26
DOUGAL
ALL AT SEA APRIL 2022
Solent based dinghy sailor David Henshall is a well known writer and speaker on topics covering the rich heritage of all aspects of leisure boating.
THE LAST TIGER HUNTER! A commission for a for a fast motorboat in Germany some 100 years ago led to a new breed of fast attack boat which went on to play a deadly role in World War II.
The last E-Boat (actually an S-Boat) being restored in Cornwall.Even with the hull stripped bare, the beauty of the hull lines fails to mask the menace these superb high speed attack boats posed to the allied ships. Image: Henshall
W
hen the 2012 Olympic regatta was being held at Weymouth, the media quickly latched on to the hot competition at the front of the Finn Class, which they christened ‘The Battle of the Bay’. This, of course, was Weymouth Bay, but if you take the trip westwards around Portland Bill, you move into the much larger and wilder Lyme Bay. There had already been a Battle of the Bay there as well, but it was back in 1588, when the British fleet had harassed the Spanish Armada as they headed eastwards up the English Channel. However, the real ‘Battle of the Bay’ would take place 356 years later in 1944, for as D-Day drew near, there was a pressing need for the Allied forces to practice the techniques needed for a successful amphibious landing. A number of stretches of South Coast shoreline that shared the features of some of the Normandy beaches, from the Isle of Wight, past Studland, down to Slapton Sands on the Devon coast near Torbay, were pressed into service as locations for dummy landings. One of the final dress rehearsals took place just six weeks before D-Day, with the exercise titled Operation Tiger. From the outset this would be an event tainted with tragedy, as the exercise highlighted the problems of seamless communications in what was a complex and challenging situation. Tiger was a ‘live-fire’ exercise and when some of the troopships were delayed as the soldiers came ashore from the landing craft, they were fired upon by warships out in the Bay. There was a heavy loss of life in this ‘blue on blue’ incident, with some reports suggesting that over 400 men had been killed.
Things were about to get even worse as the following day, on 28 April 1944, a convoy of eight US troopships, waiting for dawn to send troops ashore, found itself left with only minimal protection out in the Bay. This was the result of a litany of organisational mistakes, with just one small warship left to guard the vulnerable troopships and different radio frequencies in use, which then left the convoy open to attack. Fast and heavily armed, the German S-Boats of WW2 had a long operational range, great seakeeping qualities and were diesel engined. Image: Hans Frank
German Attack Boats
Even this late on in the war, the German high speed attack boats were known to be a serious threat as they carried out hit and run raids from their bases on the Northern French Coast. On this night, a flotilla of nine heavily armed E-Boats had left Cherbourg and made their way northwards across the Channel without being detected. On encountering the convoy, they attacked
with torpedoes and, despite the deadly nature of their attack, it was nearly an even greater disaster. The convoy was made up of LSTs, Landing Ships, Tank, which were fairly shallow draft, and it may have been that some of the first salvo of torpedoes launched passed underneath their targets without exploding. The good luck would not last and three of the eight LSTs were torpedoed, with one catching fire but still making it to shore. Sadly two others, LST 507 and 531, would take hits and sink, with LST 531 going down in less than six minutes. The soldiers had not been put through any meaningful emergency drills and were cast into the water, which in April is still cold, with those who did not drown soon succumbing to hypothermia. Coming on top of the tragedy the previous day, the death toll from the two boats was shockingly high, with the US military admitting to 639 deaths. With the whole matter shrouded in pre D-Day secrecy we will probably never know the true number of casualties, but the figure could be as high as 946, with there being stories back ashore of secret burials, and the story being covered up by the authorities. What is certain is that there were more American soldiers lost at Slapton and in Lyme Bay than were killed during the actual landing on Utah Beach on 6 June.
The Schnellboot
The boats that did all this damage were the dreaded German E-Boats, but that was just a convenient title gifted to them by the Allies, for their correct name was the S-Boot, Schnellboot, which has the easy translation of ‘fast boat’. The Americans had their PT boats and the British their MTBs (motor torpedo boat), with many of these owing their hull forms to the developments made by
the British Powerboat Company at Hythe on Southampton Water (watch out for an upcoming article on the BPC) but the S-Boots had a very different parentage. Back in the mid-1920s a German banker approached the Lürssen boatbuilders in Bremen with a commission for a fast motorboat that would be equally at home on the inland waters of the Rhine as it would be in the demanding conditions out on the North Sea. This presented the builders with a tricky issue, for the thinking of the day recognised that in the pursuit of better performance, the seakeeping qualities would be compromised. Their solution was a piece of maritime genius, a round bilged hull that was sea kindly, but with a long flat run in the aft sections to provide dynamic lift and enhance performance. They knew that the hydrodynamics of such a hull would see it starting to ‘squat’ by the stern at speed, so they positioned the engines centrally in the hull to ensure that the boat stayed level in the fore and aft trim. Their other idea was to make the boat both strong and light, so they proposed an aluminium skeleton over which the planks would be laid. The result was the Oheka II, a 74ft long hull that weighed in at only 22.5 tonnes and, with three 550hp Maybach engines, would comfortably do 34 knots, making the boat the fastest of its kind in the world. In the late 1920s the Kriegsmarine in Germany were strictly limited to the size and composition of their naval forces, but patrol boats were allowed, so Lürssen were given the contract to build an uprated, military version of the Oheka II that would be armed and fitted with twin torpedo tubes. This boat was designated S-1, the first of this new breed of fast attack boat. Lürssen quickly added further developments, with one addition being to ‘out-angle’ by 30 degrees the twin
