Sinking of the Aud

On 20 April 1916, Maundy Thursday, a steamer flying the Norwegian flag, with the name “Aud” painted on her sides, entered Tralee Bay in County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland. In reality she was the German auxiliary Libau, and beneath a cargo of timber she was carrying arms for the Irish conspirators who were preparing a rising against the British at Easter. The British chronology of the war records the sinking of the Aud under 20 April, but on that day the ship had only just reached Ireland. British warships intercepted her on 21 April, and her crew scuttled her on the morning of 22 April at the entrance to the harbour of Queenstown (Cobh).

The Libau was in fact the British freighter Castro of Hull, seized by the Germans in August 1914 in the Kiel Canal. For the voyage to Ireland she was repainted as the Norwegian ship Aud, which had a similar silhouette. She was commanded by Lieutenant Karl Spindler of the navy, and her crew consisted of 22 naval volunteers disguised as Norwegian sailors. The ship sailed from Lübeck on 9 April. She carried about 20,000 rifles, mostly captured Russian Mosin rifles, according to most sources about a million rounds of ammunition, 10 machine guns and explosives. This was far less than Roger Casement had asked for; he had been seeking German help for Ireland in Berlin since the autumn of 1914, and the Germans provided neither officers nor soldiers. Spindler sailed round the British Isles to the north, survived gales near Rockall and slipped through the British blockade patrols.

In Tralee Bay, however, no one was waiting for him. The ship had no wireless, so Spindler did not know that the leaders of the rising in Dublin had asked the Germans that the ship should not arrive before the evening of Easter Sunday, 23 April, because an earlier landing might alert the authorities. The request reached Berlin when the Aud was already at sea. The Kerry Volunteers therefore sent neither a pilot nor boats, and no one on shore answered the ship’s signals. Nor did she meet the German submarine U-19, which that same night brought Casement to the bay. Spindler waited near the islet of Inishtooskert through the night and the morning of 21 April. Meanwhile Admiral Lewis Bayly, commanding at Queenstown, had been warned by the Admiralty that the Germans were sending arms to the west coast of the island, and had deployed armed trawlers off the coasts of Kerry and Clare. On the morning of 21 April, Good Friday, a patrol trawler approached the Aud, but her crew were taken in by the disguise. When further vessels took an interest in her, Spindler tried to escape to the open sea. Pursued by several patrol craft, he was stopped in the evening by the sloop Bluebell, which ordered him to sail to Queenstown.

Spindler sailed under escort all night. On the morning of 22 April, near the lightship by the Daunt Rock at the entrance to Queenstown harbour, the ship stopped. The Germans hoisted the naval ensign, changed into naval uniforms and fired the explosive charges prepared earlier. The ship sank within a few minutes in about 40 metres of water, together with her whole cargo of arms. The crew took to the boats and were taken prisoner: according to the British official history (Corbett, Naval Operations), they numbered three officers and nineteen men. Spindler and his men spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps. A few rifles were later recovered from the wreck, and in the 21st century her anchors were raised.

The loss of the Aud wrecked the plan to arm the Volunteers in the west of Ireland. Bad luck dogged the conspirators on land too: on the evening of 21 April a car carrying Volunteers who were on their way to seize the wireless station at Cahersiveen in order to make contact with the ship drove off the pier at Ballykissane near Killorglin into the River Laune. Three of them drowned. The news of the sinking of the ship and of Casement’s arrest strengthened the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, in his decision to call off the demonstrations planned for Sunday. Some of the conspirators of the Irish Republican Brotherhood nevertheless decided to fight regardless, and on 24 April the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin, now without German arms.