Two crews died here. The first were the merchant sailors aboard the fifty-nine ships UC-75 sent to the bottom between March 1917 and May 1918 - fishermen, freighter crews, coal-trade hands, the small invisible workforce that kept Britain fed and lit. The second crew were the Germans themselves. On the night of 31 May 1918, the British destroyer HMS Fairy rammed UC-75 in the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast. Of the twenty-six aboard the U-boat, seventeen were killed. They went down in cold dark water close to where this waypoint hovers. Both crews matter; both crews were doing what their governments had ordered them to do.
SM UC-75 was a Type UC II minelaying submarine - the workhorse of the German Imperial Navy's coastal U-boat force. Ordered on 12 January 1916 and launched on 6 November of the same year, she was commissioned into service on 6 December 1916. She carried six 100-centimetre mine tubes capable of releasing eighteen UC 200 contact mines, three 50-centimetre torpedo tubes, seven torpedoes, and an 8.8 cm deck gun. Her job was not direct combat. Her job was to creep into British coastal shipping lanes, drop mines invisibly across them, and slip away. The mines did the killing for her, days or weeks later, often without anyone knowing which submarine had laid them. UC-75 patrolled thirteen times over eighteen months. By the end she was credited with sinking fifty-nine ships - some by torpedo, most by the mines she had laid behind her.
The Wikipedia entry for UC-75 carries a long table of dates and ship names: Industria, Marshall, Median, Rosslyn - four merchantmen sunk on a single day, 25 March 1917. Then Expedient, Schaldis, Alide, the small vessels Carberry King and Eleanor and Fastnet and Hibernia and Lucky Lass and North Star, each only thirty-one or twenty-one tons - drifters and fishing smacks, the smallest catches in the U-boat's quietest weeks. HMS Lavender, a sloop of 1,200 tons, sunk on 5 May 1917. The 5,532-ton Anglian on 11 June. The Q-ship HMS Prize damaged on 12 June. The big merchantmen War Helmet at 8,184 tons and Atlantian at 9,399 tons on the November 1917 patrol. Down in the very small numbers - Day Spring, Gratitude, Varuna, each just 40 tons - sit the trawlers of Britain's east-coast fishing fleet, sunk together on 4 January 1918. Each name is a crew.
On 31 May 1918, on her thirteenth patrol, UC-75 was operating off the Yorkshire coast in the North Sea. She was spotted on the surface in the dark by HMS Fairy, an old Royal Navy destroyer escorting a coastal convoy. Fairy rammed her at speed. Steel hulls crumpled and ground. UC-75 was crippled and sank rapidly. Of the twenty-six Germans aboard, seventeen died with their boat. Fourteen were rescued by Fairy's crew - whose own ship was so badly damaged in the collision that she had to be beached to save her own people. The men who had spent eighteen months killing British sailors invisibly were now pulled, wet and shivering, onto a British deck by sailors who had no orders to let them drown. The Filipino, Russian, German, and British crews of these waters all ended their war the same way: in cold North Sea salt water, hoping for rescue.
UC-75's wreck lies somewhere off the Yorkshire coast at roughly 53.95 degrees north, 0.15 degrees east - the position recorded for her sinking. She is a war grave under the UK Protection of Military Remains Act, like other identified U-boats lost in British waters. Divers occasionally visit. The brass of her conning tower and the steel of her pressure hull are slowly being consumed by the salt water she once cruised through. Of the dead and surviving on both sides, the names that mostly endure are the ships - because ship names get written down. The names of nineteen men of UC-75's crew, and of the hundreds aboard the fifty-nine merchantmen, are in archives in two countries. The wars they fought are over. The sea is the same.
The recorded loss position of UC-75 is roughly 53.95 degrees north, 0.15 degrees east, about 18 nautical miles east of the Holderness coast and northeast of Withernsea, in the North Sea. Nearest ICAO: EGNJ (Humberside), 45 km southwest; EGXC (Coningsby) about 90 km south. From altitude the area shows the broad sweep of Bridlington Bay to the north, with Flamborough Head's chalk cliffs visible in clear weather; the Westermost Rough wind farm lies to the south, marking the modern industrial geography that has overlaid the old killing grounds.