I don’t do a lot of WW2 history. On the whole, it’s just a bit too straight to fire my imagination, but the other day on Twitter, someone posted this image of a curious movie credit, which reminded me how much I like Q-ships, and prompted me to do a little dive into one of the weirder ways navies wage war.
Put simply, a Q-ship is a nautical wolf in sheep’s clothing – an innocent-looking merchant vessel packed with concealed weaponry.
I don’t know this particular ship, but anything that looks like that is going to be in trouble if a U-boat gets near it.
The idea is, they lure in a sub or small warship that'll be careless, expecting an easy kill, then blow the shit out of it. The concept is hundreds of years old - in the seventeenth century the English navy sailed disguised warships through the Med to lure Barbary Corsairs, but it went big in WW1 as an attempt to counter U-Boat attacks. At the time, it was damn near impossible to sink a sub while it was underwater. The solution? Tempt it to the surface.
Ships like HMS President (still moored on the Thames today!) were bait. Torpedoes were expensive, and subs could only carry a limited number of them, so, for easy targets like this little steamer, U-boats would surface and use their deck gun. The Q-Ship would let them get close, then BAM!
HMS President, still in disguise a century later.
Panels slid aside to reveal hidden guns, and the U-Boat got a taste of its own medicine.
Sounds cool, but like many clever ideas, it didn’t work terribly well in practice.
This picture is from a 1915 newspaper story headlined ‘Mystery Ship Trapping German Submarines’. Kind of a naval warfare variation on the ‘Man Bites Dog’ story.
To look like slow, unmanoeuvrable merchant vessels, the Q-ships had to be converted from actual slow vulnerable unmanoeuvrable vessels, and even after you put guns on them, they were still slow and unmanoeuvrable. A lot were sunk.
BUT, like most ideas, whether it’s good or bad depends on execution, and one man, Ernst-Felix Krüder, made the Q-ship concept look like genius.
A dangerous man.
For the Germans, things had to work differently. Their Q-ships existed not to hunt subs, but to sneak into allied shipping lanes in disguise.
Krüder’s vessel was called the Pinguin. In June 1940, a day after German troops marched triumphantly through Paris, this very ordinary-looking ship sailed north up the Norwegian coast at the start of one of the most devastating raids of all time.
Pinguin in the Indian Ocean, a few days before she met her fate.
In an empty fjord, the Pinguin’s crew painted her hull black, and added a hammer and sickle so she looked like a Soviet freighter. She would later adopt three more false identities – as Greek freighter Kassos, the cargo liner Trafalgar, and Norwegian tanker Tammerlane.
From that lonely Fjord, Pinguin sailed west through the Denmark strait, south along the coast of Africa, across the Indian ocean to the coast of Australia, then back to the South Atlantic and Antarctic waters. On this single cruise, she sank 28 allied ships.
Krüder was insanely skilled at seizing their cargoes intact, sending thousands of tons of precious oil and metal back to Germany. Just before Christmas 1940, Pinguin captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet of fifteen ships and sent them back to Bordeaux.
In the waters between Indonesia and Australia, Pinguin captured a Norwegian tanker, Storstad, and, like something out of the A-team, converted her into a minelaying vessel.
Storstad was known and expected to be in these waters, so could sail near allied ports. Her mines sank another four allied ships.
They added rails at the stern to act as a mine delivery system - they slide off into the sea.
For 207 days, Pinguin defied the odds and inflicted massive damage on the allied war effort, but on the 7th of May, 1941, she ran into trouble in the Indian Ocean. A British tanker managed to broadcast a frantic SOS before being sunk with torpedoes.
The signal was heard as far away as London, and a British heavy cruiser, HMS Cornwall, came to investigate. Pinguin tried to maintain her disguise, but the cruiser ordered her to submit to inspection. Krüder allowed the warship to close within 4 miles before revealing his true colours and opening fire.
This is actually HMS Cornwall’s sister ship, HMAS Australia, but as County class cruisers, they’re identical.
The sudden broadside surprised the British, and inflicted heavy damage, but it was an uneven fight. HMS Cornwall was faster, tougher and had bigger guns. In the end, even the greatest Q-ship of all time suffered the same problem as all Q-ships; it was slow and unmanoeuvrable – an easy target.
So, that’s why Q-ships aren’t a thing any more. Of course you still have disguised naval vessels – the old Soviet trawlers doing electronic surveillance, all kinds of shenanigans around the Korean peninsular, but generally not much fighting in disguise any more, which is probably a good thing really.