Sinking of the cruiser Prinz Adalbert

On the morning of 23 October 1915 the British submarine E8, commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Francis Goodhart, torpedoed the German armoured cruiser Prinz Adalbert about 20 nautical miles west of Libau. The torpedo detonated the forward magazine and the ship blew up. Of a crew of about 675 men only three survived. Thirty-two officers and 640 petty officers and ratings were killed. According to the German official history, it was the heaviest loss suffered by the German forces in the Baltic Sea since the beginning of the war.

The second hit

For Prinz Adalbert this was the second British torpedo in less than four months. The cruiser belonged to the same class as the Friedrich Carl, which had sunk on Russian mines in November 1914. After that sinking Prinz Adalbert became the flagship of the German cruisers in the Baltic, and from the spring of 1915 she flew the flag of Rear-Admiral Albert Hopman (PL), commanding the reconnaissance forces there. On 2 July 1915, during the Battle of Gotland, she was torpedoed off Rixhöft by Max Horton’s E9. Ten sailors were killed, but the badly damaged ship limped back to Kiel. After repairs she returned to the Baltic under the command of Captain Wilhelm Bunnemann and in September again flew Hopman’s flag. On 19 October, however, the admiral transferred to the cruiser Roon. Prinz Adalbert was temporarily to direct the patrol line between the island of Fårö and Cape Dagerort on the island of Dagö, because the Germans were short of light cruisers.

E8 had been waiting in the approaches to Libau since 19 October. Goodhart had come into the Baltic in August, and on 5 October he had sunk the German steamer Margarethe by gunfire. Off Libau he spent four days watching the trawlers and torpedo boats patrolling the fairway, but minefields prevented him from approaching closer. On the morning of 23 October he spotted the smoke of a ship leaving port. It was a large ship with three funnels and two tall masts, zigzagging westwards at about 15 knots, screened by two torpedo boats, one on each bow.

The explosion

Conditions, according to Goodhart, were ideal: a light wind and bright autumn sunshine. He let the escorting torpedo boat pass and from a range of about 1,200 metres fired a single torpedo from the bow tube, aiming at the bridge. A minute later he saw a brilliant flash at the waterline, and immediately afterwards the whole ship vanished in a huge column of thick grey smoke. Debris flew through the air and fell into the water around the submarine. Goodhart went deeper and waited eight minutes. When he raised the periscope again the cruiser was gone, and only the torpedo boats were circling over the site of the explosion. He did not attack them, hoping that the Germans would put the explosion down to a mine.

And so it turned out. The escorting torpedo boats had not noticed the torpedo’s track, and no alarm signal had been sent from the cruiser, so the Germans concluded that the ship had struck a mine and called up minesweepers. Even when a Russian radio station announced a submarine’s success, some commanders suspected a submerged mine. The torpedo boats S 142 and S 143 picked only three survivors out of the water. Hopman and his staff had left the ship before she sailed.

Consequences

Prinz Adalbert was an old ship, launched in 1901, but her destruction shook the German navy. On all the older ships the shells, except for ready-use ammunition, were defused, propellant charges were moved as close as possible to the middle of the hull, and the magazines were lined on the outside with empty crates. Ships were forbidden to leave or enter Libau by day. The attack coincided with a crisis in German shipping in the Baltic: in October British submarines sank several ore ships, and the command of the High Seas Fleet had to hand over two light cruisers and two torpedo-boat flotillas to the Baltic. On 7 November E19 also torpedoed the light cruiser Undine.

For his attack Goodhart received from Tsar Nicholas II the Order of St George. The wreck of Prinz Adalbert was found in 2007 by Swedish divers. She lies at a depth of about 80 metres, torn in two, the grave of more than 670 sailors.