HMS E34: A Hampshire-Built Minelayer and the Sole Survivor of B2

Built on the Itchen

HMS E34 was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at their yard at Woolston, on the River Itchen at Southampton, better known for destroyers and fast motor boats. She was launched on 27 January 1917 and completed on 1 March 1917.

She was one of the later boats of the E class, the best British submarines of the First World War, whose design is described in HMS E3, but she was built for a special job. Six of the E boats were completed as minelayers, with the torpedo tubes on either side of the hull replaced by mine tubes carrying twenty mines, and E34 also carried a 12-pounder gun forward of the conning tower.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her in a floating dock, out of the water, seen from just off her bow. It is an unusual view of a submarine of the period, and it shows clearly the full rounded shape of her hull, the hydroplanes standing out from the bow and the openings for her bow torpedo tubes.

Richard Pulleyne

Her captain was Lieutenant Richard Ivor Pulleyne, and he had a story that no other officer in the Submarine Service could match. On 4 October 1912, as a young lieutenant, he had been one of the officers of the B-class submarine B2 when she was run down off Dover by the German liner Amerika and cut almost in half.

B2 went down in seconds. Of the sixteen men aboard her, Pulleyne was the only one who got out alive. He was in the water for some time before the flares from the liner drew another submarine, C16, to the scene, and she found him and picked him up.

It was one of the long list of peacetime submarine losses before the war, the one before it being A3 in the Solent that February.

He went back to submarines. By 1918 he was twenty-nine, a lieutenant with the DSO and the DSC, and in command of one of the Navy's most dangerous submarines, doing one of its most dangerous jobs.

Twenty-Four Minefields

The minelaying submarines worked from Harwich, and their task was to lay mines where no surface minelayer could go: off the Dutch and German coasts, in the swept channels the U-boats used to come and go from their bases, close inshore under the noses of the German patrols.

Each trip meant creeping in submerged, often at night, to an exact position, releasing the mines one by one and getting away again without being seen. The minelayers rarely knew what their mines sank. The work of another Harwich minelayer captain, John Gaimes of E45, is described in HMS K5.

E34 carried out twenty-four of these operations. It is an extraordinary number, and it says a great deal about Pulleyne and his crew.

UB-16

On 10 May 1918 she had the kind of success that minelaying submarines hardly ever had. In the North Sea east of Harwich, at 52 degrees 6 minutes north, 2 degrees 1 minute east, she found the German coastal submarine UB-16 on her way home on the surface. It was after seven in the evening.

Pulleyne at first took her for a British boat, but he dived anyway to make sure, and through the periscope he saw that she was German. He crept in to about 400 yards without her crew noticing anything and fired two torpedoes. The first hit her in the bow and failed to explode.

The second struck her amidships, below the conning tower, and she sank at once.

Fifteen of UB-16's crew died. The only survivor was her commander, Oberleutnant Vicco von der Lühe, who had taken command of her less than three weeks earlier.

He was pulled out of the sea a few minutes after she went down and taken to a prisoner of war camp, where he caught influenza in the great epidemic and died on 1 March 1919. Pulleyne was recommended for the DSO for the sinking within the week.

20 July 1918

On the morning of 14 July 1918 E34 sailed from Harwich with orders to lay a minefield off Vlieland, one of the Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast. It was her twenty-fifth operation.

Before she left, a national newspaper photographed her crew, and among them was her signalman, Percy Baron Richens of Hungerford in Berkshire. He had joined the Navy as a boy in 1906 and had served in E34 since April 1917, and he had been mentioned in despatches and awarded a Romanian decoration. He was twenty-eight. She was never seen again.

She was lost on or about 20 July, somewhere between Texel and Vlieland, near the sandbanks of the Eierlandse Gronden. There were no survivors, and no reason for her loss has ever been established for certain. The most likely explanation is the bitterest one.

She was probably mined, and the minefield she ran into was very probably one laid off Vlieland some time earlier by another British submarine, E51. In waters as crowded with mines as the approaches to the German Bight had become by 1918, it was all too easy for a submarine to stray into a field her own side had laid and whose exact position nobody aboard her knew.

Thirty-one men died with her. Some time afterwards the body of a British officer was washed ashore on Vlieland, with a handkerchief in his pocket marked "Pulleyne". He and three others of her crew were buried at Noordwijk, on the Dutch coast. The man who had survived the loss of B2 did not survive this.

His DSO for the sinking of UB-16 was gazetted in August 1918, after his death. The rest of her crew are commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial.

A Hampshire Boat

E34 was one of very few British submarines of the First World War built in Hampshire. In sixteen months she laid twenty-four minefields in enemy waters and sank a U-boat, which is more than most submarines of the war achieved. The war ended less than four months after she was lost.