HMS E7: Thirteen Ships in the Marmara, Then Caught in the Net

Chatham-Built

HMS E7 was built at Chatham Dockyard, laid down on 30 March 1912, launched on 2 October 1913 and completed on 14 March 1914. She was one of the early E-class boats, the best submarines the Navy had in 1914, whose design is described in HMS E3.

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Ferdinand Feilmann, and from the end of 1914 she was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Archibald Cochrane, who had learned his trade in command of the prototype D1.

Bait at Heligoland

When war broke out E7 was at Harwich with the 8th Submarine Flotilla under Commodore Roger Keyes, and in the first weeks she patrolled in the Heligoland Bight. On 28 August 1914 she took part in the first sea battle of the war there, whose plan is described in HMS D8. Her job was the more dangerous one.

While some of the submarines waited submerged in ambush, Keyes reported that E6, E7 and E8 were "exposing themselves", running on the surface where the Germans could see them, to draw the German destroyers and cruisers out to sea into the path of the British forces. It worked, and by the evening three German cruisers and a destroyer had been sunk.

To the Dardanelles

In 1915 E7 was sent to the Mediterranean, to the campaign at Gallipoli. The Allied armies had landed on the peninsula in April, and the Turkish troops facing them were supplied largely by sea, across the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople.

If British submarines could get into the Marmara, they could cut that supply line. The difficulty was getting in.

The Dardanelles were a narrow channel some forty miles long, with a strong current running out of them, lined with guns and searchlights, sown with minefields and, at Nagara Point, crossed by a great steel net. Some boats were lost trying.

E15 ran aground under the guns at Kephez in April with her captain killed, and the Australian AE2 was lost at the end of the month. But others got through, and in the summer of 1915 the British submarines in the Marmara caused havoc. The old B-class boats that had been there first are described in HMS B6.

Thirteen Ships

E7's first patrol in the Marmara lasted twenty-four days, and by the end of it she had sunk thirteen vessels and damaged many more. Most of the vessels sunk in the Marmara that summer were small steamers, dhows and sailing craft carrying troops and supplies across the sea, and many were stopped and sunk by gunfire or with charges rather than torpedoes.

The E boats sent to the Dardanelles had been given a deck gun at Malta for exactly that kind of work. Cochrane also took her close inshore to attack the railway that ran along the coast towards the Gallipoli front.

According to the newspaper report of his DSO, he blocked the line, then shelled a troop train and blew up the ammunition wagons attached to it. For a submarine to stop a train was, even in the Marmara in 1915, a novelty.

The Net at Nagara

On 4 September 1915 E7 set off up the Straits again for her second patrol. At seven o'clock in the morning she dived to a hundred feet to pass under the anti-submarine net at Nagara Point, and her starboard propeller caught in the mesh. She was stuck fast.

For a long time Cochrane tried to work her free, going ahead and astern, while the Turks above, who could see the net moving, dropped a mine down on her.

Waiting at Chanak, a little way down the Straits, was a German U-boat officer, Oberleutnant Heino von Heimburg, whose own boat was in for repairs there. He had already made his name that summer: his small U-boat, UB-14, had sunk the troopship Royal Edward in the Aegean in August with the loss of many hundreds of men.

Hearing that a British submarine was caught in the net, Heimburg went out in a small boat, by one account rowed by his own cook, worked out where she lay, and lowered an explosive charge over the side on a line. It went off close to E7, and did enough.

Cochrane had no choice left. With the boat damaged, the air going foul and no chance of getting free, he brought E7 to the surface, under fire from the shore, got his crew out, and set charges to destroy her so that she could not be taken. She sank in the Straits. Every man of her crew survived and was taken prisoner.

Two months later Heimburg sank another British submarine, E20, in the Marmara, using information captured from a French boat.

Four-Fifty Miles to Freedom

Captivity in Turkey was hard, and four of E7's men did not survive it. Cochrane was not a man to sit it out. He tried to escape from the camp at Afion Kara Hissar and was recaptured, and spent months in prison for it.

Then in 1918 he and seven other British officers broke out of the camp at Yozgad, in the middle of Anatolia, and walked some 450 miles over the mountains to the Mediterranean coast, where they seized a boat and sailed to freedom in Cyprus. Two of them wrote the story up as Four-Fifty Miles to Freedom, published in 1919, and it is still a classic of escape literature. Cochrane received a bar to his DSO.

His later life was nearly as varied. He entered Parliament, and in the 1930s he went out to be Governor of Burma. The young lieutenant who had once stopped a train with a submarine ended up governing a country.

The photograph at the top of this page shows E7 before the Dardanelles, at speed on the surface with a wave over her bow and her number 87 on the conning tower. It was probably taken in home waters, before a deck gun was fitted at Malta, when the biggest thing in her future still looked like the German Navy.