On the morning of 14 July 1916, the German U-boat U-51 cleared the mouth of the river Ems and began the routine surface run that took every outbound boat into the open North Sea. She had cleared the channel countless times. This time, a British submarine, H.5, was waiting in the shallows, periscope just barely above the chop. U-51's commander, Kapitaenleutnant Walter Rumpel, did not see her. The torpedo struck. The boat went down in moments. Four men were pulled out of the water alive. Thirty-four did not come up.
U-51 was the first of seven Type U 51 submarines ordered by the Imperial German Navy after the early successes of unrestricted submarine warfare convinced the High Seas Fleet that bigger, longer-ranged boats were needed. She was ordered from Germaniawerft in Kiel on 23 August 1914, just weeks after the outbreak of war, laid down on 19 December, and launched on 25 November 1915. She was commissioned on 24 February 1916, after one of the fastest submarine builds the war would produce. Walter Rumpel was her captain for her entire short career.
After trials at Kiel School and a transit to Heligoland, U-51 joined the 2nd Half Flotilla and patrolled the North Sea in early May 1916. British Naval Intelligence - the famous Room 40, which had broken much of the German naval cipher - was reading her wireless traffic almost as soon as it was sent. Between 16 May and 3 June she was at sea again, this time inadvertently positioned for the largest naval engagement of the war. The Battle of Jutland unfolded on 31 May and 1 June. U-51 spotted a British battleship through her periscope and fired two torpedoes. Both missed. She returned to base.
The British were hunting German U-boats by submarine themselves, lying in wait off the German coastal exits at Heligoland, the Jade, the Ems. On 14 July 1916, His Majesty's submarine H.5, a small Holland-type boat displacing barely 360 tons submerged, was patrolling near the Ems estuary, southwest of Wilhelmshaven and west of Wangerooge. She caught U-51 in the surface phase of her outbound run. One torpedo was enough. The German submarine, brand-new and barely five months in service, sank with most of her crew still inside the pressure hull.
Of the 38 men aboard, four were rescued. The other 34 - men barely into their twenties for the most part, drawn from across the German Empire by the prestige and pay of the U-boat service - went down with the boat. Most were lost at depths from which their bodies would never be recovered. The wreck of U-51 was left on the seabed where she settled, in the muddy approaches to the Ems. She lay there for more than half a century. In 1968, finally, a salvage operation raised the wreck and broke her up for scrap. By then the men inside had been at the bottom of the North Sea for 52 years - longer than they had lived. Their families had aged. Most had died. The boat that came up was empty steel.
U-51's brief career - five months from commissioning to sinking - was not unusual. The Imperial German Navy operated 329 submarines during the First World War. Roughly half were lost. The U-boat war reshaped naval combat, made commerce raiding the dominant tactic of two world wars, and pioneered the technologies that would still be in use, however changed, a century later. But each of those boats was also a metal tube full of people. Walter Rumpel and the others on U-51 entered the war in their own boat in February 1916 and were dead by July. The North Sea closed over them, and the routine outbound run from the Ems became the route that brought no one home.
Coordinates of the documented loss position: 53.93 N, 7.92 E, in the approaches to the Ems estuary, north-northwest of Borkum and west of Wangerooge. From altitude the area shows as open North Sea with the East Frisian island chain visible to the south. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 6,000 feet. Nearest airports: Borkum (EDWR) to the south, Wilhelmshaven JadeWeserAirport (EDWI) to the southeast, Groningen Eelde (EHGG) further west in the Netherlands. Visibility offshore is often hazy; clearer in winter high-pressure systems.