Sinking of the battleship Russell

Early in the morning of 27 April 1916 the British battleship Russell struck two mines a few kilometres off the entrance to Grand Harbour at Valletta, the main base of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. The ship caught fire, heeled over and sank. About 125 officers and men were killed, but more than six hundred were saved. The mines had been laid a few days earlier by the German submarine U-73, which was on its way from Germany to the Adriatic.

Russell was a Duncan-class pre-dreadnought, launched in 1901 at the yard in Jarrow and commissioned in 1903. At the beginning of the war she served in the Grand Fleet and bombarded the German-occupied coast of Belgium. In the autumn of 1915 she was sent to the Aegean. She was based at Mudros Bay on the island of Lemnos and in January 1916 covered the evacuation of Cape Helles. According to some sources, in April 1916 she was the flagship of Rear-Admiral Sydney Fremantle, second-in-command of the British forces in the eastern Mediterranean. The ship arrived off Malta on the night of 26/27 April and at dawn was waiting for the boom across the harbour entrance to be opened.

At about 5.30 a.m. the first mine exploded under the ship’s stern, on the port side. A fire broke out in the after part of the ship and the commanding officer, Captain William Bowden-Smith, gave the order to abandon ship. A second explosion soon followed, near the after 12-inch (305 mm) gun turret, and Russell began to list heavily. According to accounts cited by the divers who explore the wreck today, she stayed afloat for about another twenty minutes before capsizing and going to the bottom. That was enough for most of the crew to get off. According to the British historian R. A. Burt, 27 officers and 98 ratings were killed; other sources give 124 or 126 dead. Among the dead were also Maltese civilian workers from the ship’s canteen. Rear-Admiral Fremantle and Captain Bowden-Smith survived, as did Lieutenant-Commander John Cunningham, later First Sea Lord. Burt believed that the sinking was hastened by inadequate subdivision of the hull into watertight compartments, which prevented the crew from correcting the list. The wreck lies at a depth of about 115 metres, a few kilometres off the Delimara peninsula.

The minefield had been laid by U-73, a submarine minelayer (PL) commanded by Kapitänleutnant Gustav Sieß. The boat had left Germany at the beginning of April, sailed round the British Isles, passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and, before entering the Austro-Hungarian base at Cattaro, laid 22 mines off Grand Harbour. One of her officers at the time was Martin Niemöller, later a pastor and opponent of Nazism. The mines claimed further victims. In the evening of the same day the sloop Nasturtium, which was searching for mines and submarines near the scene of the disaster, struck them. Seven men were killed, and the ship sank during the night. According to the British casualty list, six men of the armed yacht Aegusa, which also struck a mine, were killed the same day. In November 1916 the hospital ship Britannic, sister ship of the Titanic, sank in the Aegean on a mine laid by U-73.