Qualla: HMS H5

HMS H5: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of 2 March 1918 the Royal Mail steamer SS Rutherglen was crossing St George's Channel from Ireland when her watch saw a submarine surface ahead of her. The whole western approaches were thick with German U-boats that winter -- the unrestricted submarine campaign was sinking British shipping at a punishing rate -- and the Rutherglen's master did what merchant masters had been ordered to do. He turned the bow into the conning tower and rammed at full speed. The submarine went down in a few minutes. She was HMS H5, a British boat of the Royal Navy's H-class, returning from patrol. All twenty-six men aboard her died. Among them was a young American officer named Earle Wayne Freed Childs.

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HMS H5: The Boat

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

HMS H5 had been launched on 1 April 1915 at the height of the U-boat crisis -- one of a batch of small American-designed submarines built for the Royal Navy because British yards could not produce boats fast enough to meet the war's demand. She was 150 feet long, displaced 364 lo...

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HMS H5: The Mistake

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Rutherglen's lookouts saw what they expected to see -- a German submarine in the western approaches in 1918, where dozens of merchant ships had already been lost. The collision was not a careful identification followed by an attack. It was a glimpse of a black hull on a black...

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HMS H5: Earle Childs

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lieutenant Earle Wayne Freed Childs was a United States Navy officer assigned as observer aboard the H5. The United States had been in the war since April 1917, and American submariners were being attached to British boats to learn from the Royal Navy's hard-won experience. Child...

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HMS H5: Holyhead Remembers

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2010, on Armed Forces Day in Holyhead -- the nearest port to the spot in St George's Channel where the H5 went down -- a memorial plaque was dedicated to the twenty-six men who died that night. The plaque names the British crew and the American observer alongside them. It does...

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