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Otto Hersing (30 November 1885 – 5 July 1960) was a German U-boat commander during World War I.

Military career
Hersing was born in Mülhausen and started his military career in the Kaiserliche Marine in 1903. By 1909 he had reached the rank of Oberleutnant zur See, and soon after the outbreak of World War I he was appointed Kapitänleutnant, in charge of the submarine U-21 which had been commissioned the year before. He would command the ship for four years, with considerable success.

In August 1914 Hersing took his command on two war patrols around the British Isles. The first, around the Dover area, found no British vessels. On the second patrol, Hersing's vessel was accompanied by U-19 and U-22, on a mission to test British defences in the northern North Sea. After observing a few British warships and unsuccessfully trying to enter the Firth of Forth in Scotland, Hersing sank the scout cruiser HMS Pathfinder with a single torpedo. The attack killed 261 sailors as the ship sank quickly after an ammunition magazine exploded. With this attack Hersing became the first submarine commander in history to sink a ship with a self-propelled torpedo.

In this part of the war Hersing's actions were governed by the cruiser rules which forbade submarines from sinking ships other than warships without warning. Hersing therefore ordered the crews of the French steamer SS Malachite and the British collier SS Primo, which he caught on 14 and 17 November respectively, to abandon ship before sinking them. These were the first ships to be sunk in the German submarine offensive against British and French merchant shipping.

In January 1915, Hersing took U-19 through the Dover Barrage which defended the English Channel, and entered the Irish Sea. He exchanged fire at a range of between 6,900 and 7,200 yards with a coastal artillery battery on Walney Island after firing a shell at the airfield there, but all shells fired by both sides missed. The following day, still in the Irish sea, Hersing stopped a total of three ships, SS Ben Cruachan, SS Linda Blanche and SS Kilcoan. All three were roughly eighteen miles north-west of the Liverpool Bar Lightship when they were stopped. The Ben Cruachan was sailing to Liverpool to offload the remainder of her cargo of coal after delivering most of it to the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, while the other two ships were headed from Lancashire to Belfast, the Linda Blanche also carrying coal. Hersing gave the crews time to launch their boats before sinking their ships with explosive charges; in one case the crew abandoning ship were given cigars and cigarettes by the Germans as they did so. In the case of the Kilcoan, Hersing even sought out another smaller steamer, the SS Gladys, to ask her to steam to the location of the sinking and pick up the crew from their boats - but instructed her to land them on the Isle of Man to delay news reaching the mainland.