Torpedoing of the Sussex

On 24 March 1916, at about three in the afternoon, the German submarine UB-29 torpedoed without warning, in the English Channel, the passenger ship Sussex, sailing from Folkestone to Dieppe. The explosion tore off the ship’s bow, but Sussex stayed afloat and was towed into Boulogne. At least 50 people were killed, by some estimates as many as 80–100. The British chronology of the war calls Sussex a British ship, but since 1914 the ferry had belonged to the French State Railways and sailed under the French flag. Citizens of the United States were among the wounded, and the attack provoked the most serious crisis in American–German relations since the Lusitania.

A Channel ferry

Sussex was a small, fast steamer of about 1,350 tons, built in 1896 at the Denny yard in Dumbarton, Scotland, for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Before the war she ran between Newhaven and Dieppe. In 1914 she was bought by the French company Chemins de fer de l’État, while the British railway continued to manage her. During the war the port of Newhaven was reserved for supplying the troops in France and the ferry was transferred to the Folkestone route. She was a regular mail and passenger ship on which civilians crossed the Channel, including many citizens of neutral countries. A few days later the British Admiralty and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs assured the Americans that she had not been armed and that the passenger ferries in the Channel carried no guns.

That day there were on board, according to the American note, at least 325 passengers, according to the British official history of the naval war about 380, plus more than 50 crew. The submarine, the small UB-29 of the Flanders Flotilla, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Herbert Pustkuchen, came upon the ferry between Dungeness and Boulogne. The torpedo struck the bow forward of the bridge. The explosion destroyed the entire fore part of the ship and killed or wounded on the spot many passengers who were on deck. Some of the lifeboats capsized while being lowered and people drowned. According to the British official history, Pustkuchen at first explained that he had taken the ship, with her crowded deck, for a troop transport. Later the Germans maintained that she had been mistaken for one of the new British warships that could serve as minelayers.

The rescue

Sussex called for help by radio, but gave a position about 15 miles wrong, so the French and British ships sent to search for her could not find her for a long time. Only at 11.10 p.m. did the British destroyer Afridi come upon the drifting wreck about 14 miles west of Boulogne. A French trawler was already alongside, taking off the women and children. According to the British official history about 250 survivors were landed at Boulogne and about 120 at Dover. Sussex herself was towed stern first into Boulogne.

Among the dead was the Spanish composer and pianist Enrique Granados with his wife Amparo. He was returning from New York, where his opera Goyescas had had its premiere at the end of January. He had delayed his departure because he accepted an invitation to give a recital for President Woodrow Wilson, and for that reason, instead of sailing straight to Spain, he sailed to England and from there took the ferry to France. According to eyewitnesses he drowned trying to save his wife. Because Spanish citizens had died, the neutral government in Madrid also lodged a protest. No American was killed, but several were wounded, among them an Oxford medical student, Wilder Penfield, later a famous neurosurgeon.

Crisis with Washington

The attack came at the worst possible moment for the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Only a few days earlier Alfred von Tirpitz had left office, having lost the dispute over unrestricted submarine warfare, and Berlin was assuring Washington that passenger ships were being spared in the extended submarine campaign. Germany had already given the same assurances after the sinking of the Arabic in August 1915. On 27 March the Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, instructed the ambassador in Berlin to ask whether Sussex had been sunk by a submarine of Germany or of her allies. American officers sent to Boulogne found no trace of armament on the ship, but in the wreckage they found pieces of bronze. According to the American investigation they came from a German torpedo.

The Germans took a long time to reply, and in a note of 10 April claimed that their submarine had torpedoed a different ship that day, which it had taken for a minelayer. On 18 April the United States government replied with a note threatening to break off diplomatic relations unless Germany immediately abandoned its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and cargo ships. The next day Wilson presented this position to Congress. On 4 May Berlin gave way and undertook that submarines would not sink merchant ships without warning and without ensuring the safety of the people on board. This undertaking went down in history as the “Sussex pledge” and remained in force until early 1917.