Some 105 years ago this week: USS H-2 (Submarine No. 29) partially submerged in the Hudson River, while on recruiting duty at New York City, on 6 October 1919, with the Manhattan skyline in the background. At about that time, while commanded by LCDR Clarke Withers, she performed the remarkable feat of sending a wireless message while submerged.
Note the submarine “fish flag” atop her periscope. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. NH 45615
The second of her class of nine Electric Boat 26A/26R design subs, the 150-foot/467-ton H-1s were ordered by the U.S. Navy and the Tsarist fleet (hence the 26A and 26R designations) with the first three originally given then-traditional “fish” names: Seawolf, Nautilus, and Garfish. These were later changed before commissioning to a more homogenous H-1 through H-9 once the Tsar’s boats were acquired after the Russian Revolution and Civil War prevented delivery.
Constructed at Union Iron Works, San Francisco, H-2 would deploy with her H-1 sister to the Atlantic in October 1917, where they would spend the Great War on a series of patrols and tests of new equipment, coupled with training tasks.
Her wireless arrangement was novel for the time.
USS H-2 Description: (Submarine # 29) At the New London submarine base, Groton, Connecticut, in 1919. This photograph has been annotated to identify H-2’s radio antenna installation and features an associated diagram. This image was used in RADM R.S. Griffin’s History of the Bureau of Steam Engineering. NH 45618
Postwar, the class was soon withdrawn from service, with H-1 wrecked in 1920 and the remaining eight boats all decommissioned by 1922, later sold for scrap.
The Navy, however, would soon recycle the name “Nautilus” to two follow-on submarines, SS-168 and SSN-571, both of which set milestones of their own.
30 September 1918. Original Caption: “Front view Thomas-Morse type SH-4 Naval Training Hydroplane furnished the United States Navy during 1916-1917. Fitted with Curtiss OX-5, 100 H.P. aeromotor; wing spread 43ft., high speed 68 M.P.H., climb 2400 ft. in 10 minutes. Manufactured by the Thomas Morse Aircraft Corporation. Ithaca, New York. U.S.A.”
Signa Corps 165-WW-185D-63. National Archives Identifier 31485301
The SH-4 was one of the first aircraft obtained by the Navy that had practical military experience behind its design, several predecessor models having been sold to Britain in 1915-1916 by the Thomas Aeroplane Co before its merger with the Morse Chain Company to form Thomas-Morse. Fourteeen SH-4s (A134-A136, A396-A406) powered by 100 hp engines were bought by the Navy as observation and trainer types in 1917.
Of note, Thomas-Morse also sold the Navy 14 improved (using 80hp Le Rhone engines) S-4B/Cs whose armament was “principally a camera gun,” another half-dozen olive-drab painted S-5s in 1917, and its masterpiece: more than 250 MB-3/3As that would continue use with the Army, Navy, and Marines through the 1920s.
By 1929, “Tommy Plane” had been taken over by the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation.
Above we see the business end of the Surprise class three-masted canonnière de station, Zéléein her gleaming white tropical service livery, before 1915.
Some 110 years ago this week, this humble colonial gunboat stood up to a pair of German armored cruisers that outclassed her in every way, and in the end, forced them to retire empty-handed.
The Surprise class
Built for colonial service, the three sisters of the 680-ton Surprise class– Suprise, Décidée (Decided), and Zelee (Zealous)– were compact steam-powered gunboats/station ships, running just 184 feet overall length and 26 of beam with a mean draught of just over 10 feet.
They were one of the last designs by noted French naval architect and engineer Jacques-Augustin Normand, who built the country’s first steamship.
Composite construction, they were wooden framed with a hull of hardened steel plates sheathed in copper below the waterline. The hull was segmented via nine waterproof bulkheads. A small generator provided electric lighting topside and belowdecks as well as a powering a large searchlight atop the wheelhouse. Radio sets would be retrofitted later.
Using a pair of Niclausse boilers (Surprise had cylindrical boilers) to supply steam to a horizontal triple expansion engine of 900 horses, they had a maximum speed of 13.4 knots and a steaming radius, on 75 tons of mid-grade coal, of 2,700nm at 10 knots. They carried three masts and were rigged as a barkentine, reportedly able to make six knots under canvas to stretch that endurance.
Armament was a pair of Mle 1891 3.9″/45 guns, fore and aft with limited firing arcs, four Mle 1891 2.6″/50 9-pounders on the beam, and six M1885 37mm 1-pounder Hotchkiss rapid fire guns including one in the fighting tops of each mast and two on the bridge wings.
No shell hoists meant chain gangs to reload from an amidships below deck magazine. While torpedo tubes would have been ideal for these slow gunboats, there seems to have been no thought to adding them.
Crew would be a mix of six officers and 80-ish ratings including space for a small det of marines (Fusiliers marins), to be able to land a platoon-sized light infantry force to rough it up with the locals if needed. Speaking of the locals, in line with American and British overseas gunboats of the era, when deployed to the Far East these craft typically ran hybrid crews with most service and many deck rates recruited from Indochina and Polynesia, which had the side bonus of having pidgin translators among the complement.
Meet Zelee
Our gunboat was the second in French naval service to carry the name. The first was a trim 103-foot Chevrette-class corvette built at Toulon for the Napoleonic fleet and commissioned in 1812. Armed with a pair of 4-pounder cannon and 12-pounder carronades, she saw extensive service in the Spanish Civil War in 1823, was on the Madagascar Expedition in 1830, and later, after conversion to steam power in 1853, was used as a station ship in assorted French African colonies for a decade then, recalled to Lorient, spent another 20 years as an accommodation ship and powder hulk before she was finally disposed of in 1887 after a long 71-year career.
She is probably best known for taking part in Jules Dumont d’Urville’s second polar expedition to Antarctica together with the corvette Astrolabe, a successful four-year voyage that filled reams of books with new observations and charts. The report on the expedition (Voyage au pole sud et dans l’Océanie sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée exécuté par ordre du roi pendant les années 1837-1838-1839-1840) spans 10 volumes alone.
The expedition discovered what is known as Adélie Land, which endures as France’s Antarctic territory and base for their Dumont d’Urville Station. Zelee’s skipper on the voyage was LT (later VADM) Charles Hector Jacquinot, a noted French polar explorer in his own right who went on to be a big wheel in the Crimean War.
The Corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée in the ice, likely near the coast of Antarctica, 9 February 1838. By Auguste-Etienne-François Mayer c. 1850, via the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Our second Zelee was the third of her class and laid down at Arsenal de Rochefort in April 1898, built in the same slip that sister Décidée had just departed. Of note, Surprise was constructed by Normand at Le Havre and completed in 1896.
As completed, she originally carried a black hull. Her first of eight skippers was LT Louis Rémy Antoine Exelmans.
French gunboat Zélée, fitting out near the aviso Mésange, in 1899 at Rochefort.
Canonnière Zélée sur la Charente, 1900, soon after delivery.
Same as the above.
