Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie
Nevertheless, Tirpitz and the Naval Staff had little faith in the capabilities of U-boats, and the initial role assigned to German undersea craft was defensive. This stemmed in part from the Naval Staff’s obsessive belief that in the event of war, the British navy would charge into the Bight in an attempt to engage and destroy the High Seas Fleet. In accordance with this fixation, all U-boats were based on Heligoland, where the submarines were integrated into the defensive arrangements of the Bight. By day, an outer observation line made up of a destroyer flotilla patrolled on a concentric arc thirty miles northwest of Heligoland. The U-boats, usually a half-flotilla of seven, formed a static line, riding on the surface at mooring buoys, twenty miles out. The plan called for the outer-line destroyers to retreat, drawing approaching enemy forces over this line of U-boats, which was to submerge and launch torpedo attacks. In conjunction with massed torpedo attacks by German destroyers, the Naval Staff hoped that the U-boats would be able to whittle away at the numerical superiority of the attacking British squadrons before the High Seas Fleet sortied from the Jade.
On the eve of war, when the main body of the High Seas Fleet returned from the Norwegian coast to assemble in the Elbe and the Jade, the U-boat flotillas awaited orders at Heligoland. The orders came quickly: Commander Hermann Bauer, chief of the U-boat flotillas, was ordered to reconnoiter the North Sea, discover the whereabouts of the Grand Fleet, and establish the location of any British patrol or blockade lines. On the second day of the war, August 6, at 4:20 a.m. in thick, rainy weather, ten older submarines from the 1st Flotilla—U-5, U-7, U-8, U-9, and U-13 through U-18, selected because their captains were the more experienced commanders—sailed from Heligoland. Reaching a position near the Dogger Bank, they spread out on a sixty-mile front—seven miles between boats—and began a surface sweep northwest up the North Sea. Their goal was the latitude of the Orkneys.
Throughout their 350-mile outward voyage, the nine U-boats (one had engine trouble and returned home) failed to sight even one enemy warship. Then on August 9, between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, U-15 had her fatal encounter with the light cruiser Birmingham. On August 12, seven of the original ten submarines returned to Heligoland. One had returned earlier, U-15 had been sunk, and nothing was ever heard from U-13; it was speculated that she had struck a German mine in one of the defensive minefields laid in the Bight. The results of this pioneering operation did little to vindicate the U-boat in the eyes of the German Naval Staff. Ten U-boats had failed to damage, let alone sink, an enemy warship, yet two of their number had been lost. “Our submarine fleet was as good as any in the world—but not very good,” said one German officer. Although the U-boats brought back the first evidence that there was no close blockade, they had been unable to establish the location of a blockade line. The Naval Staff did not know that U-15 had reached the Orkneys and concluded that the Grand Fleet was so far away from Germany that it was beyond the capacities of U-boats to find it.
A few U-boats continued to sail, and one of these sorties led to revenge for the sinking of the U-15. Certain that major British warships were based at the Firth of Forth, Bauer persuaded his superiors to let him post a regular patrol of two U-boats off the estuary. On August 30, 1914, U-20 and U-21, the only two submarines available for offensive operations, were ordered to attempt an attack inside the Firth. On September 5, U-20 came up the estuary almost as far as the Forth Bridge, but seeing nothing and unaware that Beatty’s battle cruisers were anchored a few hundred yards above the bridge, turned back. Meanwhile, out to sea, Captain Otto Hersing, in U-21, spotted the 3,000-ton light cruiser Pathfinder on patrol off Abs Head, ten miles southeast of May Island. Although his submarine was pitching and rolling in a stormy sea, Hersing maneuvered until he was within 1,500 yards—just short of a mile—and fired one torpedo. The torpedo hit and the explosion detonated the ship’s forward magazine. Four minutes later, Pathfinder plunged to the bottom, taking with her more than half her crew of 360. U-21 escaped, having achieved the war’s first sinking of a British warship by a German submarine.
