Qualla: SM UB-115

SM UB-115: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirty-nine men. That is the number to begin with, because numbers in submarine warfare tend to be small and absolute. When SM UB-115 went down off Beacon Point on 29 September 1918, she took all of them. The youngest were probably nineteen. The oldest, including the captain Reinhold Thomsen, were perhaps in their late twenties. None of them knew the war they were fighting had less than six weeks left to run. They were doing what U-boat crews did in 1918 - patrolling, hunting, hiding - and they were caught by a combination of weapons that would not have existed at the start of the war they were now losing.

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SM UB-115: Built in Hamburg, Commissioned for Late War

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

UB-115 was a Type UB III submarine, the workhorse coastal U-boat of the late First World War. She was built by Blohm & Voss at Hamburg and launched on 4 November 1917, after just under a year of construction. The Type UB IIIs were larger than the early UBs they replaced - 519 ton...

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SM UB-115: Trawlers, Airships, Depth Charges

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By September 1918 the anti-submarine war had transformed. Where Royal Navy responses in 1914 had been improvised and largely ineffective, by late 1918 they were systematic. Armed trawlers patrolled coastal waters with depth charges aboard. Rigid airships drifted overhead carrying...

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SM UB-115: The Crew

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

All 39 men aboard died. That phrase carries a particular weight in submarine warfare, because it almost always means the same thing - the boat was holed below the surface and there was no way out. Submariners of 1918 had no escape apparatus worth the name. When a hull was breache...

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SM UB-115: Resting Place

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The wreck of UB-115 lies today in two pieces, where the bombs and depth charges left her. She is dusted in soft corals, the local colonisers of an iron-and-steel hulk that has spent more than a hundred years on the seabed. She also carries a more unusual layer: an accretion forme...

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