HMS H4: Built in Montreal in Five Months, Sank a U-Boat in the Adriatic

Ordered From America

When the First World War began, the Royal Navy needed more submarines than British yards could build. Early in 1915 the Admiralty ordered twenty from the United States, to a design based on the American H class.

There was a problem: the United States was neutral, and under the neutrality laws American yards could not build warships for a country at war. The answer was to send the work north.

Ten of the boats were subcontracted to Canadian Vickers at Montreal, and since many of their parts had already been made in the United States, the components were shipped across the border and the boats assembled in Canada.

They were built at astonishing speed. HMS H4 was laid down on 11 January 1915 and launched on 1 April, by Mrs Pirie, the wife of the captain of her sister H1. She was completed on 5 June 1915.

From the laying of her keel to the day she was ready for sea took less than five months, at a time when a British yard usually needed well over a year to build a submarine.

The H boats were small, about 150 feet long, with four torpedo tubes in the bow, and they would prove to be among the most successful designs of the war: the Navy went on building improved versions of them in Britain, and some of those later boats served right through the Second World War.

Across the Atlantic

H4 and her sisters H1, H2 and H3 were commissioned at Quebec and then set off for the war. With the armed merchant cruiser Calgarian as their escort, the four little submarines sailed from St John's in Newfoundland to Gibraltar, right across the Atlantic. It was a remarkable voyage for boats of their size.

Each submarine in turn was taken in tow by the Calgarian for a day so that her crew could carry out maintenance on her engines, and then the next took her place. From Gibraltar they went on into the Mediterranean.

The Adriatic

H4's war was spent in the Adriatic, working with the Italian Navy against the Austro-Hungarian fleet and the German and Austrian U-boats based at Pola and Cattaro. By 1917 she was part of the British submarine flotilla at Venice and Brindisi, looked after by the depot ship Adamant.

Her captain at first was Lieutenant Henry Smyth, and from 1917 Lieutenant Oliver North, who had earlier commanded C22 in home waters.

It was frustrating work. The Austrian fleet rarely left harbour, and the U-boats had learned to be careful.

The British boats patrolled off the enemy coast and in the Strait of Otranto, at the mouth of the Adriatic, where a barrage of drifters, nets and mines tried to stop the U-boats getting out into the Mediterranean. It was dangerous too.

H3 was lost in the Adriatic in 1916, probably on a mine, and in April 1918 H1 torpedoed the Italian submarine H5 in a tragic case of mistaken identity. The photograph at the top of this page, taken by Surgeon Oscar Parkes in August 1916, shows H4 crossing the harbour at Brindisi with two of her crew at her deck gun, and the pale stone buildings of the Italian port rising in tiers behind her.

UB-52

On 23 May 1918 H4 was on patrol in the Strait of Otranto when she found the German U-boat UB-52. UB-52 was one of the more successful German boats in the Mediterranean, with twelve ships and more than 41,000 tons sunk to her name.

H4 torpedoed her at a position of 41 degrees 46 minutes north, 18 degrees 52 minutes east. Thirty-three of UB-52's crew were killed. Only two survived: her commander, Otto Launburg, and her navigator, Heinrich Klein.

It was a fine piece of work, and it stood almost alone. One history of the boats describes the sinking of UB-52 as the only contribution of the British submarines in the Adriatic to the war effort, which is harsh on the men who spent three years patrolling those waters, but makes the point that successes were very hard to come by.

For a small boat built in five months in Montreal, it was a fitting reward. A U-boat sinking was the rarest success a submarine could have; the minelayer E34 achieved one in the North Sea in the same month.

The End

H4 came through the war and stayed in the Mediterranean, and she was sold at Malta on 30 November 1921. HMS E2, one of the E boats that had fought in the Sea of Marmara further east, was sold at Malta the same year. The little boat from Montreal had been put together in less than five months, crossed an ocean, served for three years in the Adriatic and sunk a U-boat. It is a career many bigger submarines would have envied.