U-boat on a British Beach
Even washed ashore, this WWI leviathan was still a killer.
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1919
SM U-118 was a 267-foot mine-laying submarine, one of the 329 U-boats which served in the Imperial German Navy in World War I.Commissioned in May 1918, U-118 sank two British ships in its short career before the war ended. At the end of the conflict, the entire navy was surrendered, and U-118 was handed over to the French. On April 15, 1919, as U-118 was being towed through the English Channel on its way to be scrapped, a storm caused the tow cable to snap, setting the U-boat adrift. The vessel ran aground on a beach at Hastings, England, right in front of the Queens Hotel, immediately attracting thousands of tourists and visitors.For a fortnight, visitors could pay a small fee to the Town Clerk of Hastings to climb onto the deck. Two members of the Coast Guard also took adventurous visitors on tours inside the ship. These visits were cut short when both men became terribly sick and eventually died. It is believed their deaths were caused by a hazardous gas in the bowels of the vessel, possibly chlorine released from its damaged batteries.As visitors dwindled, the ship was slowly broken down and sold for scrap, though some remains of the keel may still lie hidden under the sands of the beach.
