On 5 September 1914, HMS Pathfinder was sunk by SM U-21, the first ship to have been sunk by a submarine using a self-propelled torpedo.

Main article: U-boat Campaign (World War I)Īt the start of World War I, Germany had twenty-nine U-boats in the first ten weeks, five British cruisers had been lost to them. It is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. During the First World War the SM U-1 was used for training and was retired in 1919. At the start of World War I, Germany had 48 submarines of 13 classes in service or under construction. A diesel engine was not installed in a German navy boat until the U-19 class of 1912–13. The fifty percent larger SM U-2 had two torpedo tubes. It had a double hull, was powered by a Körting kerosene engine and was armed with a single torpedo tube. It was commissioned by the Imperial German Navy on 14 December 1906. The SM U-1 was a completely redesigned Karp-class submarine and only one was built. In 1903, Germaniawerft dockyard in Kiel completed Germany's first fully functional submarine, Forelle which was sold to Russia during the Russo-Japanese War in April 1904. This was followed in 1890 by W1 and W2, built to a Nordenfelt design. Brandtaucher was later rediscovered during dredging operations in 1887, and subsequently raised sixteen years later and placed in a museum in Germany, where it remains today. The vessel was designed in 1850 by the inventor and engineer Wilhelm Bauer and built by Schweffel & Howaldt in Kiel for the Imperial German Navy. National Archives, Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and LibraryThe first submarine built in Germany was the three-man submarine Brandtaucher, which sank to the bottom of Kiel harbor during its first test dive. Experts tend to agree now that the explosion was caused by an industrial accident (likely the detonation of coal dust or aluminum powder ignited by fire resulting from the torpedo hit), rather than the combustion of explosive munitions on board. The cause of the explosion on board the Lusitania has been the subject of study and debate since 1915. The ship sank after eighteen minutes only six of the forty-eight lifeboats had made it safely into the water. The diary chronicles the chaos and panic he observed while the ship’s crew and passengers tried to put the lifeboats in the water as the ship listed sharply starboard. In the diary, typed from his handwritten notes, Schwieger stated that he caught sight of the Lusitania in the distance, while his submarine was surfaced he quickly submerged his vessel, moved into an attack position, and at 3:10 p.m., ordered the launch of the torpedo from a distance of 700 meters. This copy of Schwieger’s diary came to the Department of the Navy (and, eventually, to the National Archives) through the U.S. His war diary describes the attack and the rapid sinking of the great liner as he viewed it through his periscope. Kapitänleutnant Walter Schwieger was the thirty-year-old commander of the submarine U-20 that sank the Lusitania. In the context of a wartime crossing, the cargo of the Lusitania on her last voyage included war materiel for the Allied war effort, including 52 tons of shrapnel shells, more than 3,000 percussion fuses, and 4,200 cases of Remington rifle cartridges. Of the 1,959 people on board, 1,195 died, including more than 120 Americans. On that day, the British luxury liner, the RMS Lusitania, set sail from New York for Liverpool six days later, twelve miles off the southern coast of Ireland, she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank.

newspapers on May 1, 1915, ten months after the outbreak of World War I and three months after Germany declared a submarine blockade of the British Isles. So read a notice from the German government that ran in forty U.S.

and that travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.” “Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany. War at Sea Kapitänleutnant Walter Schwieger - Sinking of the RMS Lusitania, 1915