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SM UB-42

1916 Type UB II submarine

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ7391651
Source-derived summary

SM UB-42 was a Type UB II submarine or U-boat for the German Imperial Navy (German: Kaiserliche Marine) during World War I. UB-42 operated in the Mediterranean and the Black Seas during the war. She was broken up at Malta in 1920.

UB-42 was ordered in July 1915 and was laid down at the AG Weser shipyard in Bremen in September. UB-42 was 36.90 m (121 ft 1 in) in length and displaced between 270 and 305 tonnes (266 and 300 long tons), depending on whether surfaced or submerged. She was equipped to carry a complement of four torpedoes for her two bow torpedo tubes and had an 5 cm (1.97 in) deck gun. As part of a group of six submarines selected for Mediterranean service, UB-42 was broken into railcar sized components and shipped to Pola where she was assembled, launched and commissioned in March 1916.

In 21 patrols during the war, UB-42 sank eleven ships of 16,061 gross register tons (GRT), captured one 97 GRT vessel as prize, and damaged HMS Veronica a British Acacia-class sloop. In October 1916, UB-42 delivered five Georgians who had gold to help finance a Georgian independence movement. After the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in late October 1918, UB-42 fled to Sevastopol, where she was surrendered in November. UB-42 was taken to Malta, where she was broken up in 1920.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “SM UB-42” as 1916 Type UB II submarine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around UB-42, Type and submarine.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1920, 1915, 1916, 1918—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with UB-42, Type and submarine providing the first useful test.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “SM UB-42”, the useful work is to connect “1916 Type UB II submarine” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7391651. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1915, 1916 and 1918.

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This entry incorporates text from SM UB-42” 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.