HMS K4 lies stranded on a sandbank off Walney Island, Barrow in January 1917, only days after her commissioning. K4 was to prove the most ill-fated unit of an ill-conceived class of steam-powered submarines that would, in the words of the naval historian Edwyn Gray, see ‘more accidents than action’ in their short life-times, and lead to the needless deaths of 270 British seamen.
As a relatively new and developmental technology, submarines had suffered more than their fair share of accidental losses ever since their introduction to the world’s navies at the beginning of the century. The Royal Navy’s first submarines built to a British design, the A-Class, had proved especially susceptible to accidents, four of thirteen units being lost, most lamentably the A-7 in January 1914.[1] Their short, uncompartmentalised hulls, toxic petrol-fuelled engines, and tiny reserve buoyancy made these submarines death-traps in any emergency; a fact that led to them to be dubbed ‘coffin ships’ by an increasingly critical British press. However, the gradual introduction of safer diesel engines, improved hulls, and external ballast tanks in the succeeding B, C, and D classes significantly reduced fatal accidents, with only four of 59 subsequent units lost, and all but one of those due to collisions.[2]
The further improved E-Class became the standard Royal Navy submarine of the Great War. With a maximum surface speed of 15kts and a range of up to 3,000 nautical miles, the E-Class provided the submarine service with its greatest military successes during WWI, causing havoc in Turkey’s Sea of Marmora during the Gallipoli campaign, and creating a stir in the Baltic. Among a total of 58 units built, only three were lost to accidents; another 25 to combat reasons.
Nevertheless, even before hostilities had started, key figures at the Admiralty were looking for a submarine design that could match the speed of a battleship and therefore work effectively alongside surface units of the Grand Fleet. The desire for such a vessel appears to have been strong in the at-sea Admirals Jellicoe and Beatty. Another proponent was Commodore Roger Keys, who had taken over leadership of the Submarine Service in 1912, and who would command the Harwich-based 8th submarine flotilla during the early stages of the War.
The result of this top-level desire for a ‘fleet submarine’ was a truly bizarre decision to revert to the kind of oil-fired steam turbines that powered the Royal Navy’s most modern dreadnoughts. Jackie Fisher, the man most responsible for the all-big-gun battleship, was evidently far less convinced of the merits of merging submarine and steam. However, when subsequent diesel-powered designs proved incapable of providing the necessary 24-knot surface speed, the K-Class was given the go ahead.
Construction of the first units following a Vickers design began in June of 1915, and the first boat, K3 was commissioned in August of the following year. The design included two retractable smokestacks abaft the conning tower to drive the vessel on the surface, and an 800hp diesel-electric motor to power her underwater. In order to accommodate the necessary number of boilers, the submarine had to be over 330ft in length, as long as one of the Royal Navy’s destroyer flotilla leaders. The vessel’s extreme length allowed for the fitting of 4-inch guns on the fore and after deck as well as a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun amidships. The class were designed to carry 10 torpedo tubes, four being in the bow and four more in the beam. A further pair were initially fitted on a revolving mount on the super-structure but these were found during trials to be unworkable.
The design of the K-Class contained a number of inherent flaws. Firstly, the necessity of retracting and sealing the funnels and dowsing the boiler fires before diving meant the boats were comparatively slow to dive, requiring at minimum four minutes to fully submerge. Secondly, their extreme length placed undue stresses on the hull during dives; by the time the stern had submerged the bow was already approaching crush depth. The hull length also severely compromised the boats’ manoeuvrability. The installation of boiler furnaces made the interior spaces extremely hot even when ventilated on the surface. Finally, the submarines proved to be very wet in open seas; having, it was said ‘too many holes’. In an effort to address the wetness issue, all units were given a modified ‘swan’ bow. Although this improved sea-keeping forward, the raised bow obscured the view of those in the deckhouse, which also required raising. The modified bow also added to steering issues.
These design flaws became immediately apparent during trials. During one of its initial test dives, K3 plunged uncontrollably to the seafloor, leaving her propellers turning above water for several disconcerting minutes. One of those aboard at the time of this misadventure was the future King George VI. Months later, in early January of 1917, while steaming on the surface, K3 was hit by a rogue wave which inundated the engine rooms and doused the boilers, leaving her without motive power. It was also around this time that the newly completed K4 became ignominiously stranded at the western end of Morecombe Bay, close to the shipyard that had constructed her. Meanwhile K2 suffered an explosion and fire while undergoing a diving test in Portsmouth Dockyard.
By far the most serious incident occurred on 29th January 1917 during the trials of K13. The ship was being tested in Scotland’s Gare Loch near the Firth of Clyde. Aboard, in addition to her skipper, Godfrey Herbert and 53 crew, were more than a dozen workmen from Fairfield, the shipyard responsible for the boat’s construction. A group of civilians as well as the commander and officers of her sister K14 added up to a ship’s complement of 80. During a test dive, the submarine’s boiler room began to flood, due to a failure in the retraction and sealing of the funnels. Efforts to bring the vessel back to the surface failed and she came to rest at an angle on the floor of the loch. A quickly executed order to close her internal watertight doors saved those in the forward part of the vessel but doomed 31 men in her engine room to death from drowning. A tortuously slow and rescue effort eventually led to the recovery of the boat and 48 survivors after almost 60 hours of airless captivity, but the commander of K14 perished during an escape attempt, and the skipper of K13 later re-assigned himself to Q-ships. The K13 was refitted and re-commissioned as K22, by which time the class had been re-christened among service personnel as the ‘Kalamity Class’, and those serving aboard them dubbed members of ‘The Suicide Club’.
On 17th June 1917, while patrolling the North Sea south of the Shetland Islands, the K7 encountered the U-boat U-95. The British vessel reportedly fired a salvo of torpedoes at the surfaced enemy, one of which was seen to strike her amidships. Alas, the offending weapon failed to detonate, and the K7 was forced to make a hasty retreat. The torpedo’s dud warhead was reputedly pulled from the German submarine’s ballast tank on her return to port.
Despite these setbacks, C-in-C of the Grand Fleet Beatty was determined to have submarines play a more offensive role in the war (rather than, as the Admiralty saw it, primarily coastal defence). The completed K-Class were formed into the 12th Submarine Flotilla (SF) based at Scapa Flo. It was not far from this anchorage that the K-Class’s one engagement with the enemy occurred. On 17th June 1917 while on patrol south of the Shetland Islands, the K7 encountered the U-boat U-95. The British vessel reportedly fired a salvo of torpedoes at her surfaced opponent, one of which was seen to strike the German submarine amidships. Alas, the offending weapon failed to detonate, and the K7 was forced to make a hasty retreat. The torpedo’s dud warhead was reputedly found lodged in the U-boat’s outer hull on her return to port.
On 17th November 1917, two more units of this flotilla, K1 and K4 were involved in a collision during a Grand Fleet sweep towards the Danish Coast. Although no one was killed, damage sustained by the former was judged serious enough that she had to be scuttled by the escorting cruiser HMS Blonde. The incident highlighted the difficulty of coordinating the movements of vessels which, as one wag put it, combined the speed of a destroyer with the bridge facilities and visibility of a picket boat, and it foreshadowed the incident for which the K-Class achieved its greatest notoriety, ‘The Battle of May Island’.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 