Sinking of *Surada* and *Murcia*

On 2 November 1918 the German submarine UC-74, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Hans Schüler, torpedoed without warning two British steamers at the entrance to Port Said, the Egyptian port at the northern end of the Suez Canal. Surada sank in the swept channel off the port, and Murcia about 12 nautical miles north of Port Said. According to the official British list of losses, “British Vessels Lost at Sea”, these were the last British merchant ships sunk by the enemy during the First World War.

Both ships were carrying rice to Marseille and both had a gun on board for defence. Surada, a steamer of about 5,300 GRT built in 1902 in Glasgow for the British India Steam Navigation Company, was sailing from Karachi. In 1915–1916, as the transport HMAT A52, she carried several contingents of Australian soldiers from Australia to Egypt and England, and from 1917 she was managed by the British Admiralty. Her entire crew survived. Murcia, of about 4,900 GRT, built in 1915 in Sunderland, was sailing from Bassein in Burma with rice and jute sacks. One member of her crew was killed.

UC-74 was a Type UC II minelaying submarine of the German flotilla operating in the Mediterranean from Austro-Hungarian bases on the Adriatic. She sank more than 30 ships in this war. Formally the German war on commerce was already over: around 20–21 October Admiral Reinhard Scheer had ordered the submarines to stop attacking merchant ships and return to base, one of the conditions set by President Wilson. The available sources do not explain whether and when the order reached UC-74, which was then on patrol far from her bases in the eastern Mediterranean. The submarine continued operating there for several more days. On 4 November the British steamer War Roach struck one of the mines she had laid in the Port Said channel. Her crew beached her, and the ship was later repaired. On 5 November UC-74 also sank a small Italian sailing vessel.

The German bases on the Adriatic were abandoned in the last days of October, and the boats that were able to sail set off for Germany through the Strait of Gibraltar. UC-74 did not make it back. She ran out of fuel and on 21 November was interned in neutral Barcelona. In March 1919 the Spanish handed her over to France. The last British merchant ships lost in this war thus went to the bottom not in the waters around the British Isles, where the heaviest fighting against the submarines had taken place, but at the entrance to the canal through which supplies came from India, Asia and Australia.