German destroyer raid off the Suffolk coast

On the night of 26 November 1916 more than a dozen German destroyers, large torpedo boats in German nomenclature, approached the east coast of England in the county of Suffolk, off the small town of Aldeburgh. They stopped a Dutch steamer, sank the British armed trawler Narval and withdrew before anyone could intercept them. The British chronology of the war calls this action the second German raid on Lowestoft, alluding to the bombardment of the town by battlecruisers in April 1916. In reality Lowestoft itself was not attacked this time. According to the British Naval Staff Monograph on home waters in the second half of 1916, the Germans operated several dozen kilometres south of it, at the entrance to the waters leading to Harwich.

Since October two flotillas of German destroyers sent from the High Seas Fleet had been based in the Belgian ports. On the night of 26/27 October they raided the barrage in the Strait of Dover and sank several British vessels. Afterwards the Germans acted more cautiously. On the night of 23/24 November 13 ships of the 9th Flotilla, commanded by Commander Goehle, were to attack shipping in the Downs anchorage off the coast of Kent and shell Ramsgate. When, however, they encountered patrolling drifters, they fired on them, loosed off a few rounds towards Margate and turned back. The British official history of the war at sea describes this sortie as a “very cautious attempt”.

Three days later the 9th Flotilla put out again, this time to the north. At about 10.30 p.m. on 26 November the German ships stopped the Dutch steamer Beijerland about 10 miles north of the Shipwash lightship and took her pilot off as a prisoner. The Dutch counted 12 destroyers. A quarter of an hour later they saw one of the ships sink an unknown vessel by gunfire half a mile from them. It was the armed trawler Narval, which was sailing from Grimsby to Harwich. At 11.45 p.m. the station at Aldeburgh reported that half an hour earlier firing had been heard eight miles offshore. After midnight Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt came out of Harwich with the cruisers Centaur and Carysfort and three destroyers, but found no one. The next day a boat from Narval was found nearby.

For a long time the British did not know what had happened to the trawler’s crew. A communiqué from Berlin of 28 November stated that a vessel had been sunk and her crew taken prisoner, but only on 8 December did word come that the whole crew of Narval had been taken to the internment camp at Ruhleben near Berlin. The British staff monograph admits that little is known about the raid itself, although the Germans came within five miles of the coast and thirty miles of Harwich. They did not come out of it unscathed either: according to German sources two ships, V30 and S34, collided in the dark and were seriously damaged. On 30 November the rest of the 9th Flotilla returned to Germany. The raid had little military significance, but it showed that German light craft from Flanders could approach the English coast unseen at night far to the north of the Strait of Dover.