Castles of Steel (26 page)

On September 17, Keyes’s warnings reached the navy’s highest level. Churchill and Sturdee were aboard a train traveling north to confer with Jellicoe on board the
Iron Duke
at Loch Ewe. Tyrwhitt and Keyes, although relatively junior in this company, had been included in the meeting because Churchill admired their initiative. Aboard the train, the First Lord encouraged both commodores to speak up. Keyes mentioned that the Grand Fleet referred to the elderly
Bacchante
s as “the ‘live bait’ squadron.” Throughout Winston Churchill’s life, there was no better way to attract his attention than to use graphic language. On this occasion, caught by the arresting phrase, he demanded to know what it meant. Keyes explained.

Aboard
Iron Duke,
Churchill brought up the matter of the
Bacchante
s and recommended that they be withdrawn. Jellicoe agreed. Sturdee objected, attempting to squash Keyes: “My dear fellow, you don’t know your history. We’ve always maintained a squadron on the Broad Fourteens.” Nevertheless, the following day Churchill sent a memo to Battenberg, who had not been present at Loch Ewe: “The
Bacchantes
ought not to continue on this beat. The risk to such ships is not justified by the services they render. The narrow seas, being the nearest point to the enemy, should be kept by a small number of good, modern ships.” Prince Louis agreed and told Sturdee to issue the necessary orders. Churchill, assuming that orders given would be obeyed, thereupon dismissed the subject from his mind. Sturdee, however, continued to focus on the danger of a German surface attack on the cross-Channel lifeline. He admitted that the
Bacchante
s were too slow for tactical work with destroyers capable of more than twice their speed and he agreed that the old armored cruisers should be relieved as soon as possible by the new light cruisers of the
Arethusa
class beginning to come from the builders’ yards. But of eight
Arethusa
s under construction, only one had actually been delivered to the navy. In the meantime, Sturdee argued, the
Bacchante
s were better than nothing; in heavy weather, when the destroyers had to be withdrawn, the old cruisers provided essential early warning and a first line of defense for the Channel. Battenberg allowed himself to be persuaded and on September 19 approved an order to the
Bacchante
s to remain on patrol in the Broad Fourteens. Battenberg did not tell Churchill. Later, Prince Louis admitted, “I should not have given in.”

On the night of September 17, the weather in the Broad Fourteens became so rough that the destroyers screening the old armored cruisers were sent back to Harwich. The 12,000-ton ships remained on patrol at 10 knots, their captains not thinking of zigzagging because they had been told that seas impossible for a destroyer would be equally impossible for submarines. At 6:00 a.m. on September 20, the patrol was reduced from four cruisers to three when
Euryalus
returned to Harwich to coal. Rear Admiral Christian, who normally would have remained with the squadron at sea, was prevented by the high waves from transferring by boat to
Aboukir
and so went into harbor with his flagship. Command of the squadron passed to the senior captain, John Drummond of
Aboukir.

For two days, September 20 and 21, the three remaining cruisers continued on their beat, pitching and rolling over the Broad Fourteens. By sunset on the twenty-first, Drummond signaled Christian in Harwich, “Still rather rough, but going down.” During the night, the wind dropped almost completely. To the west off Harwich, however, it continued blowing, and Tyrwhitt waited until 5:00 a.m. on the twenty-second to leave there with a light cruiser and eight destroyers bound for the Broad Fourteens. Their journey would take four hours.

At six o’clock that morning on the Broad Fourteens, with the eastern horizon fading from black to gray,
Aboukir, Hogue,
and
Cressy
were two miles apart, riding easily at 10 knots through a moderate sea. Because Admiral Christian had left no specific instructions about submarines and Drummond had issued none, the ships were not zigzagging, although all had posted lookouts for periscopes and one gun on each side of each ship was manned. At 6:30 a.m. this tranquil scene was shattered by an explosion on
Aboukir
’s starboard side.

