Naval battle on September 22, 1914
Aboukir , Houge and Cressy sinking
| date | September 22, 1914 |
|---|---|
| place | Southern North Sea, on Breeveertien (width Fourteen), 52 ° 18 ' N , 3 ° 41' O |
| output | German victory
three armored cruisers sunk |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
|
|
|
| Troop strength | |
| 1 submarine | 3 armored cruisers |
| losses | |
|
no |
3 ships sunk |
.svg){kind=small}
Helgoland (1914) - September 22, 1914 - Texel - Yarmouth - Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby - Cuxhaven - Doggerbank (1915) - Noordhinder Bank - Doggerbank (1916) - February 29, 1916 - Yarmouth and Lowestoft - Skagerrak - August 19, 1916 - Canal (1916) - Canal (1917) - Shetland Islands - Heligoland (1917) - Bergen - Zeebrugge and Ostend - Tønder
The naval battle of September 22, 1914 was a German submarine attack on three obsolete British armored cruisers in the early stages of the First World War . The German lieutenant captain Otto Weddigen managed to destroy the British squadron, which was mainly manned by reservists, within 90 minutes during a patrol trip with his boat U 9 . The deaths of 1,459 seafarers caused a public outcry in Britain and badly damaged the reputation of the Royal Navy . The effectiveness of the submarine weapon was reassessed by all navies in the world after this battle.
background
The British cruisers were part of the southern fleet under Rear Admiral Arthur Christian and formed the 7th Cruiser Squadron, which was commanded by Rear Admiral HH Campbell. It consisted of the Cressy- class ships Bacchante , Aboukir , Hogue and Cressy . Their task consisted primarily of patrol service and the support of destroyer and submarine units that guarded the English Channel against advances by the Imperial Navy. The armored cruisers of the Cressy class were built between 1898 and 1902, weighed around 12,000 tons, had a speed of 21 knots and carried 23.3 cm cannons as their main armament. They were out of date in 1914 due to the rapid development in warship construction. Modern and faster battlecruisers had clearly surpassed this type. As a result, the ships were only used for secondary tasks that made an encounter with modern ships of the Imperial Navy unlikely. The submarine threat was considered less severe. According to the Royal Navy war orders of July 28, 1914, in which the pre-war assessments were upheld, the ships were deployed in the southern North Sea, where destroyer attacks were considered most likely.
The Imperial Navy had a similarly vague assessment of the threat posed by submarine attacks. In the first six weeks of the war, the Germans lost two submarines without any countable successes. U 9 was put into service in 1910, was 57.38 m long and displaced 611 tons under water. The armament consisted of two bow and two stern torpedo tubes, for which a total of six torpedoes were carried. On the U 9, in July 1914, it was possible for the first time ever to reload a torpedo under water. The crew of the boat consisted of 29 seamen.
prehistory
The English Admiral Christian had ordered the 7th cruiser squadron to go to Dogger Bank on September 16 . Due to bad weather, the destroyer escort under Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt had to withdraw. When the weather worsened, the armored cruisers were finally ordered to the Breeveertien sea area to await better weather. On September 20, Christian's flagship, the Euryalus , left the association to bunker coal (he couldn't change flagship due to bad weather) and the Aboukir , Hogue and Cressy , now under the command of the Aboukir's commander , JE Drummond, remained alone at sea.
On the morning of September 22, U 9 crossed the same sea area under Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen on the way back from a patrol.
The battle
At 6:00 a.m. on the morning of September 22nd the weather had calmed down and the English Association was traveling at a speed of 10 knots in Dwarslinie with a distance of about 3.7 km. The lookouts were looking for ships or periscopes of submerged submarines, and one gun was manned on either side of a ship. U 9 had waited for the end of the storm while diving and sighted the British ships as they surfaced.
At 6:20 a.m. Weddigen fired its first torpedo at the nearest ship and hit the Aboukir on the starboard side. The engine room was flooded and the damage caused the ship to stop immediately. With no enemy ships sighted, Captain Drummond assumed he had run into a mine and ordered the other two cruisers to come closer and provide assistance. The Aboukir capsized after 25 minutes and sank five minutes later. Until then, only one lifeboat had been launched.
U 9 descended deeper after the first torpedo shot. When it was back down to periscope depth, Weddigen could see two cruisers picking up shipwrecked sailors. He fired two more torpedoes at the Hogue from a distance of 270 meters and hit with both shots. When the two torpedoes were fired, the bow of U 9 rose out of the water and the German submarine was sighted. The badly hit Hogue opened fire, but Weddigen managed to dive again without being hit. The Hogue capsized ten minutes later and sank at 7:15 a.m.
At 7.20 a.m., U 9 fired two torpedoes from the tail tubes from 910 meters at the remaining Cressy and hit her once on the starboard side . The Cressy returned fire and tried to ram U 9 without success. At 7:30 a.m. U 9 fired the last torpedo from a bow torpedo tube from 500 meters and hit the Cressy a second time, this time on the port side. The ship capsized and sank at 7:55 a.m.
