HMS Audacious (1912): The Dreadnought the Admiralty Pretended Hadn't Sunk

A Dreadnought Built for the Grand Fleet

HMS Audacious was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 23 March 1911, launched on 14 September 1912, and commissioned on 15 October 1913 at a cost of just under £1.92 million, the fourth and final ship of the King George V-class dreadnoughts.

She displaced over 25,000 tons, carried ten 13.5-inch guns in five twin turrets, and was protected by a 12-inch armoured belt, exactly the kind of powerful, modern battleship the Grand Fleet needed for the war that broke out barely a year after she entered service.

It is worth distinguishing this King George V class from the one most people think of. These four ships were laid down in 1911, carried ten 13.5-inch guns and belonged to the era of the Grand Fleet and Jutland. The King George V class of 1939, with their 14-inch guns and their Second World War careers, are an entirely different set of ships that happen to share the name of the same king. Two classes, two wars, one monarch, and a great deal of confusion in book indexes ever since.

A Mine Off Tory Island

The minefield that sank her had been laid, almost by chance, into the Grand Fleet's own path. SS Berlin had sailed from Bremerhaven on 16 October 1914 under Kapitän zur See Hans Pfundheller and sown around 200 mines in a V-shaped field between Tory Island and Lough Swilly, aimed generally at British trade.

The U-boat scare deserves a great deal more than a clause, because the situation behind it is genuinely astonishing. In 1914 Scapa Flow, the base of the greatest fleet in the world, had no submarine defences at all. No booms, no nets, no guns covering the entrances. Churchill was satisfied that the tides and the channels would keep submarines out. Jellicoe, who had to sleep there, was not, and in September he wrote asking for a submarine defence because it would give such a feeling of confidence. On 17 October a submarine was reported entering the Flow. Jellicoe thought the report false and took the entire Grand Fleet to sea anyway, telegraphing that he had no safe base at present.

So for several weeks in the autumn of 1914 the Royal Navy's main battle fleet was effectively homeless, scattered between Lough Swilly in Ireland and Loch Ewe in Scotland while blockships were sunk and nets were strung across the entrances at Scapa. That is the only reason a King George V-class dreadnought was doing gunnery practice off the north coast of Ireland in October 1914, and it is the only reason she was anywhere near a minefield laid at British trade. Audacious was lost because her own base was not safe to sit in.

Days earlier, a U-boat scare had forced the Grand Fleet to abandon its main base at Scapa Flow and shelter temporarily at Lough Swilly instead, so when Audacious sailed out for gunnery practice on 27 October she was passing straight through ground the enemy had mined only eleven days before.

On the morning of 27 October 1914, while heading out for gunnery practice off Tory Island on the northern coast of Ireland, Audacious struck a German naval mine laid by the auxiliary minelayer SS Berlin. The explosion tore into her hull some 16 feet below the waterline, forward of the port engine room, and her captain, Cecil Dampier, initially believed she had been torpedoed rather than mined.

Dampier was never blamed for the loss; within three months he had been made a Commodore First Class, was promoted Rear-Admiral in February 1915, and went on to serve as Admiral-Superintendent at Dover in 1917.

SS Berlin, the ship that laid the mine, fared rather less well: low on coal after her mission, she put into neutral Trondheim in Norway, overstayed the 24 hours she was permitted there, and was interned by the Norwegians for the rest of the war.

The light cruiser HMS Liverpool stood by while destroyers and tugs raced to help, and even the great liner RMS Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic, attempted to take her under tow, only for the towline to snap. Further rescue attempts by Liverpool and the collier SS Thornhill also failed, and it fell to Vice-Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly to coordinate the increasingly desperate operation.

The Olympic's part in it is worth dwelling on. She was on a commercial crossing with passengers aboard, she was the sister of the Titanic, and her master took the largest liner in the world alongside a sinking battleship in an open sea and tried to tow her. The line parted. What her passengers did next mattered rather more: a number of them, Americans and therefore neutrals, photographed and filmed the whole thing from the boat deck. It is one of the earliest cases of ordinary people with cameras defeating a government's attempt to keep something quiet, and it is the reason the Germans knew inside three weeks what the British were still denying four years later.

