Any crew below decks in the forward section were killed instantly. The foremast and No 1 funnel collapsed and toppled over the side.
The bow section of the ship, on the other side of the explosion, sheared off and sank like a stone. Pathfinder gave a heavy lurch forward and immediately took on an angle down by the bow of about 40 degrees. Water came swirling up the ship and quickly began to envelop the bridge and searchlight platform. The command was given to abandon ship, but the stricken ship was going down by the bow so quickly that there was no time to swing out the lifeboats.
As the water-filled forward part of the ship sank quickly into the sea, the stern lifted up out of the water and a massive pall of smoke rose into the air. Although the huge explosion in Pathfinder had happened well within sight of land and should have been seen and heard, in an effort to attract attention as she settled into the water, her captain ordered the stern gun to be fired. The gun mount perhaps had been damaged by the force of the explosion, because after firing a single round, the gun recoiled and toppled off its mounting. It rolled over the quarterdeck and then went over the stern, taking the gun crew with it. A short time later, the ship disappeared from sight below the surface, taking most of her crew down with her.
One of the few survivors later recounted how he had been below deck when the explosion occurred. He quickly got himself up on deck, only to slide down the sloping deck and become jammed beneath a gun. He was carried underwater as the ship went down but managed to free himself and swim to the surface.
Fishing boats from the port of Eyemouth were first to arrive at the scene of the disaster, only to find an expanse of sea that was littered with the scattered debris of a ship’s passing and a slick of fuel oil. Clothing, bodies and parts of bodies floated on the surface amidst the debris.
In the distance, the two-funnel 350-ton destroyer HMS Stag and the 465-ton torpedo boat destroyer HMS Express both observed the plume of smoke from the explosion – and each capable of making 30 knots, they turned to steam for the scene. It is said that as one of the destroyers arrived on scene it had an engine problem, which turned out to have been caused by a dismembered leg in a sea boot blocking a seawater intake.
There were only 18 confirmed survivors from Pathfinder’s crew.
At first, the British authorities attempted to cover up the true cause of the sinking, fearing to reveal just how vulnerable to torpedo attack British warships were. The loss of Pathfinder was therefore at first reported as being caused by a mine, the Admiralty having already reached an agreement with the Press Bureau that allowed for wartime censoring of all reports in the national interest.
Nevertheless, newspapers began to publish eyewitness accounts reflecting what had really happened, such as that of an Eyemouth fisherman who had assisted in the rescue, who confirmed rumours that a submarine had been responsible. The true story eventually came out, and the sinking of Pathfinder by a submarine made both sides in the conflict aware of the potential vulnerability of large ships to attack by submarines.
If further confirmation of the killing power of torpedoes fired from a submarine was needed, it came just a few weeks later. Early on the morning of 22 September 1914 in the North Sea, the three 12,000-ton Cressy-class cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy were sunk by a single submarine, U 9, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen.
U 9 of I Flotilla had been tasked to patrol and attack British shipping at Ostend. At about 0600 on 22 September, U 9 spotted the three patrolling British cruisers and closed on her first target, Aboukir. U 9 then fired a torpedo from about 500 metres, which struck the British cruiser on the starboard side, flooding the engine room and causing the ship to slew to a stop.
The two cruisers Hogue and Cressy, initially believing that Aboukir had struck a mine, closed the stricken ship to rescue survivors. U 9 then fired two torpedoes at Hogue from a distance of about 300 metres. Both torpedoes were hits – she was mortally wounded, and capsized and sank within 10 minutes.
Shortly after, U 9 fired two torpedoes at Cressy from her stern tubes at a range of just under 1,000 metres. One torpedo missed – but the other hit the cruiser on her starboard side. U 9 then came about and fired her remaining bow torpedo at Cressy, striking her in the port beam. Cressy heeled over and capsized.
In this one action, three valuable 12,000-ton British armoured cruisers had been sent to the bottom of the North Sea, with the loss of 1,459 officers and men. Coming so soon after Pathfinder, it was another stunning success for the German submarine campaign.
The following month, on 15 October, the same submarine, U 9, sank the 7,770-ton protected cruiser HMS Hawke in the North Sea whilst on patrol off Aberdeen. Then the pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Formidable was torpedoed and sunk in the English Channel on 1 January 1915 by U 24. In all nine Royal Navy vessels had been sunk in the opening months of the war for the loss of five German submarines. If the German submarine threat had not been fully understood and feared by the Royal Navy at the beginning of the war, it certainly was now.
The hand-thrown Lance bomb.
At the beginning of World War I, the Royal Navy had no effective means of detecting a submerged submarine and could only rely on physically sighting the periscope or its wake – and then firing on the periscope with their guns. Early anti-submarine weapons were rudimentary, like the hand-thrown Lance bomb, essentially a grenade on a stick that was hurled down by hand when the vessel was physically above or beside the submarine.
In the run-up to World War I, Britain had feared that foreign authorities might not allow its merchant ships to enter port if they were armed. But as the German submarine threat began to materialise, Britain began to arm its merchant ships with a single stern gun, equivalent to what a submarine might carry as a deck gun. Civilian captains were encouraged to use their greater speed to flee a surfaced submarine and shoot back from their more stable gun platform.
The first British merchant ship lost to a German submarine was the 866-ton British steamer SS Glitra, which was stopped by U 17 on 20 October 1914. In accordance with international maritime law, her crew were given time to launch their lifeboats and abandon ship before she was sunk. This pattern of giving crews time to abandon ship would prevail until the beginning of the following year.
On 5 February 1915, Germany published a formal Notice declaring all waters around Great Britain and Ireland a war zone. Then on 18 February 1915, she began a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare within that zone against merchant ships: any shipping, including that of neutral countries, would be sunk without warning and without regard for the lives of the civilian crews. German submarines began to sink an average of 100,000 tons of shipping per month.
Unrestricted submarine warfare continued until September 1915, when it was temporarily abandoned after an international wave of condemnation and the intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, following the sinking of RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915 and other ships carrying American civilians.
♦ ♦ ♦
HMS Pathfinder was sunk by a torpedo fired from U 21 on 5 September 1914 and by a subsequent secondary explosion. Her wreck now lies in 64 metres of water in the Firth of Forth, off the Scottish east coast. Her damaged bow section sheared off and now lies about a mile away.
The wreck of HMS Pathfinder was known in the 1970s to fishermen as a fastener or snag for their nets – and when she began to be dived in the 1980s, she was reported as sitting upright, festooned with nets. In the 1990s as the wreck began to be visited more easily by divers, ropes were still hanging from her lifeboat davits.
