UB – 45

A grave with a memorial plaque at Varna’s central cemetery reads, “Here rest 14 German sailors who died with the submarine UB 45 in a mine explosion in Varna Bay on November 6, 1916 in defence of the Bulgarian coast.”

SM During World War I, the German Imperial Navy (German: Kaiserliche Marine) developed and operated the Type UB II submarine or U-boat UB-45. UB-45 served in the Mediterranean and Black Seas before being wrecked by a mine in November 1916.

The UB-45 was ordered in July 1915 and put down in September at the AG Weser shipyard in Bremen. The UB-45 was approximately 37 metres (121 feet 5 inches) long and displaced between 270 and 305 tonnes (266 and 300 long tonnes), depending on whether it was surfaced or submerged. She was armed with a 5-centimeter (2.0-inch) deck gun and could carry four torpedoes for her two bow torpedo tubes. As one of six submarines chosen for Mediterranean duty, UB-45 was disassembled and brought to Pola, where she was assembled before being launched and commissioned in May 1916.

UB-45 sunk four ships totaling 15,361 gross register tonnes (GRT) in five missions during her six-month career. UB-45 was leaving the base at Varna, Bulgaria, in early November 1916, when it encountered a mine and sunk quickly. The attack killed fifteen of the twenty men on board; one of the five crewmen rescued from UB-45 subsequently died from his injuries. The wreck of the UB-45 was discovered and raised by the Bulgarian Navy in the 1930s with the intention of reconstructing the submarine. Engineers from AG Weser found that the submarine could be restored, however this was never done. In November 1938, the remains salvaged from the ship were buried in Varna following a funeral procession through town.

The burial was damaged during the communist era, but it was rebuilt in the 1990s.

• Wikipedia – UB -45