U-boat UC-247

Sub Hunters!

The lads done good!
Shaun Carr recalls how he and a group of fellow submarine wreck enthusiasts hunted out the remains of a WW1 German U-boat sunk off Flamborough Head in 1917, and stumbled on a British destroyer of similar vintage into the bargain.
Left: some of the Yorkshire "Let's find a U-boat" wreck-diving team. Left to right: Chris Davis, Shaun Carr, Simon Elvidge and Daz Smith (picture by Cliff Norton).

It's every diver's dream - to find a long-lost submarine at the end of the shotline! But that's how we found UC-47, an iron coffin from World War One, 24 miles off Flamborough Head, in May this year.
The discovery of the grave of UC-47 was no accident. I had been wanting to find "my own" submarine ever since I discovered diving some six years ago. It remained a dream until I found other divers with the same passion.
The Yorkshire "let's find a U-boat" wreck-diving team, which besides me includes Billy Woolford, Graham Hirst, Chris Davis, Simon Elvidge and Daz Smith, came together like pins to a magnet. We had all been diving to find wrecks in the U-boat graveyard off Flamborough Head.
At first we were looking for UB-75, which was reported lost in the area, but then in the course of digging into German U-boat archives, we found a possible position in our area for another lost submarine, a mine-layer of the UC-II class, UC-47.

UC 47 in port
Their quarry, UC-47, in port before her last, ill-fated mine-laying mission to British waters

So we swapped U-boats and pinpointed six sites that we thought might be UC-47. We discarded two when the Hydrographic Depart-ment's print-outs showed clearly that they were the wrong size for a submarine, and proceeded to dive the other four.
Our first dive caused such excitement that we almost forgot about U-boats for a while. Billy and Graham found themselves on a largely-intact World War One destroyer!
For a number of dives the hunt for the sub took a very definite second place! We're pretty sure that the destroyer is HMS Falcon, sunk in a collision with a mine-sweeper in April, 1918, while hunting U-boats off Flamborough Head.
Falcon is a great dive in 50m. You can see the engines and gauges. Guns and torpedo tubes are still in place, but exciting as she is, she still wasn't my dream wreck.
I had some difficulty in getting the lads back to the hunt for UC-47, but while I was at sea fishing for my living, Daz Smith led the rest of the team onto two of our other possibilities. They turned out to be very scattered scrap-heaps which had once been small ships.
But it was fourth time lucky! Chris Davis, Simon Elvidge and Daz Smith made the first dive - and there was our sub!
It is gloomy down there at 51m, but the viz is surprisingly good: often 10m or more. This makes the 52m-long U-boat look menacingly black against the sandhill peaks around the wreck, and the solid-looking grey mist of the sea.
UC-47 is so head down into the sand that towards the bow only the conning tower, the gun and one of her telescopic radio masts stand up out of the seabed.
But her stern is 6m clear, with both her three-bladed propellers still on their shafts. In her final seconds, after depth charges from a British patrol boat followed her down 80 years ago, the stern torpedo tube was blown clean out of her. It now lies empty on the sand completely clear of the starboard side of the wreck.
There is more damage, probably from another depth charge, on the port side near the stern, where there is a large hole. The aft hatch is closed, which means that even if they survived the attack there was no attempt at a free ascent escape by the engine room crewmen.
Not far from the aft hatch, more extensive damage to the outer hull runs right up to the bow, and an old trawl net is draped over some of the twisted metal. Both the conning tower and control room periscopes have been knocked flat to point aft and lie on the sand on the starboard side.
The conning tower hatch is open, and this may well have been where Royal Navy divers got into her and retrieved the plans of the minefields she had just laid. Just in front of the conning tower is the 88mm gun, which has live shells scattered around. There are spent shellcases among them, presumably because they were being saved for refilling.
The six hatch covers of the mine chutes are just clear of the sand. The telescopic radio mast rears up some 7m vertically from the hull between the fourth and fifth mine chutes.
The pressure hull is intact at the bow, but the outer hull and the twin bow torpedo tubes have been torn free of the wreck. Their doors are closed, so some of the seven torpedoes she carried may be still inside. There is a large hole in the air ballast tank on the starboard side. Even if UC-47 wasn't a war grave, no one could enter her now, because sand and silt come to within four or five feet of the hatch cover. But we often visit her.