To Admiral von Tirpitz, submarine attacks on warships at sea seemed an unpromising form of warfare, and to most German naval officers, these vessels appeared too small and fragile even for coastal work. It was, therefore, with a certain compassionate reluctance that the Naval Staff ordered the fleet’s handful of early U-boats to cast off their moorings and set out into the North Sea on August 6. Among these craft was
U-9,
one of the fourteen kerosene-burning submarines built between 1910 and 1911. One hundred and eighty-eight feet long, displacing 493 tons, this undersea boat had a crew of four officers and twenty-four men. Two torpedo tubes were mounted in the bow and two in the stern, and the submarine sailed with all tubes loaded. Two reserve torpedoes were carried on rails in a forward compartment from where they could be slid into the bow tubes once their predecessors had been fired. On the surface, burning kerosene, the boat could reach 14 knots; beneath the surface, switching to electric batteries, she could manage 8. Cramped space and foul air had given the submarine service a reputation for unhealthfulness as well as danger, and only recently had crews been permitted to sleep on board in port. In December 1912, as an experiment, six U-boats with crews aboard had remained on the surface anchored to buoys for six days in Heligoland Bight; this was considered an astonishing endurance achievement. Diving was always considered risky, and in rough weather, tactical procedure called for attacks to be made with the conning tower above the surface. Nevertheless, because kerosene motors smoked heavily, a U-boat on the surface sailed with a pillar of black smoke towering overhead. This made detection easy for enemy destroyers: of the fourteen kerosene burners with which Germany began the war, twelve were lost.

The captain of
U-9
was Otto Weddigen, a slight, blond, thirty-two-year-old Saxon, known for his courteous manner but also as a wrestler, a runner, and a swimmer. Weddigen disdained the common perception that submarines were scarcely more than iron coffins. In January 1911, he survived an episode during a routine training exercise in which
U-3
sank to the bottom of Kiel harbor because someone accidentally had left open one of the ventilators. Under thirty feet of water, the boat was filling with water and chlorine gas created by the chemical reaction of salt water with the acid in the battery cells of the electric motors. Nevertheless, the crew managed to close the open ventilator and then use high-pressure air to expel water from the U-boat’s forward buoyancy tanks, raising the bow to the surface. One after another, twenty-eight men escaped through a twenty-eight-foot-long, 17.7-inch wide torpedo tube. Weddigen also was famous for leaping into the North Sea and rescuing a seaman who slipped off the narrow deck of a surfaced U-boat. When the waves hurled him against the steel hull of the boat, Weddigen’s arm was broken. Two weeks later, the base commandant found Weddigen conducting a sailors’ gymnastics class and asked whether, with his bad arm, the exercise was not difficult. “Oh, no,” Weddingen replied. “I have only broken one arm.”

By 1914, Weddigen commanded his own submarine,
U-9.
He chose his crew carefully and trained it first on land, in dummy submarines. When his men were ready, Weddigen began testing
U-9
’s limits. Fifty feet down was the normal operating depth, but Weddigen dove deeper. He remained at sea in heavy weather, running his boat through high seas, both awash and submerged. He regularly practiced reloading torpedo tubes at sea, trundling forward the two reserve torpedoes hanging from overhead rails and sliding them into the empty bow tubes. Before long, Weddigen’s men considered themselves one of the elite units of the German navy. When they went to sea, they—and all submariners—were granted special privileges: gramophone players and records, sausages, smoked eels, chocolate, tobacco, coffee, jam, marmalade, and sugar. There was one exception: no beer was allowed on submarines. Weddigen was also practical about life in wartime; on August 14, he was married at the military chapel in Wilhemshaven.

Weddigen’s first wartime assignment was to patrol the stretch of the southern North Sea west of the low, sandy Frisian Islands between Borkum and Heligoland.
U-9
sailed from Wilhelmshaven on August 6, but engine trouble forced her to return and kept the submarine in the dockyard for the next six weeks. On September 16, the Naval Staff ordered the Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet to send a U-boat to attack British transports landing troops at Ostend.
U-9
was ready, but a three-day gale postponed the mission; the storm was so severe that on the island of Borkum, a German aircraft shed with two seaplanes inside was washed into the sea. Finally, at 5:00 on the morning of September 20, Weddigen was able to leave harbor, but the weather failed to improve. A rising northwest wind and heavy swells made the submarine’s gyrocompass useless and Weddigen fell back on one of the mariner’s age-old methods: navigating by soundings. Battered by ten-foot waves, he rode out the storm on the surface with his engines turning only enough to keep the bow into the sea. Uncertain of his position, he gave up the attempt to reach the Channel off Ostend and, hoping to get a bearing from a point on land, turned south toward the coast of Holland, a place notorious for shoals. On September 21, he located himself not far from the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen; he was fifty miles off course. Stopping his electric motors to conserve their batteries, and hoping to rest his weary crew, he took the submarine down to fifty feet where, still pitching and rolling,
U-9
spent the night.