Quiet Antebellum Service
Soon after delivery, class leader Surprise was later joined by sisters Décidée and Zelee caught orders for the Far East.
Painted white and given a lot of leeway in appearance, they roamed, typically separately, from Indochina to China where they served on the Yangtze and as station ships in Nanchang, to Japan, New Caledonia, and Polynesia.
Décidée Saigon
French Canonnière de station Surprise, Haiphong, with canvas covering her decks and her laundry aloft. Surprise would later be moved to Africa, where she would remain until 1916.
The gunboat Zélée in Hanavave Bay, Baie des Vierges, Fatu Hiva Island, 1910. Collection: The Marquesas Islands
Zelee while visiting Australia. Australian National Maritime Museum. Samuel J. Hood Studio ~ Object № 00035067
French Zélée gunboat Papeete Tahiti
In December 1913, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Maxime Francois Emile Destremau (Ecole Navale 1892) arrived to take command of Zelee, then stationed in the backwater Tahitian capital of Papeete.
While ostensibly a “French” colony since 1880, at the time the little harbor only had 280 French residents along with over 350 British and Commonwealth, 215 Chinese, 100 Americans, 50 Japanese, and some 30 or so Germans as well as a few Greeks, Swedes, and Spaniards. The truth was you were far more likely at the time to hear English on the narrow palm-lined streets of Papeete than French.
The colony had big plans. It was even slated to receive, sometime in 1915, a station de téléphonie sans (TFS) wireless station. Until then, it had to rely on semi-regular mail services from France, typically a six-week trip at its most rapid.
As for Destremau, the 37-year-old lieutenant had seen over 20 years of sea service including on the avisoes Scorff and Eure, the cruiser Eclaireur, and the early submarines Narval, Gustave-Zéde and Pluviose. His mission in French Oceania consisted mainly of showing the Tricolor from island to island and doing the old “hearts and minds” thing that goes back to the Romans.
Destremau, who had spent his career largely at Toulon and Brest, seemed to enjoy his Pacific deployment, creeping his shallow-draft gunboat into atolls that rarely saw the Navy.
Since yesterday we have been sailing in a truly strange way. We have crossed a large lagoon of about sixty kilometers, of which there is no map and which is full of submerged rocks. You can distinguish them by the change in color of the water and you avoid them as best you can. After four hours of this exercise under a blazing sun, we are very happy to arrive at the anchorage, where I find a charming little village hidden in the coconut trees. As the Zélée had never been there, we were given a real ovation. A meeting on the water’s edge of the entire population in full dress; gifts of coconuts and chickens, and organization of songs for the evening. Ravishing choirs, extremely accurate voices, and harmonies of a truly astonishing modernism. Just ten men and ten women are enough to compose an ensemble in at least six parts, with solo calls, an ensemble in at least six parts, with solo calls, admirable rhythm, and measure!
Postcards exist of her idyllic time in Polynesia.
gunboat Zélée (left) and the armored cruiser Montcalm in Tahiti in 1914
Tahiti Papeete Harbor– Arrival of Australian and American Couriers, Zelee is in the center background, with a giant Tricolor
Tahiti. – Pirogues ornées, 14 Juillet 1914, et Zelee
War!
In early August 1914, the entire armada under the command of RADM Albert Louis Marie Huguet’s Division navale d’Extreme-Orient— a force whose area of operation spanned from the Bay of Bengal to the Yangtze to Noumea to Tahiti– was not very impressive and, worse, was thinly spread.
His flag was on the cruiser Montcalm (9,177 tons, 21 knots, 2×7.6″, 8×6.4″, circa 1902), then steaming to New Caledonia after a rare visit to Polynesia. Another old cruiser, Dupleix (7,432 tons, 20 knots, 8×6.4″, circa 1903), was in Chinese waters. The dispatch vessel Kersaint (1,276 tons, 16 knots, 1×5.5″, 5×3.9″, circa 1897) was laid up at Noumea but was soon to be rearmed. Décidée was in Saigon. And in Polynesia was Zelee.
That’s it.
When the news hit that France and Germany were at war on 6 August– three days after the fact– Zelee was visiting the island of Raiatea, about 150 miles west of Tahiti. Immediately, the 36-year-old artist Joseph Ange Léon Octave Morillot, a naval officer who had resigned his commission in 1906 while on Polynesian station to go native, paint local topless women, and smoke opium, presented himself to Destremau and voluntarily returned to duty as a reserve ensign.
Setting out for Papeete with the news and an extra officer, Zelee arrived on the 7th.
By that time the colony was in full panic mode, with the belief that the German Bussard-class unprotected cruisers SMS Geierand Cormoran(1900t, 15 knots, 8×4.1″/35 guns, 2 tt) were typically in Samoa, just a five-day steam away from Tahiti. As Tahiti was a coaling station for the French fleet, some 5,000 tons of good Cardiff coal was on hand, which would make a valuable prize indeed.
As far as coastal defenses at Tahiti, as early as 1880, the French Navy had built a fort equipped with nine muzzle-loading black powder cannons to protect the entrance to Papeete but it had fallen into disrepair, its garrison removed in 1905 and its guns dismounted. As noted, by 1914, “the artillery pieces were lying limply on the ground among the flowers and moss. The gun carriages, covered with climbing plants, were firmly secured by a tangle of perennial vines of the most beautiful effect. In short, the tropical forest, exuberant, had reclaimed its rights and buried the battery.”
The island’s Army garrison consisted of a Corsican lieutenant by the name of Lorenzi and 25 Troupes Coloniales. When the Tahitian gendarmes were mobilized, they added another 20 locals and a French adjutant. Soon the word got around and reservists stumbled forward until Lorenzi commanded a mixed force of 60 rifles, who were soon drilling 12 hours a day.
French reservists also come running. each of whom is assigned a post. From the bush, we see emerging, with long beards and tanned skin, Frenchmen steeped in the land of Tahiti and who have become more Maori than the Maoris themselves, men who live, love, and think in Tahitian. At first, they hesitate a little to speak the beautiful language of France, but very quickly they find it again in their heads the marching songs that they sang every day during the field service hikes, so hard under the tropical sun.
With the possibility that two German cruisers, capable of landing a 150-man force, could be inbound, and with the likelihood that Zelee could survive a gun battle with either, the decision was made to write off the gunboat and move most of her men and guns ashore to make a dedicated land-based defense.
Destremau had a small wardroom– Ensign 1c PTJ Barnaud as XO, Ensign LSM Barbier, Ensign RJ Charron, Midshipman H. Dyevre, Midshipman 2c JA Morier, and Asst. Surgeon (Medecin de 2e classe, Medecin-major) C. Hederer. Meanwhile, his crew numbered 90.
Using sweat, yardarm hoists, and jacks, the crew dismounted the stern 3.9-incher (for which there were only 38 shells), all four 2.6-inchers, and all six 37mm 1-pounder Hotchkiss guns. They left the forward 3.9 mount and 10 shells.
