HMS E2: The Last Submarine Out of the Marmara

A D Boat That Became an E

HMS E2 was laid down at Chatham Dockyard on 14 February 1911 as D10, the tenth boat of the D class. While she was on the stocks the Admiralty changed its mind and decided to build her to the bigger and better E-class design instead, and she was completed on 30 June 1913 as one of the very first E boats, the class described in HMS E3.

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander David de Beauvoir Stocks, who had commanded the D-class prototype D1 three years earlier.

When war came she was at Harwich with the 8th Submarine Flotilla, patrolling the North Sea under Commodore Keyes. In 1915, with Stocks back in command, she was sent out to the Mediterranean, to the campaign at Gallipoli. As built, the early E boats had no deck gun.

The ones going to the Dardanelles had one fitted at Malta, since much of the work in the Sea of Marmara was against small craft that were not worth a torpedo, and in the photograph at the top of this page Stocks is standing beside it.

Through the Net

In August 1915 E2 was sent up the Dardanelles into the Marmara to join E11. The passage is described in HMS E7: forty miles of narrow channel, guns, searchlights, minefields, a strong current against her, and at Nagara Point the great anti-submarine net.

As E2 dived to pass under the net, a 3.5-inch steel wire from it fouled her gun mounting and held her fast. Above her a Turkish guard boat began throwing small bombs over the side, and then a destroyer arrived and began firing shells into the water where she lay.

Stocks managed to work her free, and she got through into the Marmara on 13 August. The gun mounting had been badly strained, and it took the crew two days of hard work to put it right.

In the Marmara

E2 lost no time. On 14 August, the day after she arrived, she sank the Turkish minelayer Samsun, with two of her officers and eight of her crew.

Through the rest of August she and E11 worked together against the coastal traffic, the steamers and sailing craft carrying men and supplies across the sea to the Gallipoli front, and off the pier at Mudanya E2 sank a large steamer.

In an action alongside E11 against a Turkish decoy ship, a "Q-ship", her gun mounting gave way altogether, but the crew patched it up well enough for E2 to carry out a very successful bombardment of Mudania.

Lieutenant Lyon

E2's first lieutenant was Lieutenant Lyon, and on the night of 7 to 8 September 1915 he took on a job that very few submarine officers have ever done. A railway ran along the shore of the Marmara near San Stefano, carrying supplies towards the front, and on it was a bridge.

E2 brought Lyon close inshore in the dark, and he swam ashore with a demolition charge, on his own, to blow it up. On the way, according to one account, he swam out to two dhows and destroyed them too. A loud explosion was heard from the shore. The bridge, it seems, was destroyed. Lyon never came back.

Stocks waited for him for about five hours, close inshore in enemy waters, and then stayed in the area for two more days in the hope that Lyon might reach the coast and signal. He never did, and nothing more was ever learned of him. He has no known grave, and his name is on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.

He was not the only British submariner to try something like it: in August E11's first lieutenant, Guy D'Oyly-Hughes, whose later career is in HMS K12, had swum ashore further east to blow up a stretch of railway and got back. Lyon was less lucky.

E2 came out of the Marmara on 14 September, after a month inside.

The Last Boat Out

She went back in for a second patrol on 9 December 1915. By then the campaign on land was all but over, and the decision had been taken to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula. The submarines in the Marmara were recalled one by one, and on 2 January 1916 E2 was the last British submarine to come out.

The evacuation of the last troops from Helles followed within a week.

The submarine campaign in the Marmara had been one of the few real successes of the whole Dardanelles operation. Between April and December 1915 nine British and four French submarines sank a battleship, a destroyer, five gunboats, eleven troop transports, forty-four supply ships and 148 sailing vessels, at a cost of eight Allied submarines lost.

E2 had played her part, and she was the boat that closed the door behind them. The B-class boats that had been there before her are described in HMS B6.

After the Dardanelles

E2 served on through the rest of the war, under Lieutenant Samuel Gravener from 1916. She lost one more man, Stoker John Griffin, who died of pneumonia on 8 October 1918, a month before the end. In March 1921 she was sold at Malta, where her deck gun had been fitted six years before, and broken up.