HMS E3: The First Submarine Ever Sunk by Another Submarine

The Best Submarines in the Navy

When the First World War began, the most modern submarines in the Royal Navy were the boats of the E class. Developed from the D class, whose prototype is described in HMS D1, they were bigger, faster and better armed, with torpedo tubes in the bow, in the stern and on either beam, diesel engines and the range to patrol off the German coast for days at a time.

Inside they were divided by watertight bulkheads, among the first British submarines to be so, so that a boat holed in one place had some chance of surviving. They were the best submarines the Navy had, and over the next four years the E boats would do more fighting than any other British class.

HMS E3 was one of the first of them. She was laid down by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness on 27 April 1911, launched in 1912 and completed on 29 May 1914, nine weeks before the war began. Her captain was Lieutenant Commander George Cholmley, who was thirty-two.

Off the German Coast

E3 joined the 8th Submarine Flotilla at Harwich, the force of D and E-class boats under Commodore Roger Keyes whose part in the first naval battle of the war is told in HMS D8. Its job was to watch the German Navy's bases and attack anything that came out, and in the first months of the war its boats took turns to patrol off the Heligoland Bight and the German coast, usually alone, for several days at a time.

At the start of the war nobody, on either side, had given much thought to the possibility of one submarine sinking another. Submarines were meant to attack surface ships. A submarine on patrol ran on the surface whenever it could, to save its batteries and to see further, and dived when a ship came in sight.

Nobody yet expected that the most dangerous thing on the surface of the North Sea might be another submarine, hunting from below.

18 October 1914

E3 left Harwich on 16 October 1914 to patrol off the island of Borkum, at the mouth of the Ems, on the German-Dutch border. On the morning of 18 October she was on the surface there when she was sighted by the German submarine U-27, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Bernd Wegener.

Wegener dived and began to stalk her. It was a new kind of attack, and he took his time. E3 appears to have had no idea that she was being hunted. When he was in position, Wegener fired a single torpedo. It struck E3 near the stern and blew off the after end of the boat, and she went down almost at once.

Through his periscope Wegener could see four men in the water. But he was afraid that another British submarine might be close by, waiting for him to surface, and he dived and moved away for about half an hour before coming back. When he did come back, there was no-one there. All twenty-eight of E3's crew had died.

It was the first time in history that one submarine had sunk another. It would happen again many times in the next two wars, but E3 was the first, and her loss changed the way submariners on both sides thought about their job. From that day no submarine could treat the surface of the sea as safe.

U-27's End

U-27 did not have long to enjoy it. Ten months later, on 19 August 1915, she was sunk with all hands by gunfire from the British Q-ship Baralong, a disguised merchant ship, in an action that became one of the most notorious of the war, since some of the German survivors were shot as they tried to board another ship.

The Baralong's captain was Godfrey Herbert, himself a submariner who had survived the loss of D5, and his story is told in HMS K12. Wegener died with his boat. The lesson he had taught was not forgotten on either side, and British submarines went on to sink a number of U-boats in the same way.

It cut both ways: in July 1917, off Fair Isle, a U-boat caught C34 on the surface just as U-27 had caught E3.

The Wreck

For three quarters of a century nobody knew exactly where E3 lay. In 1990 a fishing boat snagged its nets on an obstruction on the seabed about 65 kilometres off the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog, and on 14 October 1994, four days short of the eightieth anniversary of her loss, divers identified it as E3. The stern was missing, as Wegener's torpedo had left it.

She should have been left in peace. She has not been. E3 is a war grave, but she lies outside British waters, and over the years divers and salvors have taken a great deal from her.

By 2007 one Dutch dive team described the wreck as effectively cleared out, and her periscope was removed around 2016 without permission from either the Dutch or the British authorities. Her twenty-eight men are commemorated on the naval memorials at home.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken some time between her launch in 1912 and her loss in 1914, and it shows her close to a quayside with her crew out on deck, a group of them in white jumpers by the canvas-screened conning tower and three more forward by the lifebuoys. Some of them, certainly, were among the men who went down with her off Borkum.