On 17 September 1939, just over two weeks after the declaration of war, the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was sunk off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 519 sailors. Escorted by a variety of destroyers, she had been on patrol guarding merchant ships on the Western Approaches and her Fairy Swordfish aircraft were just returning from anti-submarine patrols. Unbeknown to her crew, Courageous had been stalked by U-29 captained by Kapitänleutnant Otto Schuhart (1909–1990) for over two hours but the submarine commander had been unable to get close enough to mount an attack. Not aware of the acute danger she was in, the carrier had turned into the wind to pick up the last aircraft. This manoeuvre placed her right across the bow of U-29 which fired three torpedoes.22
The first torpedo hit the engine compartment right behind the boiler room, immediately followed by an even more severe explosion caused by the second torpedo hitting. The strength of the explosions was so great that the flight deck burst in a mass of twisted metal, with smoke bellowing from her lower decks as a massive column of water shot into the air. The carrier then started listing heavily and all the lights failed, some of the crew rushing to the flight deck but many found themselves trapped in the lower decks. Surveying the damage on the bridge, Captain William Makaig-Jones gave out the order to abandon ship. The 22,500-ton carrier sunk in seventeen minutes about 190 miles southwest of Dursey Head, Ireland, only two lifeboats being lowered into the water in time. From a crew of 1,200, Captain William Makaig-Jones, 17 officers and 501 sailors were lost, including 36 RAF service crewmen. All her Swordfish aircraft belonging to 811 and 822 squadrons also went down with the ship.
After the sinking of the carrier HMS Courageous on 17 September 1939, U-boat torpedtent Kreuzer was rushed into German shops allowing children to play at being a wooden U-boat and sink a battleship.
The first British warship to be lost in the war, the sinking of HMS Courageous was a massive propaganda coup for the German Kriegsmarine. A delighted Grand Admiral Erich Raeder pinned the Iron Cross first class on to Schuhart’s tunic while all the crew were awarded the Iron Cross second class. Hitler himself also congratulated the crew while visiting Wilhelmshaven on 28 September 1939. In response to the sinking of the carrier a mass of U-boat-related toys were rushed into the shops by German toy manufacturers. Apart from board games they included wooden toys with titles like U-boat torpediert Kreuzer (Submarine torpedoes Cruiser), complete with artwork showing a German submarine sporting the Kriegsmarine emblem, blowing a huge hole in a British warship. The toys were composed of a series of separate wooden parts which made up a warship including its turrets and guns, conning tower, bridge and fire-control system. In the centre of the warship was a piece of metal which could be ‘armed’ using a catch and acted as a spring that was released when the wooden button on the outside of the hull was hit. The U-boat was also a simple design having a spring into which a wooden torpedo could be inserted. The idea of the game was to fire the torpedo at the warship until the button was hit at which point the ship would ‘explode’ into its component parts.
For Neville Chamberlain, whose premiership had been defined by appeasement towards Nazi Germany, the sinking of the Courageous was a huge shock which really brought home the tragedy of war. Despite having declared war on Germany two weeks earlier he had never sought to be a wartime prime minister and had admitted to his sister that the thought of giving orders which would result in the death of so many filled him with dread. His predicament was one that the German propaganda machine revelled in, caricaturists portraying him as being indecisive and a lameduck prime minister. German toy manufacturers also joined in, putting a top hat and an umbrella, the props which defined his premiership, on the conning tower of their wooden U-boats.
The sinking of HMS Courageous was to be the first of five Royal Navy carriers lost during the war. U-boat captain Otto Schuhart was later awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross (Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes) for his service on 16 May 1940, only the fourth commanding officer to have received it at the time. The submarine U-29 would go on to sink another eleven ships before she was withdrawn from active service in 1941, ending the war as a training vessel, eventually being scuttled in 1945. The sinking of the Courageous was a bitter foretaste of the hundreds of vessels which would be sent to the bottom by U-boats before the Battle of the Atlantic was eventually won.