Sinking of the cruiser Undine

On 7 November 1915 the British submarine E19 under Lieutenant-Commander Francis Cromie torpedoed the German light cruiser Undine in the western Baltic. The ship was escorting the train ferry Preussen, sailing from Swedish Trelleborg to Sassnitz on Rügen. Hit by two torpedoes, she blew up and sank within minutes north of Cape Arkona. It was the German navy’s second major loss in the Baltic in two weeks: on 23 October the British E8 had sunk the armoured cruiser Prinz Adalbert off Libau.

An old cruiser on the ferry route

Undine, launched in 1902 at Kiel, belonged to the Gazelle class, the first series of German small cruisers. By 1915 she was already an obsolete ship. She served in the coastal defence forces of the western Baltic and from the autumn of 1914 patrolled the waters between Trelleborg and Sassnitz. The train ferries on this route linked Germany with neutral Sweden and were of great importance to Berlin. After the first attacks by British submarines on German shipping, including E19’s attack on the steamer Svionia at the beginning of October, the ferries briefly stopped running. Now they sailed under the escort of warships. Undine was commanded by Korvettenkapitän Karl Windmüller and was accompanied by the torpedo boat V 154.

E19 had left Reval (Tallinn) on 30 October. According to the log entries quoted by the German official history of the war in the Baltic, on 2 November Cromie stopped the steamer Suomi in Hanö Bay off the Swedish coast and set fire to her cargo of timber, and on the morning of 7 November he was observing the ferry traffic between Sassnitz and Trelleborg. The British official history of the naval war states that in the morning he sighted a cruiser with two destroyers but was unable to attack it. A second opportunity came a few hours later, when the cruiser came up through the fog with a single escorting torpedo boat.

Two torpedoes

In the early afternoon, from a range of about a thousand metres, Cromie fired the first torpedo. It struck the cruiser on the starboard side forward. According to the German official history, the torpedo’s track was not spotted in time because of the bad weather. Undine made a wide turn and stopped. V 154, which had set off in pursuit of the submarine, was called back alongside because the cruiser had begun to sink. Some of the wounded had been transferred to the torpedo boat when one of V 154’s sailors spotted the track of a second torpedo. The torpedo boat immediately pulled away and avoided being hit by a few metres. Cromie, who had meanwhile passed round the torpedo boat, aimed the second torpedo at the after mast. The after magazine exploded, and debris from the ship flew towards the periscope. Undine broke in two and sank within a few minutes, firing towards the periscope to the end. The times of the attack differ depending on the source, probably because the British and the Germans gave the time according to different time zones.

Despite the rough sea, V 154 and the boats of the ferry Preussen picked up most of the crew, which normally numbered about 270 men. The German official history gives 24 killed and missing, among them the first officer, Kapitänleutnant Martini. Other German studies give 25 or 14 killed. According to some sources, most of the victims died when the forward funnel and mast fell on the men in the water. Cromie returned to Reval the next day. In his report he stressed that in such weather the attack had been possible only thanks to the sound judgement and quick reaction of Lieutenant G. Sharp, who was then on watch.

Significance

The sinking of Undine concluded a successful autumn campaign by the British submarines in the Baltic, which had been operating from Russian bases since the autumn of 1914. In October and early November they had sunk or forced to change course more than a dozen German ships carrying iron ore from Sweden, and now also two warships. The German official history judges that the aim of cutting off supplies of Swedish ore was not achieved: shipping soon returned to its former volume. It admits, however, that the navy had to transfer two light cruisers and two torpedo-boat flotillas from the North Sea to the Baltic for a long time, which weakened the readiness of the High Seas Fleet. After the loss of Undine and Prinz Adalbert the Germans markedly restricted the movements of their warships in the Baltic until the end of the year. The cruisers Amazone and Medusa were sent to replace Undine in escorting the ferry route.