Action of 22 September 1914

Dawn on the Broad Fourteens: a flat sea and a wrong assumption

It was a grey, low-horizon morning — the kind the North Sea makes when it does not want to show its teeth. Vessels ploughed a pale, indifferent path toward each other; gulls wheeled and the light barely picked out the welds on the cruisers' hulls. For the men aboard Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, the morning watch routine felt ordinary: lookouts, course checks, the dull certainty of patrol duty. They were veterans of a different naval age — armored cruisers designed in peace, crewed in war by a mixture of regulars and reservists called up from merchant service and shore jobs. Their role in September 1914 was routine and crucial: keep the sea lanes, guard against raiders, and enforce the distant blockade of Germany.

What no one aboard those ships seemed to grasp in that early hour was that the rules of naval warfare were changing beneath the waves. The Royal Navy had not yet fully reckoned with the submarine's power. To many, an undersea boat was an annoyance, an enemy to be chased away by depth charges that were still in their infancy, or by nimble destroyers that were not always present. The three cruisers steamed in line abreast, slow and steady — a posture that would turn a routine patrol into a disaster.

A hunter that had been waiting: U‑9 finds its prey

Below the water, U‑9 lay like a shadow. Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen, his crew alert and experienced, had been patrolling the southern North Sea. Submarines of 1914 were not the long-endurance weapons they would become, but they were lethal in the right place at the right time. About 06:20 on 22 September, Weddigen sighted the three cruisers in line abreast in the Broad Fourteens, a shallow, well-charted patch off the Dutch coast.

Weddigen made his choices with the cold arithmetic submariners rely on: angle, speed, and target order. He fired. The first torpedo struck HMS Aboukir with a violence that finished what the enemy’s shells could not: catastrophic flooding that could not be checked. Aboukir did not collapse instantly, but she listed and began to settle. On her decks the scene became raw and human — sailors scrambling into lifeboats, men standing in deck-smothering coats and lifejackets, many of them reservists who had been ripped from civilian lives and thrown back into war. They stared out at the empty sea, waiting.

Three ships, one mistake: stopping to save those in the water

What followed is often described now as a simple instinct turned tactical disaster. Hogue and Cressy, seeing Aboukir struck and survivors in the water, slowed and stopped to lower boats and take off men. It is a picture easy to sympathize with — ships abiding by an unwritten law of the sea to save those they can. But in stopping they became targets, sitting ducks in an area where a submarine had already proven its presence.

Weddigen did not need to make a complicated plan. He struck again. Hogue was hit while she was stationary, the torpedo breaching her side; she listed and sank too. Cressy, still engaged in rescue or maneuvering slowly, was the third to be torpedoed. Each hit unfolded in the cold morning like a chain reaction: men on the decks of one ship leaped into the water; those in the boats, exposed and vulnerable, were suddenly part of the same theatre of death. The whole engagement — sighting, three torpedo strikes, and three cruisers sinking — played out in roughly an hour.

Chaos in the water

The sea that morning became a patchwork of small boats and bodies. Many of the survivors were picked up by the very ships that had tried to help, and by others that arrived soon after: destroyers, trawlers, even fishing vessels answered the call or stumbled into the scene. These smaller craft worked quickly to recover men from frigid open water; those rescued were hypothermic, stunned, and often seriously wounded. The hurried boats and improvised rafts bore testimony to the primitive lifesaving systems of the time and to the human scramble that followed the torpedoes.

The arithmetic of loss: who survived and who did not

Counting the dead and the living in the fog of war is never simple. Contemporary and later accounts vary by a few dozen, but the scale of the loss was unequivocal. Official and commonly cited tallies place British fatalities at roughly 1,459, with about 837 survivors. Other sources offer a range—roughly 1,400–1,500 dead and 800–900 rescued. U‑9 suffered no casualties; her crew returned to port as heroes in Germany. Captain Weddigen was celebrated, awarded the Iron Cross, and his boat's success used heavily in German propaganda.