By 6:15pm all remaining personnel had been evacuated, and at 8:45pm, as HMS Exmouth approached, Audacious heeled sharply, paused, and capsized.

Fifteen minutes later she was torn apart by internal explosions, almost certainly high-explosive shells falling from their racks and igniting the cordite in her B magazine, hurling wreckage some 300 feet into the air; a single piece of armour plate travelled 800 yards and killed a petty officer aboard HMS Liverpool, remarkably the only human casualty connected with the entire sinking of a 25,000-ton battleship.

A Secret Kept for Four Years

What followed was a properly remarkable exercise in wartime censorship. Admiral Jellicoe proposed keeping the loss secret, and both the Board of Admiralty and the British Cabinet agreed: for the remainder of the war, Audacious's name continued to appear on public lists of ship movements and activities as though she were still afloat, an entire fictional career maintained on paper for a ship sitting on the seabed.

The logic was straightforward enough, to avoid revealing any apparent weakness in the Grand Fleet's strength to Germany, and the German admiral Reinhard Scheer later wrote with something close to professional admiration of Britain's willingness to conceal its own losses so completely.

The one flaw in the plan was that American tourists aboard the Olympic had photographed and filmed the entire sinking, and word of what they had witnessed spread despite British restrictions, to the point that Germany officially accepted the loss as fact by 19 November 1914.

The British government nonetheless maintained the official fiction for the rest of the war, only publishing a formal notice in The Times on 14 November 1918, days after the Armistice, confirming that Audacious had sunk after striking a mine off the north Irish coast fully four years earlier, and that this had been kept secret at the urgent request of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet.

The censorship itself is worth examining rather than simply admiring, because it was a policy with an obvious hole in it. Germany accepted the loss as a fact by 19 November 1914. The Grand Fleet knew. The Olympic's passengers knew. Any neutral shipping agent in a dozen ports could have found out. What the fiction actually protected was not the secret but the public arithmetic: the published lists of British capital ships, on which the whole prewar naval race had been argued in newspapers and in Parliament, went on showing a number that was one too high. It was a piece of accounting maintained for domestic and diplomatic effect long after it had stopped fooling the enemy.

A Costly Lesson in Damage Control

Beyond the remarkable secrecy, Audacious's loss exposed genuine and dangerous flaws in Royal Navy damage control practice. Her engine-circulating pumps lacked proper bilge connections, and her steam-powered auxiliary systems failed as the flooding spread and disabled her boilers, precisely the kind of design weakness that would later contribute to other British warship losses.

And the damage control lesson is the part that saved other ships. What actually sank her was not the hole but what the flooding did to her ability to fight it: the engine-circulating pumps had no proper connection to the bilges, so the most powerful pumping capacity aboard could not be used where it was needed, and once the water reached the boilers the steam-driven auxiliaries died and with them the rest of the pumps. A ship that cannot make steam cannot pump, and a ship that cannot pump will eventually go down from a wound she ought to have survived. Extra bilge pumps and better ventilation valves went into the dreadnought fleet within two months. It is a very short interval between a disaster and a fix, and it is a good deal to the Admiralty's credit.

Within two months, the Navy had ordered additional bilge pumps and improved ventilation valves fitted to dreadnoughts from the St Vincent and Indefatigable classes onward, a direct and fairly swift practical response to what Audacious's loss had revealed.

Her wreck lies upside down some 58 to 68 metres deep, roughly 17 miles northeast of Tory Island, with her B turret and barbette blown clear by the internal explosions, and was explored for the History Channel's Deep Wreck Mysteries in 2008.

She remains, to this day, the largest warship ever sunk by a naval mine, a distinction earned in the war's opening months and then, for four remarkable years, officially denied to have happened at all.