. Shipping Board for disposal the following day.

The Navy mulled turning her into an aviation tender– a role that eventually went to the collier USS Jupiter (AC-3), only narrowly missing the German from being converted into the U.S. Navy’s first aircraft carrier, USS Langley.

Post-war

Freddie/DeKalb, having been an ocean liner, commerce raider, and troop transport, was still thought to have some life in her, so long as her aging coal-fired boilers could be converted to more economical oilers. It was during this conversion that she suffered a serious fire.

SS DeKalb in the Hudson River near Sputtan Duyvill Creek, on 16 December 1919, after she had been damaged by fire. The fire broke out while the ship was lying ready to be converted to an oil burner for the South American trade. Her skeleton crew of 35 men was removed safely and the vessel beached. NH 54663

Bought by W. Averell Harriman, she was converted and rebuilt by the United American Line of New York over a 15-month stint at the Morse Dry Dock & Repair Co in Brooklyn. In this, all of her cabin space was homogenized to 1,452 third-class steerage passengers for transport on the emigree trade.

Renamed SS Mount Clay, she sailed directly between Hamburg and New York until October 1925.

SS Mount Clay

On her return trips from Germany, she was also used as a reparations ship, loading silver and gold from the Reichbank representatives for delivery to the U.S. Treasury Dept and banking officials in New York. On one such run back in July 1921, she brought 205 cases of silver Reichsmarks, worth some $800,000 at the time.

During this period, Mount Clay also inaugurated a new system of hybrid express mail delivery to Germany, in which special packages picked up in New York were handed over to aircraft in Cuxhaven for delivery by air within the Weimar Republic.

On 11 February 1921, while about 400 miles southeast of Halifax, the liner rescued the 37 crewmembers and ship’s cat from the sinking Belgian-flagged Lloyd Royal Belge cargo ship SS Bombardier. As Bombardier was bound from New York to Antwerp, they had their transit reversed as the New York-bound Mount Clay, loaded with 829 souls from Hamburg, put into the Big Apple a day late and landed her mid-ocean guests.

She was then laid up and acquired by the American Ship and Commerce Navigation Corp in 1926, who didn’t place her into service, then was passed on to the Pacific Motorship Company of San Francisco, who similarly left her in port pending a $1.5 million overhaul that never happened.

She was sold to the breakers in September 1934.

Epilogue

Little remains of our subject.

The National Archives holds a collection including the ship’s Tagebuch (logbook) starting in May 1913, press clippings of the vessel’s wartime operations, correspondence about the ship’s internment and leave/passes granted to her crew, correspondence and reports relating to the vessel’s transfer to Philadelphia Naval Yard and mechanical repairs, reports and copies of Executive Orders relating to the U.S. seizure of the ship, and general information concerning the ship’s operations in German service. Also in the archives is the documentation of these vessels’ subsequent service in the U.S. Navy. Little of it is digitized, with most of what is relating to the conversation to DeKalb.

One of her 10.5 cm/40 SK L/40s, originally transferred to the cruiser from either the gunboat Luchs or Tiger at Tsingtao in August 1914, has been preserved at Memorial Park in Cambridge, New York for some time.

The preserved 10.5 cm/40 SK L/40 from Hilfskreuzer Prinz Eitel Friedrich, at Cambridge, New York. Photographs copyrighted by Michael Costello via Navweps.

The ship’s German crew was released from POW camps in 1919 and allowed to return home on the NDL steamer SS Princess Irene (which had served as USS Pocahontas during the war) via Rotterdam that October.

Her skipper, Max Thierichens, released in November 1919 despite a weird cloud of federal convictions, returned to a post-Imperial Germany and was promoted to Kapitän zur See in December 1919. Retained in the interbellum Reichsmarine, he retired in 1925, capping 29 years of service at age 51. Taking over his father’s furniture store in Berlin (Charlottenburg 4, Leibnizstr. 25), he passed in 1930 amid a very tough era in German history.

While Burggraf, von Luckner, and Nerger, skippers of Mowe, Seeadler, and Wolf, were holders of the Blue Max, Thierichens was not. I cannot find where he earned an EAK1 or EAK2 either. Curious.

