E1 torpedoes the battlecruiser Moltke

On the morning of 19 August 1915 the British submarine E1, commanded by Noel Laurence, torpedoed the German battlecruiser Moltke in the Baltic Sea, west of the island of Ösel. She was one of the most valuable ships of the German fleet and the largest that a British submarine had hit in the Baltic up to that day.

Moltke belonged to the squadron of Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper, which with battlecruisers and dreadnoughts was covering the German incursion into the Gulf of Riga from the open sea. That same morning, after three days of minesweeping in the Irben Strait, two German dreadnoughts with cruisers and torpedo boats set off into the gulf. Hipper’s task was to intercept the Russian fleet if it came out of the Gulf of Finland to help. The Russians, however, sent no larger ships against the Germans, only submarines, including two British ones, E1 and E9, which had broken into the Baltic in the autumn of 1914. According to the British official history, for several days they were unable to get into position to attack, because the German ships were zigzagging, under a dense screen of torpedo boats, and the weather was misty.

On 19 August Laurence finally found himself within range of the battlecruisers steaming in line. He fired a torpedo and at once went deeper, narrowly avoiding being rammed by one of the screening torpedo boats. Hunted, he could not repeat the attack and did not see what he had hit. According to the German official history, the torpedo’s track was spotted 200 metres from the flagship Seydlitz. The torpedo passed ahead of her bow and hit Moltke, following astern, which had already begun to turn away. In the rough water its track was noticed only right by the side, too late to evade.

The torpedo struck the bow, in the area of the bow torpedo room. Eight sailors were killed and, according to various figures, more than 400 tons of water flooded into the ship. The torpedoes stored in the compartment did not explode. Moltke, commanded by Captain Magnus von Levetzow, kept up the squadron’s speed, but Hipper at once took the battlecruisers to Putzig Bay and Danzig to examine the damage. The ship was then repaired at the Blohm & Voss yard in Hamburg, roughly from 23 August to 20 September.

The hit did not decide the fate of the operation, but it reminded the Germans how vulnerable their largest ships were in waters where British submarines were operating. In July E9 had torpedoed the armoured cruiser Prinz Adalbert, and now E1 had hit a ship much larger and more valuable. The British official history suggests that the presence of British submarines may have contributed to the calling off of the German operation in the Gulf of Riga, which did indeed end two days later. German sources, however, give the exhaustion of the minesweepers and the shortage of coal as the main reasons. For his actions in the Baltic Laurence received the British Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Russian Order of St George. On the same day another British submarine, E13, on her way to the Baltic as reinforcement, was destroyed by the Germans while aground off the coast of Denmark.