HMS G14: Hunting U-Boats From the Tees in Dazzle Paint

Built on a Rumour

In 1914 British intelligence reported that the Germans were building a new kind of U-boat with a double hull, an outer skin around the pressure hull that gave more room for fuel and ballast and made a boat more seaworthy and harder to sink. The Admiralty took it seriously and ordered a class of British boats to match.

They were the G class. They had a partial double hull, a 3-inch deck gun, and a heavy 21-inch torpedo tube in the stern alongside the older 18-inch tubes in the bow.

HMS G14 was laid down by Scotts at Greenock on 1 December 1914, but she spent two and a half years on the stocks, and she was not launched until 17 May 1917. She was commissioned on 31 August 1917.

Hunting U-Boats

By then the war at sea had changed. The German High Seas Fleet rarely came out, and the real threat was the U-boat. In 1917 the U-boats came close to starving Britain into defeat, and every kind of ship and weapon was turned against them, submarines included.

The G boats were based on the North East coast, the 10th Flotilla on the Tees and the 11th at Blyth, and they patrolled the North Sea routes the U-boats used to get to and from the Atlantic, from the Dogger Bank up towards Norway. A submarine hunting a submarine was a slow, patient business.

Both sides ran on the surface when they could and dived when they saw anything, and whichever saw the other first usually won. The first time it ever happened was the loss of E3 in 1914.

The G boats had some successes. G13, later of the same flotilla as G14, torpedoed the minelaying U-boat UC-43 off Shetland in March 1917, under George Bradshaw, whose story is in HMS K15. But they paid for their war. G8 sailed from the Tees on patrol at the turn of 1918 and never came back, probably mined.

G7 disappeared in the North Sea in October 1918, the last British submarine lost in the war. And G11, coming home from a Dogger Bank patrol in thick fog, ran aground and was wrecked off Howick in Northumberland on 22 November 1918, eleven days after the Armistice.

Three Captains

G14 had three captains in her first year, and all of them crop up elsewhere in the history of the Submarine Service. Lieutenant Edward Stanley later commanded the big-gun submarine M1, three years before she was lost.

Lieutenant Maurice Bailward had come to her from the old B5, and took her to the 10th Flotilla on the Tees.

The most remarkable was Lieutenant Commander Andrew Wilmot-Smith, who had already had one of the strangest careers of the war. He had commanded the little A9 in 1909, and in 1915 the submarine E17.

Then, in September 1915, he was given command of the Q-ship Baralong, the disguised merchant ship that a month earlier, under Godfrey Herbert, had sunk the U-boat U-27, as told in HMS K12. On 24 September Wilmot-Smith came upon the U-boat U-41 attacking the steamer Urbino.

Baralong dropped her disguise, and her first shots wrecked U-41's conning tower and killed her commander. The U-boat sank. It became known as the second Baralong incident, because, as with the first, the Germans accused the British of an atrocity against the survivors. Wilmot-Smith received the DSO.

He went on to command G11, before she was wrecked, and then G14.

The Photograph

The photograph at the top of this page shows G14 lying in a choppy anchorage in the bold dark camouflage of the last years of the war, scalloped shapes painted over a lighter band along her hull, meant to make it hard for a U-boat captain to judge her course and size through a periscope. A sailor stands at the gun, more men are on the bridge, and the White Ensign flies above them.

Behind her, under a line of low hills, large warships lie at anchor, one of them with a tall tripod mast. It may well be one of the great fleet anchorages, Scapa Flow or the Forth, but the photograph does not say.

The End

G14 came through the war, and like most of the wartime submarines she was disposed of within a few years of it. The records disagree about exactly when: one gives March 1921 for her scrapping, another a sale on 11 March 1923. Either way, she spent longer on the stocks than she did at war. Her record is a quiet one.

No attack or sinking is recorded against her. But in the last year of the First World War, patrolling the North Sea for U-boats was the most important job a British submarine could do, and G14 did it.