Of her four American skippers during her 28-month spell as DeKalb, all four earned the Navy Cross during the Great War, and two– SpanAm War vets CDR Walter Rockwell Gherardi (USNA 1895) and Capt. Luther Martin Overstreet (USNA 1897)– both retired as admirals.

Neither the German nor the U.S. Navies have fielded another vessel of the same name. 

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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That Sinking Feeling

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As any sailor will vouch, there is always that hollow feeling that comes over you at least once while over the deep blue, far from shore, where you realize that it is never a certain thing that the ocean will not choose to simply rise up and swallow your little bit of floating atmosphere and take it swiftly to the bottom.

The view from the sea bridge of the 11,000-ton Royal Navy Town (Southampton)-class cruiser HMS Sheffield (C24) as she battled heavy seas while escorting convoy JW 53 to Northern Russia, in February 1943. The ship suffered severe structural damage– with a third of the roof of A turret peeled away– during three days of storms and had to return to port for repairs.

IWM (A 14890)

Sydney’s Beauty

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The second HMAS Sydney was a modified Leander class light cruiser that began life as the Royal Navy’s HMS Phaeton on 8 July 1933. Relegated to local patrols in the Pacific in 1939, she only headed West to the Mediterranean in April 1940.

This amazing series of images in the New South Wales State Library Collection captures the warship some 85 years ago this week on 5 February 1940 while under maneuvers.

She carried eight 6″/50 breech-loading Mk XXIII guns in four twin turrets

Her primary high-altitude AAA armament: four 4″/50 high-angle guns in single open mounts. Everything else was .50 cal and .303

Reloading the 4″/50s with gas gear

Still a world of hammocks.

Her torpedo battery included Two QR Mk VII quadruple mountings, carrying Mk 9 torpedoes

At the time, she had been in her namesake city over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays. She was conducting training before departing for Fremantle, Western Australia, where she arrived on 8 February 1940. From there, she would sail as part of the escort for a large Middle East-bound convoy two months later.

She would vanish the following November.

As noted by National Archives Australia:

The sinking of the light cruiser HMAS Sydney off the Western Australian coast on 19 November 1941 stands alone in the annals of Australian naval history. Not only did the close-quarters exchange with the German armed raider HSK Kormoran claim 645 lives, making it the nation’s greatest naval loss, but also no other event has been so shrouded in mystery and surrounded in controversy. As the Sydney was sunk with all hands and disappeared, what could be reliably established about the ship’s final engagement and subsequent sinking was frustratingly limited.

However, a relic of her has remained on the desk of every Royal Australian Navy CNO since 1940, a Marlin-spiked spyglass from the cruiser’s navigation department handed over to ADM Sir John Collins, KBE, CB, RAN by the officers of HMAS Sydney before leaving for the war in Europe.

It is traditionally passed from CNO to CNO as a ceremonial baton of office.

Sheathing the Broadsword

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A Falklands War veteran Type 22 frigate, HMS Broadsword (F88), was recently deep-sixed just after her 45th birthday.

The Yarrow-built Broadsword, the second such RN warship to carry the name, was commissioned in 1979 and saw a quarter-century in British service including splashing two Argentine aircraft during the Falklands with her then-revolutionary Sea Wolf missile system, making her and her sisters indispensable during the conflict.

Type 22 Frigate HMS Broadsword alongside HMS Hermes during the Falklands War, 1982. IWM (MH 27508)

Paid off after the end of the Cold War, Broadsword was sold to Brazil alongside her sisters HMS Brazen (F91), HMS Brilliant (F90), and HMS Battleaxe (F89) for £116,000,000, becoming Greenhalgh (F46), Bosísio (F48), Dodsworth (F47), and Rademaker (F49), respectively.

Although all had more than 25 years on their hulls, they were still the most advanced surface escorts and augmented the Brazilian navy’s seven smaller Vosper-designed Niteroi-class frigates.

Greenhalgh/Broadsword in Brazilian service– still with her Exocet/Sea Wolf punch.

However, with Brazil ordering eight new German (MEKO A-100) Tamandare-class frigates, both the Niterois and the Type 22s are being put to pasture.

Brilliant/Dodsworth was sold for scrap in 2012, Brazen/Bosísio expended as a target in 2017, and Broadsword/Greenhalgh, which decommissioned in 2021, was sent to the bottom during Lançamento de Armas IV back in September.

