HMS Aboukir, Hogue & Cressy

1914

U-9, Weddigen, seventy-five minutes Location: North Sea, off the Dutch coast · Coordinates: 52.18°N 3.75°E · Casualties: ~1,459 · Survivors: ~837 · Depth: 30 m · Cause: submarine torpedo — Torpedoed in succession by the German submarine U-9 (Otto Weddigen, commanding) on the morning of 22 September 1914. Weddigen hit HMS Aboukir first; HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy stopped to rescue survivors and were torpedoed as well. All three sank inside 75 minutes. · Fate: continental shelf · protected · Type: armoured cruisers · Cressy class · Tonnage: 12,000 tons each · Crew: 760 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1900 Three Cressy-class armoured cruisers of the Royal Navy, patrolling the southern North Sea off the Dutch coast on the morning of 22 September 1914. Torpedoed inside 75 minutes by U-9 under Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen, who hit the Aboukir, waited for Hogue and Cressy to stop for rescue, and torpedoed them too. 1,459 dead across three hulls. The catastrophe taught the Admiralty that stopping to rescue survivors in a submarine war would kill you. The Vessel The Live Bait Squadron was the popular Royal Navy designation for the three Cressy-class armoured cruisers HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue, and HMS Cressy, assigned in the autumn of 1914 to patrol the southern end of the North Sea between the Dutch coast and the English Channel. They were the fifth, seventh, and eighth ships of the Cressy-class, all three commissioned in 1902 and approaching obsolescence by 1914. They displaced 12,000 tons each, were 136 metres long, and carried two 9.2-inch guns, twelve 6-inch guns, and a complement of 760 men each. Their operational assignment to the southern North Sea in September 1914 was deeply controversial within the Royal Navy. The three ships were manned predominantly by Royal Naval Reserve officers and recently-recalled Royal Naval Reserve ratings rather than by regular Royal Navy personnel; their operating area was known to be within the reach of German submarines deploying from Heligoland; and the Royal Navy's Director of Operations at the Admiralty, Commodore Sir Roger Keyes, had filed repeated written protests against the assignment. Keyes's specific warning, recorded in a memorandum of 21 August 1914, was that the three cruisers would "offer themselves as bait" to German submarines. His memorandum had given the squadron its informal name, which was used among officers before the disaster and was never used by the ships' own crews. The First Sea Lord Prince Louis of Battenberg had reviewed Keyes's concern on 29 August 1914 and had direct The Disaster Captain Drummond of Aboukir, believing his ship had struck a mine, signalled HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy to close and pick up survivors. The two surviving British cruisers accelerated to the scene and stopped at 06:45 to lower boats. U-9 had reloaded her single torpedo tube during the interval. At 06:55 Weddigen fired his second torpedo at HMS Hogue from 300 metres range; it struck Hogue amidships and detonated her forward magazine. Hogue broke in half; she sank in 10 minutes. Captain Nicholson of HMS Cressy, by now aware that he was facing a submarine and not a minefield, ordered full speed ahead and commenced evasive zigzag. U-9 had reloaded her torpedo again; Weddigen fired his third torpedo at HMS Cressy at 07:15. The torpedo missed. Cressy circled to her starboard. Weddigen fired his fourth torpedo at 07:20. This torpedo struck Cressy on her starboard side and opened her hull to the sea. Cressy capsized in 15 minutes. The three Royal Navy cruisers, representing 36,000 tons of warship and approximately 2,280 men, had been sunk by a single German submarine with a single torpedo tube in approximately 75 minutes. Between 1,459 and 1,520 British sailors died. The surviving Dutch merchant ships Flora and Titan, and the British destroyers Lowestoft and Mysore arriving later, rescued 837 men from the debris field over the following four hours.