Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "The Execution of Charles Fryatt" video.

  1. You should look out for a book called 'Captain Charles Fryatt - Courageous Mariner of the First World War' by Ben Carver, who is his grandson. Published by Amberley Press in 2016. I was able to provide him with a little information on the subsequent history of Captain Fryatt's ship.
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  2. No, but possibly the captain, because he subsequently torpedoed a hospital ship in the Black Sea.
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  3. In point of fact, unrestricted submarine warfare commenced on 18 February, 1915. The first Q ship was introduced in June, 1915, and the arming of merchant ships later than that. Both were responses to the German campaign, and did not create it. UB110 was depth charged, rammed & sunk by HMS Garry on 19 July, 1918. Allegations by her captain, Kapitänleutnant Werner Fürbringer, were made after the war, in his memoirs, published in 1933. Apparently, he witnessed one of his crew killed when a member of Garry's crew threw a lump of coal at him, and Garry's crew also, allegedly, fired at the survivors with pistols, revolvers, and rifles. Furbringer also claimed that there were no independent witnesses of the massacre because Lightoller ordered his men to stop when the convoy his ship was escorting arrived on the scene. As far as I know, none of the other survivors from UB110 ever made any such claims. L19 landed in the North Sea on 1 March, 1916, returning from a bombing raid on Burton on Trent. She was observed in the sea by the trawler 'King Stephen.' The German commander of the airship spoke English, and asked the trawler's skipper, William Martin, to take the 13 man crew of the airship aboard. Martin refused, because his nine man crew were unarmed civilians, whereas the Germans were armed members of the German military. Martin undertook to report the downed airship to any British warship he might meet (King Stephen had no wireless) but didn't encounter any, and therefore was only able to report the encounter when he docked in Grimsby. The Royal Navy did send out destroyers to search for L19, but in poor weather no trace was ever found. Certainly, the cruiser prize rules benefited surface ships and had not been written with submersibles in mind, but your apparent conviction that the Germans were the victims is difficult to substantiate, despite your rather biased references to two alleged atrocities.
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  4. Absolutely. That Germany was undertaking unrestricted submarine warfare at the time had nothing to do with it. Fryatt should have ignored the fact that U33 appeared to be manoeuvring into a position from which to torpedo his ship, and accepted his fate like a gentleman. Kapitanleutnant Gausser was to become a highly successful and decorated U-Boat commander who, on 30 March, 1916, happily torpedoed a hospital ship in the Black Sea, by the way.
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  5. The British Blockade ended when the First World War did. On 28 June, 1919.
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  6. Fine. Except Fryatt's ramming attempt took place on 28 March, 1915, and the first Q ship victory was 23 June, 1915. Your point doesn't really work, therefore.
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  7.  @Citizenfitz1  Fryatt wasn't commanding a Q ship, in any case. Germany had, by the way, announced the imminent commencement of unrestricted submarine warfare on 4 February, 1915, in the 'Deutscher Reichsanzeiger' as follows :- (1) The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be a War Zone. From February 18 onwards every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. (2) Neutral vessels also will run a risk in the War Zone, because in view of the hazards of sea warfare and the British authorization of January 31 of the misuse of neutral flags, it may not always be possible to prevent attacks on enemy ships from harming neutral ships. (3) Navigation to the north of Shetland, in the eastern parts of the North Sea and through a zone at least thirty nautical miles wide along the Dutch coast is not exposed to danger.
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  8.  @Citizenfitz1  There were very few Q ships as such. Q ships were warships manned by the RN, with concealed armament. As early as 26 October, 1914 the French steamer Amiral Ganteaume, carrying 2500 Belgian refugees to Britain, was torpedoed without warning by U24. The British certainly began arming merchantmen with defensive guns, or more accurately a single gun mounted on the poop, the (questionable?) justification being that this gun could not be used to initiate an attack, but only to deter a pursuing surfaced U-Boat. The reality is that the Prize Rules had been drawn up based on surface ships only, were no longer fit for purpose, and soon came to be ignored by both sides.
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