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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling 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 24 June 2026: Scourge of the Med

Above we see the U-31-class submarine, SM U-35, stopping an Allied steamer during the Great War, with her deck gun slewed towards the aforementioned merchantman and ripping a round out.

Under skipper Kptlt. Lothar von Arnauld de la Periere, across 11 war patrols conducted between January 1916 and March 1918, the little boat would claim no less than 188 vessels (not a misprint) from 13 countries, including 40 ships in June 1916 alone– and that wasn’t even a whole month.

And that wasn’t even her best patrol!

Early German U-boats

Germany only got into the modern submarine game in 1906 with U-1, a small 139-foot/283-ton coastal boat with Körting gasoline engines. Armed with a single 17.7-inch torpedo tube and three fish, she was good for 10 knots and had an operational constructed diving depth (Konstruktionstauchtiefe) of a shallow 100 feet. Her range was 1,500nm. Built at Germaniawerft in Kiel (as Werke 119), she was a stumbling yet important first step.

The godfather behind Germaniawerft’s sub program was Hans-Heinrich Ludwig Friedrich Techel, a young engineer who had worked with the early Spanish submarine designer Raimundo Lorenzo d’Equevilley-Montjustin.

Next came U-2 in 1908, followed by U-3 and sister U-4 in 1909– all built by KW Danzig.

Then came a class of four Germaniawerft boats of the U-5 series and another four from Danzig of the U-9 class in 1910-1911.

Keeping the contracts and development flowing, another three Danzig-built U-13s and two U-17 class boats were delivered in 1912, along with the one-off Germaniawerft U-16 boat. All of these were slightly bigger than the last, and retained the dangerous petrol engines, short range, 100-foot depth, and 17.7-inch tubes of U-1.

The game changer for the pre-war German submarine fleet was U-19 and her three sisters. Delivered by Danzig in 1913, they had grown to 210 feet overall and tipped the scales at over 800 tons, more than twice the size of the original U-1 that had preceded them by just seven years. Double-hulled ocean-going boats, they were the diesel-powered German submarines and toted a combination of two MAN diesels and two AEG electric motors, capable of nearly 16 knots on the surface and 10 submerged. Further, they had big 19.7-inch tubes and could dive to 165 feet, also key firsts for the Kaiser’s growing fleet of steel sharks.

It was Techel at Germaniawerft who had first used diesels in the Italian boat R.Smg. Atropo, which was launched in Kiel in March 1912, while he also designed the Kiel-built Norwegian sub Kobben and the Austro-Hungarian Navy’s SM U3 and U4.

Germaniawerft, with Techel busy with the designs, continued down the same vein with their new U-23 class quartet delivered in late 1913-early 1914, which went the same general size (212 feet/860 tons) and characteristics (19.7-inch tubes, 165 foot depth, 16 knot speed) of the U-19s but used Germania diesels and SSW Modyn electric motors.

The U-31s

With the writing on the wall, and Danzig working on another run of improved U-19s (the U-27s), the “more” button was pressed, and Germaniawerft was given an order in turn for a class of 11 improved U-23s in 1912.

Starting with U-31 (Werke 191) and running through U-41 (Werke 201), the first boat of the 11-pack would hit the water in January 1914 and be completed soon after.

The U-31s were a very developed product, especially considering they were ordered just six years after U-1 had been delivered. With a submerged displacement of nearly 900 tons, they ran 212 feet overall. Capable of holding 110 tons of diesel oil, they had an impressive 8,800nm range on the surface at 8 knots but could make twice that speed in an attack run.

They used a pair of two-stroke 850hp GW diesel engines with their cylinders over-bored an additional 10mm to develop 925 hp at 430 rpm, as explained by Rössler.

Four 19.7-inch tubes, two bow and two stern, provided the primary armament with room for six fish, the new alcohol-powered G/6K torpedo. Adjustable for running depth and speed (35 knots at a 2,000m range or 27 knots at 5,000m), the G/6 had a 362-pound Hexanite/TNT warhead.

While U-31 and some of the first of her class were completed without a deck gun, soon after delivery, they would receive either a 75mm/15 UK L/18 or 88mm/27 TK L/30 C/08, later upped to a 105mm/43 TK L/45 C/16 gun. This was later expanded during the war to two guns in some boats, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Meet U-35

Our little boat, SM Unterseeboot U-35, was ordered from GW with the rest of her 11-boat class on 29 March 1912. Laid down at Kiel as Werke 195 on 20 December 1912, she was launched on 18 April 1914 during the Kaiserreich’s last golden spring and commissioned, with the war already in progress, on 3 November 1914. Her cost was 2,891,000 marks.

