You know, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than one novel was written about what the world war would be like. Yes, they were somewhat fantastic, but the authors tried to anticipate what would begin in them. More precisely, what began some 10 years later.
I do not mean treatises on strategy and tactics, but semi-fantasy novels. I flipped through a few, Tuckman, Julie and Jünger, and realized that people at the beginning of the last century had absolutely no idea of the nightmare that would take place on the battlefields.
Everything turned out to be wrong. The cavalry lost to machine guns, the infantry generally turned out to be a consumable in games with artillery and gases, the giants of zeppelins, bringing death to cities, lost to biplane rattles made of boards and ropes. Even the tanks, which no one knew about at all, did not turn out to be something so imbalanced.
But no one, even in a terrible unscientific-fantastic dream, could not imagine what would happen at sea. It was precisely on the seas of battles, not on the fields, that progress made the most of conservatism.
You can talk a lot about the battles of the First World War, many are still discussing Jutland, the last (and, in principle, the first) large-scale battle of the giants, but now we are not talking about it.
The events that I want to tell and speculate about were not as epic as Jutland, but in my opinion they had such an impact on military technology that perhaps not much of military history can be put next to them.
We are talking about … a battle to call it a language does not turn. The battle is Dogger Bank, this is Jutland, this is when two sides are at war. Damaging each other and so on.
And we will talk about beating. Perhaps this word is the most suitable.
It all happened on September 22, 1914 in the North Sea, 18 miles off the coast of Holland. An event, the essence of which was not only the humiliation of Britain as a naval power, although this also took place, because in an hour Britain lost more personnel than in the Battle of Trafalgar, but also the birth of a new class of combat vehicles.
Everyone has already understood that we are talking about submarines and the massacre that Otto Veddigen arranged with the crew of his U-9.
Three armored cruisers, "Hog", "Cressy" and "Abukir", could not oppose anything to the German submarine and simply drowned as a result of the very well-aimed shooting of the German crew.
Submarines. Although at that time it would be correct to call them divers, since they could be under water for very little time.
There is something in any submarine … Probably, the understanding that today it can submerge, and emerge tomorrow a thousand kilometers. Or not to surface, which also happens.
But if we are talking about the First World War, then TE submarines were something. The real weapon of the suicide bombers, who understand perfectly well that if something happens, there is no need to wait for salvation. The aviators piloting strange rattlesnakes, at least had primitive, but parachutes. The submariners had nothing, before the invention of scuba gear there were still 50 years left.
So at the beginning of the First World War, the submarines were toys. Expensive and dangerous, because the technologies of that time - you yourself understand, this is something. No normal diesels, no batteries, no air regeneration systems - nothing.
Accordingly, the attitude towards them was like this … Marine penal battalion. If you behave badly (very badly), we will send you to the "kerosene stove".
Before WWI in previous wars, submarines did not show themselves at all. In the Russo-Japanese War, neither Russian nor Japanese submarines did absolutely anything. Therefore, their effective as a weapon was considered negligible.
The British felt about the same. "Vile and damn not British weapons" - such was the opinion of one of the British admirals.
The Germans looked at the submarines in exactly the same way. Moreover, the great von Tirpitz himself did not want to finance the construction of these ships, which he considered completely useless. And, in general, Germany entered the war with 28 submarines in its fleet. The British had twice as many of them - 59.
What is a submarine of that time?
In general, they developed by leaps and bounds.
Judge for yourself: U1 had a displacement of 238 tons above water and 283 tons underwater, length - 42, 3 meters, width - 3, 75, draft - 3, 17. Two gasoline engines for surface running at 400 hp. and two electric motors for driving underwater.
The boat could reach a speed of 10.8 knots in water and 8.7 knots under water and dive as much as 30 meters. The cruising range was 1,500 miles, which is generally very good, but the armament is rather weak: one bow torpedo tube and three torpedoes. But then they did not know how to reload a torpedo tube in a submerged position. The hero of our story was the first to do this.
Artillery? Machine guns? Well, after all, the beginning of the century in the yard … There was nothing.
But this is 1904. But let's look at the boat of the hero of our story, Weddigen, U-9. Six years later, the boat was already somewhat larger.
U9 joined the fleet with the following parameters: displacement - 493 (surface) / 611 (underwater) tons, length - 57, 38 meters, width - 6, 00, draft - 3, 15, immersion depth - 50 meters, speed - 14, 2/8, 1 knot, range 3000 miles.
