Action of 16 March 1917 1917
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Date | 16 March 1917 | Wikidata |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1917 | Wikidata P585 (point in time) |
| Era | World War I era (1914–1918) | derived from year |
| Nearest landmass | At sea (nearest continent: Europe) | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Europe | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | World War I | Wikidata P361 |
| Participants | German Empire, United Kingdom | Wikidata P710 |
| Coordinates | 64.9000, 0.3667 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The Action of 16 March 1917 was a naval engagement in which the British armed boarding steamer SS Dundee and HMS Achilles, a Warrior-class armoured cruiser, fought the German auxiliary cruiser SMS Leopard, which sank with the loss of all 319 hands and six men of a British boarding party.
Leopard was the former British steamer Yarrowdale which had been captured by the German commerce raider Möwe in 1916 and brought back to Germany. The German Imperial Admiralty converted Yarrowdale into a commerce raider, arming it with guns taken from decommissioned ships and fitted two torpedo tubes. The ship was put into service as SMS Leopard and the new captain, Korvettenkapitän Hans von Laffert, sailed in early March 1917 to relieve Möwe.
The British Northern Patrol examined neutral ships entering and leaving the North Sea for contraband cargoes and kept watch for German commerce raiders trying to slip around the north of Scotland into the Atlantic. The German Admiralty warned Laffert that the British had changed their wireless cipher, which stopped them reading of British wireless transmissions to and from the Northern Patrol.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Action of 16 March 1917 (revision 1370103897), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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Other battles of the World War I
- Battle of Verdun 1916
- Bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft 1916
- Gas attacks at Hulluch 1916
- Night action at the Battle of Jutland 1916
- Trebizond Campaign 1916
- Action of 10 March 1917 1917
- Action of 11–12 December 1917 1917
- Action of 17 November 1917 1917
- Action of 4 May 1917 1917
- Action off Lerwick 1917
All 138 battles of the World War I →
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