Our little boat’s first skipper was Korvettenkapitän Waldemar Kophamel. Aged just 24 at the time, young Kophamel was already a world traveler, having shipped out to North Africa on the training ship SMS Stosch as a cadet and then to East Africa on the light cruisers Niobe and Thetis as a lieutenant. Beyond that, he had served on the battleships SMS Westfalen and Ostfriesland, commanded the torpedo boat S.3, participated in the sea trials of U-1, and been under the sea on U-2 and U-9.

This salty young man was headed into history.

War!

On 1 August 1914, with Germany, France, and Russia joining the Balkan sideshow that had been brewing against Austro-Hungary and Serbia/Montenegro, things got a bit out of hand.

Operational prewar planning by the Kaiserliche Marine had envisioned a force of 70 sea-going U-boats with 36 used rotationally to protect the German Bight, 12 to patrol the approaches to Kiel, another 12 for offensive operations in the North Sea, and 10 kept for training and reserve.

In true “you go to war with the force you have,” reality, the German admiralty only had exactly 28 operational blue water U-boats in its High Seas Fleet when the lamps went out across Europe.

Soon after commissioning, U-35 was assigned to the II. U-boot Flottille in Heligoland and completed her first two war patrols (19-21 January and 24-26 January 1915) in the Bight/North Sea, without much to show for it.

As with the other large boats in the German fleet, U-35 soon sent to spearhead the Handelskrieg (trade war) and her 3rd patrol (7-20 March 1915) took place from the English Channel to the Irish Sea and saw Kophamel and company bag her first two victims, the British steamer SS Blackwood (1,230 tons) and the French trawler Gris Nez (208 tons) as well as damaging the large freighter SS Hyndford which limped away.

U-35’s 4th war patrol (29 April to 2 May) only accounted for a small Norwegian steamer, Laila (748 tons).

Her 5th patrol was her longest to date, some 25 days (29 May to 23 June 1915), and led to the boat taking 14 ships (five large steamers and nine smaller sailing vessels) on a trip around Ireland. This included sinking four ships in a single day (8 June) off Lundy Island and bagging the large freighter SS Strathcarron (4,347 tons).

Headed South

On 4 August 1915, U-35 sailed out of Kiel on her 6th patrol, bound for the Austro-Hungarian naval base at Cattaro (now Kotor, Montenegro). A Habsburg stronghold going as far back as 1797, Cattaro in 1915 was the home port of the Austrian Fifth Fleet. The cruise to the Adriatic carried U-35 out into the Atlantic over north Scotland, and eventually hooked east past Gibraltar and Malta, arriving on the 23rd. On the way, Kophamel attacked a trio of sailing vessels (a Russian, a Frenchman, and a Norwegian) off Fastnet and sent the latter two to the bottom.

U-35 and her sister U-34, which had traveled at the same time, became part of the budding U-Boot-Sonderkommando Pola, which had been established in April with the small minelayer boats UC-12, UC- 13, UC-14, and UC-15, which had been transported by rail to Pola in sections for assembly, and joined by the ocean-going U-21 in July. In a bit of subterfuge, as Italy had not yet joined the war, the German boats flew Austrian flags until after August 1916 so as not to further inflame the situation.

U-35’s 7th patrol, her first from Cattaro, took place 12-22 September 1915, remained in the Adriatic Sea, and sank three medium-sized steamers, two British and one French.

Her 8th patrol saw her penetrate the Eastern Mediterranean in early October 1915, sinking the old Italian steamer Scilla (1,220 tons) off Sporades Island in the Aegean, followed by the British troopship Marquette (7,057) off Salonica, sending the latter to the bottom with 167 men, primarily members of the ammunition column of the British 29th Division and a New Zealand medical unit.

U-35’s 9th patrol (25 October to 13 November 1915) included a curious sortie to support the Senussi rebels in Libya who were fighting the British. This amounted to putting in at Orak Adasi (near Bodrum), taking on 10 Ottoman officers, 120,000 gold francs, 300,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, and 80 ammunition belts for machine guns, and, together with two small schooners carrying 120 Turkish soldiers and other war materiel, shepherding them 380 miles across the Med to Bardia.

She was then released on her own and would account for a diverse mixture of 11 vessels including an Egyptian coast guard boat (the small 298-ton Abbas), the large tanker Lumina (6,218 tons), the 1,800-ton armed boarding steamer HMS Tara (sunk in a raid on the Egyptian port of Sollum) and the infamous Leyland Lines steamer SS Californian, the vessel widely believed to have been the so-called “mystery ship” seen from the decks of the Titanic in 1912 that did not come to her rescue. Kophamel torpedoed and sank Californian some 60 miles SSW of Cape Matapan, sending her to the bottom.

