Sinking of HMS Britannia

On the morning of 9 November 1918, two days before the end of the war, the German submarine UB-50 torpedoed the British battleship HMS Britannia off the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. Most sources place the sinking near Cape Trafalgar on the coast of Spain, where Nelson had destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet in 1805, although according to some data the ship went down closer to Cape Spartel in Morocco. Britannia took several hours to sink, so most of her crew were able to save themselves. About 50 sailors were killed.

Britannia was a pre-dreadnought of the King Edward VII class, built at Portsmouth Dockyard and completed in 1906. At the start of the war she served in the 3rd Battle Squadron attached to the Grand Fleet, then in the Mediterranean, and from 1917, as flagship of the 9th Cruiser Squadron, she escorted convoys in the Atlantic, mainly between Sierra Leone and Simon’s Town in South Africa, and in the summer of 1918 also to Dakar. She began escorting her last convoy at the end of October. On 9 November, under Captain Francis Caulfeild, she was steaming towards Gibraltar.

UB-50, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Heinrich Kukat, belonged to the German submarine flotilla operating from Austro-Hungarian bases on the Adriatic. As Austria-Hungary fell apart, the Germans abandoned these bases, and the boats capable of long voyages set out for home through the Strait of Gibraltar. UB-50 left for Germany on 29 October and on 8 November forced her way through the strait, depth-charged by British destroyers. An order of Admiral Reinhard Scheer from the end of October forbade attacks on merchant ships, but allowed warships to be attacked on the way back to base. According to some sources UB-50’s first two torpedoes missed the battleship by a hair, and the third hit.

After the first explosion Britannia listed about 10 degrees to port. A few minutes later came a second explosion: a fire broke out in the magazine of the 9.2-inch (234 mm) guns and the cordite caught fire. In the darkness below decks the sailors could not find the valves for flooding the magazines, and those they reached were hard to get at and difficult to open. Most of the dead were poisoned by the smoke of the burning cordite. The ship stayed afloat with her list for two and a half to three hours, and according to some accounts even longer, which made it possible to take off the crew. According to the press of the time, 39 officers and 673 men were rescued. British casualty lists name about 50 killed, including several who died of wounds in the following days. About 80 were wounded.

Britannia was the last British battleship lost in the First World War and one of the last Royal Navy ships sunk by the enemy. A day later, on 10 November, in the North Sea UB-67 torpedoed the paddle minesweeper Ascot, which sank with all hands. UB-50 learned of the armistice only on 12 November. Via Lerwick in the Shetlands she reached Kiel on 29 November, and on 16 January 1919 she was handed over to the British.