It was a "battle" that involved no enemy contact whatsoever, that left two submarines sunk, 270 British submariners dead and which the Royal Navy kept secret for as long as it could. But now new evidence has emerged that sheds fresh light on the "Battle of the Isle of May".
Marine surveyors mapping the sea bed off the Fife coast have uncovered the exact resting places of the two Royal Navy submarines lost in one of the most unfortunate, but also little known, self-inflicted calamities in British naval history.
Sonar images produced by marine archaeologists EMU Ltd have now pinpointed and created images the wrecks of the two K Class submarines for the first time.
The survey work of the sea floor is being done to prepare an offshore windfarm – the Neart na Gaoithe project - which Mainstream Renewable Power hopes to build off the Fife coast.
The sonar images show the two submarines, K4 and K17, lying just 100 metres apart. K4 is missing a section of her bow, which was located a short distance away.
The calamity happened on the night of 31 January 1918 when a battle group from the British Grand Fleet, including 19 major warships and their destroyer escorts, headed out from Rosyth for a rendezvous in the North Sea.
It was a foggy night and two of the submarines collided on the surface after one moved suddenly to avoid hitting a minesweeper.
Unable to move, one of the damaged boats was then hit by another submarine, forcing all of these submarines to leave the convoy and head for home. It was then that one of the returning submarines, K22, was rammed by mistake by a battlecruiser – HMS Inflexible.
By that time, news of the collisions had reached leaders of the flotilla and several ships were sent to help. Unfortunately, this turned an accident into a disaster.
One of the ships heading back to help, the cruiser HMS Fearless, rammed K17, sending it to the bottom within eight minutes – although most of the crew managed to escape before it went down.
With Fearless stationary, the submarines behind it took evasive action to avoid hitting the cruiser. It was then that two of the submarines, K6 and K7, hit K4, sinking it almost immediately.
Unaware of what was happened in the sea around them, the ships of the 5th Battle Squadron ploughed on into the North Sea, right through the submariners who had managed to escape before their boats went to the bottom, killing most of them.
In an incident which had taken just over 90 minutes from start to finish, 270 men had lost their lives. Indeed, only eight men from K17 survived, while there were no survivors from K4.
As a result of this series of mishaps, the Royal Navy had lost two submarines while another four and one cruiser had been so badly damaged they had to return to base.
The accident was kept secret for the rest of the war, but a memorial cairn was eventually erected in the Fife coastal village of Anstruther 84 years later, on 31 January 2002, on the harbour opposite the Isle of May.
It emerged many years after the accident that one of the Royal Navy’s commanders on the night had been court-martialed, but that too was kept out of the public eye.
Ewan Walker, environment developer for Mainstream Renewable Power, stressed that the wrecks would not be moved or disturbed by the turbines.
“Although these wrecks are within our offshore windfarm boundary," he said, "they will not be affected if the windfarm is consented.
“The wrecks have legal protection which prevents activities which could disturb them. This protection includes a buffer zone around the wrecks.”
Stuart Leather, a principal consultant in the survey, said of the sonar work: “This hadn't actually been done before.
“You have the historical accounts but what you haven't had until now is the evidence of what happened on the sea bed. We've compared the wreckage on the sea bed with the account of the disaster and it has slightly modified the understanding of the previous accounts.”
The K Class submarines earned the unfortunate nickname "Kalamity-class" within the Royal Navy during the first world war.
This was largely because, of the 18 built, none were lost in action but six were sunk in accidents.
These were steam-powered submarines with a huge boiler-room which made them almost unbearably hot. Because of the complicated system of ballasts and chambers needed for diving and surfacing, they often failed on their own – without any help from the enemy.
– Archive photographs courtesy of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum.
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