This included 500-pound Mk. 82s dropped by AK-4KU (AF-1B/C) Skyhawks from VF-1, the first warshot Brazilian-made SIATT MANSUP anti-ship missile– fired from Broadsword/Greenhalgh’s sister Battleaxe/Rademaker no less– and AGM-119B Penguins from the SH-60 Seahawks of Esquadrão HS-1. Ironically, the Type 22s often only narrowly missed dumb bombs from A-4s back in 1982.

Images via the Marinha do Brasil:

There is also a video from the Marinha do Brasil of the HS-1 Penguin shots.

The Greenhalgh/Broadsword agora descansa no Reino de Poseidon.

Warship Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024: The Ones That Got Away

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024: The Ones That Got Away

Above we see the period depiction by renowned German maritime artist Willy Stöwer of the armed sailing ship (segelschiff) SMS Ayesha off Hodeida (now Al Hudaydah, Yemen) in January 1915, to the warm welcome of allied Ottoman troops. Stöwer, best known for his decades of painting battleships, cruisers, and U-boats, apparently made an exception for the humble Ayesha, as she had an incredibly interesting story that began some 110 years ago this week.

And a tale rather different from the one shown above.

The Background

Part of Admiral Maximillian von Spee’s Eastern Squadron, the 4,200-ton Dresden class of light cruiser SMS Emden was detached from the rest of Von Spee’s force to become an independent raider in the Western Pacific, as the main force of five cruisers made for the Eastern Pacific and, ultimately, the South Atlantic. In doing so, Emden was sort of a sacrificial rabbit to draw away the British, Australian, French, Russian, and Japanese hounds as Von Spee made his exit.

In an epic 97-day patrol, Emden captured 23 merchant ships (21 Brits, one Russian, one Greek) with 101,182 GRT of enemy shipping, sending 16 to the bottom, releasing three, and keeping as four as prizes. In each encounter with these unarmed merchies, Emden practiced “cruiser rules,” in which all passengers and crew on board these ships were brought to safety. She took off the kid gloves and accounted for two warships by sucker punching the 3,500-ton Russian light cruiser Zhemchug and the 300-ton French destroyer Mousquet as they slumbered in Penang harbor in British Malaysia.

German cruiser SMS Emden off Madras. Artwork by Hans Bohrdt. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Fire from Bombardment of Madras by SMS Emden

Emden also bombarded oil depots in Madras, India, sending shivers through the Raj, and tied up dozens of allied warships in running her to ground. This included four brawlers– any of which could make short work of the smaller German warship– that had closed the distance to within just 50 miles of the raider: the 14,600-ton British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur, the 16,000-ton Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki, and the twin 5,400-ton Australian light cruisers HMAS Sydney and Melbourne.

This game all cumulated in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands on 9 November 1914.

Direction Island

The remote Cocos (Keeling) Islands, two desolate flat, low-lying coral atolls made up of 27 islets in the Indian Ocean some 800 miles West of Sumatra, in 1914 only had a population of a few hundred. The British colony was defacto ruled by the Clunies-Ross family, which had settled the archipelago in the 1850s, and whose paterfamilias generally served as the resident magistrate and Crown representative.

Modernity had reached this corner of the British Empire, with the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, in 1901, establishing a cable station on Direction Island on the top of the Cocos chain with submarine cables eventually running to Rodrigues (Mauritius), Batavia (Java), and Fremantle.

By 1910, this had been complemented by a Marconi wireless station, making it a key link in the communication chain between India and Australia.

A link worthy of breaking, in the mind of Emden’s skipper, Fregattenkapitän Karl von Müller.

Arriving just offshore of the Cocos over a deep trench– Emden needed at least 18 feet of seawater under her hull to float– in the predawn of 9 November, a landungskorps was assembled and ready to go ashore, seize the station, wreck it, and withdraw with any interesting portable supplies to feed the cruiser’s 360-member crew.

Going ashore at dawn in a steam pinnace and two whaleboats was Kpt. lt Hellmuth von Mücke, Leutnants Schmidt and Gysling, six petty officers, and 41 ratings, including two signalmen who knew what to destroy and a former French Foreign Legionnaire who was good with languages (among other things). Expecting resistance from a company-sized garrison at the colony, Mücke raided Emden’s small arms locker, taking four Maxim guns– each with 2,000 rounds of ammunition– 29 dated Gewehr 71 rifles, and 24 Reichsrevolvers.

