I have the following notes regarding this loss.

A passage report was duly made at 04:30 on the morning of 30 April, ninety-five miles West of Lindesnes in Norway. According to British W/T intercepts logged in ADM 137/3917, UB 119 was reported to be in the following positions:

30.4.18 01:00 57° 38 N 04° 05E (Spindler gives the time as 04:00)
1.5.18 57° 15 N 0° 08W
2.5.18 02:44 58° 47 N 0° 55W

Between 1700 and 2050 the U-boat was sighted by coast watchers on Fair Head. The Larne Diary relates that A/S trawlers were despatched to investigate.
3.5.18 10:42 59° 20 N 5° 20 W
In the early hours of 4.5.18 a suspected U-boat was reported on a bearing of 310 from Kilmuir.
4.5.18 02:30 58° 4 N 7° 38 W
4.5.18 11:02 57° 16 N 8° 20W

Further transmissions associated with this boat may have been made off the Flannan Isles on 8.5.18 (58° 21’ N 07° 18’W) and 57° 16’ N 08° 02’ W off South Uist, though it is perhaps revealing that entries in the ADM 137/3917 file stop on 5.5.18. UB 119 did not return to base. Her disappearance may be linked to an encounter with the 257 ton cargo ship Greenisland on 5 May.
The Larne Diary contains the Admiralty response to the alleged sinking dated 14 May 1918: ‘SS Greenisland has been classified as submarine possibly slightly damaged. In all other senses the submarine is not considered to have sustained damage’. Yet it is significant that Admiralty intelligence was in no doubt that a submarine had indeed been present.

At 12:10 Greenisland was on a Westward passage through Rathlin sound when a periscope was sighted twenty yards ahead. The position was logged as two miles W by N from Bengors Head. The wheel was spun and the ship turned in to ram. The periscope was quickly lowered but the master was certain Greenisland rode heavily over the U-boat. Afterwards a large quantity of oil was observed rising at the site of the collision.
The location was stated to be 55°.16’N, 06°.24’W. Although this evidence seems slight, circumstance supports Kolbe and his crew having been lost on or immediately after 5 May. Moreover UB 119 was very likely to have been in the location of the ramming incident. The boat usually transmitted passage reports just before noon. If Kolbe maintained his habitual transmission pattern, a further radio message should have been forthcoming just before mid-day on 5 May but as we know, all was silent. It therefore remains feasible that UB 119 was rammed by Greenisland, even if supporting evidence is hardly convincing.
However we must also factor into the equation an attack made on the Wheatear at 16:15, on that same day, some three miles from the location of the Greenisland ramming incident, as reported in the Larne Diary. The Buncrana based armed trawler came under sustained shelling from a U-boat and was forced to break off and run for Portrush. The U-boat pursued the trawer inshore and several shells are noted as having fallen at Port Ballintrae near Bushmills. UB 65 was the only other boat operating in this sector on this date and her KTB does not indicate that Kplt. Schelle made this attack. The implication being that UB 119 may have survived the Greenisland ramming, only to have been destroyed elsewhere by cause unknown.
We can state with more certainty that a series of minefields had been recently laid within the North Channel. USS Baltimore had laid a deep field between Tremone Bay (55° 17’ N 7° 3’ W) towards the Island of Oversay (55° 40’ N, 6° 30’W) thence extending across the North Channel . This field was laid between 13 April and 3 May 1918 and consisted of five lines of 180 mines laid at depths varying between sixty-five and one hundred and twenty-five feet below the low water line. U-boat command was unaware of this development and there must have been a chance that UB 119 triggered one of these mines. On the other hand there is no hard evidence she ever reached the North Channel and might have succumbed to an unknown cause anywhere on the norweg. Sad to relate, one of the youngest men ever to die in any submarine was lost in UB 119. Peter Friedrich Etteldorf was born on 29 June, g1900 in Euren near Trier. In October 1917 he joined the KDM with II. Werftsdivision, Wilhelmshaven. Afterwards young Etteldorf attended the U-Schule followed by a draft to UB 119. Within the KDM the youngest man on the boat was always known as ‘Moses’ a tradition which continued into the Second World War. Peter Friedrich died aged seventeen.