Enter Arnauld

Following the completion of U-35’s 9th war patrol, the well-proven Kophamel was given a promotion to Korvettenkapitän on 18 November 1915 and placed in command of the growing German submarine group in the Adriatic, which had been renamed U-Flottille Pola, a billet he would hold down through June 1917.

This left U-35 without a skipper.

Entering stage left, we have one unproven Kapitänleutnant Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière. A Prussian noble of French heritage (his great-grandfather fled France to become an officer for Fredrick the Great), Arnauld joined the Imperial German Navy as a midshipman in 1903, at the age of 17 (Crew 4/03). Before the war, he sailed aboard the square-rigger training ship SMS Stein to the West Indies, held down a spot in the wardroom of the battleships SMS Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, Schlesien, and Schleswig-Holstein, as well as on the light cruiser Emden, before being attached to Admiral von Pohl’s staff in 1914. Transferred to the submarine service, he completed a command course on the training boats U-1 and U-3, then shipped to Pola by train to board U-35, both his first command and his first combat.

U-35’s 10th patrol, Arnauld’s 1st, began in mid-December 1915, with the boat setting out into the Central Mediterranean. It wasn’t until after the New Year that the new skipper would prove himself, sinking the British steamer SS Sutherland (3,542 tons) on 17 January 1916 while some 192 miles SE of Malta, filled with a cargo of manganese bound from Bombay to Hull.

U-35’s 11th patrol (21 February to 4 March 1916) saw Arnauld log four kills, including the 1,200-ton sloop HMS Primula and the large French auxiliary cruiser La Provence (13,753 tons). A beautiful two-funneled CGT-owned liner before the war, La Provence was carrying a full load of 1,700 French troops from Toulon to Salonika when she was torpedoed off Cerigo Island. She went down so quickly that she carried the lifeboats with her, and more than 1,000 perished, including virtually an entire battalion of the Third Colonial Infantry (3e RIC) regiment.

The only noteworthy incident on her 12th patrol was torpedoing the British Atlantic lines passenger steamer SS Minneapolis (13,500 tons) off Malta while bound from Marseille to Alexandria in ballast. Despite being one of the largest vessels sunk by a U-boat during the war, she had no cargo and only suffered 12 casualties.

Then came the epic 13th patrol of U-35. Between 13 June and 29 June 1916, Arnauld and his little boat would sink or damage no less than 40 vessels. While many of these (19) were small Italian sailing vessels, sent to the bottom via demolition charges or a few well-placed shots from the submarine’s deck guns, there were also some significant prizes such as the French passenger steamer Herault (2,299 tons), sunk off of Cabo San Antonio while on the way to Oran, the Italian steamer Mongibello (4,059 tons) sunk off Port Mahon while carrying a cargo from Baltimore destined for Genoa, and the British steamer Beachy (4,718 tons), which was filled with cargo bound for Hull from Calcutta.

It was during this cruise that U-35 went on to sail unabashedly into neutral Spain at Cartagena on 21 June 1916, saluting the Spanish cruiser Cataluna and semi-secretly landing German spy Heinrich Karl Fricke under the official cover of delivering a letter from Kaiser Wilhelm II to King Alfonso XIII.

Her 14th patrol would be even more sensational, prowling for 25 days in the French-patrolled Western Mediterranean between Marseille and Corsica. Prowling from 26 July to 20 August 1916, U-35 accounted for a staggering 54 merchant ships (32 Italian) totaling 90,350 GRT. The largest of these was the Italian LVN passenger steamer SS Siena (4,372 tons), captured and sunk by gunfire some 20 miles SW of Planier Island on the morning of 4 August while plying the Colon to Genoa route. Arnauld accomplished all this with only four torpedoes, the rest being accomplished by demo charges and gunfire, with the little U-boat crammed with 900 shells when she left Cattaro, the ordnance crammed in every nook and cranny of every compartment.

The patrol was regarded as the most successful single submarine war patrol of all time.

In any conflict.

During any war.

U-35’s 15th patrol, from 20 September to 7 October 1916, accounted for 22 ships. These included the 1,200-ton French gunboat Rigel and the bruising 14,900-ton French auxiliary cruiser Gallia, broken in half off Cape Spartivento near Sardinia. A brand-new Cie. de Navigation Sud-Atlantique steamer, Gallia, had been sailing unescorted (!) and carrying 2,000 troops (1,650 French/350 Serbian) along with a cargo of artillery and ammunition from Marseille to Salonika when she was torpedoed 35 miles SW of San Pietro. She exploded and sank in just 15 minutes, carrying 1,338 men to the bottom. It was a butcher’s bill higher than that on Lusitania.

