*U-68*'s commander was Kapitänleutnant Ludwig Güntzel, and the German High Seas Fleet U-boat command later admitted he should not have been given a boat. Standard practice was to send a new captain to sea first as a guest under a more experienced commander, to learn the patient, careful work of submarine patrol - the protocols for approaching neutral-flagged vessels, the warning signs that distinguished a genuine merchantman from a decoy. Güntzel had skipped that apprenticeship. Kommodore Hermann Bauer, who commanded the High Seas Fleet's submarine arm, would write in his memoirs that this omission had killed Güntzel and his crew. A post-war German study reviewed the encounter that destroyed *U-68* and found that her captain had broken almost every rule for approaching a suspicious ship.

*U-68* departed the Ems on 16 March 1916 for her first patrol, bound for the operating area off Britain's west coast. At 07:00 on 22 March, off the southern Irish coast near Dingle, she sighted what appeared to be a slow, unarmed merchant ship. She fired a torpedo. It missed the bow. The merchant ship, instead of zig-zagging in panic, continued at her steady speed - the first signal that should have warned Güntzel. He surfaced 1,000 yards astern, manoeuvred to the port quarter, and fired a warning shot. The merchantman stopped, blew off steam, lowered a boat as if to surrender. Güntzel closed to 800 yards. The merchant flag came down. The White Ensign went up. The hull flaps fell away and three 12-pounder guns opened fire. The ship was the British Q-ship HMS *Farnborough*, commanded by Gordon Campbell.

Twenty-one rapidly fired British rounds hit *U-68* repeatedly. She began to sink. Campbell, alert to the chance to finish her off before she could escape underwater, ordered *Farnborough* steered over the submarine's location, and dropped a depth charge - a new weapon, untested in combat - that blew *U-68*'s bow clear of the water. Five more 12-pounder rounds struck her conning tower as she went down by the stern. Her position when she sank was off Dingle in southern Ireland. There were no survivors. Thirty-eight men - officers and ratings, machinists and torpedomen, the gunner who had fired the warning shot, the helmsman who had brought her closer - went down with her. *U-68* sank no Allied ships in her brief career. She is remembered for being the first submarine ever destroyed by depth charge, the opening shot in a war beneath the waves that would last another sixty years.

It is easy, reading the action reports, to focus on the cleverness of the Q-ship and the textbook failure of the U-boat commander. But there were thirty-eight other men aboard *U-68*, and they had no say in Güntzel's tactical choices. The crew of a Type U 66 submarine numbered three or four officers and around thirty-five men packed into a hull 69.5 metres long, sharing fetid air with the diesel engines that drove them on the surface and the electric motors that pushed them when submerged. They came from Hamburg and Kiel and small towns across the Reich. Most were in their twenties. They had volunteered for an arm of service in which the casualty rate was already understood to be brutal - of the 380 U-boats committed to the First World War, 178 were lost. *U-68*'s crew was among the earliest of those losses, gone in twenty minutes of confusion on a March morning off the Kerry coast. Their wreck has not, as far as is publicly known, been located.