Shelling of St Kilda

On the morning of 15 May 1918 the German submarine U-90, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walter Remy, entered Village Bay, the main bay of the island of Hirta. Hirta is the largest island of St Kilda, an isolated archipelago in the Atlantic, the westernmost part of the Outer Hebrides, more than 60 kilometres from the nearest islands. At the time it was home to some seventy-odd people, who lived mainly from sheep and from seabirds caught on the cliffs.

At the beginning of the war the Royal Navy built a signal station with a wireless set on Hirta and stationed a small detachment of sailors there. Thanks to it the islands had daily contact with the mainland for the first time in their history. For the Germans it was a military target. According to accounts of the day, the commander of U-90 first gave a warning, and then the submarine opened fire with its deck gun. It fired 72 shells. The wireless station was destroyed, and the manse, the church and the store by the jetty were also damaged. No one was killed. One islander recalled years later that the submarine “could have knocked down all the houses, because they stood in a single row”, but it was interested only in Admiralty property. One lamb was killed, and the cattle fled to the other end of the island at the sound of the guns.

The shelling was only an episode of the patrol. Remy reportedly stopped regularly at the uninhabited islet of North Rona, north-west of Scotland, to stock up on fresh mutton. Two weeks later, on 31 May, the same U-90 sank the American transport President Lincoln in the Atlantic, on her way back from France.

After the attack a naval gun was installed above Village Bay. The emplacement was completed in autumn 1918, and the gun, which still stands there today, never fired at the enemy. More important for the islanders were other effects of the war: the naval post, a regular mail service and food deliveries from supply ships, and money, which began to replace the old barter. When the navy withdrew after the war, the sense of being cut off from the world grew deeper still. Young men left, and the population fell from 73 in 1920 to 37 in 1928. In August 1930 the last inhabitants of St Kilda were resettled on the mainland at their own request.