HMS E8: The Baltic Submarine That Sank the Prinz Adalbert

Chatham-Built

HMS E8 was built at Chatham Dockyard, laid down on 30 March 1912, launched on 30 October 1913 and completed in June 1914, only weeks before the outbreak of war. She was one of the early E-class submarines described in HMS E3, and her captain was Lieutenant Commander Francis Goodhart, who would take her through most of her war.

She was at Harwich with the 8th Submarine Flotilla when the war began, and she patrolled in the Heligoland Bight from the first weeks. On 28 August 1914, in the first sea battle of the war, she was one of the three boats that Commodore Keyes reported as "exposing themselves" on the surface to draw the German ships out, a story told in HMS E7.

Into the Baltic

The Baltic was a German lake. The German fleet could move freely between its bases there and the North Sea through the Kiel Canal, and in the Baltic it faced only the Russian fleet, which was cautious, and carried on a trade in Swedish iron ore that was vital to German industry.

In 1914 the Admiralty decided to send British submarines into the Baltic to work with the Russians. The only way in was through the narrow, shallow Sound between Denmark and Sweden, past patrols watching for exactly that.

In October 1914 Max Horton in E9, whose later career is described in HMS M1, and Noel Laurence in E1 got through.

In August 1915 E8 followed them, slipping through the Sound to join E1 and E9 at the Russian base at Reval, now Tallinn in Estonia. She arrived in time for the busiest year of the Baltic campaign.

The British boats worked with the Russian fleet against German warships and transports in the eastern Baltic, and against the ore ships coming down from Sweden, and they did so well that the Germans became seriously alarmed.

The Prinz Adalbert

On 23 October 1915 E8 was on patrol off the port of Libau, in what is now Latvia, which the Germans had captured. That morning the German armoured cruiser Prinz Adalbert came out of Libau, and about twenty nautical miles from the port E8 found her.

She was an old ship but a big one, of about 9,000 tons, and she had already been torpedoed once by Horton's E9 in July and repaired. Goodhart worked E8 into position and fired a single torpedo from about 1,200 metres.

It hit her forward, in the magazine. Prinz Adalbert blew up and sank in a matter of moments. Of her crew of some 675 men, three survived.

It was one of the heaviest losses of life the German Navy suffered in the Baltic, and it had an immediate effect: after it, the Germans temporarily withdrew their big ships from operations in the eastern Baltic, leaving the field to the Russians and the British submarines. Goodhart was awarded the DSO, and the Tsar, Nicholas II, awarded him the Russian Order of St George.

Francis Goodhart

Goodhart left E8 at the end of 1916 and came home, and in January 1917 he was invited by his friend Godfrey Herbert to come along as a guest on the trials of K13 in the Gareloch, on 29 January 1917. During a dive K13 flooded, because four large ventilators for her boiler room had been left open, and she sank to the bottom with some eighty men aboard.

The men trapped in her knew that unless the outside world knew where they were and what had happened, they would die. Goodhart and Herbert decided to try to reach the surface by flooding the conning tower and letting the air pressure blow them out through the hatch. Goodhart went first.

He struck his head on the way out, was trapped in the conning tower, and drowned. Herbert was carried up to the surface by the rush of air and picked up, and he was able to tell the rescuers what they needed to know. Forty-six men were saved.

Goodhart was awarded the Albert Medal in Gold after his death, for gallantry in attempting to save life at the cost of his own. Herbert's story is told in HMS K12, the boat he commanded after the war.

Scuttled off Helsinki

E8 stayed in the Baltic under Lieutenant Thomas Kerr. By the end of 1917 the Russian Revolution had taken Russia out of the war, and under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the British submarines found themselves in a country that had made peace with Germany.

The flotilla moved from Reval to Helsingfors, now Helsinki, in Finland, which was itself in the middle of a civil war. Then, in April 1918, a German division landed at Hanko, close to Helsingfors, to support the Finnish Whites.

The British submarines could not get out of the Baltic, and they could not be allowed to fall into German hands.

On 4 April 1918 E8 was taken out by a small care and maintenance party under Lieutenant Downie and scuttled about a mile and a half off Harmaja lighthouse, outside Helsinki harbour. E1, E9 and E19 and three C-class boats went the same way within days, together with the flotilla's supply ships, stores and torpedoes.

By one account E8's charges failed to go off at first, and she had to be blown up again. Downie and his men made their way home through Petrograd and Archangel. Her wreck is said to have been raised in 1953 and broken up in Finland.

The photograph at the top of this page shows E8 in the summer of 1916, coming in from a Baltic patrol with her crew spread along her length, weathered and streaked from months at sea. One of the men standing forward on her bow is raising a hand to his cap.