With a strange warship offshore, disguised by a false fourth funnel, overhearing a coded signal from Emden to her prize ship-turned-tender Buresk, and three small boats filled with armed men headed in from the sea, the wireless station went into alert and started broadcasting at 0630 about the unknown man-of-war, only to be jammed by chatter from Emden’s powerful Telefunken wireless set turned to maximum power.

However, the part of the message broadcast before the jamming– “SOS strange ship in harbor,” and “SOS Emden here”– reached HMAS Sydney, escorting a convoy some 50nm away. The Australian cruiser replied that she was on the way to investigate. Her call letters, NC, led Emden’s signalmen to think she was the cruiser HMS Newcastle, which ironically was also in the Far East just nowhere near Emden, and they estimated by her signal strength and bearing that she was over 200 miles away.

In short, Emden’s skipper thought they had more time, but was very wrong. 

Once landed, Von Mücke’s shore party got busy wrecking. Local photographers A.J. Peake and R. Cardwell, apparently EETC employees, began snapping photos documenting the activities of the landing party over the next two days.

The force soon captured and wrecked the undefended telegraph office without a shot– the island’s entire arsenal amounted to a “few 12 bore guns and two small and ancient pea-rifles”– cut three of four underwater cables, and felled the station’s transmission mast via explosives. This caused collateral damage as coral shot around like shrapnel, holing buildings and destroying the island’s supply of scotch. 

Emden’s launch grappling for cable at Direction Island. NLA obj-149336815

The Eastern Extension Telegraph Company office after the German raid, 9 November 1914. NLA obj-149337412

The bottom of the mast with the wireless hut at the back. NLA obj-149338323

The wireless mast as it lay across the garden. NLA obj-149338122

More shots of the destroyed cable station. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19150107-39.

Under the German flag, Direction Island, November 1914. Note the sun helmet and Mauser of the German sailors. NLA obj-149336272

At 0900, with Emden spotting an incoming ship and soon acknowledging it was not her tender Buresk, the cruiser cleared decks and signaled her shore party to return immediately.

“Landing party having been recalled by the Emden, leaves the jetty but turns back on seeing Emden putting to sea.” In the background is the copra schooner Ayesha, owned by the Clunies-Ross family.” Note the white-uniformed officer complete with pistol belt. NLA .obj-149337219

“The Emdens’ landing party left the island on their futile attempt to rejoin their ship, Direction Island, 1914.” NLA obj-149336127

Not able to catch up to the withdrawing Emden, her away force returned to the docks on Direction Island. Soon signs of a battle could be seen over the horizon.

View from the beach of Direction Island with the battle between the SMS Emden and HMAS Sydney in the far distance. NLA obj-149338507

Unknown to Von Mucke and his men, nor to the colonists on Direction Island, Emden, and Sydney clashed between 0940 and 1120 in a one-sided battle that left the German cruiser grounded and ablaze on North Keeling Island with more than half of her 316 men aboard dead, missing, or wounded.

German raider, SMS Emden is sunk by Australian Cruiser, HMAS Sydney, RAN collection.

German cruiser SMS Emden beached on Cocos Island in 1914

Sydney suffered four fatalities and a dozen wounded.

Von Mucke knew that Emden was either sunk or had fled over the horizon and that the only warship coming to collect them would likely be an enemy. He set up his Spandaus on the beach and waited.

A German Maxim gun and ammunition boxes were set up to repel landings at Direction Island, on 9 November 1914. NLA obj-149337513

Meet Ayesha

The local coconut and cargo hauler, the 97-ton, 98-foot three-master schooner Ayesha, was anchored just off the docks on Direction Island, with Von Mucke’s crew passing close by on their way to the island that morning. She was a fine-looking vessel, for a coastal lugger, and typically sailed the local waters with a crew of five or six mariners and a master.

The schooner Ayesha, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, November 1914. NLA obj-149336020

Ayesha in open water State Library of Australia PRG-1373-29-15

The solution, to Von Mucke, was to seize the schooner, requisition supplies from the station, and load his men on board with the hope of heading to Dutch Sumatra, some 800 or so miles away, where they could figure out the next steps.

He boarded her with one of his officers for an inspection.