Rigging a line from the harbor to the top of the 100-meter hill overlooking it, a roadcrew was formed to slowly muscle up the five large guns to the top. Meanwhile, the six Hotchkiss guns were mounted on as many requisitioned Ford trucks from a local copra concern– primitive mobile artillery– led by Ensign Dyevre. Ensign Barnaud formed a group of 42 riflemen who, with Dyevre’s gun trucks, formed a mobile reserve.
Destremau (center, with cap) and his staff in Tahiti: Ensigns Barbier and Barnaud, midshipmen Dyèvre and Le Breton, colonial infantry LT Lorenzi.
One of the ship’s engineers formed a section of dispatch riders mounted on proffered bicycles. The signalers formed a series of semaphore stations at the top of the hill battery visible to the old fort 18 km to the east, and the end of the lagoon five km to the west. Bonfires were built to signal at night. Within days, telephone lines connected the whole affair. Two old bronze cannons were mounted at the hilltop semaphore station and Pic Rouge in the distance, ready to fire as signal guns. Gunners mined the channel markers, ready to blow when needed. Likewise, plans were made to burn the coal depot.
The colony’s resident Germans as well as the Teutonic members of the captured Walküre’s crew, were interned and moved to the island of Motu-Uta in the harbor. In deference to their neighbors, they were not placed under guard, simply left in their own tiny penal colony in the middle of paradise.
The painter Morillot, taking it upon himself to become a one-man recruiting officer, made daily trips to the island’s interior in search of warm bodies. Soon there were more volunteers than there were rifles or positions on the gun crews.
With the whole island in a state of tense pre-invasion alarm, on 12 August the British-built German Rhederei line cargo steamer Walküre(3932 GRT) appeared offshore. Loaded with a cargo of phosphates from Chile and headed to Australia, she was unaware of the state of war.
Ensign Barbier, racing to Zelee with a skeleton crew, managed to raise steam and, with 10 shells quickly returned to the gunboat by Dyevre for its sole remaining 3.9-incher, soon set off to pursue the German steamer.
With Dyevre leading the boarding crew, pistols in hand, Walküre was captured without a shot. Impounding the vessel– with the support of her mixed British and Russian crew– our gunboat and her prize returned to Papeete to the reported wild cheers of her colonists.
By 20 August, the colony was as ready as it was going to get, with the five large guns of the ersatz battery commanding the harbor and pass, trenches dug, observation posts manned, 150 armed if somewhat motley irregular infantry, and six 37mm gun trucks, all there was to do was wait.
They had a month to stew.
Enter Von Spee
While Geier and Cormoran never made it to Tahiti, Admiral Maximillian Von Spee’s two mightiest ships in the Pacific, the 11,400-ton twin armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, did.
Scharnhorst and her sister were very distinctive with their four large funnels.
With a mission to seize the port and its desperately needed coal supply, and with no Allied warships within several days of the isolated colony other than our tiny (and largely toothless Zelee), it should have been a cakewalk.
With each of the big German cruisers packing eight 8.2-inch and another six 5.9-inch guns, and able to put a battalion size landing force ashore, the sight of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau appearing like a phantom from the sea smoke just 2,000 meters off the reef at Papeete at 0630 on 22 September 1914 was a shock to Destremau.
The signal cannon fired and the phones rang. Soon, Papeete became a desert as its inhabitants, long ready to bug out, took to the interior.
Orders came quick.
Barbier was ordered to rush to Zelee with 10 men and light her boilers, to ram the German cruiser closest to the pass once she had enough steam. The coal yard was set alight. The channel beacons went up in a flash of light and smoke. A crew on Walküre rushed to open her seacocks and she soon began settling on the bottom of the harbor.
Ensign Charron, in charge of the battery, was ordered to hold his fire until small boats began to gather for a landing which was logical as the popguns wouldn’t have done much to the German cruisers but could play god with a cluster of packed whaleboats.
By 0740, after a 70-minute wait, after steaming slowly in three circles just off the reef, first Scharnhorst and then Gneisenau opened up on the town and as retribution for the billowing smoke from the prized coal yard and the sinking Walküre.
By 0800, the fire shifted to Zelee, whose funnel was making smoke.
By 0820, the wrecked gunboat was filling with water, Barbier and his men moving to abandon their little warship– the crew in the end finished the job of the Germans by opening Zelee’s water intakes to the harbor.
Some accounts list 14 shots of 8.2-inch and another 35 of 5.9-inch fired by the German cruisers by 0900, others put the total count higher to 80 shells. Von Spee, afraid the harbor could be mined, retired, his plan to fuel his ships with French coal spoiled. He would miss those irreplaceable shells at the Falklands in December.
Two residents of the colony, a Polynesian child and a Japanese expat, were killed as well as several injured.
Estimates that as much as half of Papeete was destroyed in the bombardment.
The bombardment of Papeete, capital of Tahiti, a French possession in the Pacific. Showing a panoramic view of Papeete, capital of Tahiti, after being shelled by the German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The numbers indicate: 1. German prisoners under an armed guard, after having been compelled to assist in clearing away the debris resulting from the bombardment. 2. The market where all perishable food (…?) 3. Ruins of the back premises of Messrs A B Donald Ltd., with the Roman Catholic Cathedral in the background and the signal station on the hill to the right. Supplement to the Auckland Weekly News, 22 October 1914, p.43. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-19141022-43-01
Divers went down to Zelee just hours after the Germans steamed away, and recovered the ship’s tricolor. It was presented to Destremau.
German propagandists remembered the raid in spectacular fashion, complete with incoming fire from shore batteries and the ships coming in far closer to the harbor.
Die Kreuzer Scharnhorst and Gneisenau beschießen Papeete, die Hautpstadt von Tahiti, by Willy Moralt, via the Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges 1914.
Epilogue
Zelee would be partially salvaged in 1925 but remains a well-known dive site in the Tahiti area.
Her on-shore 3.9-inch gun is preserved at Bougainville Park in Papeete.
Décidée survived the conflict and went to the breakers in 1922.
The French navy recycled Zelee’s name once again in 1924 on the 285-ton remorqueur-patrouilleur Zelee (ex-Lakeside) which served into 1950.
As for the German freighter Walküre, she was salvaged and repaired, then sold to an American company and would remain in service until 1925.
The painter Morillot hung up his uniform after the bombardment and returned to his painting, opium, and women, passing in 1931.
Denigrated by the governor general of Tahiti– who hid in a church during the bombardment while Destremau handled the defense– our gunboat skipper was ordered back to France to face an inquiry board. Given interim command of the destroyer Boutefeu while the board hemmed and hawed about meeting, Destremau died in Toulon of illness on 7 March 1915, aged but 39.
His decorations came posthumously.
He was cited in the order of the army nine months after passing (JO 9 Dec. 1915, p. 8.998):
Lieutenant Destremau, commanding the gunboat La Zélée and the troops in Papeete, was able, during the day of 22 September 1914, to take the most judicious measures to ensure the defense of the port of Papeete against the attack of the German cruisers Sharnorst and Gneisenau. Demonstrated in the conduct of the defense operations the greatest personal bravery and first-rate military qualities which resulted in preserving the port of Papeete and causing the enemy cruisers to move away.
