Sinking of the battleship King Edward VII

On 6 January 1916 the British battleship King Edward VII sank off the north coast of Scotland. In the morning she struck a mine near Cape Wrath, the north-westernmost tip of Great Britain. For several hours efforts were made to save her, but in the evening she capsized and went to the bottom. For a long time the British did not know where a mine in that place had come from. She was the first victim of the German auxiliary cruiser Möwe, which had broken through the blockade at the turn of the year and on 1 January, in a snowstorm, had laid a minefield at the western entrance to the Pentland Firth.

King Edward VII was a ship from the beginning of the 20th century, built at Devonport and commissioned in 1905. She gave her name to a class of eight battleships, among the last British pre-dreadnoughts, which as early as 1906 were outclassed by the revolutionary Dreadnought. In 1916 she belonged to the 3rd Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet. On the morning of 6 January she left Scapa Flow, without an admiral’s flag, on the passage round the north of Scotland to Belfast, where she was to undergo a refit. According to British accounts, at about 10.47 a.m. a mine exploded under the starboard engine room. The ship heeled over to starboard, her rudder jammed, and the engine rooms quickly flooded.

Her captain, Crawford Maclachlan, wanted to make for the shore and if necessary beach the ship, but the engines stopped. At first it was thought that the battleship had been torpedoed by a submarine, so the flotilla leader Kempenfelt and twelve destroyers were sent to help. The passing collier Princess Melita and Kempenfelt herself tried to tow the battleship, but in the strong wind and rising sea the list kept increasing, and the tow lines parted or had to be cast off. After 2.40 p.m. Maclachlan ordered the ship abandoned. The destroyers Musketeer, Marne, Fortune and Nessus came alongside in turn and took off the crew. The captain left last, at about 4.10 p.m. The abandoned battleship capsized and sank in the evening, at about 8.10 p.m.

Rescuing the crew in such conditions was a feat. The British official history of the war at sea states that all the men from the battleship were saved. Some more recent studies say that one man was killed, having fallen between the sides of the battleship and a destroyer, and British naval casualty lists record for that day two sailors drowned from the destroyer Musketeer, which was damaged during the rescue by fittings of the sinking ship. Either way, for the loss of a battleship the human losses were exceptionally small.

The mystery of the mine was solved only after several weeks. On the morning of the same day the battleship Africa had passed that way unscathed, and no minefield was known in the area. Stormy weather and the lack of minesweepers, many of which had been sent to the Mediterranean, delayed the search of the area. When it was finally established that there were a great many mines, it became clear that they had been laid by a surface ship and not by a submarine. By then Möwe was far to the south, and from 11 January she was stopping Allied ships on the Atlantic shipping lanes.