Execution of Captain Fryatt

On 27 July 1916, in the town hall of Bruges in occupied Belgium, a field court martial of the German Marine Corps sentenced the British merchant navy captain Charles Fryatt to death. It found him guilty of having tried in March 1915, as a civilian who did not belong to the armed forces, to ram and destroy a German submarine. That same evening, at about seven, a firing squad shot him in Bruges. The sentence was carried out within a few hours of being pronounced. The captain’s family in England believed at the time that he was safe in an internment camp.

The captain from Harwich

Fryatt was born in 1872 in Southampton, but grew up in Harwich, a port on the North Sea. From 1892 he sailed on the ships of the Great Eastern Railway, which ran regular ferry services from Harwich to the Netherlands and Belgium. He rose in its service to the rank of captain. The line to the Netherlands kept running despite the war, although it passed close to the coast of German-occupied Belgium, from which German torpedo boats and submarines put to sea.

In the spring of 1915 Fryatt twice escaped from U-boats. At the beginning of March, in command of the Wrexham, he ran from a submarine, having the boilers stoked so hard that the ship reached Rotterdam with scorched funnels. On 28 March, the same day that U-28 sank the passenger ship Falaba, Fryatt was taking the steamer Brussels near the Dutch coast. The surfaced German submarine U-33 ordered him to stop. Fryatt judged that turning either way would expose the ship to a torpedo, and steamed at full speed straight at the submarine, which had to dive. The Brussels escaped. The instructions of the British Admiralty at the time recommended exactly this manoeuvre to merchant captains, and the Admiralty rewarded Fryatt with a gold watch bearing an engraved inscription. British newspapers wrote about his deed, and he was also praised in the House of Commons.

In German hands

On 23 June 1916 the Brussels sailed by night from Hook of Holland for Harwich with a cargo of food, mail and Belgian refugees on board. According to the crew’s account someone was signalling with lights from the Dutch shore, and soon the ship was surrounded by five German torpedo boats. Fryatt ordered the passengers to prepare to take their places in the boats and the first officer to burn the secret papers. The Germans boarded, destroyed the wireless and took the ship to Zeebrugge, and then along the canal to Bruges. The crew were sent to the camp for interned civilians at Ruhleben near Berlin. After a few days, however, Fryatt and the first officer, William Hartnell, were sent back to Bruges and interrogated about the submarine Fryatt had supposedly sunk. The evidence against him was chiefly the Admiralty watch and articles from British newspapers of March and April 1915. In reality U-33 had not sunk. It was then operating in the Black Sea, where in March 1916 it sank the Russian hospital ship Portugal.

Trial and sentence

The trial before the field court of the German Marine Corps lasted one day. According to Hartnell, who was in the courtroom with several sailors from the Brussels, the accused was given a defence counsel only during the hearing, and two officers who were said to have served on U-33 drew the positions of the two vessels on a blackboard. The court found Fryatt to be a franc-tireur, that is a civilian who had unlawfully taken up arms against the armed forces, and sentenced him to death. According to some sources the sentence was confirmed by the Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Fryatt expected to be executed the next morning, but at half past six in the evening he was told that he would be shot in half an hour. According to Hartnell, at seven o’clock a volley of sixteen rifles rang out.

A proclamation in three languages, German, Dutch and French, was signed by Admiral Ludwig von Schröder, commander of the Marine Corps in Flanders. It stated that the English merchant captain Charles Fryatt, although not a member of the enemy’s armed forces, had on 28 March 1915 attempted to destroy a German submarine by ramming it. It ended with the sentence: “This ruthless deed has thus been avenged, belatedly but justly.” The Germans argued that the laws of war allowed only soldiers and naval personnel to fight, and that a civilian who attacked a warship forfeited the protection due to a prisoner of war.

Outrage

In Britain the execution caused a storm comparable to the one that broke out after the shooting of Edith Cavell. The British replied that a captain defending his ship from being sunk was not a guerrilla, and that German submarines themselves broke the law by sinking ships without warning. A few days later the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, called Fryatt’s death in the House of Commons a murder and an atrocious crime against the law of nations, and the government announced that those responsible would be punished after the war. The press in neutral countries, in the United States and the Netherlands, also wrote sharply.

The dispute over whether the sentence was lawful continued after the war. In 1919 a German commission investigating breaches of international law found that the sentence had not violated it, though it regretted the haste with which it had been carried out. Two of its members, including Eduard Bernstein, nevertheless called it judicial murder. In July 1919 Fryatt’s body was brought back to England. After a service in St Paul’s Cathedral in London he was buried at Dovercourt near Harwich.