After the war, he was awarded the Legion of Honor in March 1919.
The colony’s newest station ship/gunboat, the 262-foot Teriieroo a Teriierooiterai (P780) arrived at Papeete in May after a two-month transit from France.
The more things change…
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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What a tranquil scene, some 110 years ago today: The 3,700-ton Bremen-class light cruiser SMS Leipzig, part of KAdm Maximilian von Spee’s exiled German East Asia Squadron, is seen coaling in Guaymas on Mexico’s Gulf of California/Sea of Cortez, on 8 September 1914. Of note, she is only about 240 miles south of the Arizona border.
You’d almost think there wasn’t a war on.
Leipzig. She had an all-up armament of 10 4.1-inch SK L/40 guns as well as a battery of smaller 37mm guns and two torpedo tubes.
Leipzig would prove fast on the trigger just seven weeks later at the Battles of Coronel in November, firing 407 4.1-inch shells– four times what fellow German light cruisers Dresden (102) and three times what Nurnberg (135) managed.
Engaged with the larger (5,300 ton) British Bristol-class light cruiser HMS Glasgow, the latter was only lightly damaged by five hits, leaving four lightly wounded ratings and, sadly, killing some parrots that the men had purchased while on a South American port call– an act of Teutonic barbarity that shocked the crew.
Leipzig, meanwhile, came away undamaged.
The Bristol class light cruiser HMS Glasgow. She carried two 6-inch guns, one aft and one forward, as well as 10 4-inch guns, arranged five on each side. IWM (Q 21286)
On 8 December, Glasgow would have a rematch at the Battle of the Falkland Islands where, assisted by the Monmouth-class armored cruiser HMS Cornwall (9,800t, 4×10-inch), her parrot-mourning crew would watch Leipzig battered below the waves. Leipzig in return had hit Glasgow twice, killing a single man and wounding four, and hit Cornwall 18 times, causing a slight list on that bruiser but no casualties.
Only 18 of Leipzig’s nearly 300-member crew were pulled from the freezing water of the South Atlantic.
SMS Leipzig sinking in a painting by William Lionel Wyllie as HMS Cornwall and HMS Glasgow look on
Official wartime caption: “Members of the IX Troop Carrier Command hold a last-minute briefing session before another glider mission in Holland. 2 September 1944.”
U.S. Air Force Number 83086AC, NARA 342-FH-3A26203-83086AC
Note the invasion-striped CG-4 Waco glider behind the group along with the uncensored shoulder patches of the 101st “Screaming Eagles” Airborne Division.
Also seen, on the camo-net-clad M1 helmets of the assembled men, are the “clubs” markings for the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment (GIR).
The 101st’s helmet markings circa 1944:
With a lineage that dates back to the old 82nd “All American” Infantry in the Great War, the 327th was only redesignated as a glider unit and swapped over to the 101st on 15 August 1942.
Moving to Britain in September 1943, they spent eight months getting ready for the Overlord landings but, due to the shortage of C-47s on the early morning of D-Day (the Allied dropped the bulk of three airborne divisions at roughly the same time), the 327th wound up hitting the sand as “leg” infantry with the 4th Infantry Division on Utah Beach on D-Day.
“Hey, Mack, where’s the wings on this thing?” 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, GIs mix with Joes from the 4th Infantry Division aboard an LCT on the way to Tare Green Sector, Utah Beach, Normandy, on D-Day.
Pulled back to England in mid-July to reform (the regiment had suffered over 100 KIAs at Carentan alone) and reequip for future operations, the 327th was placed on alert to glider into France (Operation Transfigure) and Belgium (Operation Limet 1) but both missions were scrapped as rapidly advancing ground forces made them irrelevant.
Glider troops were the “heavy” option for airmobile infantry as they could carry Jeeps, pack artillery, and other items in their Wacos or Horsas that were far too big to fit through the jump door of a C-47. This even trickled down to the squad level, with glider troops carrying M1918 BARs, a platform rarely strapped to the back of a paratrooper.
Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division Load a Jeep Into the Open Nose of a Glider in Preparation for Airborne Landings in Holland, in early September 1944. 111-SC-198683_001
Then came a big lift– Operation Market Garden– in which the 327th finally got the green light to ride their gliders into battle for the first time. Carried into German-occupied Holland over three days, they were tasked with Landing Zone – W, north of Eindhoven.
A glider-dotted area where the First Airborne Army landed, Holland. 18 September 1944. (U.S. Air Force Number 75246AC)
The 327th would spend the rest of the war in heavy combat, earning the name “Bastogne Bulldogs” during the Battle of the Bulge for their tenacity.
The 327th would go on to earn campaign honors for Normandy (with arrowhead), Rhineland (with arrowhead), Ardennes-Alsace, and Central Europe.
The regiment suffered 524 casualties in Normandy, 662 in Holland, and 580 in Bastogne.
Today, two of its battalions (1st BN “Above the Rest” and 2nd BN “No Slack”) are still on active duty with the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne, but prefer UH-60s and CH-47s over gliders.
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Warship Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024: Inadvertent Records
Above we see a great action shot of the late Victorian-era Hermes class protected cruiser HMS Highflyer living up to her name while fighting the Atlantic, circa 1905.
Although a dated design by the time of the Great War, Highflyer still made short work of a faster and larger German auxiliary cruiser some 110 years ago this week.
The Hermes Class
The Admiralty, starting in 1889, began to order several successive batches of “second-class” protected cruisers: rakish steel-hulled steamers capable of 20 or so knots (fast for their age) and, while girded with an internal curved steel armored deck protecting their vital machinery spaces, weren’t meant primarily for fleet-on-fleet action but instead tasked with the role of overseas patrol and protection.
With an armament of 6 and 4.7-inch QF guns and a few torpedo tubes, as well as the ability to land 100 or so Tars armed as light infantry for work ashore, these vessels were seen as capable of keeping the peace against either local rebellions or foreign interlopers short of a battleship during times of peace. In times of war– something not seen against a European power by the Royal Navy since the Crimea– such warships could both capture enemy shipping, using the very gentlemanly “cruiser prize rules” and protect the crown’s own merchantmen from the enemy’s own raiders.
In the short period between just 1889 and 1898, the Royal Navy ordered 38 of these cruisers: 21 Apollo-class (3,600t, 19.75kts, 2×6″, 8×4.7″, 4x 14″ TT), 8 Astraea-class (4,360t, 19.5kts, 2×6″, 8×4.7″, 1x 18″ TT), and 9 Eclipse-class (5,600t, 18.5kts, 5×6″, 6×4.7″, 3x 18″ TT).