The position of UC-47 is 54 01 00; 00 20 00E, but as she lies in an area of sandhills that give funny readings on an echo-sounder, you really need a magnetometer to spot her or you'll find yourself diving a desert! This is a long-way-out hard boat dive, and anyone qualified to dive 50m, who wants to visit on a look-but-no-touch basis either the sub (a war grave) or HMS Falcon should use John Jarvis and his registered charter boat Blue Marlin (01262-601183).

Kendall McDonald believes the Yorkshire sub hunters may have solved an 80-year-old mystery about UC-47's presence at the surface the morning she was sunk

Rammed!

It has always been a mystery why Oberleutnant Wigankow allowed himself to be caught on the surface in the raw dark just before dawn on November 18,1917. But Shaun Carr and his team have probably found the answer by reporting the extended telescopic radio mast of UC-47.
Communications between the U-boats of the Flanders Flotilla, when hunting in the North Sea, and their headquarters at Bruges were always difficult. Without the radio masts fully extended, wireless range from the low hull of the submarine was about 30 miles, which meant that Wigankow would have had to rely on other boats nearer home passing on his messages.
With the masts fully raised - this could be done from inside the boat by small electric motors - the radio range was increased to well over 100 miles. So it is likely that Oberleutnant Wigankow was trying to pass some message back to Bruges when he was spotted.
Wigankow was not inexperienced. He had commanded the two attack boats, UB-12 and UB-17. Once on UC-47, he torpedoed two ships familiar to Yorkshire divers on his first mission to the south-east of Flamborough Head - the 1057-ton British steamer Togston and the Australian Cadmus of 1879 tons.
On his second mission to the same area he sank the French Isabelle and the British Ballogie (another wreck well-known to local divers), before sinking the Dana, whose wreck has also been found. Wigankow left Zeebrugge on November 17 with orders to attack shipping on "der englischen Ostkuste vor Flamborough Head und weiter sudlich".

The patrol boat HMS P-57 rammed UC-47 with her specially prepared hard steel bows.

It was 6.23 the following morning and still dark when UC-47 was found by HMS P-57. This was one of 60 patrol boats designed to hunt submarines. It had bows of hard steel for ramming U-boats, a 4-inch gun, pom-poms and two special depth-charge "throwers".
Her commander, H. C. Birnie, had just challenged a steamer by pinning her in his searchlights, but almost immediately saw she was friendly. As he put out the lights and turned away, a lookout shouted that there was a big buoy on the port bow. Birnie was puzzled - there should be no buoys in the area. He altered course again.
Almost immediately he and the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Isdale, saw that the "big buoy" was Wigankow's conning tower. The sub was now only 200 yards away. P-57 swung violently to port at Birnie's command and her engines raced to full speed ahead.
She was capable of 20 knots, but had hardly got to that speed in the 15 seconds before her bow bit deep into UC-47, just before the conning-tower and almost at a right-angle to the hull. The force of the attack drove the submarine down and away and she started to pass astern of Birnie's boat.

The crew of P-57 quickly released a depth charge. Birnie turned his ship, came racing back over the U-boat and dropped another charge. Turning again, he dropped a marker buoy into the middle of the turmoil and waited.
Soon oil was coming to the surface close to the buoy and the patrol boat sent down another depth charge into the source of the slick, followed by another buoy.
P-57 patrolled around for the rest of the day and the next night but none of the U-boat's 26 crew came to the surface. A minesweeper arrived, hooked her with a chain sweep with an explosive charge and detonated it.
A day later Navy divers went down to the wreck, entered her despite their hard-hat gear, and recovered charts of the minefields she had laid on earlier operations.
Commander Birnie was awarded the DSO and the Admiralty gave the standard reward for a "kill" of £1,000 to be shared by his crew.

Appeared in DIVER - July 1997

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