From a June 1915 New York Times interview with Von Mucke translated from the Berliner Tageblatt:

I made up my mind to leave the island as soon as possible. The Emden was gone the danger for us growing. I noticed a three-master, the schooner Ayesha. Mr. Ross, the owner of the ship and the island, had warned me that the boat was leaky but I found it a quite seaworthy tub.

“Schooner Ayesha commandeered by Germans being prepared for the voyage” Sails have been bent to the booms and forestays. AWM P11611.027.002

Germans commandeer cable station stores to provision the yacht Ayesha, owned by the Clunies-Ross family after the German raider SMS Emden was driven ashore at North Keeling Island by HMAS Sydney on 9 November 1914. On the evening of 10 November 1914, a party from the Emden used the Ayesha to escape from the island. AWM P03912.001

A German landing party at Direction Island, preparing to go aboard the yacht Ayesha, after their ship the German raider SMS Emden was destroyed by HMAS Sydney on 9 November 1914. AWM P03912.002

The master and mate were released from their duties, although they warned Von Mucke the ship’s hull, thin, “worn through” and overgrown, could not handle an ocean voyage. Inspecting the hold, the wood was indeed “red and rotten, so much so, indeed, that we stopped our scratching as we had no desire to poke the points of our knives into the Indian Ocean.”

On the evening of 10 November, the Germans used the Ayesha to escape from the island.

The locals– according to both German and British reports– actually gave the Germans three cheers as they left. Von Mucke said they went even further and asked for their autographs. Emden’s fame had proceeded them.

“Steam pinnace taking last of Germans aboard the Ayesha. The Germans are waving to the British, who have given them three cheers.” NLA obj-149339081

It wasn’t until the next day, 11 November, that sailors and Marines from HMAS Sydney arrived at Direction Island to find out that the Emden’s shore party had come and gone, with a decent head start.

A party of armed sailors from HMAS Sydney lands on Direction Island, on 11 November 1914. A party from the German raider Emden had landed and taken possession of the cable station on the island, but on the evening of the 10th, they escaped in the schooner Ayesha, which belonged to the owner of the island. AWM EN0390

Von Mucke raised their small war flag and christened the schooner SMS Ayesha (Emden II) to three hurrahs from her new crew. Nonetheless, she struck her flag soon after and sailors soon went over the side to paint over the ship’s name. Word had to have gone out and the British were no doubt looking for her.

Ayesha’s navigational equipment was limited to a sextant, two chronometers, and a circa 1882 Indian Ocean Directory, filled with quaint old high-scale charts and notes made as far back as the 1780s. With 50 men crowded onto a ship designed for five, they fashioned hammocks from old ropes and slept in holds and on deck.

Even more limited was the crew’s kit, as the men had landed on Direction Island for a raid and only had the clothes on their backs and cartridges in their pouches.

The whole crew went about naked in order to spare our wash…Toothbrushes were long ago out of sight. One razor made the rounds of the crew. The entire ship had one precious comb.

Further, Ayesha’s canvas was old and rotten, and three of the schooner’s four water tanks had been contaminated with salt water.

She had enough canvas to rig fore and aft sails on the main and mizzen and two square sails on the foremast. Still, these were threadbare and had to be patched constantly as they “tore at the slightest provocation.”

One condemned sail was rigged over the ballast for use as a shared bed by ratings, which sounds almost enjoyable until you find out that the schooner leaked so bad that water rose over the ballast at sea and typically sloshed around just below the sail bed.

From Von Mucke’s later book, as translated in 1933 and republished by the USNI:

Below deck, aft of the hold, were two small cabins originally fitted with bunks, but in these, we were compelled to store our provisions. Swarms of huge cockroaches made it impossible for human beings to inhabit them.

Another old sail was rigged up to catch and filter rainwater into three repurposed Standard Oil cans for drinking which was rendered palatable by “a dash or lime juice of which we had fortunately found few bottles among the provisions of the former captain.”

Gratefully, it turned out that the crew’s former Legionaire was a crack chef and managed to cobble together decent meals from the larder of rice and tinned beef.

At night, the only light was two oil lamps that “gave off more smoke than light.”

Most of the armament was secured down below, with the Spandaus concealed and arranged to fire through loopholes on deck should they be needed.

