The U-9 and the Realm of the Unexpected

By Ralph Kinney Bennett

Exactly 100 years ago the world was reminded yet again that war — declared or undeclared — is in many ways a chronicle of disastrous assumptions and unpleasant surprises.

As the summer of 1914 closed and World War I entered its third month, the British Royal Navy held a virtually unchallenged command of the seas, daring the German High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm to come out from the safety of its ports. Part of this effort was a patrol of obsolescent Cressy-class armored cruisers in that area of the North Sea just north of the English Channel known as the Broad Fourteens, where the sea bottom is consistently 14 fathoms (about 85 feet).  Many senior officers were opposed to using these older, slower ships to patrol the “narrow seas” between England and Europe, fearing that they could be suddenly attacked by fast new German warships. The patrol quickly earned the sardonic name “The Live Bait Squadron.”



On September 18, 1914, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, wrote a memo suggesting that the older cruisers “ought not to continue on this beat. The risk to such ships is not justified by any services they can render.” But the Admiralty chose to continue the patrols until more modern cruisers, still under construction, could take over.
Two days after Churchill wrote his memo, four of the “Live Bait” cruisers set out from Harwich for the Broad Fourteens. One of them had to turn back for more coal and repairs to its wireless antenna. The other three, HMS Cressy, HMS Aboukir, and HMS Hogue, proceeded in a gale so foul that their escort screen of destroyers had to return to port. The three cruisers headed north through the storm alone.
On the same day the cruisers had departed, September 20, a German submarine, the U-9, had begun a patrol south along the Belgian coast looking for British transports that might be landing troops or supplies in support of the then-raging Battle of the Marne. Because of difficulties with her gyro-compass, the German sub journeyed further south than intended and found itself just off the Dutch coast in the storm. It submerged and spent the night of September 21-22 resting 50 feet beneath the roiling waves.
On the morning of the 22nd, the U-9 surfaced and began cruising the Broad Fourteens, charging its batteries. The sea was calm. The morning sun promised a clear day. The kerosene-fueled Korting engines hummed, sending thick smoke out the top of the “demountable” stack protruding from the deck behind the conning tower.
Suddenly, a lookout spotted masts on the horizon to the southwest.
The crew quickly descended to battle stations, the smokestack was stowed, and the sub slipped beneath the water. At periscope depth, Captain Otto Weddigen settled his face into the eyepiece and took a look. He saw one… two… three British warships steaming toward him in perfect formation abreast. They were big. Not as big as battleships, but big. Armored cruisers. The 32-year-old Weddigen swept his periscope right and left, looking for the usual screen of destroyers that should have been darting here and there around the bigger ships. There were none. He was stunned to see such big undefended targets.

It was clear that the navy brass were astonished and even affronted that three ships had been lost in the space of an hour to a weapons system that some still dismissed as a novelty.

A few weeks earlier, on the afternoon of September 5, another aging British ship, the “scout cruiser” H.M.S. Pathfinder, had been sunk by the German submarine U-21 just off the coast of Scotland below the Firth of Forth. A single torpedo had struck near the ammunition magazine. The ship sank within minutes, killing 259 crew. It was the first warship to be sunk by a self-propelled torpedo fired from a submarine.
A brief tremor of caution ran through the Royal Navy. Warships were ordered to steam briskly and zig-zag, changing course frequently to make targeting by submarines difficult. But submarines were still subjects of much speculation and not a little scorn regarding their ultimate effectiveness. Many in the navy did not take them seriously. Thus the three warships in Weddigen’s periscope were moving north-northeast in a straight course at a leisurely speed of about 10 knots (11.5 miles per hour). It was assumed that there were no submarines in the area, although lookouts scanned for periscopes and a single defensive gun was manned on both sides of each ship.
The cruisers were moving at barely more than the U-9’s top submerged speed of about 9 miles per hour. They formed a rough triangle, Aboukir leading, Hogue behind on its right, and Cressy behind on its left. Little more than a mile separated each ship from the other. “I could see their gray-black sides riding high in the water,” Captain Weddigen would recall. He had six torpedoes aboard — four in the bow and two in the stern. Earlier that summer, just before he had taken command, the U-9 had proudly made history by becoming the first submarine to successfully perform what was then a dicey feat — reloading its torpedo tubes while submerged.
At approximately 6:20 a.m., he launched one torpedo at the port side of Aboukir from a range of about 550 yards. Torpedoes at that time were notoriously inaccurate and unpredictable, but this one ran true, exploding near the bridge, stopping the engines, and causing massive flooding. Aboukir began to list immediately.

A still-young Winston Churchill, wrote a memo suggesting that the older cruisers ‘ought not to continue on this beat.’

