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DOUGAL ON TOUR
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
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
When 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. 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
One of the Landing Ship-Tanks, LST-289 limps back into the harbour at Dartmouth after being attacked during Operation Tiger. Image: National Museum of the US Navy
rudder blades. At speed these helped by providing additional lift that not only flattened the ride but reduced the prominence of the wake from the stern. In these pre-radar days, this made it harder to spot the boats from their wake, making night the natural hunting time for these deadly boats.
Ready for war By the start of WW2 the S-Boots had evolved into hard hitting attack craft that could be used for high-speed hit and run raids, mine laying and coastal defence, with the genre reaching its zenith with the S-100 range of boats, a 35m/114ft long, heavily armed mini-warship capable of 44kt and with a range of some 800nm.
The UK equivalents, the MTBs, were powered by marinised aircraft engines running on high-octane aviation fuel, but this could be a risky enterprise when incendiary cannon shells were flying around.
In contrast, the S-Boots were diesel powered, with three V20 2,000hp Daimler-Benz engines, each driving its own shaft and propeller. For much of the war the German boats had better range and, in open water, could be faster and were more robust than their Allied equivalents.
But, just as with the Air-Sea Rescue boats that we featured recently, the rapid advances in technology seen during the war years would soon render the S-Boots obsolete, with the attack on the Operation Tiger transports being something of a final fling for them.
Just two months after the action in Lyme Bay, their Cherbourg base had fallen to the Americans and with the Allied forces enjoying near total air superiority, the S-Boots were being savaged by aircraft in their harbours and when they were out on patrol. With the surrender of Germany, the remaining S-Boots were seized and put back into service in the navies of a number of nations.
The problem for the S-Boots was that aircraft and helicopters could do their job faster, better and cheaper, and although
On closer inspection, the damage wreaked on LST-289 is all too clear to see. Although they took a number of casualties, the crew were lucky to save their ship. Image: National Museum of the US Navy
One of the hidden secrets of the S-Boot’s performance lay in the construction, which used a lightweight aluminium skeleton on to which the planking was laid, resulting in a strong, but light hull. Image: Henshall The other secret of the S-Boot’s performance lay in her hull shape, with wide, powerful sections aft that helped promote planing. Image: Henshall
they continued to work into the 1960s the S-Boots would vanished from the scene as they were broken up.
Last Survivor The wartime order had been for 347 S-100 class boats, but in the end only 86 were completed to see service, with 85 of these being lost. However, the one remaining example is a very special boat, for it was one of the S-Boots that took part in the attack on the Tiger convoy and is credited with sinking one of the LSTs.
S-130, named Rabe, was built at Travemünde in 1943 and was thus ‘state-of-the-art’ in terms of S-Boot development. At some point in her service she was damaged in an air attack, and then came her attack on the Tiger transports.
Shortly after the war’s end, S-130 was back at work, mainly in the Baltic and in the hands of the UK Intelligence Service as part of the Cold War. After that she was used as a training vessel, then a houseboat, but then, after 50 years’ service, her hard life afloat was taking its toll.
In 2003 she was saved from the scrapyard and taken to Southampton, where she underwent some interim remedial work before she was towed down to Cornwall, where she now rests in her own shed.
The latest plan is to get her, if not seaworthy, at least watertight, which itself will be a huge task, but at least then she will be able to make the journey, albeit under tow, around to Appledore on the North Devon Coast, where the main restoration can be started.
Saving S-130 This will be a multi-year, not to mention multi-million-pound undertaking, but we have to hope that the fates smile kindly on the work, as S-130 is a boat that really should be saved for future generations to see. Not just as a museum piece, but as a living embodiment of the development in performance motorboat hulls.
More than that it is a true rarity, a boat that did not just see active service but played a part in one of the great sea actions just off our coasts, albeit under the enemy flag.
There are those who point to the central role played by S-130 in that Battle of the Bay, who question the moral correctness of championing the cause of this boat. That is a shame, for we have to separate the role played by the people involved and the ‘tools’ they had at their disposal.
Just like the Spitfire, the S-Boot was ground-breaking in performance and ability (not to mention in looks as well) and was superbly capable for the job of being a fast hunter of the seas. Even in pieces in a Cornish shed, you can feel the power in S-130, wonder at the technology of the hull construction and appreciate the clean, yet curvaceous lines of the hull.
This is a boat that has to be seen back afloat and we wish the restoration team well with their efforts.
