Sinking of HMS Audacious

On the morning of 27 October 1914 the British battleship Audacious struck a mine off the north coast of Ireland, near Tory Island. Despite a struggle lasting many hours to keep the ship afloat, in the evening she capsized and sank. She was the first dreadnought lost by the Royal Navy in this war.

A mine on the route to Lough Swilly

Audacious belonged to the King George V class and had entered service only a year earlier, in October 1913. She served in the 2nd Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet. After the fleet moved away from Scapa Flow, the squadron was based in Lough Swilly in the north of Ireland. On 27 October the ships put to sea for gunnery practice.

No one knew that a few days earlier the German auxiliary cruiser Berlin, converted from a passenger liner, had laid about 200 mines in these waters. The Germans, for their part, did not know that the British fleet had moved to Ireland. The mines were meant to threaten merchant shipping leaving British ports for the Atlantic by the northern route.

At about 8.45 a.m. a mine exploded under the after part of Audacious, near the port engine room. Water came in slowly but steadily, and the ship began to list to port. After about an hour the engines stopped. The captain, Cecil Dampier, believed that Audacious had been torpedoed and hoisted a signal warning of a submarine. In accordance with their instructions, the other battleships quickly left the danger area. Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, sent destroyers and tugs to help, but for fear of U-boats did not risk any more battleships.

Olympic to the rescue

The liner Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic, was passing nearby on her way from New York. Her captain, Herbert Haddock, offered assistance. Olympic’s boats took off about 250 sailors from the battleship. In the afternoon further attempts were made to tow Audacious: first by Olympic, then by the cruiser Liverpool and the collier Thornhill. Each time the cables parted or fouled, and the damaged ship became ever harder to handle.

Towards evening the rest of the crew were taken off. At about 8.45 p.m. Audacious suddenly heeled over and capsized, keel uppermost. A dozen or so minutes later there was a huge explosion in the wreck, probably in one of the magazines. A fragment of armour plate that flew several hundred metres killed a petty officer on the cruiser Liverpool. He was the only fatality of the disaster. No one from the battleship’s crew was killed.

A wartime secret

Jellicoe judged that the loss of one of the newest battleships was too valuable a piece of information for the Germans, as it weakened the Grand Fleet’s superiority over the German High Seas Fleet. At his request the Admiralty kept the sinking secret, and the British press complied with the ban. Olympic was held in Lough Swilly until 2 November, and her passengers were not allowed to contact the outside world.

Keeping the secret, however, proved impossible. Among Olympic’s passengers were Americans who had photographed and even filmed the sinking ship. News and pictures soon reached the other side of the Atlantic and the press. Nevertheless, the British Admiralty officially kept silent throughout the war. The loss of Audacious was announced only on 14 November 1918, three days after the armistice, in a statement published in “The Times”.