Scuttling of British submarines at Helsinki

In the first days of April 1918 British sailors took their submarines out of the harbour at Helsinki and scuttled them in deep water off the city, near the Harmaja (Gråhara) lighthouse. Seven boats went to the bottom: E1, E8, E9, E19, C26, C27 and C35, and with them the flotilla’s supply ships, including the Cicero. Thus ended the activity of the British submarine flotilla in the Baltic. The British chronology of the war places the scuttling on the night of 3–4 April. According to the dates given for the individual boats, however, the operation lasted several days: E1, E9 and E19 were scuttled on 3 April, E8 and C26 on 4 April, and C27 and C35 a day later. Some works give 8 April for E19.

A flotilla without a war

The first British submarines broke through into the Baltic in October 1914. Others came through the Sound in 1915, and four smaller C-class boats were carried on barges via Archangel and the Russian rivers. The flotilla, placed under the Russian Baltic Fleet and based mainly at Tallinn (Reval), hunted German warships and the steamers carrying iron ore from Sweden. The most famous of its commanders was Francis Cromie, who in E19 sank the cruiser Undine. The flotilla lost several boats along the way: E13 ran aground in the Sound in 1915 and was destroyed by the Germans, E18 went missing in 1916, and C32 was lost in the autumn of 1917 during the German operation in the Gulf of Riga.

After the October Revolution and the armistice on the Eastern Front the British practically stopped fighting. Cromie, promoted to captain, became naval attaché at the British embassy in Petrograd in October 1917, but remained responsible for the fate of the flotilla. In the winter of 1917/1918 the boats were moved to Helsinki, where part of the Russian fleet also lay. In February 1918 the Germans occupied Tallinn, and on 3 March Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Among other things, it obliged Russia to withdraw its fleet from Finnish ports. The British boats were not bound by the Russo-German agreements, but they could no longer sail anywhere: the Gulf of Finland was icebound, and the way to the North Sea was blocked by German warships and minefields.

The last voyage

The fate of the flotilla was sealed by the landing of the Baltic Division at Hanko on 3 April. From Hanko the Germans were to march straight on Helsinki, and the Reds, who then ruled the city, were unable to stop them. The boats could therefore be neither defended nor evacuated. According to Russian works, an icebreaker led them out of the harbour, and Cromie himself directed the operation. The crews scuttled the boats about one and a half nautical miles from the Harmaja lighthouse. The same day Russian sailors set fire to and scuttled four Russian submarines lying in the harbour at Hanko. Henry Newbolt’s British official history of the naval war lists seven submarines “blown up at Helsingfors” among the Royal Navy’s losses in 1918.

The crews were taken to Petrograd and from there by rail to Murmansk, where some of the sailors later took part in the Allied intervention in North Russia. Cromie stayed in Petrograd as attaché. He was killed on 31 August 1918 defending the embassy against a Cheka detachment. The Germans entered Helsinki less than two weeks after the flotilla was scuttled. The wrecks lay on the seabed for decades. According to Finnish sources, in 1953 they were raised and cut up for scrap.