Following in the wake of this hectic building spree, the Admiralty ordered a further five vessels in the Estimates of 1896-1901, laid down in five different yards. Repeats of the Eclipse class with a few tweaks, the Hermes (or Highflyer) class were roughly the same size, a little faster, and carried a more homogenous armament of 11 6″/40 (15.2 cm) QF Mark I guns instead of the mixed 6-inch/4.7-inch batteries.
These were arranged in single open mounts, one forward, two aft, and eight arranged in broadside. Armored with a 3-inch thick steel front shield, these mounts were capable of lobbing a 100-pound HE shell to 10,000 yards at a rate of fire of 5-to-7 rounds per minute depending on crew training.
Two 6″/40 (15.2 cm) guns on the aft quarterdeck aft of HMS Hermes.
The 373-foot Hermes/Highflyer class, second-rate protected cruiser HMS Hyacinth pictured c1902. This three-color peacetime livery shows off her waist broadside 6-inchers well.
For countering torpedo boats, these new cruisers would carry nine 3″/40 12pdr 12cwt QF Mk Is and a half-dozen 47mm/40 3pdr Hotchkiss Mk I guns. Their torpedo battery consisted of two 18-inch tubes below the waterline on the beam. Two Maxim machine guns and an 800-pound QF 12-pounder 8 cwt landing gun on a carriage were also carried for the ship’s ashore force.
Carrying 500 tons of Harvey armor, this ranged from 6 inches on the CT to 5 inches over the engine hatches with a 3-inch deck.
Powered by 18 Bellville boilers which drove a pair of 4-cylinder VTEs on two screws, the designed speed was 20 knots with a planned endurance, on 1,100 tons (max load) of good coal, of 3,300nm at 18 knots. On builder’s trials, over an eight-hour course at full power, most beat the 20-knot guideline while, when driving at 30 hours on 3/4 power, still ranged from 17.34 to 19.4 knots. Not bad for the 1900s.
Published builder’s speed trials for 1899, with three of our class, Hermes, Highflyer, and Hyacinth, listed in the middle:
With a 21-foot draft (more when carrying a double load of coal), these cruisers carried a flotilla of small boats including two 36-foot sail pinnaces, a 32-foot steam cutter, a 30-foot gig, and several smaller gigs and whalers as ship-to-shore connectors.
Listed in journals as having a 450-man ship’s company, this size was often larger during peacetime overseas sailing– especially when an RM platoon was embarked– and drastically reduced while in ordinary.
The class consisted of five cruisers: the first flight Hermes, Highflyer, and Hyacinth, then the follow-on modified (with heavier boilers) Challenger and Encounter.
Jane’s 1914 listing for the class.
Meet Highflyer
Our subject is the fourth Royal Navy vessel named Highflyer, a tradition that began with the (brief) capture and reuse of the 5-gun American privateer of that name in 1813 by the HMS Poictiers. The second was a small 2-gun tender while the third was a well-traveled 21-gun wooden-hulled screw frigate that served in the Crimean War and the Second Opium War with time out to bombard the Arab fort at Al Zorah.
Ordered alongside class leader Hermes (Yard No. 401) at Fairfield, Govan, Highflyer was Yard No. 402 and was laid down on 7 June 1897. Launched on 4 June 1898, she was completed on 7 December 1899– the last RN cruiser commissioned in the 19th Century.
Peacetime career
Dispatched to serve as the flagship of RADM Day Bosanquet’s East Indies Station, Highflyer set out in February 1900 for Trincomalee, Ceylon. There she remained for over three years, cruising around the region as directed, and served the same mission for the next East Indies Station commander, RADM Charles Carter Drury.
HMS Highflyer NH 60585
Next came a stint as flag for the North America and West Indies Station, again under RADM Bosanquet until 1908 when she was rotated back to England for drydocking and refit.
HMS Highflyer IWM (Q 42674)
Again deploying overseas, she left for East Indies Station in early 1911 to relieve her sister Hyacinth, and carried the flag of RADM Edmond Slade until April 1913.
Relieved by HMS Swiftsure, Highflyer was sent back to England to join the 3rd Fleet, detailed as a training ship for the new Special Entry Cadet scheme which took lads 17½ to 18½ years of age and gave them up to 18 months of training before sending them to the fleet. Such training meant hours and hours of holystoning decks, chipping and painting bulkheads, polishing brightwork, and drills, drills, drills.
HMS Highflyer IWM (Q 75385)
Her “lucky 13th” skipper, Capt. Henry Tritton Buller, assumed command on 1 July 1913.
Her complement was nearly doubled during this period, as noted by this log entry while at Chatam in late 1913.
She undertook a three-month Med training cruise in the Spring of 1914, roaming to Malta from Devonport with stops at Villefranche, Tangier, Naples, Algiers, and Gibraltar.
War!
With Europe under tension of war, on 13 July 1914 at 0100, Highflyer logged a note to mobilize for fleet service and began receiving Marines and ratings from the Devonport depots and hospital. Three days later, she weighed anchor for Spithead via Bournemouth, leading the Astraea-class protected cruiser HMS Charybdis and class leader HMS Eclipse out to sea.
Putting in at Portsmouth, she soon took on ammunition and coal. With Sarajevo on fire from Austrian shells and the Kaiser sending his troops into Belgium, on 3 August, Highflyer’s complement– augmented by fresh reservists arriving every day– began fuzing lyddite shells and arranging torpedoes.
With the news of war declared against Germany flashed at 23:23 on 4 August, Highflyer made ready to prepare for battle and sortied out into the Channel with the Arrogant-class cruiser HMS Vindictive.
On the morning of the second day of Britain’s war, Highflyer spotted the 13,000-ton Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd liner SS Tubantia and promptly stopped her for inspection. Returning from Buenos Aires with £500,000 in gold destined for German banks, the liner’s steerage berths held 150 German military reservists returning home from South America and a cargo of Argentine grain likewise destined for the Vaterland.
With such a floating violation of neutrality, Highflyer’s prize crew directed the liner to Plymouth with the cruiser closely escorting. Once there on 6 August, Royal Marines escorted the German reservists off while the gold was confiscated– along with her German-bound mail which included bundles of rubber and wool– and taken ashore.
Tubantia, relieved of contraband, was later released and allowed to resume her voyage.
Putting back to sea to patrol the Bay of Biscay for German blockade runners, Highflyer sailed to Gibraltar and, with orders for Cape Verde, it was off the Spanish Northwest African enclave of Río de Oro that she spotted a familiar ship on the morning of 26 August.
The Norddeutscher Lloyd liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, at 24,000 tons and 649 feet overall, was the largest ship in the world when she put to sea in 1897.
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse circa 1897 card by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y. LC-USZ62-69220
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse circa 1897 card by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y. LC-USZ62-69219
Capable of carrying as many as 1,500 passengers, the liner’s Baroque revival decor, overseen by Johann Poppe, can be seen in this view of her smoking cabin, North German Lloyd pamphlet c. 1905. LC-DIG-ppmsca-02202
Size comparison by the Gray Lithograph company for the lines North German Lines of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse with the Trinity Church, the St. Paul Building in New York, the Washington Monument, and the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-50050
One of the fastest ships in the world as well, she twice captured the Blue Riband, sustaining a 22.3 knot Atlantic crossing in 1898.
