Bombardment of Funchal

On Sunday 3 December 1916, at about 8.30 a.m., the German submarine U-38 attacked the ships lying in the roads of Funchal, capital of Portuguese Madeira. Within a few minutes she sank three Allied vessels and a coal barge with torpedoes, then surfaced and shelled the town for nearly two hours. It was the German navy’s first attack on the territory of Portugal, with which Germany had been at war since March.

Why Madeira

Funchal lay at a crossroads of Atlantic routes, and Allied warships had used it since the beginning of the war. After Portugal entered the war, the British cruisers patrolling the central Atlantic could coal there freely. The port, however, had neither anti-torpedo nets nor any real defence: the harbour authority had three armed yachts, and on land there were two batteries, at the São Tiago fort and in the Quinta da Vigia park. The British official history of the war at sea admits that when, in the autumn of 1916, German submarines of a new type began to sail as far as the coast of America, the open roadsteads of Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands ceased to be fit anchorages, and the command of the British squadron moved to Sierra Leone.

U-38 was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Max Valentiner, one of the most successful German submarine commanders. It was he who a year earlier had sunk the liner Ancona. The boat had left the Austro-Hungarian base at Cattaro, slipped past Gibraltar into the Atlantic and headed south. A week earlier, off the coast of Portugal, another German submarine had sunk the French battleship Suffren.

Attack on the roads

In his memoirs Valentiner wrote that he had hoped to find a British squadron but found only a few ships in port. In the roads lay the French gunboat Surprise, which half an hour earlier had escorted into port the British cable ship Dacia, which was working on the submarine cables between Casablanca and Dakar. Nearby lay the French Kanguroo, a ship built to transport submarines, which had been repairing her engines at Funchal since 24 November. There was also a neutral American yacht, which Valentiner left alone.

The first torpedo struck Surprise amidships, probably in her magazine. The gunboat broke in two and sank in less than a minute, dragging down with her the barge moored alongside from which she was taking on coal. Further torpedoes hit Dacia and Kanguroo. The crews of both ships managed to abandon them. Before she sank, the commander of Kanguroo fired some 25 rounds at the submarine from her bow gun. Part of the crew of Surprise was killed, including her commander, as were Portuguese workers from the barge. The figures differ by source: Portuguese studies speak of 33 sailors of the foreign crews and eight Portuguese, French ones of 34 French dead.

Shelling the town

After sinking the ships, U-38 surfaced about two miles from the shore and shelled the town with her deck gun. According to Portuguese sources she fired about 50 rounds and kept firing until roughly 11 a.m. Her targets were the batteries at the São Tiago fort and at Quinta da Vigia, the submarine cable station and the power station. Several shells hit houses, including the offices of the Blandy firm, which handled the coal trade in the port, and a pavilion in the municipal garden, but no one in the town was killed. The batteries replied with more than 50 rounds, but the boat stayed out of their range and was not hit.

Panic broke out in Funchal. Many families fled to the hills above the town, shops closed early, and at night the army patrolled the streets. According to Portuguese sources U-38 returned off Madeira on 16 December and shelled the town again, this time without much damage. At the end of December Lisbon sent an auxiliary cruiser to the island with reinforcements and nine guns. On 26 December Valentiner received the Pour le Mérite. The people of Funchal raised a monument to the victims of the attack in the cemetery, unveiled on the first anniversary of the attack. Nine days later, on 12 December 1917, Funchal was shelled again by a German submarine, this time U-156.