Leaving the steam pinnacle behind for the islanders to use, Von Mucke originally towed the two cutters from Emden behind the Ayesha, as there was no tackle available to bring them aboard nor deck space to house them but eventually, they were lost. Soon all they had in terms of small boats were a pair of jolly boats that the schooner carried in small davits, each able to hold two men. At times of doldrums, they were put out to tow the schooner with the help of Emden’s lost cutter’s long oars. 

After 16 days at sea wandering towards Sumatra and keeping over the horizon from steamers, Ayesha was intercepted by the Dutch Fret-class destroyer Lynx (510 tons, 210 feet oal, 30 knots, 4×3″, 2xtt) on 26 November and was escorted into Padang in Wester Sumatra the next day.

Given 24 hours in port, Von Mucke was warned by Lynx’s Belgian-born skipper “I could run into the harbor but whether I might not come out again was doubtful.”

Von Mucke related that at the time he “felt truly sorry for the Lynx. It must have been very irritating to her to have to trundle behind us at the wonderful speed of one knot, a speed which, with the light breeze blowing, the Ayesha could not exceed.”

The Dutch did not allow Ayesha to take on clothes, charts, or tackle, as they could have added to the warship’s effectiveness. What was allowed were some tinned provisions and ten live pigs, the latter stored in a makeshift pen around the chain locker. 

They left the Dutch port with reinforcements as two reserve officers, LTs Gerdts and Wellman, who had been interned at Pandang on German steamers earlier in the war and wanted to cast their lot with Von Mucke. Once smuggled aboard under darkness via rowboat, as berthing was already a problem, their spaces were found on the deck under the mess table.

The German schooner was towed back out to sea on the evening of the 28th. She was followed out of territorial waters by the Dutch cruiser De Zeven Provincien.

Another bright spot of her brief stay in the Dutch East Indies was that the local German consul managed to smuggle the crew a small bundle of chocolate, cigarettes, and German newspapers. There was also a promised rendezvous location out to sea in a fortnight or so with a German merchant steamer that was still afloat and filled with enough coal to steam anywhere on the globe.

With a few weeks’ worth of food left from the stockpile removed from Direction Island, but relying largely on rainwater for drinking and bathing, the schooner spent the next two weeks wandering West into the Indian Ocean, keeping hidden while drifting towards her promised rendezvous.

Finally, in heavy seas near South Pagai in the Dutch Mentawai Islands on 14 December, Ayesha spied the Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) freighter Choising (ex-Madeleine Rickmers), a slight vessel of just 1,657 tons. Still, she was the best Christmas present Von Mucke could ask for.

The meeting, in the fog and mist, was probably traumatic to the complement of the steamer whose ship’s officers and engineer were German, and most of the crew were Chinese. 

Up flew our ensign and colours. The steamer ran up the German flag. The crew climbed aloft into the shrouds, and three cheers rang from deck to deck. As usual, our men were dressed in the manner customary in thc Garden of Eden, a costume which necessity had forced upon them. The men of the Choising confided to us later that they were speechless with astonishment when suddenly, out of the fog, emerged a schooner, the shrouds of which were filled with naked forms.

Having sailed Ayesha for 1,709 sea miles, the crews waited until the waters calmed on the 16th to transfer to the steamer then scuttled the schooner, Emden’s final victim. They removed Ayesha’s wheel and figurehead and took them along to their new ship. 

Willy Stöwer – Ayesha im Indischen Ozean nach Treffen mit Choising

The overloaded Choising set out West across the Indian Ocean towards Yemen on the Arabian peninsula, part of the now-German allied Ottoman Empire. Thumbing through Choising’s Lloyds book, the freighter assumed the identity of the Italian steamer Shenir, which was similarly sized and had the same general layout.

This included painting Shenir, Genoa on her bow and crafting an approximated Italian flag from sailcloth and a green window curtain from the captain’s cabin.

They stayed out of the shipping lanes, celebrated a low-key Christmas and New Year at sea, and after entering the Bab-el-Mandeb, passing close abreast of two British gunboats in the darkness, made it to Hodeida on 5 January 1915, having crossed 4,100 miles of the Indian Ocean successfully.

