HMS D8: Into the Heligoland Bight on the First Day of Battle

Chatham-Built

HMS D8 was built at Chatham Dockyard, laid down on 14 February 1910, launched on 23 September 1911 and completed on 23 March 1912. She was the last of the eight D-class submarines, the boats that took the Royal Navy's submarines out of the harbours and into the open sea.

Their diesel engines, twin propellers and wireless sets are described in HMS D1, the prototype. As one of the later boats, D8 was a little larger than D1, and like her sisters she could stay at sea for days and patrol far out into the North Sea, which was exactly what the Navy was about to ask of her.

Theodore Brodie

Her first captain, from 1911, was Lieutenant Theodore Stuart Brodie, one of a pair of twins who had joined the Navy together and both become submariners. His brother, Charles Gordon Brodie, would one day command M1, the submarine with a battleship's gun. Theodore's story ended at the Dardanelles.

On 17 April 1915, in command of E15, he tried to take her up through the Straits into the Sea of Marmara, and in the strong current she ran aground on Kephez Point, under the Turkish guns. As Brodie opened the hatch to climb out of the conning tower he was killed by a shell.

According to one account, his twin brother was flying overhead at that moment as an observer in a seaplane, and saw it happen.

The 8th Flotilla

When war came in August 1914 D8 was one of the eight boats of the 8th Submarine Flotilla, the Navy's most modern submarines, with the D and E-class boats that could reach the German coast. Their commodore was Roger Keyes, and their depot ship was Maidstone, with Adamant.

At the outbreak of war the flotilla moved from Portsmouth to Harwich, the nearest British port to the German bases, and from the first days of the war its submarines were patrolling in the Heligoland Bight, the approaches to the German Navy's main anchorages. Her captain by then was Lieutenant Commander William Foster, who had been the first captain of C16 six years before.

Heligoland Bight, 28 August 1914

The patrols showed that German destroyers came out of the Bight every evening to sweep for British submarines and went home every morning, with light cruisers in support. Keyes and Commodore Tyrwhitt of the Harwich destroyers worked out a plan to catch them.

On 28 August 1914 Tyrwhitt's light cruisers and destroyers would sweep into the Bight at dawn and cut off the German patrols, while Keyes's submarines took up positions in advance. Some were to show themselves on the surface to draw the Germans out to sea.

Others were to wait submerged, ready to attack any German warship that came out to help.

D8 was one of the eight boats in Keyes's report of the operation, and her part was to wait in ambush with her sister D2 off the mouth of the River Ems, on the western side of the Bight, in case German ships came out from there.

It was the first major naval action of the war, and it turned into a confused, misty day in which British and German ships, and sometimes British and British, came on each other without warning. The arrival of Beatty's battlecruisers settled it.

By evening three German light cruisers and a destroyer had been sunk, and no British ship had been lost. D8 saw no target, but she was there. Among the submarine captains Keyes singled out for praise was Cecil Talbot of E6, whose story is told in HMS B5.

Half the Class

The D class paid heavily for its war. Exactly half of the eight boats were lost. D2, D8's partner at Heligoland, disappeared with all hands off Borkum in November 1914.

D5 was blown up by a drifting mine off Great Yarmouth in the same month, and her captain Godfrey Herbert's extraordinary later life is told in HMS K12. D3 was bombed in error by a French airship in March 1918, a story told in D1's article, and D6 was torpedoed by a U-boat off Ireland in June 1918. D8 was one of the four that came home.

She was given new captains as the war went on, among them Hubert Vaughan-Jones in 1915, who went on to commission the steam submarine K15. Even out of danger from the enemy, a submarine could still be deadly.

On 8 August 1918 Engine Room Artificer Simpson Anderson of D8 died of arseniuretted hydrogen poisoning, a gas given off by contaminated batteries as they charged, which collected unseen in the boat. It was a reminder that the batteries that made a submarine possible could also poison her crew.

The End

D8 survived the war and was scrapped on 19 December 1921, a few months short of ten years after she was completed. The photograph at the top of this page shows her gliding through calm water with a handful of her crew on the bridge and casing, "D.8" painted on her bow and her number 78 on her conning tower.

It was taken some time between 1912 and 1918, and it is quite possible that some of the men in it were with her in the Bight on 28 August 1914, waiting off the Ems for a German ship that never came.