By July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse caught orders to chop over to the Kaiserliche Marine and, while at Bremerhaven, quickly converted to become an auxiliary cruiser (hilfskreuzer) under the command of Fregattenkapitän Max Reymann. While she had been designed to carry as many as eight 5.9-inch and four 4.7-inch guns as well as up to 14 Spandau machine guns, only four old 4.1-inchers were on hand for the conversion.
Ordered to sea on 4 August to take a route northeast of Iceland, Reymann took his barely converted cruiser to sea, with orders to make for the South Atlantic. He promptly sank three British ships, taking 126 of their crew aboard. Several other ships were stopped but the enemy passenger problem was getting out of hand so Reymann simply disabled their wireless and allowed them to proceed.
KWdG’s brief raiding record:
7 August: trawler Tubal Cain (227 GRT), sunk. 15 August: passenger ship Galician (6,757 GRT), allowed to proceed. 15 August: passenger ship Arlanza (15,044 GRT), allowed to proceed. 16 August: frozen meat freight Kaipara (7,392 GRT) and Nyanga (3,066 GRT), sunk. 16 August: coal steamer Arucas, captured for use as an escort ship with a prize crew.
Needing a breather from the Royal Navy dragnet looking for him, Reymann put into Río de Oro for a couple of days on 17 August to take coal from Arucas and two German ships (Magdeburg and Bethania) sheltering there.
Reymann never got to finish his cruise before Highflyer appeared on the horizon on the 26th in what was, technically, a breach of neutrality.
A series of signals were exchanged between the two ships:
Highflyer: “Surrender.”
Highflyer: “I demand your surrender.”
KWdG: “German warships will not surrender. I request you to respect Spanish neutrality.”
Highflyer: “This is the second time you have been coaling in this harbor, I demand that you surrender; if not, I will open fire on you immediately.”
KWdG: “This is the first time I’m coaling here, and besides, this is a Spanish matter.”
Highflyer: “Surrender immediately.”
KWdG: “I have nothing more to say to you.”
Putting ashore his prisoners and non-combatant complement, Reymann figured the end was near, and, sailing out, Highflyer soon opened up at 1515, with the German replying.
Although KWdG was faster, Highflyer had an excellent position and continued to exchange fire with her larger guns at ranges past 7,500 yards while the artillery duel between the two lasted until 1615 when the German ship ceased fire and, smoking, withdrew behind some sand hills.
Reymann, low on ammunition and with two men dead and zero chance of escaping, smashed his wireless, scuttled his ship (she had rolled on her side by 1710), and put his crew ashore via lifeboats.
The shipless Fregattenkapitän and his men landed on a Saharan beach five miles from the Spanish fort at Villa Cisneros (Al-Dakhla) where they were interred.
Buller, ever the gentleman, attempted to send his own medical teams to help the crew of the German cruiser but recalled them once he determined they were not needed. Highflyer suffered one killed– RJ Lobb, Leading Carpenter’s Crew, ON M.2882– and 10 wounded during the engagement. A prize court would later grant Highflyer’s crew £2,680 for the sinking.
The battle made Highflyer famous, and newspapers around the globe celebrated the fight.
Assuming the flag of the Cape Verde station by October, Highflyer remained on a sharp lookout for German raiders and runners for the next two years without the same sort of brilliant luck she had in the first three weeks of the war. She spent much of this time combing the seas off West Africa, often haunting Sierra Leone and St. Vincent.
By 1917, she was engaged in cross-Atlantic convoy escorts from Halifax to Plymouth as part of the North American Squadron.
May 1917,”S.S. Durham Castle with [S.S.] Ayrshire and HMS Highflyer ahead.” Exterior view from the deck of the SS Durham Castle looking fore at two ships ahead. Lt. Irvine of the RAMC, having just graduated in medicine, was shipping out on the SS Durham Castle to the campaign in German East Africa. The image is from an album chronicling the wartime experiences of Archibald Clive Irvine (1893-1974) in East Africa. During this time he would meet Dr John W Arthur which in turn would lead to his missionary work at Chogoria in Kenya. Acc.12016/1 (reference number), International Mission Photography Archive, ca.1860-ca.1960 (collection), National Library of Scotland (subcollection), NLS DOD ID: 97047298 (file).
It was while at Halifax on 6 December that Highflyer had a ringside seat for the great Halifax explosion when a collision between the relief ship SS Imo and the munitions ship SS Mont Blanc sent the latter sky-high in the world’s largest pre-atomic explosion, killing over 1,900.
With the Mont Blanc ablaze and abandoned by its crew, six volunteers from Highflyer rowed almost a mile across the harbor to the ship to offer assistance. All perished but one when the Mont Blanc’s cargo exploded when the whaler was only 300 feet away.
The survivor, Second Class Able Seaman William Becker, J5841, was propelled 1,600 yards across the harbor by the explosion. Becker swam through the icy water to safety and lived until 1969. He earned an Albert Medal and was entered in the Guinness Book as the “Farthest-Flying Human Projectile (Involuntary).”
From Highflyer’s deck log:
8:40 am: Port watch of stokers landed for route march. 8:45 am: Collision between IMO (Belgian relief ship) and S.S. MONT BLANC (French) . 8:48 am: Fire broke out on MONT BLANC. 8:55 am: Commander Triggs and Lieutenant Ruffles proceeded in whaler to investigate. 9:08 am: Mont Blanc exploded (cargo, ammunition previously unknown) causing large wave and setting Richmond on fire. Damage was done to HIGHFLYER and to most of its boats. The skiff was sent to find the whaler’s crew and picked up Murphy AB who was unconscious and later died. Becker AB was found on the shore, having swum there. No trace of the remainder of the whaler’s crew was found. HIGHFLYER received wounded from other ships, made temporary repairs and cleared debris. The ship had to be unmoored at one point because of the danger from its proximity to the PICTON and the fires. The watch of stokers which had been landed administered first aid on shore. Casualties Killed Jones, Robert DCS 270699 ERA 1st class Kelly, Francis DK 21331 Sto. 1st class Rogers, Edn. Benjamin DK 33240 Sto. 1st class Murphy, Joseph DJ 2308 Able Seaman, [who was picked up in the water] (whaler’s crew) Missing (Whaler’s crew) Triggs, Tom Kenneth Commander Ruffles, James Rayward Lieutenant RNR Rushen, Claude Eggleton LS DCS 234241 Fowling, James Able Seaman DCS 22261 Prewer, Samuel David Able Seaman DCS 236276 Wounded: 2 Slightly Wounded 25 Minor Injuries 20 Several Officers with facial injuries and injured tympanic membranes who carried on with their duties. From other ships: 2 Pte. of Composite Regiment 2 of crew of Tug HILFORD (one, Perrin, Charles died later) 5 from S.S. PICTON 6 from S.S. IMO 3 others injured 55 other survivors, several with minor injuries were accommodated on board
Halifax explosion, with HMS Highflyer shown in the channel, via the Halifax Naval Museum
Repaired at Devonport, Highflyer was sent to Bermuda to serve as a guard and station ship for the first half of 1918 then returned to convoy work, escorting Yanks to Europe. She was off Glasgow on one such run when the Armistice was announced on 11 November.
