Second bombardment of Funchal

On the morning of 12 December 1917 the German submarine U-156 shelled Funchal, the capital of Portuguese Madeira. It came almost exactly a year after the first attack on the town, when on 3 December 1916 U-38 sank three Allied ships in the roadstead and then shelled the port and the town. On that occasion nobody in the town itself was killed. This time the bombardment lasted only about 20 minutes, but the shells killed several residents.

The U-cruiser

U-156 belonged to a new series of large U-cruisers, originally designed as merchant submarines for voyages to America, like Deutschland, which as U-155 shelled Ponta Delgada in July in the Azores. The boat was commissioned in August 1917. It was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Konrad Gansser, who had earlier been successful in U-33. According to the operational order preserved in the German military archive, U-156 was to attack shipping on the routes of the north-eastern Atlantic from 17 November 1917 to 10 March 1918, including the Azores, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands and the African coast as far as Dakar. The cruise went badly, however. Strong winds and rough seas hampered the hunt, and Gansser sank his first prize, the Canadian fishing schooner W. C. McKay, only on 7 December.

The bombardment

According to U-156’s war diary, studied by the German historian Mathias Saecker, the boat arrived off Madeira at two in the morning. The town was brightly lit right up to the high mountains. Between two and five U-156 approached to within a mile of the shore, but no ship lay in the roadstead. Since the Allies had begun sailing ships in convoys, they called at Funchal less often, and two Portuguese steamers expected that day had not yet arrived. Gansser therefore moved further from the shore to take up a good firing position at dawn. According to his notes, at 6.18 a.m. the São Tiago fort opened fire, and a minute later the boat began shelling the forts and the town. At 6.38 a.m., after firing 52 shells, it broke off the action.

Portuguese sources describe it somewhat differently. According to the local daily Diário de Notícias, the boat was spotted at about four in the morning by a fisherman, António Vieira. The first to open fire was the armed patrol boat Dekade I, which fired about 40 rounds, and then a second, Mariano de Carvalho, joined in. The shore batteries held their fire so as not to hit their own boats, and by the time these had moved out of the line of fire, the submarine was already out of range of the forts’ guns. The patrol boats came out of the action without loss.

Victims and consequences

The shells fell in various parts of the town, most densely in the centre. According to Saecker, who relies on the press and on documents from the regional archive of Madeira, five civilians were killed and more than 30 wounded. Other accounts speak of three killed and 17 wounded. The most notorious hit struck the church of the Santa Clara convent. A shell struck the dome over the crossing during Mass. Fragments wounded the celebrating priest, Abel da Silva Branco, the sacristan and two members of the congregation, one of whom soon died.

Panic seized the inhabitants and many families fled to the outskirts. The military authorities ordered houses blacked out and the lighting in the town and its surroundings extinguished. That same day the island’s military commander telegraphed Lisbon asking for a destroyer to be sent. The government promised help but, preoccupied with the consequences of the coup d’état of a few days earlier, did not provide it for a long time. At the request of the United States consul on Madeira, a destroyer from the American naval division stationed in the Azores was sent to the waters around the island.

Gansser himself did not return to Funchal. Because of the bad weather he moved to the routes south of the Canary Islands. The German command was not pleased with his action. In April 1918 the Admiralstab noted in the boat’s war diary that the bombardment of Funchal had been “completely useless” and had merely betrayed the presence of a U-cruiser. From then on such bombardments, unless combined with an attack on ships in a roadstead, were in principle forbidden.