SM UB - 44 SM " UB - 44 " was a Type UB II submarine or U - boat for the German Imperial Navy ( ) during World War I . " UB - 44 " operated in the Mediterranean and disappeared in August 1916 . " UB - 44 " was ordered in July 1915 and was laid down at the AG Weser shipyard in Bremen in September . " UB - 44 " was a little more than in length and displaced between , depending on whether surfaced or submerged . She was equipped to carry a complement of four torpedoes for her two bow torpedo tube s and had an deck gun . As part of a group of six submarines selected for Mediterranean service , " UB - 44 " was broken into railcar sized components and shipped to Pola where she was assembled and launched in April 1916 and commissioned in May . In two patrols in her three - month career , " UB - 44 " sank one ship of . In early August 1916 , " UB - 44 " departed from Cattaro for Hersingstand and never arrived . Her fate is officially unknown , but she may have been sunk by a torpedo boat near the island of Paxoi on 8 August . Design and construction . The German UB II design improved upon the design of the UB I boats , which had been ordered in September 1914 . In service , the UB I boats were found to be too small and too slow . A major problem was that , because they had a single propeller shaft / engine combo , if either component failed , the U - boat became almost totally disabled . To rectify this flaw , the UB II boats featured twin propeller shafts and twin engines ( one shaft for each engine ) , which also increased the U - boat ' s top speed . The new design also included more powerful batteries , larger torpedo tubes , and a deck gun . As a UB II boat , " U - 47 " could also carry twice the torpedo load of her UB I counterparts , and nearly ten times as much fuel . To contain all of these changes the hull was larger , and the surface and submerged displacement was more than double that of the UB I boats . The Imperial German Navy ordered " UB - 44 " from AG Weser on 31 July 1915 as one of a series of six UB II boats ( numbered from to ) . " UB - 44 " was long and abeam . She had a single hull with saddle tank s and had a draft of when surfaced . She displaced while submerged but only on the surface . The submarine was equipped with twin diesel engines and twin electric motors — for surfaced and submerged running , respectively — that drove twin propeller shafts . " UB - 44 " had a surface speed of up to and could go as fast as while underwater . The U - boat could carry up to of diesel fuel , giving her a range of at . Her electric motors and batteries provided a range of at while submerged . " UB - 44 " was equipped with two bow torpedo tube s and could carry four torpedo es . The U - boat was also armed with a 5 cm KL / 40 ( 2 . 0 in ) deck gun . " UB - 44 " was laid down by AG Weser at its Bremen shipyard on 3 September 1915 . As one of six U - boats selected for service in the Mediterranean while under construction , " UB - 44 " was broken into railcar - sized components and shipped overland to the Austro - Hungarian port of Pola . Shipyard workers from Weser assembled the boat and her five sisters at Pola , where she was launched on 20 April 1916 . Service career . SM " UB - 44 " was commissioned into the German Imperial Navy on 11 May 1916 under the command of " Oberleutnant zur See " Franz Wäger . " UB - 44 " , Wäger ' s fourth U - boat command , was assigned to the Navy ' s Pola Flotilla ( ) . Although the flotilla was based in Pola , the site of the main Austro - Hungarian Navy base , boats of the flotilla operated out of the Austro - Hungarian base at Cattaro which was located farther south and closer to the Mediterranean . German U - boats typically returned to Pola only for repairs . On 30 June , Wäger and " UB - 44 " achieved their only success when they sank the steamer " Moeris " southeast of Cape Sidero , Crete . The 3 , 409 - gross register ton British steamer was carrying a general cargo from Glasgow for Alexandria when she went down with the loss of three men . After Germany ' s conquest of Romania ( see " Romania during World War I " ) , the German Imperial Navy had sufficient fuel oil for submarines located in the Black Sea . " UB - 44 " and three of her sister ships in the Pola Flotilla were ordered to Constantinople and , en route , had to navigate through the Dardanelles , which had been heavily mine d by the Allies in the middle of 1916 . " UB - 44 " departed from Cattaro on 8 August for Hersingstand ( located on the Gallipoli peninsula ) to pick up a pilot for the trip through the Dardanelles , but never arrived . " UB - 44 " s fate is unknown . Two British post - war reports list " UB - 44 " as falling victim to the Otranto Barrage on 30 July but , as author Dwight Messimer points out , German records record " UB - 44 " s departure from Cattaro nine days after that . Messimer reports that it is possible that " UB - 44 " was sunk by the torpedo boat " HMS 368 " , which was reported by an Athenian newspaper as sinking a U - boat on 8 August off Paxoi with a lance bomb .