Cruise of the Emden, Ayesha, and Choising. Bestanddeelnr 22032 010

Arabian Nights

With the French cruiser, Desaix spotted near Hodeida, Von Mucke and his men bid Choising farewell. With no Ottoman naval officials to turn to, she went across the straits to Massawa in Eritrea which was under Italian control and still neutral, intending to link up with the cruiser SMS Konigsberg which they thought was still off the coast of Africa but was trapped upriver in the Rufiji.

Choising, remaining in Somaliland, would go on to be seized by the Italian government once that former German ally declared war against the Empire in May 1915. This led to her final service as the Italian-flagged Carroccio. As part of a small Italian convoy, she was sent to the bottom of the Adriatic Sea on 15 May 1917 off the coast of Albania by the Austrian destroyer Balaton in a messy surface action known today as the Battle of the Strait of Otranto.

Meanwhile, contrary to early rosy reports that the Turks welcomed Von Mucke with open arms in Hodeida and soon spirited them via train up the Hejaz railroad to Constantinople and from there to Germany, it would be five long months of slogging across Arabia to Damascus before the Germans had any sort of safety.

Overland from Hodeida, from Von Mucke’s book

The reason for choosing the port was simple: 

Our only knowledge regarding Arabian ways and customs was a ” round the world’ guidebook that would have answered the purposes of a sight-seeing couple on their honeymoon very well. From it we learned that Hodcida is a large commercial city, and that the Hedjaz railway to Hodeida was in course of construction. As the book was some years old and as one of my officers remembered that years ago he had met a French engineer who told him that he had been engaged in the construction of a railway to Hodeida, we took it for granted that the railway was completed by this time.

Nonetheless, the word would precede them, hence Willie Stower’s fanciful depiction of the long-scuttled Ayesha arriving at a big red carpet Ottoman welcome at Hodeida. 

Another such propaganda piece from 1915:

With the railway incomplete, the journey, which is a bit off subject for a Warship blog, included a three-day firefight with a battalion-sized force of Arab rebels, unruly camel caravans with wary Bedouins watching from the dunes, creeping up the uncharted coast on local fishing dhows (zambuks), and avoiding being kept as “guests” by local Turkish garrison commanders and sheiks looking to add the Teutonic travelers to their muscle.

SMS Emden crew is attacked by Arabs on their desert hike to Jeddah, Der Krieg 1914/19 in Wort und Bild, 35. Heft

Finally arriving at the terminus for the Hejaz railroad at Al Ula, a trek of 1,100 miles from Hodeida on 7 May, the force met Berliner Tageblatt correspondent Emil Ludwig, who was waiting for them, and within days they were being hosted by the German counsel in Damascus. By this point, their firearms cache had been whittled down to one machine gun, a few revolvers, and just 13 rifles, the rest bartered along the way for food, safe passage, boats, and camels; or lost in zambuk wrecks. 

The photo of the Damascus meeting shows the Emden’s men complete with crisp new Turkish uniforms and fezes! 

Besatzungsmitglieder von SMS Ayesha im Garten des Kaiserlichen Konsulats in Damaskus 11. Mai 1915. 2) Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke, 3) Konsul Walter Rößler. Note the Gewehr 71 Mausers.

Then came an even larger show in Constantinople, attended by foreign legations and German RADM Wilhelm Souchon, former commander of the Kaiser’s Mediterranean Squadron and current unofficial commander of the Ottoman fleet. Souchon had a gift for the men: Iron Crosses sent directly from Berlin.

Six of the 50-man forces that had landed at Direction Island six months prior had been left behind, three killed by rebels, and three by assorted diseases and accidents. Of Emden’s 360 crew, virtually all except Von Mucke’s detachment were dead or POWs by this point in the war– to include the Kaiser’s own nephew. The same could be said broadly for all the fine young men of Von Spee’s squadron.

The arrival of Captain Mücke with the SMS Emden’s landing party in Constantinople

Captured German photograph of the captain and officers of the Ayesha being presented to the Turkish authorities by the American Ambassador. Figures from right to left are (1) Enver Pasha; (2) German Ambassador; (3,5,6) Officers of the raider Emden; (4) Provost of Town; (7) Admiral Suchow Pasha of Goeben. AWM A011403

Captured German photograph showing the arrival of the officers who escaped from the raider Emden after commandeering the yacht Ayesha, with the German flag which saved them from falling into the hands of the enemy. AWM A01402

They were lucky.