Weddigen’s attack was a total surprise. Aboukir’s captain believed his ship had hit a mine. He signaled for his sister ships to come to his aid. Too late — perhaps someone had spotted the torpedo’s characteristic wake — he realized his fatal mistake. But now, instead of fleeing danger, the two cruisers had closed on Aboukir, slowing to a stop and lowering boats to aid the hundreds of sailors now abandoning ship.
Weddigen, who had dived deep after his first shot, came to periscope depth again and found the Hogue, which had turned left toward her sinking sister. Weddigen had come around Aboukir under water and was now closing on the Hogue. He launched two torpedoes from a range of about 330 yards. Both detonated amidships on Hogue’s port side. Suddenly freed of the weight of two torpedoes, U-9 lost “trim” and burst to the surface as its crew frantically tried to restore ballast. Bravely staying at their stations, gunners on the Hogue fired wildly at the suddenly emerging U-9 but did not hit her. The cruiser had been mortally wounded and sank within 10 minutes.
Now, Captain Weddigen coolly made his way at periscope depth (and at agonizingly slow battery speed) toward Cressy, which was lowering lifeboats when its lookouts spotted the U-9’s periscope. The captain desperately ordered full speed ahead, hoping perhaps to ram the sub. But the old coal-fired triple-expansion steam engines responded slowly, and as the ship tried to get underway Weddigen fired two torpedoes from more than 500 yards. One missed but the other struck Cressy’s starboard side, leaving her limping and wounded. Weddigen turned about and used one of his stern tubes to launch his last torpedo. This coup de grace hit home and Cressy was gone in 15 minutes. “She sank,” Weddigen recalled, “with a loud sound, as if from a creature in pain.”
The whole action had taken barely over an hour.

Submarines were still subjects of much speculation and not a little scorn regarding their ultimate effectiveness, and in some naval quarters they were not yet being taken seriously.

The U-9, batteries low, armament depleted, crept off to the north. Several merchant ships and fishing trawlers, some of which had witnessed the horrific sinkings, moved in cautiously to pick up survivors; 837 men were rescued but 1,459 were lost. And naval warfare would never be the same again.
The British Admiralty put on as brave a face as possible. With a degree of candor one doubts would be duplicated today, its press dispatch noted that while the sinking of HMS Aboukir “was of course an ordinary hazard of patrolling duty,” the actions of its sister cruisers had compounded the disaster. They had “proceeded to the assistance of their consort and remained with engines stopped endeavoring to save life, thus presenting an easy and certain target to further submarine attacks. The natural promptings of humanity have in this case led to heavy losses which would have been avoided by a strict adherence to military considerations.”
Further, the dispatch implied that an attack of such devastating effect must have been made by a group of submarines, not a single boat. It was clear that the navy brass were astonished and even affronted that three ships had been lost in the space of an hour to a weapons system that some still dismissed as a novelty, a naval sideshow, and certainly not a “gentleman’s” way of waging war at sea. The Admiralty’s words dripped with this sentiment.
“The loss of nearly 60 officers and 1400 men would not have been grudged if it had been brought about by gunfire in an open action, but it is peculiarly distressing under the conditions which prevailed.” While praising the courage and discipline of crews, the Admiralty lamented “the absence of any of the ardor and excitement of an engagement.”
But, indeed there had been “an engagement” — one that would galvanize naval establishments all over the world. If it had not been “open” in the manner of “traditional” naval engagements, it had certainly opened the eyes of those who had been dismissive of the submarine. As Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Hezlet, former head of the Royal Navy Submarine Service, would later write in his book The Submarine and Sea Power, the attack of the U-9 “was a startling illustration of the power of the submarine and emphasized in no uncertain terms the precautions that must be taken against it.”

Earlier that summer, the U-9 had proudly made history by becoming the first submarine to successfully perform what was then a dicey feat — reloading its torpedo tubes while submerged.

Devices and methods to improve submarines and to detect and defend against them would become a significant part of naval budgets, beginning a cycle of advances in submarine and antisubmarine warfare that continues to this day.
Weddigen’s attack would fix itself in the pantheon of submarine legend. In both the First and Second World Wars, submarines would sink millions of tons of merchant shipping and many warships, but never again would there be a single submarine attack on large warships with such resounding success at so little cost.
As for Captain Weddigen, he would suffer a truly ironic fate. Hailed as a hero, he was given command of a new larger submarine, the U-29. On March 18, 1915, he encountered what had once been the battleship of battleships, HMS Dreadnought, the world’s first steam turbine–powered warship. Once the fastest and most famous battleship in the world, the by-then-obsolescent Dreadnought rammed the U-29, slicing it in two and killing Weddigen and his entire crew. (The legendary Dreadnought never engaged in combat against another battleship, but it remains the only battleship to ever sink a submarine.)
On September 22, 1914, unheeded warnings, disastrous assumptions, and the blind chance of time and place enabled Otto Weddigen and the crew of U-9 to make naval history by simply seizing an opportunity and doing their duty. In one devastating hour they affirmed once again that great and overarching reality of warfare — in the words of the great military thinker B. H. Liddell Hart — “War is the realm of the unexpected.”

Ralph Kinney Bennett is a contributor to The American.