SM U-8
1911 Type U 5 submarine
SM U-8 was one of 329 U-boatss which served in the Imperial German Navy during World War I.
A Type U 5 submarine, she was built at Germaniawerft in Kiel between 1909 and 1911. The boat was launched on 14 March 1911 and commissioned into the Navy on 18 June. The boat was scuttled in the English Channel in March 1915.
Service history
At the beginning of World War I, U-8 was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Konrad Gansser. In August 1914 she took part in the first U-boat operation of the war, sailing from Heligoland in a coordinated attack on the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow.
Kapitänleutnant Alfred Stoß took over the boat on 1 September 1914, with Gansser moving to command U-33. During February 1915 she sank five British steamers in the English Channel. On 4 March, however, U-8 became trapped in anti-submarine nets in the Channel and was forced to surface. After coming under gunfire from HMS Gurkha and HMS Maori, the crew scuttled the boat at position 50°56′N 01°16′E. The crew were taken prisoner.
In June 2015 the submarine's propeller, which had been illegally removed from the wreck, was recovered and presented to the German Navy.
“SM U-8” enters the record as 1911 Type U 5 submarine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Type and submarine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “SM U-8” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.