Pathfinder was a ten-year-old ship of marginal value, but her loss had a strong impact on Jellicoe. The torpedoing confirmed the Commander-in-Chief in his belief that the southern and central North Sea were dangerous for large warships, and thereafter he held the Grand Fleet as far to the north as the Admiralty would permit. Some British officers found Jellicoe’s fears exaggerated, and in other parts of the navy operating orders and tactical routines relating to submarines were more relaxed. The result was a spectacular disaster. Only three and a half weeks after Beatty’s triumph in the Bight, the Royal Navy lost more men in ninety minutes than the Germans had lost in the all-day battle around Heligoland. The weapon responsible for this British defeat was one small German submarine.
At the beginning of the war, the Royal Navy possessed a multitude of elderly surface warships that Fisher had wanted to scrap, but which remained afloat, requiring crews whose numbers were out of all proportion to the vessels’ fighting value. Among these were the six 12,000-ton armored cruisers of the Bacchante class, laid down in 1898 and 1899, and now thoroughly worn out. Their engines, designed to make 21 knots, could scarcely produce 15. Nevertheless, rather than scrapping them outright, the Admiralty had placed the Bacchantes in Reserve Fleet limbo; no money was to be spent repairing them, but they were to be kept in the inventory until they were utterly useless. In the summer of 1914, they were tied up, rusting peacefully, at Medway on the Thames estuary.
The outbreak of war brought these old ships back to life. Each cruiser carried two 9.2-inch guns and eight 6-inch guns, which might be used to punch holes in any German light cruisers or destroyers their shells managed to hit. For this reason, a coat of fresh, gray war paint was applied, ammunition and supplies were hoisted in, and more than 700 officers and men marched aboard each ship. The seamen came from the Royal Navy Reserves and the Fleet Reserves, a pool of navy pensioners, many of them middle-aged family men. Like many reserve ships in the Royal Navy, the old Bacchantes were local ships; most men in the crews came from nearby towns and villages, which took pride in their men now going to sea. To compensate for the inexperience of the crews, the old armored cruisers were assigned regular navy captains and officers. In addition, each ship was alloted nine young cadets from the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, most of them boys under fifteen.
Because the cruisers were old and slow and their crews were new, there was never a thought that they should operate with the Grand Fleet. Instead, they were assigned to patrol the “Broad Fourteens,” a patch of the southern North Sea off the Dutch coast named for its latitude. Five of the ships, Bacchante, Aboukir, Hogue, Cressy, and Euryalus, were based at Harwich, where their mission was to support Tyrwhitt’s destroyers and Keyes’s submarines in blocking any German surface force attempting to attack the transports carrying the BEF to the continent. Frequent bad weather had altered this arrangment, however, and instead of acting in support of the smaller ships, the old cruisers, better able to cope with the rough seas, became the front line. Back and forth, day after day, the cruisers patrolled their beat, remaining at sea without rest, taking turns going in to coal. As the autumn advanced and the seas rose higher, the accompanying destroyers frequently returned to port. Meanwhile, the cruisers had fallen into bad habits. It was intended that they maintain 15 knots, with occasional zigzagging. Fifteen knots proved impossible, as the ships’ aging engines suffered repeated breakdowns; Rear Admiral Arthur Christian considered himself fortunate if he had three of his five cruisers available at any time. At over 13 knots, the Bacchantes gobbled up coal; accordingly, they usually plodded at 12 knots, which often slipped to 9. None of the British cruisers zigzagged, because none had ever sighted a periscope.
The danger attached to this disposition had been noticed elsewhere. From Harwich, Tyrwhitt and Keyes insisted that the old ships were museum pieces that never should have been sent to sea. On August 21, Keyes wrote to Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Leveson, director of the Admi
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 Bacchantes 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 Bacchantes 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 Bacchantes 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 Arethusas under construction, only one had actually been delivered to the navy. In the meantime, Sturdee argued, the Bacchantes 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 Bacchantes 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, Weddig
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.