Eric,

No offense taken.

The thing to remember about WWI is that it is underresearched, especially in comparison to WWII. Basically, what's available are national lists of merchant ship losses ("British Vessels Lost at sea 1914-1918" is the easiest to get) plus "Lloyd's War Losses." On the German side, there's the offcial history series "Der Krieg zur See" including a five volume series by Admiral Arno Spindler on submarine operations against merchant shipping. Beyond that, you have a few books that repackage this basic information (Bendert's books on UB and UC U-boats, Tennent).

Sometimes more information is available on a loss (shipping company, route, cargo etc.). There also are cases of vessels where all Yves and I know at this point is a date, flag, tonnage, and the utterly precise location of, say, "Mediterranean", which makes things a bit difficult to sort out sometimes.

If you need more information besides what's in these sources, you have to consult primary sources, like the U-boat's war diaries (KTBs). Even there, descriptions of attacks are often brief -- it is not unusual to have a sinking described in three sentences.

Still got 200+ cases in the database w/o attribution, so there still a lot of work to do...

(Tennent's "British Merchant Ships Sunk by U-boats in teh 1914-1918 War" is essentially a combination of information from "Lloyd's War losses", BVLAS, Lloyd's registry information, plus attributions from Spindler. It covers British steamers over 500 grt sunk by U-boat or U-boat laid mines.)

Best wishes,

Michael