Arnauld would receive the coveted Prussian Pour le Mérite, the Blue Max, just a week after Gallia was reported lost and U-35 made it back to Cattaro with the news. Of note, while over 5 million Iron Crosses were handed out during the Great War, only 1,600 Maxes were presented.

U-35’s 16th and 17th patrols (3-11 January and 8-28 February 1917) were successful, adding another 20 ships to her tally, albeit with a half-dozen of those being small (under 400 ton) sailing vessels.

Ready for my close-up

With all the fame that the renowned Kptlt. Arnauld had garnered back home, he was sent out on U-35’s 18th patrol in April 1917 with a BUFA film crew embarked to chronicle the voyage for the good damen und herren back in the Vaterland.

These images are from said film, Der Magische Gürtel, which is available in both the IWM (21 minutes) and NARA (12 minutes) with post-war English cards and the 44-minute original German version (in three parts), with stills in both as well as the LOC, making U-35 probably the best photographed submarine of the Great War.

The film crew was aboard U-35 for 36 days, during which the boat sank 23 enemy and neutral ships, with 10 of the sinkings captured on film.

It was an exciting cruise, with the steamers SS Parkgate, Maplewood, Corfu, Nentmoor, India, and Stromboli taken. The largest of U-35‘s targets on the patrol, the 9,737-ton Union-Castle Mail steamer SS Leasowe Castle, bound for Liverpool, managed to limp away with only a torpedo in her hold, received while some 90 miles off Gibraltar. Leasowe Castle was one of just 10 damaged ships that managed to escape U-35 in the boat’s career.

She also had several meetings with German seaplanes while on patrol, to both collect dispatches and transfer captured papers to see if actionable intelligence could be discerned.

U-35’s 19th patrol would not come until mid-October 1917, concluding in early November. Her 20th, conducted in December, would close out the year. Between the two, Arnuald would add another 20 ships to his lengthy record, including a trio of steamers– the British SS Argo (3,811 tons) and Cliftondale (3,071 tons), along with the Norwegian Nordol (2,053 tons)– sunk on Christmas Day just off Algiers.

U-35’s 21st war patrol, Arnuald’s 11th, would venture out into the Med in early 1918 (22 February to 10 March) and bring back flag for five kills to include the big Japanese steamer Daiten Maru (4,555 tons) sunk off Sicily while bound for Reggio with cargo from Baltimore.

On 16 March 1918, Arnauld was relieved by U-35’s incoming new commander, Kplt. Ernst von Voigt, late of U-73, UC-35, and UB-8. While Voigt claimed 32 vessels before coming to U-35, he would never add a 33rd to his list.

Post Arnauld

Across Kophamel and Arnauld’s 19 successful patrols, U-35 reliably claimed 226 ships sunk (538,500 tons) and 10 ships damaged (36,889 tons), including three large troopships with their vital human cargo. With that, suffering from cranky engines, she was sent into semi-retirement, ordered back to Kiel to serve as a training boat.

In October 1918, just three weeks before the Armistice, Kptlt. Heino von Heimburg, a Blue Max wearer who had sunk the British submarine E20, British troop transport HMS Royal Edward, the Italian submarine Medusa, and the Italian cruiser Amalfi, took over U-35.

Heimburg’s command would be cut short.

In the end, U-35 was one of 122 remaining German U-boats that surrendered to the Allies post-Armistice. The scourge of the Mediterranean was handed over to Great Britain on 26 November 1918 and scrapped in Blyth between 1919 and 1920.

Ultimately, of the 373 German U-boats used by the Kaiserliche Marine during the Great War, 178 were lost in operations during the conflict. These included U-35’s sisters U-31 and U-34 (disappeared on patrol), U-32 (sunk by depth charges from British sloop), U-37 (lost to a mine), U-39 (damaged by French seaplanes and interned at Cartagena in 1918), U-40 (sunk by a decoy ship and partnered British sub), along with U-36 and U-41 (sunk by Q ships).

Post-war, the damaged U-39 was handed over to France, as was Max Valentiner’s famed U-38, while the surviving U-32 was nominated for transfer to the British. All three were broken up soon after Versailles, sharing U-35’s fate and thus ending the tale of the U-31 class.

