The sinking of HMS Courageous

On the evening of 17 September 1939, the day the Red Army entered Poland, the German submarine U-29, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Otto Schuhart, torpedoed the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous in the Atlantic west of Ireland. Two torpedoes struck the ship on her port side. Within a quarter of an hour or so Courageous capsized and sank. Some 518 or 519 men were killed, among them her commanding officer, Captain William Makeig-Jones. She was the first British warship sunk by the enemy in this war and the Royal Navy’s first great loss. The Admiralty was quick to draw a lesson from it: carriers were withdrawn from hunting submarines.

A figure of 514 dead is sometimes given. It appears in some older compilations, but most accounts, including the British casualty lists and German records of the submarine war, speak of 518 or 519 killed out of the 1,259 men on board that day. The discrepancy depends on whether those who later died of their wounds, and the Royal Air Force airmen serving on board, are included.

A ship from another age

Courageous had not been built as an aircraft carrier. She was designed during the First World War, at the instigation of Admiral John Fisher, as a so-called large light cruiser: a fast, lightly armoured ship with four 381 mm (15-inch) guns, intended for operations in the shallow waters of the Baltic. She was completed at the end of 1916 and in November 1917 took part in an action against German warships in the Heligoland Bight. After the war she was no longer needed, and the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which limited the number of battleships, allowed some existing hulls to be converted into aircraft carriers. In 1924–1928, like her sister ship Glorious, Courageous was given a two-level hangar, a flight deck and a starboard island with a funnel at the Devonport dockyard.

The ship could carry about 48 aircraft, but in September 1939 she had two squadrons on board, 811 and 822, each with twelve Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers. For ten years she had served in the Mediterranean and in the waters around the British Isles, and in the winter of 1938–1939 she was a training carrier. In May 1939 she returned to front-line service; on 9 August she took part in the fleet review at Portland, and on 31 August she embarked her aircraft. The Royal Navy then had seven aircraft carriers, most of them converted ships from the First World War. Each was precious, as new ones were still on the slipways.

Hunting U-boats

After the sinking of the Athenia on 3 September the Admiralty concluded that Germany was waging unrestricted submarine warfare. Plans drawn up before the war provided for two responses. The first was the system of convoys, introduced from the first days of the war. On 16 September the first HX convoy sailed from Halifax. But there were still few convoys, and too few escort vessels to protect every ship. Many sailed alone.

The second response was to be hunting. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who had joined the War Cabinet on 3 September, wanted the fleet not merely to defend shipping but to seek out and destroy submarines actively. Search groups were formed, each consisting of an aircraft carrier and several destroyers. They were to patrol the Western Approaches, the waters to the west and south-west of the British Isles through which most of the shipping bound for Britain passed. The carrier aircraft were to spot U-boats on the surface and the destroyers to finish them off. In practice this proved very difficult. A submarine, with its low silhouette, usually saw surface ships first and dived, while aircraft did not yet have an effective weapon against submerged boats. The carrier, huge and slow during take-offs and landings, became an easy target herself.

The first warning came on 14 September. West of the Hebrides the German U-39 fired torpedoes at the modern carrier Ark Royal. The torpedoes exploded prematurely, and the escorting destroyers sank U-39 and took her entire crew prisoner. She was the first U-boat lost in the war. The Admiralty regarded the episode as a success rather than a warning, and the patrols continued.

The attack

Courageous left Plymouth on her next patrol on the morning of 16 September, escorted by four destroyers: Inglefield, Ivanhoe, Impulsive and Intrepid. By the afternoon of 17 September the group was some 350 nautical miles west of Land’s End. At about 2.45 p.m. it picked up a distress call from the British freighter Kafiristan, which was being attacked by U-53. Two of the four escorting destroyers, Inglefield and Intrepid, were sent to help, and the carrier flew off four Swordfish. One of them forced U-53 to dive but did not damage her.

Meanwhile, at about 6 p.m., the carrier was sighted from another submarine, U-29, by her commander, Otto Schuhart. The thirty-year-old Kapitänleutnant, a graduate of the naval academy at Mürwik, had served in the navy since 1929 and had taken command of U-29 in April 1939. U-29, a Type VIIA boat, had left Wilhelmshaven on 19 August, before the outbreak of war, and in the first weeks of September had sunk the tankers Regent Tiger and British Influence and the tug Neptunia in the Atlantic. Schuhart came upon the British carrier by chance. For more than an hour and a half he shadowed the group, but the U-boat, slower when submerged, could not get into a position to attack.

His chance was handed to him by the enemy. At about 7.30 p.m. Courageous, turning into the wind to recover the aircraft returning from their search, came onto a course that led straight towards the submarine. She was steaming on a steady course at about 18 knots, and of her four destroyers only two remained with her. A few minutes after the last aircraft had landed – at about 7.40–7.50 p.m., according to British and German records – U-29 fired three electric torpedoes. Two of them hit the carrier on her port side, near the forward part of the hull and the boiler rooms.