The gasoline engines were replaced by two Korting kerosene engines (on the surface) and two electric motors underwater.
But the armament was quite: 4 torpedo tubes with ammunition of 6 torpedoes and a deck gun (retractable) of 105 mm caliber. According to the staffing table, the crew consisted of 35 people.
Well, the crews were preparing from the heart. The survivors later wrote about this in their memoirs.
But in Germany, as well as in Great Britain, France and Russia, they were convinced that the fate of a future war at sea would be decided by huge armored ships armed with long-range artillery of the highest possible caliber.
In principle, this is how it began, but then the time came for what? That's right, Britain decided to blockade Germany and lock her "High Seas Fleet" in the bases.
This was done by proven means, that is, with the help of all the same dreadnoughts / battleships and other ships such as battle cruisers and destroyers. The British sailors had experience of such operations, so they were able to organize the blockade very efficiently. So that not a single German ship could slip by unnoticed.
A ship, but we're talking about boats … Diving …
So this blockade did not concern the submarines at all. And, running a little ahead, I will say that during the Second World War, the German submariners gave the British a very serious headache with their actions. And already Britain was on the verge of a complete blockade.
But in World War I, the goal of the German submariners was primarily not the British merchant fleet, but the military. The blockade had to be lifted.
It so happened that one of the units of the British ships that carried out the blockade of the Dutch coast, was made up of five large armored cruisers of the Cressy class.
On the one hand, a blockade is an energy-intensive thing and requires a lot of ships. On the other hand, you shouldn't write off the weather. Light cruisers and destroyers, of course, are more suitable for such tasks, but the trouble is that great excitement nullified the effectiveness of these ships.
That is why heavy, but seaworthy "Cressy" type irons could be on patrol in any weather, unlike destroyers. It is clear that the British Admiralty did not create illusions about the fate of battleships if they happened to meet new German ships. Everything was clear and understandable here.
The group even received the nickname "live bait squadron". And it was supposed to catch the ships of the Hochseeflot. And then already to pile on them with all the ships of the main forces.
But these ships were definitely not "whipping boys" either. We look at the characteristics.
Cressy type. They were built not so long ago, in the interval from 1898 to 1902. A displacement of 12,000 tons, a little less than battleships, but that's a little bit.
Length - 143.9 meters, width - 21, 2, draft - 7, 6. Two steam engines (30 boilers) developed a power of 21 thousand horsepower and a speed of up to 21 knots.
Armament: 2 guns of 233 mm caliber, 12 x 152 mm, 14 x 76 mm, 18 x 37 mm. Plus 2 torpedo tubes. The thickness of the armor belt is 152 mm. The team consisted of 760 people.
In general, such a five could have puzzled anyone, with the exception, probably, of guys like "Von der Tann" and their comrades.
So what happened next?
And then a storm began in the patrolled sector. And the British destroyers were forced to abandon their heavy cruisers and retreat to base.
In general, it was believed in theory that with such excitement, submarines could not work, a short and high wave would interfere. But nevertheless, the cruisers had to navigate variable courses at a speed of at least 12 knots.
But two things happened at once. The first - and one, and the other rule, the British disregarded. And they walked along the sector on a straight course at a speed of 8 knots. Coal, apparently, was saved. Second - Weddigen did not know that with such excitement, his boat could not attack enemy ships. That's why he went out to sea.
True, the U-9 also suffered from the excitement. The boat lost its course and miraculously did not run aground due to the breakdown of the gyrocompass. But on September 22, 1914, the sea calmed down and the weather was very good.
Noticing the smoke on the horizon, the engines on U-9 were muffled and plunged to periscope depth. Soon the Germans saw and identified three British cruisers sailing two miles apart. Having calculated the course, speed and probability of deviation, Weddigen fired the first torpedo from 500 meters, one might say, point-blank. After 31 seconds, the boat shook: the torpedo hit the target.
It was Abukir. The crew, having "missed" the torpedo, considered that the ship had become a victim of an unknown minefield. The cruiser began to list to starboard. When the roll reached 20 degrees, an attempt was made to straighten the ship by flooding the opposite compartments, which did not help, but only accelerated the death.
The Hog, in accordance with the instructions, approached the Abukir, stopped the course in two cables and lowered the boats. When the boats rolled away from the side, two torpedoes crashed into the stopped cruiser at once, and a submarine suddenly flew to the surface of the sea from the left side.
