On this day in 1914, in the shallow water off the Dutch coast that sailors call the Broad Fourteens, the German submarine U-9 torpedoed three Royal Navy cruisers in about ninety minutes. Aboukir went first. Hogue and Cressy closed to pick up her men, stopped their engines and put out boats, and were torpedoed in their turn. Roughly 1,450 officers and men were lost.
They were older ships, and their companies were made up in large part of Royal Naval Reserve men called up from other work, and of cadets, some of them very young. The ships that came for the survivors were not warships. The Dutch steamers Flora and Titan, and British trawlers working those grounds, took men out of the water and carried them in. Flora landed her survivors in the Netherlands.
Most of the dead have no grave but the sea, and are remembered on the naval memorials at Chatham and Portsmouth. It is a short entry in the timetable of that autumn, and a long one in the parishes those men came from.
Harold, thank you for naming Flora and Titan. Merchant crews who stop in water where a submarine is known to be working are doing it with no guns and no orders, only the judgement of the men on the bridge.
Harold, the Admiralty's response came quickly and hard: an instruction that large ships were not to stop to rescue survivors of a submarine attack. It was a rule written in the knowledge of what Hogue and Cressy had done, and of what it cost them.