HMS Oracle (1915): Sinking a U-boat by Gunfire and a Deliberate Ramming

The Build: Sunderland

HMS Oracle was ordered as part of the Third War Programme in late November 1914 and built by William Doxford and Sons at Sunderland, laid down in February 1915, launched on 23 December 1915 and completed in August 1916, a Repeat Admiralty M-class destroyer, an improved version of the earlier M-class incorporating a raked stem and other refinements drawn from early wartime experience, designed for speeds of 34 knots in an era when rumours of exceptionally fast German destroyers had briefly pushed British designers to chase even higher performance.

Hunting Submarines From Scapa Flow

HMS Oracle joined the Grand Fleet's Thirteenth Destroyer Flotilla at Scapa Flow, engaging primarily in anti-submarine patrol work through the middle years of the war. On 19 August 1916, with much of the damage from Jutland finally repaired and the German High Seas Fleet venturing back out into the North Sea, the light cruiser HMS Nottingham was torpedoed by the German submarine U-52, its periscope having first been mistaken for a small fishing boat's sail by a lookout on the neighbouring HMS Dublin. Her captain, C. B. Miller, later reported that the first two torpedoes had "carried away both topgallant mast heads and rendered the wireless aerial useless", leaving the stricken cruiser unable even to call for help until Admiral Beatty, alerted half an hour later by other means, detached Oracle and HMS Penn to her aid; a third torpedo finished Nottingham off at 7.10am. Oracle helped pull survivors from the water, though not everyone made it: Sergeant William Edward Patrick Daley of the Royal Marines Light Infantry was among the 38 lost.

Barely a month later, on 13 September 1916, Oracle herself was in a collision, this time with the battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, and in October she found gentler work salvaging the merchant ship SS Jupiter near the May Island lighthouse in the Firth of Forth.

She took part in a rather less successful anti-submarine sweep off the Dogger Bank on 18 and 19 January 1917, a coordinated operation involving two cruisers, four screening destroyers and six paravane-equipped destroyers including Oracle herself, using paravanes, a type of underwater cutting device towed to snag and destroy mines. The destroyers lost touch with their cruisers overnight, and the whole sweep had to be called off at daylight without a single submarine encountered.

Cornering and Ramming U-44

HMS Oracle achieved her defining moment on 12 August 1917, while patrolling off the Norwegian coast with the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron, spotting a vessel on the horizon to the northwest that proved to be the German submarine U-44, commanded throughout her whole career by Kapitänleutnant Paul Wagenführ. U-44 was already in serious trouble: she had just been damaged in a clash with the Royal Navy's disguised decoy ship Bracondale (sunk in the same encounter under her cover identity Chagford) and could no longer submerge. Her captain had radioed for a German escort through the minefields to get her home, a signal British intelligence promptly intercepted and decoded, and Oracle was sent straight to intercept her instead.

That sentence is doing an enormous amount of work and deserves unpacking, because it explains how a destroyer came to be waiting off the Norwegian coast for one particular damaged submarine, which is not a thing that happens by seamanship. On 26 August 1914 the German light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground off the Estonian coast in fog. Her captain set the demolition charges, but Russian cruisers came out of the murk and opened fire, the charges went off early and before her secret papers could be got away, and the Russians recovered the Imperial German Navy's principal signal book and handed it to the Admiralty. That October the British acquired a second codebook, the one used in common by warships, merchantmen, naval zeppelins and U-boats.

What grew out of that was Room 40, the Admiralty's codebreaking department and the direct ancestor of Bletchley Park. And they had a second advantage that is less famous and just as important. From early 1915 the Navy had radio direction-finding equipment, built for it by Captain Round of the Marconi Company, which could establish roughly where a transmission had come from by taking bearings on it. By May of that year the Admiralty could follow German submarines across the North Sea simply by listening to them.

So when Wagenfuhr, unable to dive and a long way from home, broke wireless silence to ask for an escort through the minefields, he was not only asking Germany for help. He was telling Britain where he was, in a code Britain had been reading for three years, on a transmitter that could be located by bearing. Oracle did not stumble across U-44 on the horizon. She was sent to the place where the mathematics said the submarine would be.

Trapped on the surface with nowhere to hide, HMS Oracle opened fire and then rammed the submarine directly between her conning tower and stern, sending U-44 to the bottom with no survivors, a notably decisive and hard-won success against an enemy that, throughout most of the war, proved frustratingly difficult for surface ships to actually catch and destroy.

Following this success, destroyers like HMS Oracle increasingly shifted from independent patrol work towards dedicated convoy escort duties, a change in tactics that proved considerably more effective against the submarine threat overall.

A Hard-Worked Hull

HMS Oracle suffered from the harsh operational wear typical of wartime destroyer service, her hull structure lacking the galvanised protection that might have slowed her deterioration, a common enough problem for ships built quickly and worked hard through years of near-continuous North Sea patrol duty.

Broken Up After the War

Following her U-44 success, Oracle spent October 1917 to August 1918 with the 4th Destroyer Flotilla at Devonport, was briefly detached back to the Grand Fleet in November 1918 as the war ended, and returned to Devonport that December. She joined the Defence Flotilla at Portsmouth the following year, and by December 1919 had been reduced to a Care and Maintenance Party there, where, on 16 January 1920, she found time for a second collision of her own, this one with the trawler Thomas Haggarty, evidently a ship with a talent for running into things even when there wasn't a U-boat in sight.

HMS Oracle was placed in reserve on 1 February 1920 amid the wave of peacetime demobilisation that swept through the fleet. She was sold to W. and A. T. Burden on 30 October 1921 and broken up, closing out the career of a destroyer whose confirmed sinking of U-44 stood as a genuine, hard-earned success in a war where submarine kills were considerably harder to come by than most people at the time might have assumed.