Nevertheless, newspapers began to publish eyewitness accounts reflecting what had really happened, such as that of an Eyemouth fisherman who had assisted in the rescue, who confirmed rumours that a submarine had been responsible. The true story eventually came out, and the sinking of Pathfinder by a submarine made both sides in the conflict aware of the potential vulnerability of large ships to attack by submarines.
If further confirmation of the killing power of torpedoes fired from a submarine was needed, it came just a few weeks later. Early on the morning of 22 September 1914 in the North Sea, the three 12,000-ton Cressy-class cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy were sunk by a single submarine, U 9, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen.
U 9 of I Flotilla had been tasked to patrol and attack British shipping at Ostend. At about 0600 on 22 September, U 9 spotted the three patrolling British cruisers and closed on her first target, Aboukir. U 9 then fired a torpedo from about 500 metres, which struck the British cruiser on the starboard side, flooding the engine room and causing the ship to slew to a stop.
The two cruisers Hogue and Cressy, initially believing that Aboukir had struck a mine, closed the stricken ship to rescue survivors. U 9 then fired two torpedoes at Hogue from a distance of about 300 metres. Both torpedoes were hits – she was mortally wounded, and capsized and sank within 10 minutes.
Shortly after, U 9 fired two torpedoes at Cressy from her stern tubes at a range of just under 1,000 metres. One torpedo missed – but the other hit the cruiser on her starboard side. U 9 then came about and fired her remaining bow torpedo at Cressy, striking her in the port beam. Cressy heeled over and capsized.
In this one action, three valuable 12,000-ton British armoured cruisers had been sent to the bottom of the North Sea, with the loss of 1,459 officers and men. Coming so soon after Pathfinder, it was another stunning success for the German submarine campaign.
The following month, on 15 October, the same submarine, U 9, sank the 7,770-ton protected cruiser HMS Hawke in the North Sea whilst on patrol off Aberdeen. Then the pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Formidable was torpedoed and sunk in the English Channel on 1 January 1915 by U 24. In all nine Royal Navy vessels had been sunk in the opening months of the war for the loss of five German submarines. If the German submarine threat had not been fully understood and feared by the Royal Navy at the beginning of the war, it certainly was now.
The hand-thrown Lance bomb.
At the beginning of World War I, the Royal Navy had no effective means of detecting a submerged submarine and could only rely on physically sighting the periscope or its wake – and then firing on the periscope with their guns. Early anti-submarine weapons were rudimentary, like the hand-thrown Lance bomb, essentially a grenade on a stick that was hurled down by hand when the vessel was physically above or beside the submarine.
In the run-up to World War I, Britain had feared that foreign authorities might not allow its merchant ships to enter port if they were armed. But as the German submarine threat began to materialise, Britain began to arm its merchant ships with a single stern gun, equivalent to what a submarine might carry as a deck gun. Civilian captains were encouraged to use their greater speed to flee a surfaced submarine and shoot back from their more stable gun platform.
The first British merchant ship lost to a German submarine was the 866-ton British steamer SS Glitra, which was stopped by U 17 on 20 October 1914. In accordance with international maritime law, her crew were given time to launch their lifeboats and abandon ship before she was sunk. This pattern of giving crews time to abandon ship would prevail until the beginning of the following year.
On 5 February 1915, Germany published a formal Notice declaring all waters around Great Britain and Ireland a war zone. Then on 18 February 1915, she began a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare within that zone against merchant ships: any shipping, including that of neutral countries, would be sunk without warning and without regard for the lives of the civilian crews. German submarines began to sink an average of 100,000 tons of shipping per month.
Unrestricted submarine warfare continued until September 1915, when it was temporarily abandoned after an international wave of condemnation and the intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, following the sinking of RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915 and other ships carrying American civilians.
♦ ♦ ♦
HMS Pathfinder was sunk by a torpedo fired from U 21 on 5 September 1914 and by a subsequent secondary explosion. Her wreck now lies in 64 metres of water in the Firth of Forth, off the Scottish east coast. Her damaged bow section sheared off and now lies about a mile away.
The wreck of HMS Pathfinder was known in the 1970s to fishermen as a fastener or snag for their nets – and when she began to be dived in the 1980s, she was reported as sitting upright, festooned with nets. In the 1990s as the wreck began to be visited more easily by divers, ropes were still hanging from her lifeboat davits.
Pathfinder sits on an even keel in 64 metres of water in a deep channel in the middle of the Firth of Forth, which is so wide here that the land seems very distant – you feel almost as if you are in open water. She is in a depth that is well within the modern technical diving range. So I determined to dive her and see this fascinating piece of naval history for myself.
My regular dive buddy, Paul Haynes, and I booked ourselves onto a technical dive boat that runs out of Eyemouth, and with a fully laden jeep filled with two full sets of technical diving rig and two underwater scooters (diver propulsion vehicles – DPVs) we drove the three hours down from Stonehaven on a Friday evening to stay overnight locally in Eyemouth and be ready for an early ropes off the next morning to catch slack water – the Holy Grail of diving, the time when the tide would go slack on the wreck and there would be no current to fight against.
The next morning, we were up early for a full breakfast – I always like to stock up well first thing when I am going to be out at sea all day. Next came the laborious task of ferrying all our dive kit, rebreathers, weights, bailout cylinders and scooters along the jetty and onto the dive boat.
Finally, after working up a bit of a sweat, it was done, and it was time for ropes off. Our skipper skilfully took the boat away from the jetty and we moved slowly north-east out of the quaint, ancient fishing harbour. As we left the harbour, the mainland was to our left and local skerries to our right. To our north and east lay the North Sea.
Once in open water, we turned to the north-west and began to motor up towards the Firth of Forth – towards the last resting place of Pathfinder. It was a warm calm day, the early morning sunlight sparkling off the blue water and casting long shadows. We passed the rocky foreshore and cliffs of the famous St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve on our port beam, before leaving the land behind as we headed out into the open expanse of the Firth of Forth. Our destination lay far offshore.
As we neared the site, I popped into the wheelhouse and watched the echo sounder as the boat slowed on our approach to the site. On the first pass, the familiar multi-coloured silhouette of a wreck far below, rising a good 5–10 metres off the seabed, appeared on the sounder. We were in business – and the crew readied the shotline, a weighted line with a large buoy at its other end.
The UK has semi-diurnal tides, which means that the seawater flows in one direction, say south, for roughly six hours, before turning to move in the opposite direction, north, for another six hours. The current gets progressively stronger from the beginning of the six-hour period until midway through the cycle, after which the strength of the current begins to drop away and lessen towards the point when the tide begins to turn, at which point the water goes slack; there is little or no tidal flow.
The actual strength of the tide at any one time in the cycle depends on celestial mechanics and the alignment of the sun, earth and moon. There are two types of tides - the stronger are called spring tides, whilst the weaker are called neap tides.
Spring