On July 14, 1916 a group of seven U-boats were en route to Wilhelmshaven for overhaul, among them was SMS U-51 under the command of Kapitänleutnant Walter Rumple. It was around noontime when they approached the mouth of the Ems river, some men were eating lunch others were on watch and all was in order when an explosion rocked the boat. The torpedo fired by Lieutenant Cromwell Varley and HMS H-5 hit the boat abaft of the conning tower and the boat began to sink rapidly. Startled and scared men scrambled fore and aft and sealed themselves into the only safe compartments on the doomed boat.

Some eighteen men, including the commander, were in the forward torpedo room, three other survivors were in the aft torpedo room, none of those who were between the two torpedo rooms survived. At first they seemed content to wait for rescue, but after some hours they realized that rescue was not coming. They did not know that a number of small craft were hovering above, but they had no means of saving the trapped men in the U-boat below.

The two groups of men knew of each other because they had tapped out morse code messages, but they could not help one another. In the forward torpedo room several men died because of the poisonous conditions of the air and Rumple finally decided to try to escape. After eleven hours they flooded the room and blew the hatch open and after two men had escaped the hatch closed, one of the survivors surmised that those inside were too weak to reopen it, nobody else from the forward torpedo room escaped.

In the after torpedo room the three survivors also realized that the only chance of survival was to escape, but one of them was terrified of flooding the compartment. The other two made several attempts to blow the hatch, but each time the third man became hysterical with fear. Finally they could wait no more and the hatch was opened, the panic stricken man was grabbed by the neck and hauled out. All three reached the surface almost sixteen hours after the boat had been sunk, but again the third man panicked and grabbed one of the others around the neck and nearly drowned him. In order to save his own life he pushed the man off of him, the frantic sailor drowned before he was rescued. The final chapter to this story was written in 1968 when the wreck was raised and scrapped.

It is interesting to note that the press had reported in July 1915 that U-51 was sunk by Russian warships in the Black Sea, they claimed that U-51 was the submarine which sank HMS Majestic and HMS Triumph the month before, however neither of the claims were correct, it was SMS U-21 which sank the British battleships and that boat was not sunk in the Black Sea, but survived the war. It sank in an "accident" while on passage to surrender in Feb. of 1919.