HMS K3: The Submarine That Nearly Took a Future King to the Bottom

Barrow-Built

HMS K3 was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 21 May 1915 and commissioned on 4 August 1916, the lead ship of the British K-class submarines, a large and ambitious steam-powered design meant to keep pace with the battle fleet on the surface, displacing nearly 2,000 tons and capable of 24 knots, but a class that would go on to earn a particularly troubled reputation for accidents.

Why Anybody Built a Steam Submarine

The reputation was not bad luck, and it follows directly from a single decision that is worth setting out because the usual verdict, that the K boats were simply badly built, is not quite right. They did what they were designed to do. The design was the problem.

Admiral Sir John Fisher wanted submarines that could operate with the battle fleet, screening it and ambushing an enemy fleet as it came out. To do that a submarine has to keep station with battleships, which meant better than twenty knots on the surface, and in 1915 no diesel engine small enough to go in a submarine could produce anything like that power. Steam turbines could.

Steam means boilers, boilers mean funnels, and funnels are holes in the top of a submarine. Before K3 could dive, two funnels had to be shut down and folded into wells in the casing, the wells had to be covered, the boiler room ventilators had to be closed, and somewhere around thirty separate openings had to be secured by hand while a fire was being drawn under a boiler full of scalding water.

The best time anybody achieved was about five minutes. It was frequently much longer. A contemporary diesel boat could be under in thirty seconds. Five minutes is not a delay, it is a different category of vessel: it means she cannot dive to avoid anything she has not seen coming several miles off, and it means that every emergency on the surface has to be solved on the surface.

The fleet submarine was an idea several navies tried and none made work. Britain came back to the theme once more with HMS X1 in the 1920s, from the opposite direction, and got a different sort of failure out of it.

A Terrifying Dive With a Future King Aboard

In December 1916, with the future King George VI aboard, K3 suffered an uncontrolled dive to 150 feet, so severe that her propellers were left thrashing above the water's surface even as the rest of the boat plunged, and it took a nerve-wracking twenty minutes before she could be brought back up, a truly alarming episode that speaks to the real dangers inherent in the K-class design and gives a vivid sense of just how close disaster could come even on what should have been a routine outing.

The picture is worth getting right, because the geometry is what makes it appalling. K3 was three hundred and thirty-nine feet long. Her bow went into the bottom and stuck there, and the hull stood up behind it at an angle steep enough to lift her stern and both screws clear of the surface, where they went on turning in the open air. Anybody watching from a boat nearby saw the after end of a submarine sticking out of the sea with its propellers thrashing and nothing else visible at all.

Inside, every man aboard was standing on a bulkhead or hanging from something, in the dark, listening to a hull that was designed for two hundred feet being pressed into the mud, for twenty minutes.

The passenger deserves introducing properly. Prince Albert was twenty-one, and he was not a royal visitor being shown round. He was a serving officer. Six months earlier he had fought at Jutland as a sub-lieutenant in the battleship HMS Collingwood, in a gun turret, and he had been in and out of hospital ever since with the stomach trouble that dogged him all his life. Twenty-two years later he was King, and by then he had commanded nothing more dangerous than a speech.

Further Close Calls

K3's difficulties were far from over. On 9 January 1917, her boiler room flooded in the North Sea, and in November that year she was involved in an accident alongside the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron that resulted in the sinking of her sister boat HMS K1.

That sentence stops one step short of the end. K1 collided with K4 off the Danish coast on 18 November 1917 and was left damaged and unable to keep up, in waters where a German ship might reasonably be expected along at any time. Rather than let her be captured or salvaged, the escorting ship HMS Blonde sank her with gunfire.

It is worth pausing on how ordinary that was becoming. This was a squadron of British submarines operating in company at speed, at night, and the two things they most reliably ran into were each other. A K boat on the surface at twenty knots handles like a small destroyer with almost no freeboard, the bridge is a few feet above the water, and the man conning her can see very little in any sea at all.

K3 herself suffered another uncontrolled dive on 2 May 1918, plunging to 266 feet, a depth that actually crushed part of her hull, a serious structural failure that any crew would have been fortunate to survive.

The figure needs its context to land. A K boat was designed for about two hundred feet. She went to two hundred and sixty-six, which is a third deeper than the hull was built for, and the hull began to fail while she was down there.

What makes it worse is that this was the second uncontrolled dive in the same boat in seventeen months, and nothing in between had been fixed, because there was nothing to fix. The K boats went out of control because they were very long, very fast, very fine-lined hulls with poor buoyancy forward, and once one of them got a bow-down angle on at speed there was not enough reserve buoyancy up front to stop her. That is a shape, not a fault, and a shape cannot be repaired.

The Battle of May Island

K3 was also present during the infamous Battle of May Island in January 1918, a chaotic night exercise gone catastrophically wrong that saw several K-class boats collide with each other and with surface escorts in the darkness, one of the most notorious training disasters in Royal Navy history and a stark illustration of just how unforgiving the class's size and handling characteristics could be.

The particulars are worth having, and the surface side of that night is told in HMS Inflexible, which was one of the ships in that line. Two flotillas of K boats were running north through the Firth of Forth at night, darkened, in company with battlecruisers and cruisers, at speed, with no radio discipline that could untangle what followed.

In about seventy-five minutes K22 and K14 collided, Inflexible ran into K22, the cruiser Fearless rammed and sank K17, and K4 was cut almost in half by K6 and then struck by K7. Two submarines were sunk, several more were damaged, and 105 men were killed. Not a shot was fired and no enemy was within four hundred miles.

K3 came through it. That is worth saying, because in a class with this record simply being somewhere at the time and coming home is a distinction. The whole business was covered up for years, on the reasonable grounds that a hundred and five men killed by their own side on an exercise was not something the country needed to hear about in 1918, and the details did not become public until long after the war.

The End of a Troubled Career

HMS K3 was sold on 26 October 1921 to the Barking Ship Breaking Company for scrapping in London, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose service was defined as much by the genuine dangers of her class's design as by any actual combat against the enemy.

It is worth being blunt about the class as a whole. Not one K boat ever sank an enemy vessel of any kind. The closest any of them came was K7, which got a torpedo into the German submarine U-95 and had the satisfaction of watching it fail to explode.

Against that they killed a very large number of British submariners. K1 was scuttled after a collision. K4 and K17 went down at May Island. K13 sank on trials in the Gareloch and was raised. K5 was lost with everybody aboard in the Bay of Biscay in 1921 and was never found. The crews called themselves the suicide club, and the standing joke in the service was that the K stood for calamity, which required a certain spelling and got one.

None of that was cowardice or incompetence on anybody's part. The men who took these boats to sea knew exactly what they were sitting in and went anyway, which is a harder thing than fighting an enemy who can at least be seen. K3 herself went through an uncontrolled dive with a future king aboard, a flooded boiler room, a hull-crushing plunge and the worst night in the history of the British submarine service, and was sold to a breaker at Barking in 1921 without ever having been near a German. In the K class that counts as a successful career.