The human dimensions of the loss ran beyond the numbers. Many of those killed were reservists and merchant sailors, men plucked from British towns and ports whose absence would be felt in communities across the country. The wrecks themselves would become graves, weighty and private, lying on the seabed a hundred years of salt and shells later.

The navy's uncomfortable reckoning: lessons pressed into procedure

The immediate rescue operations — carried out by destroyers, trawlers and fishing vessels — were frantic and compassionate, but the Admiralty's larger concern was harder to bear: the loss of three armored cruisers to a single submarine was a blow to doctrine and pride. The action exposed several hard facts.

First, large, slow armored cruisers were vulnerable without escorts. Second, stopping to render assistance in waters where a submarine had already fired was now recognized as an unacceptable risk. Third, the Royal Navy had to take the submarine threat seriously — not as an occasional nuisance but as a strategic challenge.

The Admiralty's response was not a single, instantaneous revolution. In practice, the action of 22 September became a harsh lesson added to a growing list of U‑boat successes that, together, forced change. Over the following months and years the Royal Navy strengthened destroyer screens, tightened instructions against stopping in suspected submarine zones, emphasized zigzagging and lookout procedures, and accelerated the development and deployment of anti‑submarine technologies: early depth charges, hydrophone detection, convoy escorts and more rigorous patrol practices. The sinking forced doctrine to evolve from complacency into systematic caution.

Money, propaganda and morale: the ripple effects

On paper, the three cruisers represented a notional replacement cost. Early-20th-century estimates put the value of a warship of that class in the low millions of dollars (1914 USD); by rough conversion the combined loss might equate to the low hundreds of millions in modern dollars. But the political and psychological damage was arguably more costly. The British public and press were shocked; the navy's image — dominant and unassailable at sea — was bruised. Across the North Sea in Berlin, Weddigen's triumph was trumpeted.

Still, the strategic blockade and the Royal Navy's supremacy were not overturned by a single morning's events. What the action changed was perception: the submarine was a weapon that could not be wished away, and navies would now plan around its reality.

The graves beneath the waves and the memory they carry

All three wrecks — Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy — lie on the seabed in the Broad Fourteens. They are war graves: the final resting place for sailors whose names are printed on memorials and whose bones may still rest within the iron lungs of their ships. Divers and maritime historians have located and documented the positions of the wrecks; they attract scholarly interest and solemn visits. Legal protections for such sites vary by jurisdiction, and while some wrecks receive formal statutory status, others are treated as protected by convention. In any case, the wrecks are not salvage targets in the moral sense — they are places of mourning and memory.

Historians today place the action firmly within a pattern of early-war submarine successes that collectively reshaped naval practice. While tiny disagreements remain about minutes, exact headcounts, or personal details, the essential narrative is stable: a single U‑boat, well handled, sank three armored cruisers and exacted a grievous human toll.

Small acts that became lessons: how the navy changed its ways

The behavioral changes the Royal Navy adopted were practical and often granular. Destroyer screens became more consistent for patrols in hazardous areas; orders were clearer about the dangers of stopping in waters where submarines might be present; lookouts and readiness levels were raised; and tactics for anti-submarine action started to be formalized. These measures would not prevent every U‑boat success, but they made British ships harder to catch and incrementally reduced the submarine’s dramatic leverage. The convoy system and the refinement of depth charges and detection equipment came later and were shaped by many battles — but 22 September stood as one of the earliest, most vivid proofs that such changes were necessary.

The quiet after the guns and the story that endured

When the seas calmed and the rescue boats delivered their survivors to shore, the story spread — newspapers in Britain reprinted survivors' accounts, Admiralty papers logged the loss, and German papers celebrated Weddigen's feat. For a time, the image of three large cruisers sunk by a single submarine was a vivid symbol of a new era in naval warfare.

A century on, the names Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy evoke not just a single morning of loss, but the moment when navies and nations learned that the ocean's surface could no longer answer for the whole of the sea. The men who went down that day — sailors, reservists, fishermen who came to help — are part of a human ledger that the wrecks quietly keep. The event reshaped tactics, sharpened technology, and left a series of graves whose silence still speaks to those willing to listen.