Speaking to the out-sized success of the U-31 class, the four highest scoring U-boats of the Great War, U-35 (226 ships), U-39 (154 ships), U-38 (139 ships), and U-34 (119 ships) were all from the same 11-boat class. The seventh highest-scoring was sister U-33 (84 ships), leaving the class to hold fully half of the top ten slots.

Epilogue

As far as I can tell, other than the 44-minute film of U-35’s April-May 1917 patrol, and the above images, little remains of the boat.

The film enjoyed a wide release in English-speaking countries in 1919, a window into the once-novel seagoing pestilence that had claimed over 11 million tons of merchant and fishing shipping during the war.

When it comes to her skippers, after leaving his exceptionally well-fought U-boat flotilla at Pola in 1917 (it had chalked up 1.8 million tons of shipping under his command), Kophamel returned to Germany and commanded the big submarine cruisers SM U-151 and U-140, chalking up an additional two patrols to his credit before the war ended, having personally been at the scope for the sinking of 54 ships for 148,852 tons. Kophamel was the seventh U-boat commander to be awarded the Blue Max. Post-war, he briefly commanded the small cruiser Strasbourg in the Reichsmarine before he was demobilized in August 1920. He passed away in 1934, aged 54. The Kriegsmarine used his name for a 5,600-ton Bauer-class submarine tender for 27. U-Flottille in 1939. Sunk in 1944 by British bombers at Gotenhafen (Gdynia) in Poland, the Soviets raised the tender and used her for another 25 years in their Baltic fleet.

Ernst von Voigt, who brought U-35 back to Germany but never got a “kill” to his credit while on her decks, was retired from the Reichsmarine in 1919. Having spent just 13 years in uniform, he didn’t rate a pension despite his Blue Max, which meant increasingly less in the coming years. Korvettenkapitän der Reserve Ernst von Voigt, with the Staff of the Kriegsmarine’s Inspection of Naval Artillery Office (Stabe der Inspektion der Marineartilleriezeugämter) during WWII, survived the maelstrom and passed in Hannover in 1961, aged 73.

U-35’s final skipper, Heimburg, finished the war with 21 ships (55,036 GRT) to his tally. Retained by the U-boat-less Reichsmarine, he was a putschist with Knapp in Berlin, then spent the interwar years in a series of positions ranging from navigator on the old cruiser Amazone to XO of the elderly battlewagon Schlesien and commander of the fortifications at Cuxhaven. Promoted to a rear admiral in 1939, he spent the next few years in desk jobs and, a convinced National Socialist, often clocked in on assorted kangaroo tribunals and military courts. Upgraded to vice admiral status when shifted to the retired list in 1943, he was captured by the Soviets in 1945. He died in a POW camp near Stalingrad, aged 55.

Finally, after leaving U-35 and Pola, Arnauld commanded the U-cruiser U-139 late in the war and added five small ships to his tally. The Reichsmarine made sure to keep the Blue Max-clad hero on the rolls post-war despite the fact it had zero submarines by stipulation of the Versailles treaty. He was a nav officer on a variety of surface ships, led the training division, was a staff officer, and finally skipper of the new light cruiser Emden from 1928 to 1930, including visiting New Orleans with the man-o-war for Mardi Gras, where she was the first German warship to visit the U.S. since 1914, and he was welcomed aboard the battlewagon USS Texas.

After retiring from the Reichsmarine in 1930 as a captain with 27 years of service, Arnauld authored a book about his war (U 35 auf Jagd), then taught at the Turkish Naval Academy while wearing an admiral’s uniform for the rest of the decade until called back to serve in the Kriegsmarine in September 1939. Riding a desk as a frocked admiral, though still listed as retired, Arnauld perished in a plane crash in France in 1941, just shy of his 55th birthday.

In memoriam, U-boat Wolfpack Arnauld operated in the Atlantic later that year and during its short run sank the British carrier HMS Ark Royal (91) in the face of a trying Force 11 storm off Gibraltar.

The old man would probably have been touched.

A methodical people, the Germans have reissued the U-35 designator twice since 1915, not counting the small Great War-era coastal and minelaying boats UC-35 and UB-35.

The Kriegsmarine’s Type VIIA U-boat U-35 was appropriately built at Germaniawerft (Werke 558) in 1936, and was a showboat in her brief career, later run to ground on her second war patrol in November 1939 and scuttled.

Today’s German submarine U-35 (S185) is an ultra-modern Type 212 SSK that entered service in 2015.

Part of 1. Ubootgeschwader at Eckernförde, she followed in the footsteps of her Great War namesake by deploying to the Med in 2021 as part of the EU’s Operation Irini, albeit without any gun actions or torpedoes fired.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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