On January 21, 1940, 85 years ago this month, the Royal Navy E-Class destroyer HMS Exmouth was sunk in the Moray Firth off the east coast of Scotland by the Kriegsmarine Type II-B submarine U-22. All 175 members of Exmouth’s crew were lost.
On March 27, 1940, two months later, U-22 went on patrol in the Skagerrak between Norway and Denmark and never returned. Her fate is unknown and her crew of 27 were lost.
These losses are now just footnotes in the story of the Battle of the Atlantic, which was waged from the first days of the war until the last. Indeed, on September 3, 1939, the day that Germany and Britain declared war, the British passenger ship Athenia was torpedoed and sunk by U-30, and on April 9, 1945, immediately before VE Day, the RAF bombed and fatally damaged the Kriegsmarine cruiser Admiral Hipper.
From the Beginning to the End
Athenia September 1939
This was a period of 2,070 days of uninterrupted and unmerciful maritime warfare, encapsulated perfectly by the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat’s phrase ‘the cruel sea,’ from whom I have derived this blog’s title.
Exmouth was built in 1934 and was one of many escort destroyers that the Royal Navy deployed to safeguard the global shipping lanes upon which the British Empire depended. E-Class Destroyers were no-frills working ships armed with guns, torpedoes, and depth charges. They boasted an impressive top speed of 35 knots but few creature comforts for their crews, who were crammed into their narrow hulls like human sardines.
One can only imagine the shock of a torpedo strike just before dawn on a frigid January morning in the North Sea when U-22 struck Exmouth. The water temperature was in the low 40s Fahrenheit when they sank, and death from hypothermia would have been swifter than from drowning. Exmouth’s motto was ‘by God’s help,’ but evidently God was busy elsewhere that morning.
Kriegsmarine U-Boats—Unterseeboots—were not given names. U-22 was a Type II-B U-Boat, a small submarine class 140 feet long designed for use in shallow coastal waters. Type II-Bs were strictly utilitarian and known to their crews as ‘dugout canoes.’ The crew of 27 men shared 12 bunks squeezed in between three torpedo tubes and two spare torpedoes—even smaller sardine cans.
U-Boats are better imagined as ‘submersibles’ rather than ‘submarines,’ I suggest. They were designed to travel on the surface powered by diesel engines, submerging and switching to battery power only to hide and to attack.
U-22 spent the first few months of the war attacking shipping around Scotland, primarily by laying mines, and claimed eight sinkings. Exmouth was U-22’s only torpedo victory.
On March 20th, two months after sinking Exmouth, U-22 departed on another patrol and never returned. Her fate is unknown, and her wreckage has never been found.
Opposing Perspectives
The Battle of the Atlantic was an endless succession of brutal encounters such as these. Ships sink, and men drown, one by one, but the numbers accumulate: in World War II, from 1939 until 1945, the Allies lost some 3,500 merchant ships and almost 200 warships in the Atlantic with an estimated 72,000 dead. The Kriegsmarine lost almost 800 submarines, and 30,000 dead out of a total of 40,000 U-boat crew members. This was, I believe, the highest cumulative casualty rate of any arm of any major military service on either side, (although I am not sure how to account for the casualty rates of the explicitly suicidal kamikaze squadrons).
And so, 85 years ago, U-22 sank Exmouth and, shortly thereafter, was lost herself. Now they both rest on the chill, shallow floor of the North Sea.
Does it matter, in these days of TikTok and AI and all the rest of our modern world? I think it does: throughout recorded history, the North Sea witnessed almost uninterrupted warfare, from the days of the Phoenicians to the Vikings to the Armadas to the Ships of the Line to the battles of the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine. But, since 1945, not a single ship has been lost in battle, and that’s why it matters.
