on 5 August 1781. Dogger Bank incident, during the Russo-Japanese War, Russian naval ships opened fire on British fishing boats in the area of Dogger Bank on 21 October 1904, mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats. Battle of Dogger Bank (1915) and Battle of Dogger Bank (1916), during the First World War, saw battles between the Royal Navy and the German High Seas Fleet. Several shipwrecks lie on the bank. In 1966, the German submarine U-Hai, a German Type XXIII submarine, sank during a gale. 19 of 20 men died, one of the worst peacetime naval disasters in German history. Ecology The bank is an important fishing area, with cod and herring being caught in large numbers. Dogger Bank has been identified as an oceanic environment that exhibits high primary productivity throughout the year in the form of phytoplankton. As such, it was proposed to designate the area a Marine Nature Reserve. Under European Union legislation, the protected area has been divided between several countries, including the UK. Trawling and protected areas In September 2020, Greenpeace dropped several granite boulders from their ship Esperanza on the Dogger Bank area. Concerns had been raised when a supertrawler had been seen off the Yorkshire coast. The action undertaken by Greenpeace had support from some of those in the fishing trade. The large granite rocks are harmless to marine life and surface fishing, but they get entangled in the weighted nets of bottom trawlers, obstructing the practice. A Greenpeace spokesperson said "how can you continue to allow bottom trawlers to plough the seabed in a protected area? .... [it] is the equivalent to allowing bulldozers to plough through a protected forest." Wind farm and wind power hub The Dogger Bank was selected for offshore wind farms because it is far away from shore, avoiding complaints about the visual impact of wind turbines, yet the water is shallow enough for traditional fixed foundation wind turbine designs. Fixed-foundation wind turbines are economically limited to maximum water depths of ; at greater water depths new floating wind turbine designs are required, which currently cost significantly more to build. In January 2010, a licence to develop a wind farm on Dogger Bank was granted to Forewind Ltd, a consortium of developers. Originally projected to develop up to 9 gigawatts of power as part of a planned nine zone project of 32 gigawatts, the plan was later scaled