Destroyer action off Dunkirk

On the night of 20–21 March 1918 German destroyers and torpedo boats of the Flanders flotilla left their bases in occupied Belgium to bombard the coast between Dunkirk and the front on the Yser. At about 3.45 a.m. heavy firing was seen and heard in Dunkirk from the direction of the sea. The bombardment was brief, and as the Germans were turning back to their bases, they were intercepted by Allied destroyers lying in Dunkirk roads. In a short night action these sank two small German torpedo boats, while the British flotilla leader HMS Botha was torpedoed in the confusion by a French destroyer. At the same time, at 4.40 a.m., more than a hundred kilometres to the south, the great German offensive on the Somme began.

The plan of the raid

According to Henry Newbolt’s British official history of the naval war, the commander of the German flotilla in Flanders issued the order for the operation on 18 March. Its target was the railway line from Dunkirk to Nieuport, which over a long stretch runs close to the sea and supplied the front in Flanders. The ships were to operate in three groups: the first was to shell rail traffic east of Dunkirk, the second the stretch near Bray-Dunes, and the third De Panne and Adinkerke. The small torpedo boats A 4 and A 9, and A 19 (PL) and A 7 (PL), were to mark the firing positions on the shoals. Newbolt regarded the raid as a complement to the offensive on land and stressed that in the Admiralty’s assessment it was the only attempt by German naval forces in that area to support it. R. P. P. Rowe’s British chronicle of the war of 1920 wrote of 18 German destroyers. More recent accounts speak of a dozen or more destroyers and large torpedo boats and a few small torpedo boats.

That night the command at Dunkirk sent some of its destroyers to patrol the mine barrage in the Strait of Dover, where less than five weeks earlier the Germans had smashed the drifter patrol. Lying ready in Dunkirk roads were Botha and the destroyer Morris, and the French destroyers Capitaine Mehl, Magon and Bouclier. Off the beaches near De Panne, where a German landing was feared, two monitors were at anchor, among them Terror with two 381 mm guns, and the French torpedo boat Oriflamme.

Fighting in the dark

When firing was heard in Dunkirk, the commander of Botha, Commander R. L’E. M. Rede, ordered star shells to be fired, but saw nothing. The captain of Terror was luckier: his star shells revealed three or four large destroyers. The monitor opened fire on them. Botha and the destroyers with her weighed anchor and set off towards the enemy. At 4.35 a.m. Rede sighted five German destroyers, and behind them two small torpedo boats, which had weighed anchor in haste and could not keep up with the rest. After about ten minutes of exchanging fire a shell hit Botha in a boiler room and the ship began to lose speed. Rede fired two torpedoes, then closed the German line and rammed A 19, cutting her in two. He also tried to ram A 7, but missed and fired on her at close range with his after guns. The German destroyers laid a smoke screen and the Allied ships lost touch with one another.

In the action Botha’s electric cables were cut and her recognition lights went out. The commander of Capitaine Mehl, Captain de Parseval, saw on his starboard side a large destroyer steaming without lights. He himself thought it was Botha, but the officer at the torpedo tube took her for an enemy ship and fired a torpedo. It hit Botha in the after boiler room and the ship stopped. The French destroyers sank A 7 by gunfire. The disabled Botha was taken in tow by Morris and brought back to Dunkirk under French cover. The German destroyers escaped. Just after five in the morning, off Ostend, they were attacked once more by the British coastal motor boat (PL) CMB 20 of Lieutenant Willett. Her crew believed they had hit one of the destroyers, but no German destroyer was sunk that night.

Outcome

The Germans lost two small coastal torpedo boats, each of about 130 tons displacement. According to some sources several dozen men died in them. In Botha 13 sailors were killed, most of them stokers from the boiler rooms. Early British accounts greatly exaggerated the success. Rowe’s chronicle wrote of three German destroyers sunk and one damaged, and a popular book on the Dover Patrol published in 1919 even of four ships destroyed. Newbolt, who already had access to the German orders, called the whole German raid short and fruitless. The Allies, however, paid for their success with a badly damaged flotilla leader, hit by their own ally.