HMS K12: Surviving May Island, With a Gallery of Remarkable Captains

Built on the Tyne

HMS K12 was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Newcastle upon Tyne, laid down on 1 October 1915, launched on 23 February 1917 and completed on 1 August 1917. She was a K boat, one of the steam-driven fleet submarines with boilers and funnels that were meant to keep up with the Grand Fleet at twenty-four knots, and the reasons for that design and its consequences are set out in the history of HMS K3.

She joined the 13th Submarine Flotilla, which moved between Scapa Flow and Rosyth with the battlecruisers, led by a light cruiser acting as flotilla leader.

The Night of May Island

On the evening of 31 January 1918 the 13th Flotilla put to sea from Rosyth with the battlecruisers for an exercise in the North Sea, Operation EC1. The ships went down the Firth of Forth in the dark, without lights, in a long line: the flotilla leader Ithuriel, then K11, K17, K14, K12 and K22, with the battlecruisers and another flotilla of K boats behind them.

Off May Island, at the mouth of the Forth, the leading submarines came across a group of minesweeping trawlers crossing their path. In the confusion that followed, K14's helm jammed, K22 ran into her, and the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible then ran into K22.

Further back, the cruiser Fearless rammed and sank K17, and K4 was rammed by K6 and run over by K7 and sank with all hands. In little more than an hour two submarines had gone and 105 men had died.

K12 was in the middle of it, the fifth ship in the line, with K14 just ahead and K22 just astern. When things began to go wrong she was steaming on with Ithuriel, K11 and K17, unaware of what was happening behind her in the darkness. She came through the night undamaged and without a man lost. In the K class, that was as good as a battle honour.

The Swan Bow

The K boats had a dangerous habit. With a long, low bow and a speed of twenty-four knots they tended to drive their noses into a head sea, and once a K boat's bow went under, the speed and the angle could take the whole ship down without anyone having ordered a dive.

After the war the surviving boats were given a raised, bulbous bow, known as the "swan bow", to lift them over the waves. It changed their appearance completely, and K12 shows it clearly in the photograph above, taken in about 1924, with the high flared stem rising well clear of the water. It helped.

It did not make them safe. In January 1921 K5 dived during an exercise and never surfaced, and that June K15 sank at her moorings in Portsmouth. K12 herself was in collision with K2 as the two boats were leaving harbour in 1924, and both had to be repaired.

A Gallery of Captains

K12's real distinction is the list of men who commanded her.

One of her first captains, in 1917, was Lieutenant Commander John Graham Bower, who under the pen name "Klaxon" wrote some of the best-known accounts of British submarines in the First World War, among them The Story of Our Submarines, published in 1919, as well as On Patrol and a book whose title gave the letters H.M.S. and left the name of the ship blank, in the approved wartime manner.

His books did a great deal to tell the public what the Submarine Service had done, at a time when the Admiralty preferred to say very little.

In 1919 she was commanded by Commander Godfrey Herbert, who had already survived three of the most remarkable episodes of the naval war. In the first weeks of the war, in command of the submarine D5, he had a German cruiser, the Rostock, in his sights and fired two torpedoes at her, and both ran too deep and missed, because the live warheads were heavier than the practice heads the torpedoes had been set for.

In November 1914 D5 was blown up by a drifting mine off Great Yarmouth, and he was one of only a handful of survivors.

In August 1915, in command of the disguised Q-ship Baralong, he sank the U-boat U-27, the same boat that had sunk the British submarine E3 the previous October; in the course of it some of the German survivors were shot as they tried to board a nearby steamer, an incident that Germany denounced as murder and that made him famous as "Baralong Herbert".

And in January 1917, in command of the brand-new K13 on her trials in the Gareloch, he was trapped on the bottom when she flooded and sank, and got out through her conning tower in an escape that helped save forty-six of the men still inside. K13 was raised and renamed K22, the same boat that sailed astern of K12 at May Island.

There can have been few officers in the Navy with more reason to distrust K boats, and he came back to command one anyway. He left the Navy later that year, was recalled in 1939 to command an armed merchant cruiser in another war, and died in Rhodesia in 1961.

Her last captain, in 1924, was Lieutenant Commander Guy D'Oyly-Hughes. In 1915 he had been the first lieutenant of E11 under Martin Nasmith in the Sea of Marmara, and in August that year he had swum ashore in the Gulf of Izmit with explosives on a raft and blown up part of the Constantinople to Baghdad railway, for which he received the DSO.

His later career ended in tragedy. In 1940 he was the captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious when she was caught and sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway, and he was lost with her and most of her company.

The End of the K Boats

By the mid-1920s the case for the fleet submarine had gone. The Navy was smaller and poorer, and the K boats were expensive and dangerous to run. K12 was scrapped at Charlestown on the Forth in July 1926, not far from where she had come through May Island eight years before.

She had never fired a torpedo at an enemy, and almost nothing about her career appears in the history books. But she survived the worst night her class ever had, and the men who commanded her are some of the most extraordinary the Submarine Service ever produced.