Battles & Incidents

The Zeebrugge Raid

23rd April 1918

Zeebrugge is best known today as a Belgian cross-channel ferry port, but during the First World War it was an important base for German surface ships which could harass Britain's vital British supply route across the Channel for its forces fighting on the Western Front. The port also allowed U-boats an outlet into the North Sea without having to travel around the north of Denmark.

The U-boats in particular were inflicting enormous losses on the Allies, sinking 1,975 Allied ships between July 1917 and March 1918. Seventy five U-boats were at sea at any one time, and losses were averaging a million tons of shipping per month^[1].

Rear Admiral Roger Keyes, the Admiralty's Director of Plans, devised a scheme to attack Zeebrugge from the sea, and to sink ships to block the entrance to the Zeebrugge canal, which was the route by which U-boats passed through the harbour and out into the North Sea. Ostend was to be attacked at the same time. A Beer man, Walter Harner (see below), who joined the Royal Navy in 1903, was to play a significant role in the raid on Zeebrugge.

The harbour at Zeebrugge was protected by a curving wall, 'The Mole', almost a mile long. At its landward end it was linked to the coast by a railway viaduct some 400 yards long, built on a network of girders. In the event of an attack from the sea, the German plan was for troops to be rushed to positions along the Mole by means of a light railway which ran along the viaduct.

Lieutenant Commander Francis Sandford, one of the seven sons of the Archdeacon of Exeter, devised the plan to destroy the viaduct and prevent German troops reaching their defensive positions on the Mole. An elderly C-class submarine with its bows packed with five tons of amatol explosive was to be towed to a point close to Zeebrugge, and would then start engines and ram the girders of the viaduct. The crew would use gyroscopic controls to guide the submarine the last few hundred yards to the target, and would abandon the submarine and escape in a motor boat before the explosion^[2].

Francis Sandford's younger brother Lieutenant Richard Sandford accepted the job of commanding C3 on this mission. However Admiral Keyes clearly suspected that the crew would actually take the submarine all the way to the target themselves. Referring to the gyroscopic guidance system, Keyes said:

'I do not believe that he or his brother ever intended to make use of it, and they only installed it to save me from a subsequent charge of having condemned six men to practically certain death.'^[3]

The C3's part of the operation was successful, but the raid as a whole is seen by most historians as a costly failure. Within three weeks, both surface ships and submarines were able to use the harbour as before. The British lost 206 killed, 412 wounded and missing, and 19 taken prisoner. German casualties were 10 killed and 25 wounded.

[1] The Zeebrugge and Ostend Raids 1918 by Deborah Lake (2002)

[2] The Zeebrugge and Ostend Raids 1918 by Deborah Lake (2002)

[3] Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, quoted in The Zeebrugge and Ostend Raids 1918 by Deborah Lake