Submariners AssociationBarrow in Furness Branch
E14 - One That Got Away & Won Two VCs
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Until 1908 Vickers Sons and Maxim had held undisputed sway when it came to British submarine construction. They had built the Holland's, all 13 of the A class and all 11 B's. By 1908 they had built 16 of the C class, 290 tonners and a slight improvement on the B's.
AE.1
Then Chatham Dockyard entered the field, and, like Barrow, Chatham has since built up an interest in and expertise on submarine construction.
Yet Barrow claimed the lion's share of the contracts for the C boats, Chatham getting only six of the 30 orders for construction. The dockyard was there again to build the last two of eight D class and those boats took the submarine to a surface displacement of about 500 tons.
HMS D4 incidentally, was the first British submarine to mount a gun and later versions received two 12-pounders to augment their three 18-inch torpedo tubes.
Chatham was in work again when the Admiralty placed orders for the class that can be regarded as the true forerunner of the modern submarine the E's, but Barrow had a singular honour in constructing the first submarines the Royal Australian Navy ever had and they happened to be E class boats, named AE1 and AE2, both built in 1914 and both destined to have a very short career.
The demands of the 1914-18 war meant that even Barrow and Chatham could not cope with the orders for the E class and as more than 50 were built between 1914 and 1916 it is not surprising that Beardmore, Armstrong Whitworth, Palmers, Cammell Laird, Swan Hunter, Fairfield, John Brown, and Scotts of Greenock all got a small share of the cake. William Denny at Dumbarton built three but the pioneering work was done at Barrow and at Chatham.
Barrow's first of the class for the Royal Navy was the E9 (1913), and while there may be doubt as to who takes the real credit Chatham or Vickers for developing the E's, Barrow built two boats which between them, earned three VCs in the first World War.
Like their predecessors, all the E class submarines were of the saddle tank type. They displaced 660 tons on the surface and 800 tons submerged. They were 181 feet in length and were powered by two diesel engines driving twin/shafts.
The surface speed was improved enormously to 15½ knots and as batteries and electric motors had been improved as well the "E's" had an underwater speed of 10 knots.
The 14 shipbuilders concerned in turning out the boats found themselves involved in a variety of designs. There were various combinations of torpedo tubes and mine laying facilities and in some instances mines were carried in vertical chutes in the main ballast tanks.
E11 had a standard fit of two 18-inch torpedo tubes in the bows, two tubes on the beam and one in the stern. She also carried one deck gun - a 12-pounder similar to the 3-inch which was fitted aboard the small submarines of World War 2. E11 had three officers and 28 men.
One could claim that the boats were the 1915 equivalent of the 1989-45 T boats for they saw service in all theatres of war.
Their exploits were concentrated in the Baltic and Eastern Mediterranean and as Britain was very much involved with the Dardanelle's at the time, that part of the world and the Sea of Marmora produced some brilliant exploits.
HMS E11 commanded by Lieut. Commander M E Dunbar Nasmith, a brilliant officer inventive and daring but never foolhardy achieved a remarkable distinction in the Sea of Marmora. On May 25, 1915, Nasmith took his boat into Constantinople Harbour and torpedoed the "Stamboul" moored alongside the Turkish arsenal.
It is said of Dunbar Nasmith that he never believed in wasting his precious torpedoes and that on one occasion when he had fired and missed he surfaced his boat, swam out to the errant torpedo, made it safe and attached a line so that it could be drawn back and reloaded through the stern tube.
The incident in Constantinople was part of a patrol in which E11 sank a large transport, became entangled with a moored mine and dragged it for five miles until clear of the Turkish shore batteries. Then E11 surfaced stern first and "encouraged" the mine to float clear.
Later the submarine torpedoed and sank the Turkish battleship "Hirredin Barbarosa" and the name of Nasmith was well known in the Sea of Marmora for his exploits earned him the VC.
E14, exactly the same as E11, was also employed in the Dardanelle's theatre of war. Her distinction is that she had two commanding officers, each of whom won the Victoria Cross in the same area but three years apart.
On April 27, 1915 Lieutenant Commander E C Boyle took E14 into the Sea of Marmora and was then only the second British submarine commander to have done so during the campaign.
He patrolled for 22 days harassing Turkish shipping and forcing Turkish reinforcements for Gallipoli to take a long and tiring overland journey thus helping the Allied forces there.
Boyle sank a heavily laden troop transport and it is on record that he claimed and received £30,000 "blood money." One can estimate that as being worth about £150,000, possibly more in today's currency.
It was tremendously difficult operating in the Sea of Marmora. Never more than 40 miles wide and less than 100 miles in length, the Sea could be entered only via the Dardanelle's passage.
That meant that a marauding submarine was on her own, cut off from all help. Her position once revealed, was, as E14 found, constantly reported. Continual changes of operational area had to be made. The skipper could never relax, nor could his crew.
The air was frequently foul and Boyle's boat was running short of drinking water by the time the patrol was ending. In all he completed 70 days in the Sea in three patrols and on his way back from the third his luck ran out.
He hit the Turkish anti-submarine nets fair and square and maybe more by good luck than good judgement managed to scrape through with the hull heavily cut and scraped by the wires. E14 was surely "the one that got away."
E14's last commanding officer was Lieutenant G S White. He won his VC posthumously for in a gallant and desperate effort to torpedo the German battleship Goeben, mined and aground off Nagara Point one of his torpedoes exploded prematurely and damaged his own command.
The severe damage forced him to surface E14. He steered a course for shore and the enemy guns now concentrating on his boat.
This gave his crew a chance to escape but White himself was killed by
shellfire shortly before E14 sank. That was in 1918. As for E11, she
survived and was sold for scrap in 1921 when she was based at Malta
Reproduced from
Ulverston News (1976)