HMS E42: The Submarine That Torpedoed the Moltke

Built on the Mersey

HMS E42 was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 1 December 1914, launched on 22 October 1915 and completed in the summer of 1916. She was one of the later E-class boats ordered in large numbers once the war had begun, and the class is described in HMS E3.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken on her trials in June or July 1916 by Surgeon Oscar Parkes, and it shows her at speed, throwing up a white bow wave, with exhaust smoke trailing low over the water behind her and her bridge crowded with men.

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander John Graham Bower, the submarine officer who wrote under the name "Klaxon" and whose story is told in HMS K12. In 1917 command passed to Lieutenant Charles Allen, and it was Allen who would give E42 her place in history.

The Last Sortie

By the spring of 1918 the German High Seas Fleet had hardly been to sea in strength since Jutland. But the German army, planning its great offensive in the west, wanted the Navy to do something about the flow of Allied shipping, and Admiral Scheer saw a target.

Convoys were running regularly between Scotland and Norway, escorted by only a few warships at a time, and they were vulnerable. If the whole High Seas Fleet came out, with Admiral Hipper's battlecruisers in the lead, it could fall on one of those convoys and its escort and destroy them before the Grand Fleet could arrive.

On 23 April 1918 the High Seas Fleet sailed, and for once the British did not know. The plan went wrong in two ways. The first was that there was no convoy where they went to look for it. The second was the Moltke.

On the morning of 24 April, far out in the North Sea, her inner starboard propeller shaft snapped, because an old repair had failed. The broken shaft wrecked the turbine, and she rapidly took in some 1,600 tons of water. By a quarter to six in the morning Hipper had been told she could make only four knots.

She had to be taken in tow by the battleship Oldenburg, and the whole fleet turned for home at the speed of a crippled ship.

It was now that the British found out. Moltke's signals about her breakdown broke the German wireless silence, and once they had been read the Grand Fleet put to sea. But the Germans were already heading south, and the Grand Fleet could not get across the North Sea in time to catch them.

One British submarine, J6, had actually seen the German ships on their way out, but her captain had been told that British cruisers might be in his area, took them for British, and did not report them.

25 April 1918

E42 was on patrol off the German coast, on the line the returning fleet would have to cross. In the late afternoon of 25 April Allen saw smoke on the horizon and dashed south-east towards it, and as the evening came on he found himself looking at a line of German heavy ships passing in front of him.

At about 18.38 he fired four torpedoes at a range of over 2,000 yards.

One hit. It struck Moltke abreast her port engine room, and more than 1,700 tons of water flooded in. She was a big, tough ship, a veteran of the Battle of Jutland, where she had fought in Hipper's battlecruiser squadron against Beatty's, and she did not sink.

Her crew kept her going, and the next morning she was safe at anchor in German waters. E42 got away undamaged.

But Moltke was out of the war for months. She was taken into the dockyard at Wilhelmshaven, and she was not fully operational again until September 1918, two months before the Armistice.

Successful submarine attacks on German capital ships were rare in the First World War, and Moltke was unlucky enough to suffer two of them: she had already been torpedoed in the Baltic in 1915 by E1, one of the boats whose campaign there is told in HMS E8.

It was the last time the High Seas Fleet put to sea to fight. Its next voyage was to the Firth of Forth in November 1918, to surrender, and from there to Scapa Flow, where in June 1919 its crews scuttled it. Moltke went to the bottom of Scapa Flow with the rest.

Her old opponents at Jutland, ships like HMS Inflexible, were by then being paid off themselves.

The Rest of Her War

E42 went on patrolling. On 1 July 1918 she attacked the German U-boat U-92, without success. She came through the war, served on for a few more years under a run of new captains, and was sold on 6 September 1922 to be broken up at Poole.

It was a quiet end for a boat that had, on one spring evening in 1918, put a torpedo into one of the most famous ships of the German Navy.