Churchill rejected Fisher’s vision. The use of submarines to attack unarmed merchant ships without warning, he wrote, would be “abhorrent to the immemorial law and practice of the sea.”
Even he acknowledged, however, that such tactics when deployed against naval targets constituted “fair war,” but early on neither he nor his German counterparts expected the submarine to play much of a role in deep-ocean battle. The strategic thinking of both sides centered on their main fleets, the British “Grand Fleet” and the German “High Seas Fleet,” and both anticipated an all-or-nothing, Trafalgar-esque naval duel using their big battleships. But neither side was willing to be the first to come out in direct challenge of the other. Britain had more firepower—twenty-seven Dreadnought-class battleships to Germany’s sixteen—but Churchill recognized that chance events could nullify that advantage “if some ghastly novelty or blunder supervened.” For added safety, the Admiralty based the fleet in Scapa Flow, a kind of island fortress formed by the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Churchill expected Germany to make the first move, early and in full strength, for the German fleet would never be stronger than at the war’s beginning.
German strategists, on the other hand, recognized Britain’s superiority and crafted a plan whereby German ships would make limited raids against the British fleet to gradually erode its power, a campaign that Germany’s Adm. Reinhard Scheer called “guerrilla warfare,” borrowing a Spanish term for small-scale warfare in use since the early nineteenth century. Once the British fleet was pared down, Scheer wrote, the German fleet would seek a “favorable” opportunity for the climactic battle.
“So we waited,” wrote Churchill; “and nothing happened. No great event immediately occurred. No battle was fought.”
At the start of the war, the submarine barely figured in the strategic planning of either side. “In those early days,” wrote Hereward Hook, a young British sailor, “I do not think that anyone realized that a submarine could do any damage.” He was soon to learn otherwise, in an incident that demonstrated in vivid fashion the true destructive power of submarines and revealed a grave flaw in the design of Britain’s big warships.
At dawn, on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 1914, three large British cruisers, HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, were patrolling a swath of the North Sea off Holland known as the “Broad Fourteens,” moving at eight knots, a leisurely and, as it happened, foolhardy pace. The ships were full of cadets. Hook, one of them, was fifteen years old and assigned to the Hogue. The ships were old and slow, and so clearly at risk that within Britain’s Grand Fleet they bore the nickname “the live-bait squadron.” Hook—who in later life would indeed be promoted to Captain Hook—was in his bunk, asleep, when at 6:20 A.M. he was awakened by “a violent shaking” of his hammock. A midshipman was trying to wake him and other cadets, to alert them to the fact that one of the big cruisers, the Aboukir, had been torpedoed and was sinking.
Hook sprinted to the deck, and watched the Aboukir begin to list. Within minutes the ship heeled and disappeared. It was, he wrote, “my first sight of men struggling for their lives.”
His ship and the other intact cruiser, the Cressy, maneuvered to rescue the sailors in the water, each coming to a dead stop a few hundred yards away to launch boats. Hook and his fellow crewmen were ordered to throw overboard anything that could float to help the men in the water. Moments later, two torpedoes struck his own ship, the Hogue, and in six or seven minutes “she was quite out of sight,” he wrote. He was pulled into one of the Hogue’s previously launched lifeboats. After picking up more survivors, the lifeboat began making its way toward the third cruiser, the Cressy. But another torpedo was now tearing through the water. The torpedo struck the Cressy on its starboard side. Like the two other cruisers, the Cressy immediately began to list. Unlike the others, however, the list halted, and the ship seemed as if it might stay afloat. But then a second torpedo struck and hit the magazine that stored ammunition for the ship’s heavy guns. The Cressy exploded and sank. Where just an hour earlier there had been three large cruisers, there were now only men, a few small boats, and wreckage. A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.
Weddigen and his U-boat were of course to blame, but the design of the ships—their longitudinal coal bunkers—contributed greatly to the speed with which they sank and thus the number of lives lost. Once ruptured, the bunkers caused one side of each ship’s hull to fill quickly, creating a catastrophic imbalance.
The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.