Sinking of the Glitra
- Category:
- Military operations
- Front:
- War at sea
- Date:
- 20 October 1914
- Author:
- Natalia
On 20 October 1914 the German submarine U-17 stopped the British steamer Glitra off the south-west coast of Norway. The Germans ordered the crew into the boats and then sank the ship. Glitra went down in history as the first British merchant ship sunk in the war by a U-boat, and she is usually regarded as the first merchant ship ever sunk by a submarine.
A small steamer from Leith
Glitra was a small, old steamer of 866 gross register tons. She had been built in 1881 as the Saxon Prince, and from 1896 belonged to the firm of Christian Salvesen of Leith in Scotland. On 18 October she sailed from Grangemouth for Stavanger with a cargo of coal, iron plate and oil. The voyage to neutral Norway seemed safe. Until then German submarines had hunted only warships, like U-9, which a few days earlier had sunk the cruiser Hawke.
By prize rules
U-17, commanded by Johannes Feldkirchner, caught up with Glitra about 14 nautical miles west-south-west of Skudeneshavn on the island of Karmøy, not far from Stavanger. The surfaced submarine circled the ship and fired a warning shot from its deck gun, and the steamer stopped. An armed officer with two sailors went on board. They searched the ship and gave the crew ten minutes to get into the boats. Then a German engineer opened the sea cocks and Glitra went to the bottom.
Feldkirchner acted in accordance with the prize rules that governed war at sea. A warship could stop an enemy merchant ship, search it and sink it, but first it had to ensure the safety of the crew. The Germans towed the boats towards land for a quarter of an hour, and the sailors rowed the rest of the way themselves. According to some sources a Norwegian torpedo boat on neutrality patrol towed them into the port of Skudeneshavn. No one was killed.
A foretaste of the war on trade
The sinking of Glitra was a minor episode, but it showed that U-boats could also destroy merchant shipping. The German command soon saw submarines as an effective weapon against British trade, all the more so because the British naval blockade was cutting Germany off from supplies ever more tightly.
Stopping ships according to prize rules was, however, risky and inefficient for a submarine. Its small crew could not take prizes into port, and a surfaced submarine was an easy target. On 4 February 1915 Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone in which merchant ships would be sunk without warning. This began the first phase of unrestricted submarine warfare, which became one of the main reasons for the United States’ entry into the war in 1917.
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(04)Elsewhere in the same days.
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Related events
(04)The same battle, people or subject.
- 17 October 1914 · War at seaAlarm at Scapa FlowOn 16–17 October 1914 an alarm over a supposed U-boat was raised at the Grand Fleet base, Scapa Flow. The fleet put to sea, though no submarine was ever found.
- 15 October 1914 · War at seaSinking of HMS HawkeOn 15 October 1914 Otto Weddigen's U-9 sank the British cruiser Hawke in the North Sea. More than 520 sailors were killed and about 70 survived.
- 13 October 1914 · War at seaU-boats on the Southampton–Le Havre routeOn 13 October 1914 a British torpedo boat came upon a German submarine off the Isle of Wight. The Admiralty diverted the Canadian convoy to Plymouth.
- 11 October 1914 · War at seaSinking of the cruiser PalladaOn 11 October 1914 the German U-26 torpedoed the Russian cruiser Pallada at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. The ship blew up with all hands.