Sinking of the cruiser Arethusa

On 11 February 1916 the British light cruiser Arethusa, the flagship of Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, struck a mine just before returning to her base at Harwich. The explosion occurred near the North Cutler buoy, on the approach to the harbour opposite Felixstowe. The mine had been laid shortly before by the German minelaying submarine UC-7. The damaged ship could not be towed in. Wind and sea drove her onto a shoal, where she broke in two.

A false alarm

Arethusa was returning from a sortie that had turned out to be unnecessary. On 9 and 10 February the Admiralty received signs that the German High Seas Fleet was preparing some operation, and then that light cruisers and destroyers had come out of the Jade heading west. Expecting a raid on the English coast, the Admiralty sent out David Beatty’s battlecruisers from Rosyth and Tyrwhitt’s force from Harwich. The Germans meanwhile struck on the night of 10/11 February at a flotilla of sloops sweeping channels east of the Dogger Bank. They sank the sloop Arabis, while the other three sloops managed to escape. The German destroyers then returned to base. The British official naval history judges that this was only a strong patrol, one of the first signs of activity by the new commander of the German fleet, Admiral Reinhard Scheer.

When it became clear that nothing more threatened, Tyrwhitt was ordered back. He led his cruisers to Harwich by a channel believed to be clear. Shortly before, according to the British official history only a day or two before the cruisers’ return, the channel had been mined by UC-7, a small submarine of the Flanders Flotilla, operating from Zeebrugge. Such boats carried only 12 mines, but they laid them where the British least expected them, on the approaches to harbours and in the Thames estuary.

Loss of the ship

The explosion stopped the cruiser’s engines and the ship began to settle. Despite a heavy sea running against the tide, the flotilla leader Lightfoot took Arethusa in tow, but the line parted. A second attempt was made by the destroyer Loyal, with the same result. The cruiser drifted onto the Cutler shoal and broke her back. Only then did Tyrwhitt order the ship abandoned and shift his broad pennant to Lightfoot. According to the British official history the explosion killed six men. The Royal Navy’s casualty lists name twelve dead under that date, almost all stokers and engine-room ratings. The wreck lay on the shoal until August 1916, when hope of raising her was abandoned, and in time she was broken up.

The ship from Heligoland

Arethusa was the first ship of a new class of fast light cruisers built to lead destroyer flotillas. She was launched in October 1913 at Chatham Dockyard. She displaced about 3,500 tons and made 29 knots. She was commissioned just after the outbreak of war and at once became Tyrwhitt’s flagship. At the Battle of Heligoland Bight on 28 August 1914 she was badly damaged in a duel with German cruisers and had to be towed home. In December 1914 she covered the Cuxhaven Raid, and at the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915 her torpedoes finished off the armoured cruiser Blücher. As recently as 29 January 1916, during an unsuccessful attempt at a seaplane raid on the airship bases, a German torpedo grazed her stern.

The British official history writes that Tyrwhitt and his crew had brought the name Arethusa a fame worthy of the earlier ships of that name, which is why the loss of the ship was particularly painful. In these weeks mines from the small Flanders submarines became a real plague in the Thames estuary and the Strait of Dover. Two weeks later, on 27 February, one of them claimed the liner Maloja, which sank at the entrance to Dover harbour.