E19 attacks the steamer Svionia

Late in the afternoon of 3 October 1915 the British submarine E19, commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Francis Cromie, stopped the German steamer Svionia off the coast of Rügen. The ship was sailing in ballast from Stettin to Sweden. The crew had to take to the boats, and the abandoned steamer ran aground on rocks below the cliffs of the Jasmund peninsula, not far from Sassnitz. It was the beginning of the British war on German merchant shipping in the Baltic.

The British chronology of the war, published in 1918 by the Ministry of Information, records under this date the sinking of the ship “Livonia” by a British submarine in the Baltic and calls it the first such sinking of a German merchant ship. No ship of that name, however, is mentioned in either German or British sources from those days. It is almost certainly the Svionia. On 4 October London agencies reported, citing dispatches from Amsterdam and Copenhagen, that a British submarine had attacked the steamer Svionia of Stettin in the Baltic. The German official history of the war in the Baltic describes the same attack on the evening of 3 October, and in 1936 a German Pomeranian monthly quoted an entry from E19’s log: “3 October, 4.30 p.m., off Rügen stopped steamer Svionia, crew released”.

The attack off Rügen

The Svionia was a steamer of about 2,800 gross register tons, built in 1895 in England, at South Shields. She belonged to the Stettin shipping firm Kunstmann. According to the German official history the submarine ordered her to stop, and when the captain tried to escape, it opened fire. The crew took to the boats. Cromie recorded that after the shelling he fired two more torpedoes, but one did not leave the tube and the other passed under the hull. The abandoned Svionia drifted towards the shore and ran aground on the rocks at the foot of the Königsstuhl, Rügen’s most famous chalk cliff.

Berlin accused the British of breaking the rules of naval warfare. The semi-official Overseas News Agency claimed that the submarine had fired without warning, having first hoisted the German flag and only then the British one. The log and the German official history show, however, that Cromie kept to the prize rules observed by British submarines in the Baltic: they stopped a ship, ordered the crew to abandon her and only then tried to destroy her. According to the first reports from Amsterdam, ten sailors landed on the shore and the rest were rowing to Sassnitz in the boats.

Submarines on the ore routes

E19 had got into the Baltic in September 1915, the last of five British submarines to succeed in passing through the Danish straits. The first two, E1 and E9, had arrived there in the autumn of 1914, and in the summer they attacked German warships, as shown by the torpedoing of the battlecruiser Moltke in August. Now, operating from Reval (Tallinn), the British commanders were given a new task: to cut off supplies of Swedish iron ore, without which German war industry could not do. The day before the attack on the Svionia, Cromie’s boat exchanged fire with the German auxiliary cruiser Silvana near Gedser in Denmark. The Germans then searched for it with torpedo boats, minesweepers and even an airship and an aeroplane, but without success.

The claim of the “first” ship needs qualifying. The Svionia did not sink, but ran aground. As early as May 1915, according to the British official history, E9 had torpedoed a German transport returning from Libau, and the German official history calls the Svionia and the steamer Margarethe, sunk by gunfire by E8 two days later, the first losses of German shipping “since last winter”. Both attacks, however, caused great alarm on the German coast. Shipowners kept their ships in port, and the ferries from Sassnitz to Trelleborg in Sweden and from Warnemünde to Gedser stopped running until the navy decided there was no reason for a complete halt to traffic. A week later E19 sank several German ore carriers off Öland in a single day.

The wreck of the Svionia remained stuck among the rocks below Jasmund for years. In 1918–1919 attempts were made to dredge the bottom around her and pull her into deep water, but in 1919 the ship caught fire for unexplained reasons. Her remains could still be seen from the shore in the 1930s.