Qualla: SMS Hela

SMS Hela: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. It took two torpedoes, a stern hit, and roughly thirty minutes. That was all the time the cruiser SMS Hela had on 13 September 1914 between the moment a British periscope appeared off her quarter and the moment she slipped beneath the North Sea, six nautical miles southwest of Heligoland. Her crew was almost entirely saved - all but two men, plucked from the water by a U-boat and a patrol boat - but the loss itself was historic. Hela was the first German warship sunk by a British submarine in the First World War. Within days, the German Imperial Navy ordered every ship conducting training exercises to relocate to the Baltic. The submarine had arrived. The North Sea was no longer safe.

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Image: Public domain

SMS Hela: A Ship Between Categories

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Hela had been built in 1893-95 at AG Weser in Bremen as the last of a type the Germans called an aviso - a fast, lightly armed scout, midway between a torpedo boat and a proper cruiser. By the time she was completed, the naval world had moved on. Her four 8.8 cm guns and three to...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

SMS Hela: Imperial Errands

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fr. Kloppmann Nachf., Wilhelmshaven, Public domain. Her career reads like a tour of imperial Germany's preoccupations at the turn of the century. She escorted Kaiser Wilhelm II's yacht Hohenzollern to Norwegian fjords in 1898 and to the Mediterranean later that year. She sailed to Dover in 1899 to mark Queen Victoria's eightieth b...

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Image: Fr. Kloppmann Nachf., Wilhelmshaven | Public domain

SMS Hela: The Periscope at 0700

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hohum, CC BY-SA 3.0. When war came in July 1914, Hela was brought back to active service and assigned to IV Scouting Group, supporting the torpedo boats that formed the outer ring of patrols in the German Bight. On 28 August, when British cruisers attacked the patrol line in the Battle of Heligoland ...

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Image: Hohum | CC BY-SA 3.0

SMS Hela: A Gun on the Shore

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur Renard, Public domain. Two of Hela's sailors did not survive. The rest - roughly two hundred officers and enlisted men - were pulled from the cold water by U-18 and a coastal patrol vessel. The lesson the German navy took from the sinking was rapid and absolute: training in the Bight was over. Every ex...

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Image: Arthur Renard | Public domain