Distress calls had been picked up by various ships. The Dutch Flora was the first ship to reach the scene at 8:30 a.m. and rescued 286 castaways, the Titan another 147 sailors. At 10:45 a.m. the British destroyers under Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt reached the sea area, so that a total of 837 men could be rescued. But 1,459 sailors, mostly reservists, drowned. The destroyers began a search for U 9 , which could only travel a short distance submerged with an electric drive. But Weddigen remained under water until night and escaped unscathed.
consequences
The disaster came as a shock to the British public and damaged the reputation of the Royal Navy around the world. Three times more British seamen had been killed in 90 minutes than at Trafalgar . The remaining armored cruisers were immediately withdrawn from patrols and orders were issued that only small vehicles such as destroyers were allowed to provide assistance, while ships of cruiser size and above had to continue their voyage. Rear Admiral Christian was reprimanded. Captain Drummond was criticized in the following investigation for neglecting known precautions against submarine attacks (such as regular course changes). For his behavior during the battle, however, he was praised.
The seaman Wenman "Kit" Wykehan-Musgrave (1899–1989) sank with all three ships. His daughter later reported that he went overboard on the Aboukir and reached the Hogue while swimming . Just as he was climbing on board, she was hit himself and he managed to swim to the Cressy again, only to be torpedoed again. He eventually clung to a piece of driftwood and was rescued by a Dutch trawler .
Weddigen and his boat returned to Germany as heroes. He received the Iron Cross 1st Class from the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm and every member of his team received the Iron Cross 2nd Class. Three weeks later, on October 15, 1914, Weddigen sank the British cruiser Hawke , for which he was awarded the Pour le Mérite . The cult around his person and his heroic deeds became so great that only the German fighter pilot Baron von Richthofen was able to surpass it. Weddigen died on March 18, 1915 while on patrol with U 29 , when the boat was rammed by the dreadnought south of the Orkney Islands and sank with the entire crew. Unlike von Richthofen, he was quickly forgotten outside of naval circles after the war.
Weddigen's battle successes made submarine attacks serious in navies around the world. The British Commander Dudley Pound (later First Sea Lord ) wrote in his diary on September 24th on board the battleship St. Vincent :
“Much as one regrets the loss of life one cannot help thinking that it is a useful warning to us - we had almost begun to consider the German submarines as no good and our awakening which had to come sooner or later and it might have been accompanied by the loss of some of our Battle Fleet. "
“Just as we regret the loss of life, we cannot help but notice that this is a useful warning to us - we had almost started to regard the German submarines as unsuitable and our awakening had to come sooner or later and then maybe with the loss of part of our (modern) battle fleet. "
literature
- Charles F. Horne (Ed.): Source Records of the Great War. Volume II. National Alumni, 1923 (source collection, including reports by Weddigen and Nicholson as of Sept. 22, 1914).
- Jürgen Busche: Hero's test. The denied World War I legacy. DVA, Frankfurt 2004.
- Volker Jakob: From the decay of fame (essayistic portrait of Weddigen). In: Westfalenspiegel. 1, 2006, p. 56 f.
- Rene Schilling: "War Heroes". Patterns of interpretation of heroic masculinity in Germany from 1813 to 1945 (= war in history. Volume 15). Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2002, ISBN 3-506-74483-6 .
- Heinrich Richter: Otto Weddigen, a picture of life. Published by Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld / Leipzig 1915.
Web links
- Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen on the website of the German Navy
Individual evidence
- ^ Julian S. Corbett: Naval operations . Longmans, Green, London 2009, pp. 171 f . ( archive.org - first edition: 1920).
- ↑ Roger Chesneau, NJM Campbell: Conway's all the world's fighting ships, 1860-1905 . Ed .: Eugène M. Koleśnik. Mayflower Books, New York 1979, ISBN 0-8317-0302-4 , pp. 68-69 .
- ↑ Gröner 1991: U-boats and Mine Warfare Vessels. German Warships 1815-1945. Pp. 4-5.
- ^ Hugh Lyon, David Lyon: Warships from 1900 to today. Technology and commitment . Buch-u.-Zeit-Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne 1985, OCLC 159853922 , p. 150 .
- ^ Julian S. Corbett: Naval operations . Longmans, Green, London 2009, pp. 172–173 ( archive.org - first edition: 1920).
- ^ Robert K Massie: Castles of steel. Britain, Germany, and the winning of the Great War at sea . 1st edition. Random House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-224-04092-8 , pp. 130 .
- ↑ Elmar B. Potter, Chester W. Nimitz: Seemacht. A history of naval warfare from antiquity to the present . Manfred Pawlack Verlagsgesellschaft, Herrsching 1982, ISBN 3-88199-082-8 , p. 350-351 .
- ^ Julian S. Corbett: Naval operations . Longmans, Green, London 2009, pp. 174 ( archive.org - first edition: 1920).
- ^ Robert K Massie: Castles of steel. Britain, Germany, and the winning of the Great War at sea . 1st edition. Random House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-224-04092-8 , pp. 133-135 .
- ^ Robert K Massie: Castles of steel. Britain, Germany, and the winning of the Great War at sea . 1st edition. Random House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-224-04092-8 , pp. 136 .
- ↑ Yorkshire Dive Uncovers Disaster Cruisers. In: BBC Inside Out - Yorkshire dive & Lincolnshire. bbc.co.uk, July 7, 2003, accessed June 25, 2018 .
- ^ Jörg Hillmann: Lieutenant Captain Otto Weddigen. Bundeswehr - Marine.de, June 23, 16, accessed on September 15, 2016 .
- ^ Paul G. Halpern: The Naval Miscellan. Ed .: Michael Duffy (= Publications of the Navy Records Society . Band 146 ). tape VI . Ashgate, Aldershot 2003, ISBN 0-7546-3831-6 , pp. 413 .
- ↑ James P. Delgado, Clive Cussler: Silent Killers: Submarines and Underwater Warfare . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-1-84908-860-2 , pp. 128 ( books.google.de ).