Q-Ship Gallantry

By cunning, guile, and disguise, the Royal Navy’s Q-ships lured unsuspecting U-boats into a trap before opening fire on the German submarines in often successful ‘sting’ operations. It was such an operation which won one of the Q-ship captains a Victoria

In 1917, The London Gazette began to publish unusually brief and uninformative citations for certain naval Victoria Crosses. On 14 September 1918, for example, it was announced that Lieutenant Harold Auten DSC, RNR, had been awarded the VC ‘for service in action with enemy submarines.’ Other than his name and rank, there was no further information.

The secrecy surrounding the award was because he was the captain of HMS Stock Force, a disguised former collier that served as one of the Royal Navy’s Q-ships. The son of a retired naval paymaster, Auten was born in Leatherhead, Surrey, on 22 August 1891. He attended grammar school in Camberwell and afterwards was apprenticed to the P&O line. In 1910, he joined the Royal Naval Reserve and was promoted to sub-lieutenant just prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914.

Auten mainly served on Q-ships - but what were Q-ships?

In 1915, Britain was in desperate need of countermeasures against U-boats . Convoys were rejected by the Admiralty and by captains. Depth charges of the time were relatively primitive, and almost the only chance of sinking a submarine was by gunfire or ramming on the surface. But how to lure the U-boat to the surface?

A solution was the the Q-ship, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. Their codename referred to the vessels’ home port, Queenstown, Ireland, but they were known to the Germans as a U-Boot-Falle (U-boat trap).

A Q-ship would appear an easy target, but in fact carried hidden armaments. A typical Q-ship resembled a tramp steamer sailing alone in an area where a U-boat was reported to be operating.

Torpedoes being expensive, and with submarines only carrying a limited number, they were only employed when the vessel was submerged and invisible to her target. Ammunition for a deck gun, on the other hand, was inexpensive and plentiful. As a result, submarine captains preferred to surface and use their deck guns on easy targets.

By appearing a suitable target for the U-boat’s deck gun, a Q-ship was intended to lure a submarine into surfacing. Once the U-boat was vulnerable, misled by some of the crew dressed as civilian mariners ‘abandoning ship’ and taking to a boat, the Q-ship would drop its disguise panels and open fire with deck guns. At the same time, the vessel would raise the Royal Navy White Ensign. When successfully fooled, a U-boat could be quickly overwhelmed by several guns to its one. These, then, were the Q-ships.

Auten joined the ex-collier Q-ship Zylpha as a sub-lieutenant RNR in the early days of September 1915, and took over his first Q-ship command, Q.16, or Heather, in April 1917. However, his most famous Q-ship, that in which he won the Victoria Cross, was HMS Stock Force ,a 360-ton collier which he picked out after she had taken his fancy in a Cardiff dock. “This was the ship for me”, he later wrote.

It was whilst Stock Force was patrolling the English Channel on 30 July 1918, that a U-boat, the UB-80, struck, the torpedo hitting the Q-ship at 17.00 hours. The following account of what happened was eventually published in The London Gazette on 20 November 1918 when the story could be properly told:

‘The torpedo struck the ship abreast No.1 hatch, entirely wrecking the fore part of the ship, including the bridge, and wounding three ratings. A tremendous shower of planks, unexploded shells, hatches, and other debris followed the explosion, wounding the first lieutenant (Lieutenant E.J. Grey, R.N.R.) and the navigating officer (Lieutenant L.E. Workman, R.N.R.) and adding to the

injuries of the foremost gun’s crew and a number of other ratings. The ship settled down forward, flooding the foremost magazine and between decks to the depth of about three feet.

‘[The] “Panic party,” in charge of Lieutenant Workman, R.N.R., immediately abandoned ship, and the wounded were removed to the lower deck, where the surgeon (Surgeon Probationer G.E. Strahan, R.N.V.R.), working up to his waist in water, attended to their injuries. The captain, two guns’ crews and the engineroom staff remained at their posts.

‘The submarine then came to the surface ahead of the ship half a mile distant, and remained there a quarter of an hour, apparently watching the ship for any doubtful movement.

‘The “panic party” in the boat accordingly commenced to row back towards the ship in an endeavour to decoy the submarine within range of the hidden guns. The submarine followed, coming slowly down the port side of the Stock Force, about three hundred yards away. Lieutenant Auten, however, withheld his fire until she was abeam, when both of his guns could bear. Fire was opened at 5.40 p.m.; the first shot carried away one of the periscopes, the second round hit the conning tower, blowing it away and throwing the occupant high into the air. The next round struck the submarine on the waterline, tearing her open and blowing out a number of the crew.

‘The enemy then subsided several feet into the water and her bows rose. She thus presented a large and immobile target into which the Stock Force poured shell after shell until the submarine sank by the stern, leaving a quantity of debris on the water. During the whole of the action one man (Officer’s Steward, 2nd Class, R.J. Starling) remained pinned down under the foremost gun after the explosion of the torpedo, and remained there cheerfully and without complaint, although the ship was apparently sinking, until the end of the action.

‘The Stock Force was a vessel of 360 tons, and despite the severity of the shock sustained by the officers and men when she was torpedoed, and the fact that her bows were almost obliterated, she was kept afloat by the exertions of her ship’s company until 9.25 p.m. She then sank with colours flying, and the officers and men were taken off by two torpedo boats and a trawler.’

Such were the actions of Auten and his crew that the engagement was cited as: ‘one of the finest examples of coolness, discipline, and good organisation in the history of Q-ships’.

After the war, Auten published his memoirs, Q Boat Adventures and in 1925, he was promoted to lieutenantcommander..

Having started working in the film industry in 1922, Auten eventually became Executive Vice-President of the Rank Organisation. He lived for 30 years in Bushkill, Pennsylvania, where he owned the Bushkill Manor Hotel and Playhouse.

In August 1939, he was promoted to Commander RNR, and during the Second World War was employed in routeing convoys across the Atlantic.

He died on 3 October 1964 in Pennsylvania.

■ This ‘now it can be told’ magazine feature told the story of the Q-ships to a fascinated British public after the war.

(Critical Past, via Historic Military Press) ■ Lieutenant-Commander Harold Auten disguised as a tramp skipper onboard a Q-ship. Auten was the last of the Great War Q-ship VCs. When King George V was presenting the Victoria Cross to Lieutenant-Commander Auten DSC, RNR in the quadrangle at Buckingham Palace on 18th September 1918, the band played ‘Hush, Hush, Here Comes the Bogey Man’, to the great amusement of the King, Auten, and the spectators.

(Historic Military Press) ■ Members of the crew of a Q-ship show the gun after its removal from covers.

(Historic Military Press) ■ A ‘panic party’ goes to work on Auten’s Q-ship HMS Suffolk Coast, the men preparing to ‘abandon ship’ while gunners stand to at their posts.

■ An official diagram showing how Q-ships were frequently disguised.

■ Post war, Harold Auten wrote his account of life as a Q-ship captain, ‘Q’ Boat Adventures.