Second Ostend raid

On the night of 9/10 May 1918 ships of the British Dover Patrol tried for a second time to close the exit from Ostend to the Germans. It was one of the two ports through which submarines and torpedo boats from Bruges put to sea. This time the blockship was the old cruiser Vindictive, which two and a half weeks earlier had come alongside the mole at Zeebrugge. In thick fog and under fire from German batteries the ship entered between the piers and was scuttled by her own crew, but she settled at an angle to the axis of the channel and closed only part of the passage. The British lost several dozen killed, wounded and missing, and three Victoria Crosses were awarded for the night.

A second attempt

On St George’s night, 23 April, two blockships sank in the channel at Zeebrugge, but off Ostend Brilliant and Sirius passed a buoy the Germans had moved, ran aground far from the entrance and were blown up there. Ostend remained open. Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes reported to the Admiralty immediately afterwards that he wanted to repeat the attempt in four days’ time, this time with the help of Vindictive. Preparations were completed on 27 April, but then the weather broke. Choosing the day was difficult: the blockships had to reach the port at high tide, and the whole expedition had to take place in darkness, of which there was less and less in May. Tidal calculations showed that only the nights from 9 to 14 May were suitable.

The crews of Vindictive and of the second blockship, the old cruiser Sappho, were made up of volunteers, mostly veterans of the failed April attempt. Command of Vindictive went to Commander Alfred Godsal, who had commanded Brilliant on 23 April, and his second in command was Lieutenant Victor Crutchley. The ships’ bow compartments were filled with concrete. The operation off Ostend was again directed by Commodore Hubert Lynes, while Keyes, in the destroyer Warwick, covered it from the sea with a dozen or so destroyers in case German torpedo boats came out of Zeebrugge. Four monitors were to bombard the coastal batteries, coastal motor boats were to torpedo the piers at the harbour entrance and mark the way, and motor launches were to lay a smoke screen and take off the blockships’ crews.

The night of 9/10 May

On 9 May Keyes and Lynes were at Belgian headquarters at De Panne when during the day the wind veered to the north and began to blow from the sea. Both at once drove to Dunkirk, from where Keyes signalled that the expedition would sail that night. After dark the ships left Dunkirk and Dover. From the start not everything went well. Airmen confirmed that the Germans had removed all the buoys on the approach to Ostend, so Lynes had to lay his own light buoy. Shortly after midnight Sappho suffered boiler damage and had to turn back. Lynes decided that in such good weather it was worth going ahead with one blockship, and allowed Godsal to carry on alone.

The monitors and the German batteries began an artillery duel, and the coastal motor boats hit the pier heads, where German machine guns stood, with torpedoes. Then, however, fog rolled in from the sea and, together with the smoke, hid the harbour entrance. Godsal searched for it blindly and once passed it. Only when one of the boats fired a powerful flare were the piers seen from the bridge a few hundred metres off the ship’s side. Vindictive turned towards the entrance and ran into the concentrated fire of all the German batteries. Godsal stepped out of the conning tower to see better and a moment later was killed by a shell that swept away part of the bridge. According to Henry Newbolt’s British official history of the naval war, the helm remained over because there was nobody in the conning tower to give the order, and according to some accounts one of the propellers also failed. Crutchley, who took command, could not place the ship across the channel. Vindictive drove her bow into the shoal by the eastern pier, and the current swung her stern round. Crutchley ordered the charges fired and the ship abandoned. The wreck settled on the bottom at a sharp angle to the axis of the channel.

Of the five motor launches that were to take off the crew, only Lieutenant Geoffrey Drummond’s ML 254 stayed by the cruiser in the fog. A shell killed his second in command, and Drummond himself was badly wounded, but he took 38 men on board, including Crutchley. The overloaded and holed launch barely reached the destroyer Warwick as day was breaking. Behind it came Lieutenant Rowley Bourke’s ML 276, which went back to the wreck several times under fire and picked out of the water Vindictive’s badly wounded navigating officer, Lieutenant John Alleyne, and a few sailors clinging to an upturned boat (accounts speak of two or three). The launch, in which several dozen bullet holes were later counted, left the harbour in tow. On the way back Warwick struck a mine, but stayed afloat and with the help of the destroyer Velox reached Dover.

Losses and consequences

According to the first British figures 8 men were killed, 10 missing and 29 wounded. The Germans lost, according to figures cited in the literature, 3 killed and 8 wounded. On the morning of 10 May the Admiralty announced that the operation had succeeded and that Vindictive had sunk between the piers across the entrance to Ostend. Keyes, who returned to Dover in the afternoon, reported, however, that the wreck blocked at most a third of the channel, and protested against a communiqué that promised more than had been achieved. He immediately began preparing a third attempt. The Victoria Cross was awarded to Crutchley, Drummond and Bourke.

Ostend was not closed. The wreck hampered the movement of larger ships, but smaller vessels, including submarines, passed beside it, and at Zeebrugge the Germans had already dredged a passage beside the sunken blockships. A third attempt was in the end never made, and Bruges served the German Flanders Flotilla until the autumn of 1918, when the Germans withdrew from the Belgian coast. The wreck of Vindictive was raised in August 1920, and her bow was set up in Ostend as a memorial.