Second raid on Ramsgate

In the night of 26–27 April 1917 several German torpedo boats from Flanders, in practice modern destroyers, approached Ramsgate on the coast of Kent from the sea and shelled the town. The British chronology of the war calls this action the second German destroyer raid on Ramsgate. The first had been the raid of 17–18 March, when the Germans shelled Ramsgate and neighbouring Broadstairs. The memoirs of Vice-Admiral Reginald Bacon, commander of the forces at Dover, and the local press date the bombardment to the early hours of 27 April.

After the defeat in the Strait

A week earlier, in the night of 20–21 April, the British flotilla leaders Swift and Broke had sunk two German torpedo boats in the Strait of Dover. After this defeat the ships from Flanders stopped venturing deep into the Strait and looked for easier targets on its fringes. In the night of 24–25 April they shelled Dunkirk and sank the French destroyer Étendard, which was lost with all hands. Two nights later they struck at Ramsgate, the port at the entrance to the Downs anchorage, where ships sailing along the coast to and from London gathered.

The bombardment

The bombardment was brief. According to the Admiralty communiqué, several enemy destroyers opened fire from the sea in the direction of Ramsgate, but the British replied at once and drove the raiders off, although they had managed to fire many shells. According to contemporary communiqués they fired about a hundred shells. The local newspaper, the Thanet Advertiser, later wrote of as many as about three hundred, fired in less than ten minutes. The German ships were engaged by the monitor Marshal Ney, which since 2 April had been serving as guardship at Ramsgate, and by new, recently completed batteries of 6-inch guns on the headlands of North Foreland and Foreness. This time the armed fishing drifters of Ramsgate did not join the fight.

According to the communiqué of the Home Forces command, a man and a woman were killed, and a man and two women were injured. Bacon in his memoirs wrote of two civilians killed and two or three injured. The local press gave the names of the victims: 61-year-old John Hobday was killed in his own home, and a shell that hit the roof of a house in Upper Dumpton Park Drive mortally injured 22-year-old Ivy Thorncroft. Twenty-one houses and two stables were damaged, and a horse was killed.

The last raid on the Downs in 1917

For Bacon the raid confirmed that the new guns were deterring the Germans. He wrote that they had not liked the fire of the 6-inch guns. He proposed to the Admiralty that navigation lights in the Downs area be dimmed further: the Gull lightship and the lights on the wreck-marking buoys extinguished, the lights on the Goodwin Sands and on Deal pier dimmed, and the North Foreland light screened except for a narrow sector marking the fairway. The Admiralty agreed at once. From then on the German ships had almost no landmarks at sea, while British ships, which knew the waters of the anchorage, could move about it safely.

At the same time Bacon changed the night patrols in the Strait. Destroyers now sailed in groups of four and leaders in twos or threes, on strictly defined lines and at a fixed rhythm, so that patrols never met. Any destroyer encountered could therefore be attacked without challenging it by signal, which in earlier raids had cost the British precious seconds. According to Bacon, the monitor Marshal Ney, the new batteries and the extension of the net at the northern end of the Goodwin Sands prevented further raids on his area in 1917. The shelling of Ramsgate was the last raid by German torpedo boats on the Downs and the Thanet coast that year.