The U-28 'Undersea Crocodile' and the Sinking of the SS Iberian

Summer 1915. The war at sea had reached the shipping lanes off Ireland. SM U-28, a Type U 27 boat, was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner.

On 30 July 1915 his target was the SS Iberian, a steamer of 5,223 tons sailing from Manchester to Boston with general cargo. The attack came about 9 nautical miles southwest of Fastnet Rock, off County Cork. Seven of her crew died.

Forstner said his torpedo struck the Iberian's stern. She "sank rapidly, stern-first, with her bow clear of the sea, and her hull almost vertical." About 25 seconds after she vanished, there was an explosion somewhere below. In one translation of Forstner's words, "pieces of wreckage, among them a huge marine animal which made violent movements, were thrown out of the water, flying approximately 20 or 30 meters high."

Forstner was not alone in the conning tower. Sources place the officers of the watch, the chief engineer, the navigator and the helmsman beside him. What they saw looked like a giant crocodile. It had four powerful paddle-like limbs, a long pointed head and a long tail tapering to a point. Forstner put its length at about 20 meters, and later insisted he "would not give up a single meter of the length of the animal."

It stayed in sight for 10 to 15 seconds. Then it slipped beneath the water. There was no time for a photograph. Forstner believed the blast had caught the creature and forced it to the surface. The men had a name for it: "The 'undersea-crocodile,' as we called it."

The account first appeared in print in 1933, 18 years later. Forstner published it in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung under a telling title: "The Scottish sea monster already sighted by U.28." That year, Loch Ness was in the headlines. In 1935 the tale appeared again in Begegnungen mit Seeungeheuern, with an illustration by Richard Hennig.

The only official record from 1915 concerns the sinking itself. A telegram from Wesley Frost, the U.S. Consul at Cork, reported that the submarine gave the Iberian's crew time to take to the boats. It says nothing about anything strange in the water. U-28 herself was lost with all 39 crew in 1917, when the munitions ship Olive Branch, which she had attacked, blew up.

Bernard Heuvelmans accepted the sighting and placed it among his marine saurian reports. Heuvelmans doubted the explanation, though. He wrote that "to sink even 100 fathoms in 25 seconds would be good going," and suggested the animal leapt from the water because it was startled. The sea there is about 104 m deep, far short of the "one thousand meters" Forstner guessed for the explosion.

Willy Ley implied that the Loch Ness publicity prompted Forstner to publish. Darren Naish goes further. He calls it "a total fabrication." Naish points out that the creature is absent from the logs, that the survivors of the Iberian did not recall such an animal, and that the 1935 illustration was derived from a crocodile specimen.

The story has outlived its teller and his boat. It sits beside other naval sea monster tales, from HMS Daedalus to the UB-85 legend, and still fuels talk of surviving mosasaurs and ocean-going crocodiles. A startled animal, or a tale shaped by the year of Loch Ness? No log entry settles it. Only the word of the men in the conning tower remains.