Sinking of HMS Cornwallis

On 9 January 1917 the German submarine U-32 torpedoed the British battleship Cornwallis in the Mediterranean, about 60 nautical miles east of Malta. The ship stayed afloat for more than an hour and a half, which made it possible to save almost the entire crew. Fifteen sailors were killed. She was the second old Allied battleship to sink in the Mediterranean in less than a week: on 4 January the Russian Peresvet had struck mines off Port Said and sunk.

Cornwallis was a Duncan-class pre-dreadnought, built at the Thames Iron Works yard in London and launched in 1901. She displaced about 14,000 tons and carried four 305 mm guns, but by 1917 she was already obsolete. Her war record, on the other hand, was a rich one. It was she who on 19 February 1915 fired the first shot of the naval attack on the Dardanelles, taking the Turkish battery at Orkanie as her target. She then gave fire support to the landing at Cape Helles and to the troops fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula. On the night of 12/13 May 1915 she was on guard in the Straits together with Goliath, which was sunk that night by the torpedoes of a Turkish destroyer. In December she covered the evacuation of Suvla. In the first months of 1916 she patrolled the Suez Canal and escorted convoys in the Indian Ocean, and in the summer she underwent a refit at Malta.

According to British accounts the first torpedo struck the starboard side. Several boiler rooms flooded and the ship heeled over by about ten degrees. Counter-flooding of compartments on the other side brought her upright, but Cornwallis lost propulsion and came to a standstill. The destroyers accompanying her attacked U-32 with depth charges, but the submarine slipped away. As the British were preparing to take the battleship in tow, the commander of U-32 fired another torpedo from long range. It too struck the starboard side, roughly 75 minutes after the first. This time the ship quickly rolled over onto her side and sank after about half an hour. Sources differ on the number of hits: according to the British naval historian Ian Burt two torpedoes struck, according to other accounts three.

The Royal Navy casualty list names fifteen killed, most of them stokers who died in the torpedo explosions below deck. Among them was a Maltese stoker of the naval reserve, Francesco Falzon. The rest of the crew were taken off by the escorting destroyers. Such small losses in the sinking of a battleship were owed to the fact that Cornwallis sank slowly and had an escort with her, as had the French Gaulois two weeks earlier.

U-32 was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Kurt Hartwig. At the beginning of the war he had been torpedo officer of the cruiser Dresden, the only ship of von Spee’s squadron to escape from the Battle of the Falkland Islands. After the sinking of the Dresden in March 1915 he was interned in Chile, from where he escaped with several other officers, reaching Germany in July 1915. He trained in submarines and from 1916 operated in U-32 against shipping in the Mediterranean from the Austro-Hungarian base at Pola. Cornwallis was the only warship sunk by U-32. The sinking of a battleship in the waters between Malta and Egypt, through which transports sailed to Salonika and Egypt, showed that the Royal Navy was having ever greater difficulty protecting even large, escorted vessels from German submarines.