Sinking of the cruiser Friedrich Carl

On the night of 17 November 1914 the German armoured cruiser Friedrich Carl struck two Russian mines about 33 nautical miles west of Memel (Klaipėda), and after several hours sank in the cold waters of the Baltic Sea. Most of the crew were saved.

Friedrich Carl belonged to the Prinz Adalbert class and entered service in 1903. She was armed with four 21 cm guns and ten 15 cm guns, and her crew numbered nearly 600 men. At the end of August 1914 she was returned to active service and made the flagship of the German cruisers in the Baltic, commanded by Rear-Admiral Ehler Behring. On the evening of 16 November the cruiser put to sea to take part in an operation against the Russian port of Libau, which the Germans wanted to block before British submarines began to use it.

Two mines

At 1.46 a.m. the cruiser struck the first mine. On board it was at first thought that she had been torpedoed by a submarine, and the captain ordered her to continue at full speed to avoid another hit. Eleven minutes later, at 1.57 a.m., a second mine exploded on the port side aft. The rudder jammed, and water poured into the hull faster than the pumps could remove it. The ship slowly sank.

The mines came from fields laid at the turn of October and November by Russian destroyers, which in several sorties had mined the waters west and south-west of Memel. The Russian Baltic Fleet, weaker than the German one, avoided open battle, but laid such offensive minefields on routes used by the enemy.

Rescue of the crew

For several hours the crew fought to keep the ship afloat. This gave time for the light cruiser Augsburg to arrive, and at about 6 a.m. she began taking men off. A quarter of an hour or so later the order was given to abandon ship. At about 7.15 a.m. Friedrich Carl capsized and sank. Seven or eight sailors were killed, according to some sources in the stern torpedo room, near the site of the explosion.

The loss of the cruiser did not stop the operation. The same day other German ships shelled Libau and scuttled blockships in the harbour entrances. Behring transferred to Augsburg, and her sister ship Prinz Adalbert was sent to the Baltic to replace the sunken cruiser. On 4 November another German armoured cruiser, Yorck, had sunk on German mines off the Jade estuary. Two such losses in less than two weeks showed what a dangerous weapon naval mines had become in the shallow waters of the North Sea and the Baltic.