"Princess Maud"

Keel laid:	1901
Length:
Beam:
Weight:	1,566 gross tons
Horse Power:	250
Ship Type:	Passenger and Cargo Vessel

          

1885

Built by Napier & Miller Yoker, Port Glasgow (Yard No 121), For M Langlands & Co, Glasgow.

1916

Requisitioned by the Admiralty as a 'Fleet Messenger'. The vessel appears to have been fitted with hidden deck guns (Q-Ship?)

1918

23rd May, H W Black was engaged as a crewmember of the Princess Maud 

10th June, Torpedoed and sunk off Blyth by the UB-88, captained by Reinhard von Rabenau.
Of the 29 crew, 5 were saved including H W Black



After shakedown in the North and Baltic Seas, UB-88 was assigned to the I U-Flotille Flandern (1st Submarine Flotilla, Flanders) at Zeebrugge on the Belgian coast. She departed Kiel, Germany, on 4 June and headed via the eastern route, around Denmark and through the Skaggerak, south to Zeebrugge. During the voyage to her first duty station, the submarine scored her first victory. Passing down the east coast of England on the 10th, she encountered a convoy of five freighters and six trawlers escorted by two destroyers and a pair of aircraft. In a submerged attack, she fired two torpedoes, one of which struck and sank the 1,555-ton Swedish steamer SS Dora, while the second torpedo struck the Princess Maud.

According to the Submarine's Log and the vessel shakedown report (Frames 43, 44 & 51) it appears that the UB-88 was unaware that the second torpedo it fired had been successful. This was probably because it was in a hurry to submerge and evade the depth charge attack from the convoy's escorts.

What is known from the British records is  that the Dora and the Princess Maud were in the same convoy journeying from London to Leith, that they lie close to each other on the seabed and that both crews were picked up by the same trawler at the same time. Additionally, it is known that both the Princess Maud and the Dora were sunk by a single torpedo strike each and that the UB-88 fired two torpedoes, one of which it considered to be unsuccessful. Whether the UB-88 deliberately fired at the Princess Maud will not be known until a full translation of the log book entries is available, but the Uboat which fired the torpedo was undoubtedly the UB-88, since the nearest U-boat to this position other than the UB-88 was the UB-34 at Whitby.

Soon after the 11 November 1918, armistice ended hostilities, UB-88 surrendered along with the other warships of the High Seas Fleet. They were interned-probably at Harwich, England-on 26 November 1918. When the United States Navy expressed an interest in acquiring several German submarines to be used in conjunction with the current Victory Bond drive and to enable American crews to learn their supposed secrets, UB-88 and five other boats were allocated to the United States with the agreement that they would be destroyed upon the conclusion of the bond campaign. Naval personnel were dispatched from the United States early in 1919, and they took over the warship on 23 March 1919. Soon afterwards, the UB-88 was placed in special commission for the voyage across the Atlantic, Lt. Cmdr. Joseph L. Nielson in command.

After a brief period allotted to the crew to make repairs and familiarize themselves with the foreign submarine's machinery, UB-88 stood out of Harwich on 3 April, 1919 in company with Bushnell (Submarine Tender No. 2) and three other former German U-boats, U-117, UC-97, and UB-148. That task unit, dubbed the Ex-German Submarine Expeditionary Force, steamed via the Azores and Bermuda to New York, where it arrived on 27 April 1919.

As part of the armistice agreement, the giving of the U-boats to the USA was on the condition that once they had server their purpose, they were to be destroyed and so on 3 January 1921, the Ub-88 was scuttled when it was used as a target in a live gunfire exercise. The UB-88 is consequently the only German U-Boat wreck on the West coast of the USA.

In 2003, the UB-88's final resting place was discovered by Gary Fabian, who has kindly allowed me to use his photos of the vessel on this site:


For a the complete history of the UB-88 and descriptions of its discovery please see Gary Fabian's site http://www.ub88.org

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© 2006 Jonathan S Farley