HMS E18: The Last Photograph, Leaving Reval in May 1916

A War Baby

HMS E18 was one of the E-class submarines ordered in the last months of peace and built in a hurry once the war had begun. She was laid down by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness on 1 January 1914, launched on 4 March 1915 and completed on 6 June 1915, when she joined the 8th Submarine Flotilla at Harwich.

Her captain was Lieutenant Commander Robert Halahan. The class is described in HMS E3.

She was at Harwich for only a few months. In September 1915 she was sent to the Baltic, to join the British submarines working with the Russian fleet from Reval, and like the boats before her she had to slip through the narrow Sound between Denmark and Sweden to get there.

Why the British sent submarines into the Baltic, and what they achieved, is told in HMS E8, which went in a few weeks before her and was her partner on her last patrol.

She did not go alone. By most accounts she left Harwich at the end of August 1915 in company with E19, commanded by Francis Cromie, a former captain of the prototype D1 who would become one of the most famous British officers of the Baltic campaign.

The two boats got through the Sound and reached Reval in September. Cromie made his name within weeks, sinking a string of German ore ships off the Swedish coast in October. E18 had less luck. Her patrols that autumn found little, and one cruise of three weeks ended at Reval in November without a success.

It was the nature of submarine warfare that one boat could find a target every day and another, in the next patrol area, nothing for a month.

25 May 1916

The eastern Baltic freezes in winter, and the submarine campaign there largely stopped until the spring. By late May 1916 it was under way again. On 25 May 1916 E18 was ordered to sail at six in the evening, in company with the Russian submarine Gepard, and given a patrol area off Memel, on the coast of East Prussia. E8 sailed on the same patrol.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken that day, as E18 moved out through the crowded harbour at Reval. Her hull and conning tower are covered in the blotched camouflage the Baltic boats wore, and a handful of her crew stand spaced out along the casing from bow to stern.

Behind her are the merchant steamers, the masts and funnels and the harbour buildings of the old Estonian port. It was the last time she left port, and it is the last photograph ever taken of her.

The V100

On 26 May, off Memel, she found a German destroyer, V100, one of the big new boats of the German Navy, and torpedoed her. The torpedo blew off V100's bow. A second torpedo missed. The destroyer did not sink: her crew kept her afloat, and she was towed home.

But it was a hit, and E18 got away from the German escorts and headed off along the coast.

On 28 May a German naval aircraft sighted her off Memel and she dived. On 1 June the German submarine UB-30 saw a periscope about twenty-five miles north-west of Steinort, and the Germans believed it was E18. She was due to report at Dagerort, the lighthouse at the western tip of the island of Hiiumaa, on 2 June.

She never arrived. Nothing more was heard from her, Thirty men were lost with her, Halahan among them.

Two Men Left Behind

Two of her crew were not aboard. Petty Officer John Percival Ryan had gone down with measles before she sailed and had been left ashore. He was later drafted to E19.

The other was Able Seaman Charles Henry Sexton, who had been left behind for that patrol, and who was already one of the luckiest men in the Submarine Service: he had been one of the handful of survivors when D5 was blown up by a mine off Great Yarmouth in November 1914, a loss recorded in HMS D8. Sexton was later drafted to E8. Few men can have had more reason to believe in fate.

Found in 2009

For a long time the Germans believed that E18 had been sunk by one of their own decoy ships, a trap ship known as Hilfsschiff K, operating off the Estonian coast. Other historians suspected that she had run into a minefield laid only shortly before across her route home. Nobody could be sure, because nobody knew where she lay.

The answer came ninety-three years later. Guided by information from an Australian descendant of one of her crew, the Swedish marine survey company MMT spent years looking for her, and on 17 October 2009 its survey vessel Triad located a wreck close to the island of Hiiumaa, the island where the Dagerort lighthouse stands and where she had been heading.

A remotely operated vehicle was sent down, and its cameras showed E18, in remarkably good condition. Her hatch was open, which suggests that she was running on the surface when she struck a mine, and her hull shows damage of the kind a mine would cause. The story of the trap ship was put to rest.

When the news of her loss reached Petrograd, the Tsar sent a telegram of condolence and awarded Halahan the Order of St George. E18 lies where she sank, a war grave, with her thirty men.

The photograph of her leaving Reval is now the best memorial they have: a fine, ordinary picture of a submarine going out on patrol on a spring evening, with no idea that she was not coming back.