While on "Abukir" they figured out what had happened and fought for survivability, Weddigen managed to reload the torpedo tube and walked around the "Abukir" under water. And he ended up two cables from the Hog. U-9 fired a salvo with two torpedoes and began to go deep and work out with engines back. But this maneuver was not enough, and the boat, with its bow raised, went up. They still did not know how to compensate for the weight of torpedoes.
But Weddigen was really a tough commander and was able to straighten the boat by getting the free crew members to run inside, using people as movable ballast. Even in a modern submarine it will still be an exercise, but in a submarine from the beginning of the last century …
In general, everything went a little not according to plan, and it turned out that the roll was leveled, but the boat was on the surface. According to the law of meanness, some three hundred meters from the "Hog". Yes, the cruiser, stocked with two torpedoes, was sinking, but it was a British cruiser. With British sailors on board.
Therefore, it is not surprising that from the "Hog", which remained on an even keel, they opened fire on the boat. After a while, the boat went under water. The British were convinced that she had sunk. But the same law of meanness worked, and not a single shell hit the target. It's just that the Germans were still able to fill the ballast tanks and go to the depths.
"Abukir" by that time had already turned over and sank, almost immediately the "Hog" sank. On the U-9, the electric batteries were almost empty, there was nothing to breathe, but Weddigen and his team, having gone into a rage, decided to attack the last cruiser.
Turning aft to the target, the Germans fired two torpedoes from a distance, all the same 2 cables from their rear pipes. That is, point-blank again. But the Cressy had already realized that they were dealing with a submarine, and still spotted the torpedo trail. The cruiser tried to evade, and one torpedo even passed by, but the second one hit the starboard side. The damage was not fatal, the ship remained on an even keel, and its guns opened fire at the place where the boat was supposedly located. And with the same success as the Hog.
And Veddigen had one more torpedo and a mountain of unspent adrenaline. The Germans reloaded the torpedo tube for the second time in the battle, which in itself was either a feat or an achievement. At a depth of ten meters, U-9 bypassed the Cressy, climbed to periscope depth and hit the cruiser's port side with the last torpedo.
And that is all. Being a good commander, Weddigen did not wait for the return of the British destroyers, but rushed towards the base with maximum speed.
In this … battle? Rather, Britain lost 1,459 sailors in this carnage, nearly three times as many as in the Battle of Trafalgar.
The funny thing is that Weddigen believed that he was attacking light cruisers of the Birmingham class. Only when they arrived at the base did the submariners learn that they had sent three heavy armored cruisers with a displacement of 36,000 tons to the bottom.
When U-9 arrived in Wilhelmshaven on 23 September, all of Germany already knew what had happened. Otto Weddigen was awarded the Iron Crosses of the first and second classes, and the entire crew - the Iron Crosses of the second class.
In Britain, the loss of three large warships caused shock. The Admiralty, always reluctant to believe the obvious, insisted that several submarines had taken part in the attack. And even when the details of the battle became known, the Lords of the Admiralty stubbornly refused to recognize the skill of the German submariners.
The general opinion was expressed by the commander of the British submarine fleet Roger Keyes:
"In the first months of the war, the sinking of surface ships by submarines was no more difficult than an ambush hunt for tame elephants tied to trees."
However, the main result of the U-9 battle was not the sinking of three large cruisers, but a grandiose demonstration of the capabilities of the submarine fleet.
Many later said that the Cressy-class cruisers were outdated, it was not difficult to sink them, but forgive me, you might think that the newest dreadnoughts or destroyers of that time did not yet have sonars, and even the new ships were completely defenseless against submarines.
As for Germany, the victory of the U-9 gave a powerful impetus to the development of the submarine fleet. The country rushed to build submarines. Until the end of the war, the Germans had commissioned 375 submarines of seven different types.
In general, after the Battle of Jutland and the subsequent complete blockade of German bases by the ships of the British fleet, submarines became the only effective weapon of warfare at sea.
During the First World War, British shipping from attacks by German submarines lost ships with a total carrying capacity of 6 million 692 thousand tons.
In total, in 1914-1918, German submarines destroyed 5,708 ships with a carrying capacity of 11 million 18 thousand tons.
Plus, it is impossible to take into account how many ships were killed by mines set by submarines.
During this time, the German submarine fleet lost 202 submarines, 515 officers and 4,894 sailors. Every third submariner in Germany died.
However, another new class of warships was born, which went through two world wars and many local wars. And today submarines are considered one of the most effective types of weapons.
It's funny, but once no one believed in "kerosene stoves" …
