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Updated: July 25, 2025
The barrage when completed gave an enemy submarine about one chance in ten of getting through. According to reliable records, it accomplished the destruction or serious injury of 17 German submarines, and by its deterrent effect, must have practically closed the northern exit to both under-water and surface craft. The Attack on Zeebrugge and Ostend
I was at last out of Germany, but the lights of the Hook of Holland reminded me that a field of German activity lay ahead floating mines, torpedoes, submarines, and swift destroyers operating from Ostend and Zeebrugge. They are challenging British supremacy in the southern part of the North Sea, through the waters of which we must now feel our way.
It is difficult also not to trace a political motive, if not in the attacks on Zeebrugge and Ostend, at least in the contrast between the enormous publicity they received and the silence which shrouded the more normal but not less important or heroic work of the British Navy.
Outside of Zeebrugge, shallow water extends to a distance of about five miles from the coast, and it has been suggested that a large number of aircraft, carrying bombs and torpedoes, should be used to patrol systematically the channel leading from that port to deep water, with the intent of attacking the submersibles as they emerge from this base.
Both Calais and Dunkirk were bombarded by German destroyers. In the former town some civilians were killed. As a result of the attack on Dunkirk one French destroyer was sunk. On May 10, 1917, a squadron of eleven German destroyers about to sail out of Zeebrugge was attacked by a British naval force and forced back into the former Belgian harbor, then serving as a German naval base.
Of all the anti-submarine measures employed, prior to the North Sea Barrage and the Zeebrugge attack, the adoption of the convoy system was undoubtedly the most effective in checking the loss of tonnage at the height of the submarine campaign.
If we had not been successful, the recall would not have been sounded yet. There is still plenty of time if we needed it, and our damage has not been great enough to leave the job unfinished." Jack was right. The harbors of Ostend and Zeebrugge had been effectually sealed. No longer would enemy U-Boats make nightly raids into the North Sea, only to scurry back to their bases when it grew light.
It was doubtful whether any would get away, for the Germans had at last begun serious fighting up the Scheldt in order to cut off the retreat towards Zeebrugge and Ostend. In the narrow gap between the intruding Germans and the Dutch frontier some were forced across the latter and interned; others fell into the enemy's hands; and less than a third of the first Naval Brigade escaped to England.
An engagement occurred between a French and a German torpedo-boat flotilla on May 20, 1917, during which one of the French boats was damaged. A few days later British warships bombarded Ostend and Zeebrugge. Six German destroyers engaged in a running fight with a British squadron, as a result of which one German destroyer was sunk and another damaged.
THE VICTORY AT SEA, Vice-Admiral W. S. Sims, U. S. N., 1920. ZEEBRUGGE AND OSTEND DISPATCHES, ed. by C. Sanford Terry, 1919. C. S. Alden, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings. June-July, 1920. The brief survey of sea power in the preceding chapters has shown that the ocean has been the highway for the march of civilization and empire.
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