Thirty-nine men. That is the number to begin with, because numbers in submarine warfare tend to be small and absolute. When SM UB-115 went down off Beacon Point on 29 September 1918, she took all of them. The youngest were probably nineteen. The oldest, including the captain Reinhold Thomsen, were perhaps in their late twenties. None of them knew the war they were fighting had less than six weeks left to run. They were doing what U-boat crews did in 1918 - patrolling, hunting, hiding - and they were caught by a combination of weapons that would not have existed at the start of the war they were now losing.
UB-115 was a Type UB III submarine, the workhorse coastal U-boat of the late First World War. She was built by Blohm & Voss at Hamburg and launched on 4 November 1917, after just under a year of construction. The Type UB IIIs were larger than the early UBs they replaced - 519 tonnes surfaced, 649 submerged, with a range of 7,420 nautical miles and a top speed of 13.3 knots on diesels. She carried ten torpedoes, an 88mm deck gun, and a complement of three officers and 31 men. Commissioning came on 28 May 1918 under Oberleutnant zur See Reinhold Thomsen. UB-115 was the only boat in the Imperial Navy ever to carry the number 115.
By September 1918 the anti-submarine war had transformed. Where Royal Navy responses in 1914 had been improvised and largely ineffective, by late 1918 they were systematic. Armed trawlers patrolled coastal waters with depth charges aboard. Rigid airships drifted overhead carrying bombs, their high-altitude view of the sea perfect for spotting the dark shape of a submerged U-boat in clear water. UB-115 ran into both. On 29 September, while under Thomsen's command, she was engaged by armed trawlers - among them the requisitioned fishing vessel Viola - and by the rigid airship R29, which dropped aerial bombs. The trawlers added depth charges. The combined attack tore the submarine apart and sent her to the bottom about 4.5 nautical miles north-east of Beacon Point, off Newton-by-the-Sea.
All 39 men aboard died. That phrase carries a particular weight in submarine warfare, because it almost always means the same thing - the boat was holed below the surface and there was no way out. Submariners of 1918 had no escape apparatus worth the name. When a hull was breached at depth, water came in fast, and pressure killed before drowning could. The men of UB-115 are not individually named in most accounts. Reinhold Thomsen, their captain, is. So is the family-of-ships background that puts them on board: many were trade-school engineers, mechanics or sailors recruited in the great expansion of the U-boat arm in 1917 and 1918. None of them came home. The war ended on 11 November - 43 days after they were lost - and the German Imperial Navy that had ordered them out on patrol effectively ceased to exist.
The wreck of UB-115 lies today in two pieces, where the bombs and depth charges left her. She is dusted in soft corals, the local colonisers of an iron-and-steel hulk that has spent more than a hundred years on the seabed. She also carries a more unusual layer: an accretion formed from fly ash blown out to sea from a local power plant, fused with the marine growth. The mixture is, in its way, a record of the twentieth century compressed onto a single small wreck - the war that put her there, the industry that came after, the marine ecosystem that does not care about either. Technical divers visit. For most of those who reach her, the boat is treated as what she is: a war grave, holding 39 sailors who did not get to find out which side won.
SM UB-115 lies at approximately 55.22 degrees north, 1.37 degrees west, roughly 4.5 nautical miles north-east of Beacon Point near Newton-by-the-Sea on the Northumberland coast. At 3,000-5,000 feet the coastal village of Newton-by-the-Sea and the broad sweep of Embleton Bay are easily picked out, with Dunstanburgh Castle's ruins prominent on the headland to the south. Newcastle International (EGNT) is the nearest major airport, about 23 nautical miles south-west. The Farne Islands lie a short distance further north along the coast - the same general waters where HMS Unity was lost a generation later in 1940.