When a US submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4, it marked the first known instance of such an attack on an enemy combatant since World War II. For many in India, the incident evokes memories of an earlier naval attack on the subcontinent. This was the bombardment of Madras (now Chennai) at the outset of World War I in 1914, when a German warship shelled the city’s harbour installations.

In August 1914, Great Britain, with 29 capital ships ready and 13 under construction, and Germany, with 18 and nine respectively, were the two great rival sea powers. The first significant encounter between the two navies was the Battle of Helgoland Bight, on August 28, 1914. A British force under Admiral Sir David Beatty, having entered German home waters, sank and damaged several light cruisers and killed or captured 1,000 men, at a cost of one British ship damaged and 35 deaths.

For the following months, the Germans in European or British waters confined themselves to submarine warfare—”not without some notable successes,” notes academic Tara L Mann in World War I: A Political and Diplomatic History of the Modern World (2017).  On December 15, 1914, for instance, battle cruisers of the German High Seas Fleet set off on a sortie across the North Sea, under the command of Admiral Franz von Hipper: they bombarded several British towns and then made their way home safely.

Mann writes, “Abroad on the high seas, the Germans’ most powerful surface force was the East Asiatic squadron of fast cruisers, including the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, and the Nurnberg, under Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee.”

For four months, this fleet ranged almost unhindered over the Pacific Ocean, while the SMS Emden, having joined the squadron in August 1914, was detached for service in the Indian Ocean. “The Germans could thus threaten not only merchant shipping on the British trade routes but also troopships on their way to Europe or the Middle East from India, New Zealand, or Australia.”

SMS Emden sank merchant ships in the Bay of Bengal and bombarded Madras on September 22, 1914, while also haunting the approaches to Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

Captain Karl von Müller was in charge of SMS Emden when it approached Madras on the night of September 1914. He would later write, “I had this shelling in view simply as a demonstration to arouse interest among the Indian population, to disturb English commerce, to diminish English prestige.”

After entering the Madras harbour area around 9.30 pm, Müller ordered an attack on several large oil tanks belonging to the Burmah Oil Company that the British kept near the port. After firing at least 125 shells in 10 minutes, Emden hit five of the tanks and destroyed 350,000 gallons of fuel, leaving Madras in panic. The bombardment was a severe blow to British morale and led many in Madras to flee.

Retreating, SMS Emden then sailed southwards down the east coast to Ceylon. It, however, was lost to the combination of naval fire from the Australian warship Sydney and a reef in the Cocos Islands on November 9, 1914. “This,” notes historian Jeremy Black in Mapping Naval Warfare: A Visual History of Conflict at Sea (2018), “was an important triumph for the Royal Australian Navy, which had been established in 1911.”