Late-war she apparently had a dazzle scheme drawn up by British Vorticist (the very English modernist movement that grew out of Cubism) artist Edward Wadsworth who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the Great War.
HMS Highflyer, 1917 dazzle camo, Edward Wadsworth Art.IWM DAZ 37
Following a post-war refit at Devonport, Highflyer was sent once more to assume the role of flagship for the East Indies Station. Hoisting the flag of RADM Hugh H. D. Tothill, she held down the station from July 1919 to January 1921.
Paid off, she was sold for scrap at Bombay on 10 June 1921, at the time, she was the last Victorian-era cruiser in RN service.
Epilogue
The RN has not reissued the name “Highflyer” to another vessel.
However, in a salute to her extensive service on the East Indies Station– which was both her first and last posting– the “stone frigate” of the Royal Navy shore establishment in Trincomalee was named HMS Highflyer from 1943 until 1958 when the dockyard, wireless station, hospital, and headquarters facility was taken over by the Royal Ceylon Navy. I believe the old cruiser’s bell was located there during WWII but I can’t discern if/where it still exists.
Our cruiser is remembered in maritime art.
HMS Highflyer by Alma Claude Burlton Cull 1880-1931
Of her sisters and half-sisters, Hermes was converted to a seaplane carrier in 1913, and sunk on 31 October 1914 by SM U 27.
HMS Hermes, sank after being struck by a torpedo from U-27 on October 31, 1914
Hyacinth spent her Great War career off Africa and assisted in the blockade of the German cruiser SMS Konigsberg there. She was decommissioned in 1919.
HMS Hyacinth listed to increase the range of her 6-inch guns, firing on German positions north of Lukuledi River, Lindi, German East Africa, 11th June 1917.
Near-sisters Challenger and Encounter, the latter in Australian service, spent the Great War off Africa and in the Pacific. While Challenger was broken up in 1920, Encounter would endure as a disarmed depot ship for the Royal Australian Navy throughout the 1920s until she was scuttled in 1932.
Modified Hermes class Challenger class protected cruiser HMAS Encounter IWM (Q 75381)
As for Highflyer’s hard-charging early war skipper, who captured Tubantia and sank Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, Admiral Sir Henry Tritton Buller, G.C.V.O., C.B., went on to command three different battleships and HM yachts before moving to the retired list in 1931. He passed in 1960, aged 86.
Meanwhile, KWdG’s skipper, Max Reymann, released himself from Spanish custody and managed to make it as far as Switzerland before the war ended. The bulk of his crew, some 350 men, were not as lucky and, catching a ride to the U.S. aboard the Spanish steamer Bethania, were intercepted in the Caribbean by the British armored cruiser HMS Essex and spent the rest of their war in a POW camp in Jamacia. Reymann returned to service, was appointed president of the Marinefriedenskommission (Naval Peace Commission) with the post-war Reichsmarine, and retired as a vice admiral in 1923. He passed in 1948, aged 76. He is remembered on the Ehrenrangliste der Kaiserlich Deutschen Marine (list of honorable men of the Imperial German Navy.)
Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, partially salvaged, is still in Rio de Oro, now in Moroccan waters. What is left of her wreck was located in shallow waters in 2013 and can be dived, with the proper permission.
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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Somewhere on what would soon be referred to as the Western Front, we see this impressive period Tournassoud autochrome Lumiere showing soldiers of 3e régiment de Zouaves (3e RZ),37e division d’Afrique, moving to the line in late August 1914 in Belgium, around the time of the Battle of Charleroi.
Soldats du 3e régiment de zouaves (RZ) de la division de Constantine. Réf. : AUL 69 La Divion de Marche Marocaine de l’armée d’Afrique Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud/ECPAD/Défense
1914 – Unknown location A Zouave stops in the countryside and has his meal. Ref.: AUL 77. Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud/ECPAD/Défense
The unit’s flashy full-color “La tenue garance” uniforms were little changed from the 1840s and they would only adopt a more contemporary khaki-yellow field uniform in 1916.
July 20, 1870 – The 3rd Zouave Regiment passes through Place Gutenberg. National and University Library of Strasbourg.
Zouave, circa 1888.
3e régiment de zouaves with their flag. They wore white trousers until after the Boxer Rebellion, turning to red in 1902
3rd Zouaves in 1916. Note the khaki-yellow uniforms, complete with fez.
A Zouave in 1917 marching order. note they still have a fez. “1er-24 juillet 1917 – Vincennes (Val-de-Marne) Un zouave pose avec son équipement militaire habitual. Réf. : SPA 16 W 988. Jacques Ridel/ECPAD/Défense”
Formed in 1842 from volunteers drawn from 23 line regiments and 11 of light infantry, the 3rd Zouaves were a renowned fire-eating unit and spent almost their entire history shouldering rifles for the Empire and Republic.
This included the conquest of Algeria, the Crimean War, the 1859 Italian campaign, the ill-fated Mexican Expedition (earning a Légion d’Honneur in 1863 for their flag), the terrible 1870 war, Hanoi, Tonkin, the Boxer Rebellion Tunisia, Morocco, the list goes on.
By 1914, the regiment was made up of six active battalions (2nd & 4th in Morocco, 1st/3rd/6th in Algeria, 5th in France) and two reserve battalions (11th and 12th, with reservists all over France and North Africa).
Assembled at Sathonay-Camp outside of Lyon just after the Great War began, the 3e RZ marched to war on 16 August with the 1st (which had just been rushed from Algeria via Marseille), the “local” 5th and the hurriedly activated 11th battalion. Arriving at Rimogne in the Ardennes on 16 August, they linked up with the recently-arrived 3e régiment de marche de tirailleurs algériens (3e RMTA), another North African regiment, to form the 37th African Division’s 74th Brigade.
Crossing the border into Belgium with the French Fifth Army (General Charles Lanrezac) on 17 August, the very colorful brigade was at Saint-Gérard on 21 August, fought hard over the next two days in the Battle of Charleroi, advancing as far as Fosses, then retreated to Mettet and Wagnée in the general recoil back towards France which began on the 24th. Tasked to provide a covering force for the division, the Zouaves protected the withdrawal, falling slowly back to Chambry by 31 August.
Picked up and transported to Vauxaillon, the Zouaves were soon deep in the battle for the Marine, where they captured the flag of a Bavarian battalion at Tracy-le-Val on 19 September. In subsequent action on 25 September, they charged and seized a mile of German positions, cataloging 11 artillery pieces, 9 machine guns, and 400 prisoners– not a bad day’s work!
