Attack on the submarine E13

On the morning of 19 August 1915 two German torpedo boats, G 132 and G 134, opened fire on the British submarine E13, which a few hours earlier had run aground off the Danish island of Saltholm in the Sound, between Copenhagen and Malmö. The submarine lay in the territorial waters of neutral Denmark, with Danish torpedo boats keeping watch beside her. Fifteen British sailors were killed.

Aground off Saltholm

E13, under Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Layton, and her sister boat E8 sailed from Harwich in mid-August to reinforce the British submarines in the Baltic. The Russians had asked for help, because the German fleet was just then forcing its way into the Gulf of Riga. The passage through the shallow Sound, watched by German patrols, was the most difficult part of the journey. E8 got through safely. On E13, on the night of 18–19 August, according to the British official history shortly after 11 p.m., the compass failed and the boat ran onto the shallows at the south-eastern edge of the Saltholm flat. The crew tried all night to get her off, without success.

At about 5 a.m. the Danish torpedo boat Narhvalen came up. Her commander informed Layton that, under the rules of neutrality, he had 24 hours to leave Danish waters, or the boat and her crew would be interned. The Danes could not give assistance, but they promised a guard. One of the British officers was taken to a Danish guard ship to agree on what to do next. In the morning three Danish torpedo boats took station beside E13. The stranded submarine was also spotted by the German torpedo boat G 132, patrolling the Sound from the south, which reported it by wireless. Rear-Admiral Robert Mischke, in command of German coastal defence, gave the order to destroy the boat. According to the German official history he feared that E13 might at any moment free herself and slip into the Baltic, where the operation in the Gulf of Riga was under way, and that same morning a British submarine had torpedoed the battlecruiser Moltke there.

The shelling

According to Danish accounts, at about 10.30 a.m. local time G 132 and G 134 came up at high speed from the south. G 132, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Paul Graf von Montgelas, hoisted a signal ordering the crew to abandon ship and almost immediately fired a torpedo. It struck the bottom beside E13 and did her no harm. At the same time the torpedo boats opened fire with their guns from a range of a few hundred metres. The submarine burst into flames, and poisonous chlorine began to escape from her damaged batteries. Layton ordered the crew to jump into the water and swim to the shore or to the Danish boats. According to the British official history and Layton’s account, the Germans also fired on the men in the water with machine guns and shrapnel. The firing stopped when the Danish torpedo boat Søulven steamed in between the Germans and the survivors. The German torpedo boats made off to the south. The whole encounter lasted only a few minutes.

The German official history gives a different account. It claims that the British did not obey the order to abandon ship and returned fire when the torpedo was launched, and it rejects the charge of firing on men in the water.

The dead and the interned

The Danes picked up 14 survivors, among them Layton. The same day they recovered the bodies of 14 dead, and a few days later the fifteenth. The survivors were interned in Copenhagen. Layton and his first lieutenant later escaped from internment and returned to Britain. The dead were taken with military honours aboard the steamer Vidar to Hull, escorted by Danish torpedo boats. The Danes pulled the wreck of E13 off the shallows and towed it to Copenhagen. After the war it was broken up.

The attack on a defenceless vessel in neutral waters caused outrage in Britain and Denmark. The British official history later wrote of a crime “committed in cold blood”. The Danish government protested in Berlin, and Germany expressed regret and gave assurances that ship commanders had again been reminded of their duty to respect neutrality. The Danish navy had troubles of its own: its ships, although they had been ordered to protect the British boat, did not use their weapons, and the accounts of Danish officers as to whether their ships did all they could differ from one another.