U-53 off the coast of the United States

On 8 October 1916 the German submarine U-53 under Kapitänleutnant Hans Rose sank five ships in international waters near the Nantucket lightship, which marked the approach to the ports of the east coast of the United States. The lightship lay about 45 miles from the island of Nantucket. From dawn to late evening Rose sent to the bottom three British ships, one Dutch and one Norwegian, a total of just over 20,000 gross register tons. No one was killed. It was the first time in this war that a German submarine had waged commerce warfare off the coast of America, and it happened the day after its crew had been hospitably received in an American naval port.

The visit to Newport

U-53 was a new, large submarine, in service only since April 1916. In mid-September she put to sea and rounded the British Isles to the north. Some of her ballast tanks had been converted into additional fuel tanks so that she would have enough for the voyage there and back. According to German accounts the order was given directly by the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, because the commander of the High Seas Fleet, Reinhard Scheer, feared that such an expedition would give the Americans a pretext for war. The boat was to support the voyage of the merchant submarine Bremen, sister of the Deutschland, which had reached Baltimore in the summer, and to attack British warships lying in wait on her route. Bremen, however, disappeared without trace, and Rose decided to carry out the rest of his task.

On the afternoon of 7 October U-53 entered Newport, Rhode Island, a base of the American fleet. Rose paid a courtesy call on the commandant of the naval district, Rear-Admiral Austin M. Knight, and also on Rear-Admiral Albert Gleaves, commander of the destroyer flotilla, aboard the cruiser Birmingham. Both admirals then visited the boat. Gleaves came with his wife and daughter, and numerous American officers were shown round the deck. Rose assured them that he needed no fuel, food or repairs. He had, however, brought a letter for the German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff. The authorities in Washington spent about two hours considering how to treat the unexpected guest. When talk turned to quarantine formalities, Rose did not want to risk being detained and, after a stay of two or three hours and without taking on any supplies, put back out to sea.

Five ships at the lightship

The next morning U-53 began stopping ships near the Nantucket lightship. She acted according to prize rules: she stopped a ship with a shot across the bows, checked her papers and let the crew take to the boats, and only then sank her. The American steamer Kansan was let go because she was not carrying contraband. The British Strathdene and the Norwegian tanker Christian Knudsen, with a cargo of oil for London, were sunk with torpedoes, and the British West Point with explosive charges. Messages from the lightship led to more than a dozen American destroyers, seventeen according to most sources, leaving Newport to help the survivors.

In the evening, now in the presence of American warships, Rose stopped the Dutch Blommersdijk carrying grain. He judged that the cargo was in fact destined for the British, although according to American reports the grain was consigned to the Dutch government. According to German accounts he asked one of the destroyers by signal to move away from the ship, and the American did so. The last victim was the British passenger ship Stephano, sailing from New York to Nova Scotia. The destroyers took off the passengers and crew, and Rose sank the ship with his last torpedoes late in the evening. The American press also reported a sixth ship, Kingstonian, but she does not appear in U-53’s loss lists. The boat then set off home along the Gulf Stream, slipped past British destroyers sent from Canada and reached Heligoland at the end of October.

Outrage and Washington’s calm

On 9 October the news spread through the American newspapers. The British official history writes that the excitement spread like a prairie fire. The campaign for the presidential election was in full swing, and since the start of the war Americans had been sensitive to any act of war near their coasts. Now a boat that had been a guest in Newport the previous day was sinking ships, using American navigational marks, before the eyes of the American crew of the lightship. The British complained that the American destroyers had merely looked on. According to English-language accounts, the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, later reassured them that neutral warships had no right to intervene and had done everything to save lives.

The government of Woodrow Wilson concluded that U-53 had not broken the law. The ships had been sunk outside American territorial waters, after warning and without loss of life, in accordance with the rules to which Germany had committed itself in May. According to Bernstorff’s memoirs, however, the president made it clear to him that such an incident must not be repeated. For the German press U-53’s expedition was proof of the navy’s reach, but in America it left behind mainly distrust. German submarines returned to the coast of the United States only in 1918, when the two countries were already at war. Rose himself sank the destroyer Jacob Jones on 6 December 1917, the first American destroyer sunk by the enemy in this war.