Sinking of the troopship Royal Edward

On the morning of 13 August 1915, in the Aegean Sea, off the islet of Kandeliusa south-west of Kos, the German submarine UB-14 torpedoed the British troopship Royal Edward, which was sailing from Alexandria to Mudros with drafts for the troops on Gallipoli. The ship sank within a few minutes. More than 850 men died, according to some sources more than 900. It was the largest single loss of life the Allies suffered at sea during the Dardanelles campaign. The British official chronology of the war recorded Royal Edward as the first troop transport lost in this way.

Royal Edward was a liner of 11,117 GRT, built in 1907 at Govan in Scotland as Cairo for the route linking Marseille with Alexandria. In 1910 she was bought by a Canadian shipping company and under her new name sailed from Avonmouth near Bristol to Canada. After the outbreak of war she was requisitioned as a troopship. On 28 July 1915 about 1,370 officers and men embarked on her at Avonmouth, mainly drafts for the British 29th Division fighting at Cape Helles, as well as orderlies of the Royal Army Medical Corps and men of labour units. With a crew of about 220, there were, according to The Times, more than 1,600 people on board. From Alexandria, which she reached in August, she set off north towards Lemnos, without an escort.

UB-14 was a small submarine of the UB I type with a crew of fourteen. She was commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Heino von Heimburg, who in July in the Adriatic had sunk the Italian cruiser Amalfi. The boat was to join the German flotilla at Constantinople. On 15 July she left Pola in tow of an Austro-Hungarian destroyer and, after failures of her engine and compass, reached Bodrum on the Turkish coast with difficulty on 24 July. There she waited for weeks for a repair team, which travelled from Constantinople by rail and then by camel. She put to sea again on 13 August and almost at once came upon two British ships sailing in opposite directions. The first was the hospital ship Soudan, returning from Mudros to Alexandria. Heimburg let her pass without attacking. The second was Royal Edward.

Heimburg fired one of his two torpedoes from a range of about a nautical mile. It struck the stern. According to the American historians James Wise and Scott Baron, the transport sank stern first within about six minutes, and the casualties were so heavy because the soldiers had just finished a lifeboat drill and most of them had gone below decks to stow their equipment. The wireless operator managed to send a distress call. Soudan turned back and within a few hours picked up 13 officers and 428 men, and several hundred more survivors were rescued by French destroyers and trawlers sent in haste. UB-14 escaped, although her compass broke down again and she had to return to Bodrum.

The death toll varies from source to source. The Admiralty list published in The Times in September named 13 officers and 851 men, that is 864 people, as missing; Wise and Baron give 935 killed. After the disaster the French admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère, who was responsible for the shipping routes in the Mediterranean, moved the route of the transports further west, through the strait near Kasos and past Santorini, and the British demanded additional life rafts for troopships. From this moment German submarines became a real threat to the supply lines of the army on Gallipoli. Heimburg made himself felt again at the beginning of September, when on the approaches to Lemnos he torpedoed the British transport Southland with Australian troops on board, which nevertheless stayed afloat.