Soon after Von Mucke’s trip up the Arabian peninsula, another group of Von Spee’s men, elements of the crew of the river patrol boat SMS Tsingtau including Kptlt. Erwin von Möller, LtzS Hans von Arnim, Vizesteuermann Heinrich Deike, Karl Gründler, Heinrich Mau, Arthur Schwarting plus Turkish ship’s cook Said Achmad, sailed the coastal schooner Marboek for 82 days from Sumatra where they were interned to the Arabian coast at Hadramaut, then headed out overland for Sana, much like Von Mucke.

They were all killed in the desert by rebels on 25 May 1916.

Epilogue

Von Mucke, whose interviews with Emil Ludwig soon circled the globe, spent some time as head of a Turko-German river flotilla in the Euphrates, then finished the war back in Germany as head of the Danube Flotilla. You could say the Kaiserliche Marine wanted to keep him from being lost at sea. Sadly, half of the men who had returned with him from Emden had been killed later in the Great War. 

His mug was snapped often and widely distributed. A dashing hero with a romantic tale.

Capt. Von Mucke & bride & sailors of EMDEN LOC ggbain-20400-20461v

Kpt. Von Mucke in Berlin LOC ggbain-19500-19578v

He also penned two thin wartime books, one on each of the vessels he served on during the conflict.

Postwar, retired from the Navy after an 18-year career, he had six children and earned a living in Weimar Germany through writing and conducting lecture tours, retelling his story. Turning to politics, he briefly held a seat in the Saxon state parliament, flirted with the Nazis (membership number 3,579) before they rose to power, then by 1930 had become an outspoken pacifist and member of the Deutschlandbund, an anti-Nazi group. Banned from writing after 1933, he was labeled a communist and tossed into concentration camps on at least two occasions. Despite the fact his naval pension had been suspended, he volunteered for combat with the Kriegsmarine in 1939 at age 58 but was rejected because he was considered politically unreliable.

Remaining in East Germany post-WWII, Von Mucke wrote pamphlets against the rearmament of West Germany for the communists but soon fell out with them as well. He passed in 1957 at age 76 and is buried in Ahrensburg.

As she sat in shallow water along the reefs off Keeling and was extensively salvaged over 40 years, literally tons of souvenirs of Emden exist, primarily in Australia, where her bell and several relics are on display at the AWM in Canberra while two of her 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/40 guns are in parks in the Canberra and Sydney.

Relics from Sydney and Emden’s battle on display at the Australian War Memorial

It is also likely that many tons of her good Krupp steel armor plate were recycled for use by the Japanese Combined Fleet, as her salvors for long periods in the 1920s and 30s were from Yokohama.

However, little, if anything, survives of Ayesha other than period photographs and romanticized postcards, along with the works of Von Mücke.

She is remembered in postal stamps of the Cocos Islands, for obvious reasons. 

The small 4×6 Reichskriegsflagge flown over Keeling by Emden’s Landungskorps, then our subject schooner and brought back to Germany in 1915 with Von Mücke and the gang at some point was put on display in the Marienkirche (St. Mary’s Church) in Lübeck.

Then in the 1930s, it was passed on to Kapt. Julius Lauterbach. A HAPAG reserve officer who had served on the liner Staatssekretär Kraetke before the war and as Emden’s 1st navigation officer during the conflict. He left the cruiser with a 15-man prize crew put aboard the captured 4,350-ton British steamer Buresk in September 1914 to serve as a tender. Captured after Emden was destroyed and Buresk scuttled, he escaped along with 34 other Germans held by the British in Singapore during the Sepoy Mutiny in February 1915. Returning to Germany on his own, (like Von Mücke he also wrote a thin book published during the war, “1000£ Price on Your Head – Dead or Alive: The Escape Adventures of Former Prize Officer S. M. S. Emden”) he was given command of a trap ship (German Q-ship), and subsequently the raider SMS Mowe. In 1955, Lauterbach’s widow donated the flag to German militaria collector Karl Flöck who placed it on display at the Gasthaus zum Roten Ochsen in Cologne for years until it went up to auction in 2009. It is now in private hands.

The tale of Emden has been told numerous times in numerous ways, but it generally left out that of Von Mucke and his refugees. Of note, a 2013 German film, Die Männer der Emden, included it. The trailer includes camels, suffering, and a bit of swashbuckling, as it should.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

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