At dawn on September 22,
U-9
started her electric motors and rose to the surface. Weddigen had traveled 200 miles on this patrol so far and was ready to turn back for home. Before leaving, he decided to take a last look at his surroundings. When her periscope broke the surface, Weddigen and his First Officer, Johann Spiess, got an agreeable surprise: “Light streamed from the eastern horizon and spread over a cloudless sky,” Spiess wrote after the war. “The wind was a whisper and the sea was calm save for a long, low swell. Visibility was excellent. The horizon was a clear, sharp line where sea met sky. . . . A few Dutch fishing boats lay shadowed against the sunrise as if in some vividly colored print.” There was nothing else. The submarine rose and lay on the surface, and Weddigen went down for breakfast. While the captain was below, Spiess in the conning tower spotted smoke and a mast on the horizon. He immediately turned off the kerosene motors to eliminate the column of smoke overhead and summoned the captain. Weddigen hurried up the ladder, took a look, and ordered the U-boat to dive.

At periscope depth, Weddigen, glued to his eyepiece, watched the mast grow into a ship, then two ships, then three. They were warships steaming parallel, 4,000 yards apart. He thought at first that they must be a screen for a fleet, but, seeing no larger ships behind, he made preparations to attack. Steering in their direction, alternately raising and lowering his periscope, he reported, “three cruisers, each with four funnels.” “I could see their gray-black sides riding high out of the water.” Weddigen steered for the middle ship of the three. Approaching on his target’s port bow, he moved in close “to make my aim sure.” At 6:20 a.m., he fired a torpedo from bow tube number 2 and ordered a dive to fifty feet. As the submarine slid down, the crew listened. At a range of 550 yards, the time required for the torpedo to travel to the target and for the sound of an explosion to travel back would be thirty-one seconds. Thirty-one seconds later, the submariners heard “a dull thud, followed by a shrill-toned crash.” Cheers broke out on
U-9,
and Weddigen and Spiess forgot formality and slapped each other on the back.

The torpedo hit
Aboukir
amidships on the starboard side below the waterline. Water flooded into the engine and boiler rooms, bringing the cruiser to a stop and causing a list to port. On the bridge, Captain Drummond, seeing no sign of a submarine, assumed that his ship had hit a mine. He hoisted the mine warning signal and ordered the other two cruisers to come closer so that he could transfer his wounded men. As
Aboukir
’s list increased to twenty degrees, he tried to right her by flooding compartments on the opposite side. The list increased and it became obvious that the ship would sink, but when “Abandon ship” was sounded, only a single boat was available. The others had been smashed in the explosion or could not be swung out and lowered for lack of steam to power the winches. Twenty-five minutes after she was hit,
Aboukir
capsized. She floated, her red-painted bottom up, for five minutes, tempting a few seamen to scramble up her slimy bottom and cling to her keel. When she sank, the clingers went with her.

As
Hogue
and
Cressy
approached to help, Captain Wilmot Nicholson of
Hogue
realized that he was dealing with a submarine and signaled
Cressy
to look out for a periscope. Even so, Nicholson steamed slowly among the men in the water while his crew threw overboard mess tables, chairs, anything that would float, and then stopped and lowered all his boats. His men—those who had a moment to look—were transfixed by a sight none of them had ever seen: a big ship rolling over in her death agony. One young officer remembered seeing “the sun shining on pink, naked men walking down her sides, inch by inch, as she heeled over, some standing, others sitting down and sliding into the water, which was soon dotted with heads.” At 6:55 a.m., as
Aboukir
was giving her final lurch,
Hogue,
nearby, was struck by two torpedoes, five seconds apart. There was “a terrific crash . . .” recalled an officer, “the ship lifted up, quivering all over . . . a second later, another, duller crash and a great cloud of smoke followed by a torrent of water.”