Sinking of the Arabic

On the morning of 19 August 1915 the German submarine U-24 torpedoed without warning the British liner Arabic of the White Star Line, bound from Liverpool to New York. She was hit at about 9.15–9.30 a.m., roughly 50 nautical miles south of Kinsale, not far from the spot where three months earlier the Lusitania had sunk. The ship went down in about ten minutes. According to most sources 44 people died. Among the victims were two or three citizens of the United States, and the sinking of the Arabic caused the most serious crisis in relations between Berlin and Washington since the Lusitania.

The attack

The Arabic, built in 1903, a ship of about 15,800 gross register tons, had been sailing between Liverpool and New York again since the beginning of 1915. In August she set out on another westbound voyage. On board, according to the British official history, were 429 passengers and crew. According to the American consulate in Queenstown there were more than twenty Americans among them.

Kapitänleutnant Rudolf Schneider’s U-24, which three days earlier had shelled the works at Lowca, had that morning stopped the British freighter Dunsley south of Ireland and was trying to sink her by gunfire when a much larger ship approached from the east. It was the Arabic. According to the British official history Schneider was wary of large ships, because on his way through the Irish Sea he had several times nearly been rammed. The liner was zigzagging. Schneider later claimed that her change of course looked like an attempt to ram the submarine, and that in his view this released him from the secret order in force since June not to sink large passenger ships without warning. Without checking what ship it was, he dived and at close range fired a single torpedo. It struck the starboard side aft.

Ten minutes

Captain Will Finch and his crew lowered the boats efficiently. According to survivors’ accounts there was no panic. The American consul reported to Washington that the ship sank in eleven minutes and that eleven boats with survivors were brought into Queenstown. About 390 people were saved. The number of dead varies in the sources: 44 is most often given, while the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, in a note of December 1915, wrote of 47 victims. One of the American survivors told the consul that the ship had been sunk “deliberately and in cold blood”, without any warning.

The crisis

The sinking of the Arabic struck at the most sensitive point of the American-German dispute. In the third Lusitania note, of 21 July, President Woodrow Wilson had warned Berlin that the United States would regard further sinkings in which Americans died as acts “deliberately unfriendly”. This time the Germans could not plead munitions in the holds: the Arabic was sailing from Europe to America. The American press spoke of a possible breach of diplomatic relations, which in practice could have meant war.

In Berlin the news caused alarm. The Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and the Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, concluded that any U-boat commander could at any moment drag Germany into war with America. Over the following days and weeks they secured tighter orders for the submarines against the opposition of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Gustav Bachmann. On 1 September the ambassador in Washington, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, assured Secretary of State Robert Lansing in writing that German submarines would not sink liners without warning and without ensuring the safety of the passengers, provided the ships did not try to escape or offer resistance. This undertaking went down in history as the “Arabic pledge”.

The same afternoon, a few dozen miles away, the British Q-ship Baralong sank another German submarine, U-27, and the events that followed became the subject of a bitter dispute between London and Berlin.