“Destruction of the German Raider Leopard by HMS Achilles and the HMS Dundee,” by maritime artist William Lionel Wyllie.
IWM collection Art.IWM ART 15814
The piece portrays the “Action of March 17, 1917,” a surface battle with the Warrior-class armored cruiser Achilles (14,500t, 505 ft oal, 23 knots, 6x 9.2 inch, 4×7.5 inch, 3 tt.)in the foreground firing on SMS Leopard (9,880t, 390 ft oal, 13 knots, 5x 155mm SK L40, 4x88mm SK L45, 2 tt.), shown smothered in flames in the background. Meanwhile, the armed boarding steamer Dundee (2,187t, 290 ft oal, 15 knots, 2x 4 inch, 1x 3 pdr) is shown as the grey smudge to Leopard’s left.
Leopard, formerly the Mackill Steamship Co’s SS Yarrowdale, had been captured by the German commerce raider SMS Möwe in the Atlantic just before Christmas 1916 then sent through the blockade safely back to Germany with 400 interned Allied mariners aboard.
Converted to become the final commerce raider that the Kaiserliche Marine sent out in the Great War, her only sortie began on 7 March and ended just nine days later in the above action.
It took less than an hour and even though Leopard fired at least three torpedos at Dundee (who in turn fired every shell she had in her magazine at the German) and several salvos at both Dundee and Achilles, the Brits suffered no damage and six MIA (a boarding party sent by Dundee that never returned) while Leopard went down with all 319 souls aboard.