The effects were immediate. The ship lost electrical power, the lights went out, and water poured into the boiler rooms and the compartments beneath the flight deck. Courageous began to heel rapidly to port. Attempts to correct the list failed. According to various accounts, 15–20 minutes after being hit she capsized and sank some 190 nautical miles south-west of Dursey Head on the Irish coast. Many seamen, especially from the engine and boiler rooms, could not get up on deck in time. Those who jumped into the water swam in a thick layer of oil. Captain Makeig-Jones stayed on the bridge. According to some survivors he was saluting the ensign in his last moments, but such stories belong more to legend than to established fact. All the Swordfish of both squadrons went down with the ship.

Rescue and counter-attack

The destroyers Ivanhoe and Impulsive began to search for the attacker and to rescue survivors. Merchant ships passing nearby also helped: the British freighter Dido, the American Collingsworth and the Dutch liner Veendam, which lowered a dozen or more lifeboats. Pulling men out of the oily water as darkness fell was difficult. The Dido alone picked up more than two hundred survivors. Further destroyers that arrived during the night joined the hunt for the U-boat. In all, 741 men survived.

For several hours U-29 was attacked with depth charges, but she went deep, waited it out and slipped away in the night. The crew heard the explosions, but the boat was not damaged. Seventeen officers and more than 500 ratings lost their lives in the disaster, among them 36 RAF airmen and mechanics who serviced the carrier’s aircraft.

“A glorious success”

The Admiralty announced the loss of the carrier the very next day, 18 September. The news from British radio reached the German U-boat command before Schuhart himself had reported. The Commander of U-boats, Commodore Karl Dönitz, wrote in his war diary that day that it was “a glorious success” and further proof that British anti-submarine defences were not as effective as London claimed. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda trumpeted the sinking of the carrier as a great triumph of German arms.

U-29 returned to Wilhelmshaven on 26 September. In his diary Dönitz called her patrol “outstandingly successful”. On the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, Schuhart was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class that same day, and every member of his crew the Iron Cross Second Class. The success strengthened the arguments of Dönitz, who had been insisting for years that submarines, and not the great surface ships of Plan Z, were the most effective weapon against Britain.

Courageous is often called the first major warship sunk in the war. Strictly speaking, she was the first British warship sunk by the enemy. A week earlier, on 10 September, the Royal Navy had lost the submarine Oxley, but she had been sunk in error by another British submarine, Triton. The Polish Navy had already lost the destroyer Wicher and the minelayer Gryf on 3 September, sunk in harbour by German aircraft, but these were much smaller vessels.

Carriers withdrawn from the hunt

The loss of Courageous three days after the failed attack on Ark Royal convinced the Admiralty that hunting submarines with aircraft carriers was an unacceptable risk. The carriers were too valuable to be exposed to torpedoes in exchange for slim chances of finding a U-boat. They were withdrawn from patrols in the Western Approaches and assigned to fleet duties: covering capital ships, hunting German surface raiders and operations in the Mediterranean. The burden of the fight against the U-boats fell on destroyers, escort vessels and the aircraft of RAF Coastal Command, which in September alone flew more than a hundred thousand miles over the sea.

In the longer term this disaster reinforced a conviction shared from the outset by some admirals: that the best way to fight submarines was not to search for them on the open ocean but to escort convoys. A U-boat that wanted to sink a ship had to approach the convoy, and there the escorts were waiting for it. This principle became the foundation of British strategy in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Significance

The sinking of Courageous showed, in only the second week of the war at sea, that the Kriegsmarine, though far weaker than the Royal Navy, possessed in its submarines a weapon capable of dealing very painful blows. The German submarine fleet then numbered fewer than 60 boats, and only a dozen or so of them could operate in the Atlantic. Even so, in the first weeks of the war it sank several dozen merchant ships and one of Britain’s seven aircraft carriers. Schuhart’s success strengthened the position of Dönitz and his concept of submarine warfare, and a week later the Kriegsmarine command began gradually to lift the restrictions that prize law imposed on the U-boats.

Further blows came quickly. On 14 October Günther Prien’s U-47 penetrated the fleet base at Scapa Flow (PL) and sank the battleship Royal Oak, with the loss of more than 830 men. Her sister ship Glorious went down on 8 June 1940 during the evacuation from Norway, shelled by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, with more than a thousand of her crew. Carriers returned to the fight against submarines only in a new form: in 1941 the first escort carrier, HMS Audacity, converted from a captured German merchant ship, joined the convoy escorts. In 1943–1945 several dozen of these small carriers, built mainly in the United States, sailed with the convoys and in support groups. It was they, together with long-range aircraft, that closed the gap in the mid-Atlantic where the U-boats had previously operated with impunity.

U-29 survived the war. From 1941 she served as a training boat, and in May 1945 her crew scuttled her near Flensburg. Otto Schuhart survived the war and in 1955 joined the navy of the Federal Republic of Germany. The wreck of Courageous lies on the floor of the Atlantic, a war grave for more than five hundred seamen.