They would finish the war with campaign honors on their flag for Champaign (1915), Verdun (1916), and Moreuil-Noyon (1918), along with a fourragère, a Croix de guerre with 6 palms, and the Legion of Honor, going on to occupy the Rhineland.
Fighting again in WWII, the 3rd Zouaves won additional honors for Le Faid (1943) and on the Danube (1945) for the city of Ulm, then once again occupying Germany– stationed in Berlin, where they would remain until October 1945. Their final honor was added for the 1952-62 fight against AFN in Algeria although it was “Elle ne sera jamais portée sur les soies” (never to be worn on silks).
The 3rd Zouaves were disbanded on 1 November 1962, and its banner was placed in storage on the 14th.
The 7,700-ton Edgar-class protected cruiser HMS Hawke. Commissioned on 16 May 1893, Hawke was the only member of her 9-ship class to be lost in the Great War. IWM Q 39034
Lost in Waters Deep in conjunction with Buchan Divers and the dive vessel Clasina have found what they believe– and hope the Royal Navy will soon confirm– is the resting place of the long-lost Edgar-class protected cruiser HMS Hawke.
Sent to the bottom on 15 October 1914 by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen’s SM U-9about 70 miles east of Fraserburgh in the North Sea, Hawke took 524 souls with her to the bottom.
Only 70 members of her crew survived the sinking.
German artistic impression of the sinking of HMS Hawke by Willy Stoewer 1914
U-9, fresh off sinking the “Live Bait Squadron” armoured cruisers HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, with almost 1,500 men sent to the bottom, left Hawke in much the same condition.
The Edgars were distinctive in the respect that they had two masts, two stacks, and two BL 9.2″/31.5 Mk VI guns– which the LiWD team was able to identify.
HMS Hawke’s 9-inch gun. Photo by Simon Kay
Side Scan image of HMS Hawke. C Max CM2 side scan 75m range 325 kHz
“On the 11th August 2024 a group of very experienced technical divers located and dived the wreck of HMS Hawke in 110m of water,” notes the group. The dive was conducted off the dive vessel Clasina.”
HMS Hawke team on DV Clasina
Reports say the wreck is in amazing condition, with lots of teak decking and Royal Navy crockery intact.
The same expedition also mappedSM U77 (Kptlt. Erich Günzel), which rests nearby. The UE-1 type was lost in July 1916 with all hands while laying mines off Kinnaird Head, Scotland.
Commissioned in 1908, the SMS Augsburg, one of four Kolberg-class light cruisers in the Kaiserliche Marine, had been detailed to train torpedo and gun crews for the High Seas Fleet. Meanwhile, her three sisters, Kolberg, Mainz, and Cöln were assigned to the II Scouting Group and made ready to fight the British once the lights went out in Europe.
Fate being a funny thing, Augsburg was able to get into combat before her sisters when, on the night of 2 August 1914, the second day of the Great War, detailed along with the light cruiser Magdeburg, she bombarded the Russian harbor of Libau (today’s Liepaja, Latvia). She also apparently crossed swords with one of the Tsar’s torpedo boats, with neither suffering any reportable damage.
Augsburg famously wired in the open a series of three messages, which were duly picked up in neutral Sweden and Denmark and repeated worldwide:
“Am bombarding the naval harbor at Libau on the Baltic Sea.”
“Am engaged with enemy’s cruiser.”
“Port Libau is in flames.”
The Russians quickly did damage control, and reported that Libau only suffered minor damage and counterclaimed a heroic torpedo boat had sent Augsburg to the bottom before she could flee into the night.
One of the first naval actions of the war, German artists made sure to flood the market with celebratory martial postcards and pulp illustrations which were duly snapped up and kept for generations.
To be sure, each embellished the “battle.”
Kreuzer Augsburg beschiesst Libau Magdeburg Wilhelm Jonas
Kreuzer Augsburg beschiesst Libau Magdeburg Hans Bohrdt
Note that she now only has two large funnels rather than three thin ones, and sports a profile more akin to a Nassau-class battleship
Kreuzer Augsburg beschiesst Libau Magdeburg, Harry Heusser
Kleinen Kreuzer SMS AUGSBURG. Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges 1914-15
Kreuzer Augsburg beschiesst Libau, C Schon, Berlin August 1914
Der Krieg 1914-19 in Wort und Bild, published 1919,
Moving past her minor engagement at Libau, Augsburg held on to her luck. While she was reported sunk at least two other times by the Russians in the course of the war, and two of her sisters (Cöln and Mainz) actually were sent to the bottom by the Royal Navy, the postcard hero survived the war, albeit flying a red flag for the last few weeks of it.
Post-Versailles, Augsburg was awarded to Japan as a war prize ship “Y” but the Emperor had no use for her and she was immediately sold for scrap, never leaving Europe.
Self-portraits from an Austrian Army feldpost letter from 28-year-old LT Erwin Schrödinger to his cousin Hugo Hinterberger, dated 23 February 1916.
The Austrian theoretical physicist, who earned his doctorate in 1910 from the University of Vienna, had, as no surprise for a math whiz, trained as a reserve artillery officer before the Great War and was called to rejoin his regiment on 31 July 1914 at a point when the war only contained Serbia and Austro-Hungary.
Assigned to assorted fortress artillery units, by July 1915 he was dispatched to join a scratch battery of naval artillery guns being deployed in the mountains around Gorizia (Görz), a key stronghold during the assorted Battles of the Isonzo in the KuK’s fight against the Italians.
Needing more artillery along the Isonzo front– and suffering losses of hundreds of its precious howitzers and morsers to the Russians in Galicia– the Austrians stripped a series of Krupp/Skoda 15 cm/40 (5.9″) L/40 K94/K96 naval guns from assorted old coastal defense ships, armored cruisers, and pre-dreadnoughts and 12 cm/45 Škoda guns from river monitors and schlepped them to the mountains via tractor, truck, and sled where they would be emplaced in wooden batteries as needed.
Marinebatterie 15 cm kuk ONB 10CACED9
Marinebatterie 15 cm kuk ONB 10CACEE2
Ein schweres Marinegeschütz wird mit Schlitten auf das Nassfeld gefördert kuk ONB 10D3F0FA
Austrian kuk Navy 15 cm L40 Marinegeschütz auf der Straniger Alm, 1916.
Ein schweres Marinegeschütz in Feuerstellung kuk ONB 10D3F110
Marine Batterien 15cm Marine-Geschütz L40 auf der Rattendorfer-Alpe, 02.05.1917 kuk Austran Marines ONB 10EE7FCD
After being decorated for combat with the Marinebatterien, Schrödinger by 1917 was assigned to a battery near Prosecco, a fairly safe village near the city of Trieste, and finished the war in an even quieter post in Vienna, much to his joy, noting it was “a great advantage because I was not affected by the disastrous backflow of that frayed frontline.”
Hanging up his uniform, he was then able to turn to more serious scientific matters post-1918 and soon moved on to a professorship as the chair for theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. By 1933, the whole world knew who he was.
