RG: In our opinion

“They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning

Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning.” – Rudyard Kipling

In the course of less than one desperate hour on the morning of September 22, 1914 a lone U-boat was able to bag what disbelieving Germans called “three before breakfast” — the British cruisers Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue.

More than 36,000 tons of heavily armoured shipping was sent to the bottom of the sea that day in an engagement which effectively ushered in the modern age of submarine warfare.

One of the opening naval actions of what subsequently became known as the First World War (1914-1918), the incident off the Dutch coast badly damaged the Royal Navy’s once unquestioned reputation for invincibility.

It also undermined the morale of both British servicemen and the general public in those heady, early days of a conflict which commentators were confidently predicting would be over by Christmas.

A total of 1,459 lives were lost that morning, more than the total number of British casualties at the pivotal Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain in 1805.

Among those who died was Bermudian William Edmund Smith, a 22-year-old crewman from Sandys Parish who had taken up the King’s Shilling at the Royal Navy Dockyard in 1912. Two years later he was serving aboard HMS Aboukir when he became the first Bermudian military casualty of the First World War. Following his death his parents, William Felix Smith and Emma Jane (Douglas) of Harmon’s Hill, Somerset received a letter signed by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill conveying the sympathy of King George V and Queen Mary.

Old, slow and achingly vulnerable to the lethal new weapon the German navy had invested so much money and hope in, on September 22 the 472-foot Aboukir and her sister ships Cressy and Hogue had been on patrol in the North Sea. The sector the cruisers were operating in protected access to the eastern end of the English Channel and British supply routes to its forces in France.

With typical military gallows humour, the ships comprising Cruiser Force C had been nicknamed the “Live Bait Squadron” by those serving aboard them because it was obvious they would be outclassed, outmanoeuvred and outgunned during any raid by most German surface ships. The likely threat posed to the squadron by the sleek German Unterseeboots (“undersea boats”) had not actually been properly assessed by Admiralty officials who were as close to obsolete as the vessels themselves.

A memorandum drawn up by First Sea Lord Churchill on the advice of younger naval officers had specifically recommended the ageing ships “ought not to continue on this beat. The risk to such ships is not justified by any service they can render.”

But the chief of the Admiralty war staff objected, stating that while the cruisers should be replaced his resources were limited and there were no modern ships available which could operate during the bad weather experienced in the North Sea’s waters. So the Aboukir’s fate was sealed and, along with it, William Edmund Smith’s.

“The Aboukir had been stricken in a vital spot …”, German submarine commander Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen later recalled. “[and] that made the blow all the greater. Her crew were brave, and even with death staring them in the face kept to their posts, ready to handle their useless guns.”

The engagement was emblematic of the way the entire war unfolded.

The opening shots of the First World War had been fired in the Balkan city of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife were gunned down by a Serbian nationalist. Before the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918 more than nine million combatants and untold millions of civilians had died in a conflict which literally became global. The carnage was on a scale entirely unprecedented in all of previous human history, prodigal, almost Biblical in nature.

The conflict opened up what Churchill memorably termed “vistas of fathomless catastrophe” because modern transportation and communications systems effectively reduced the entire globe to a single, vast battlefield. But the elderly commanders of the belligerent nations were, of course, attempting to fight a 19th century war with the almost unlimited resources and firepower of modern industrialised states.

They were slow to adapt to such technological innovations as submarines, aircraft and tanks and entirely unprepared for the appalling casualty rates inflicted by machine guns, flame-throwers and devastating new artillery pieces and mortars.

Consequently, the old men heading the Allied and Central Powers’ armed forces presided over what amounted to a murderous four year stalemate while the young men under their command were killed in almost unquantifiable numbers.

Close to 90 Bermudians died while bearing arms during the 1914-18 war; of the more than 400 others who served overseas with either the Bermuda Militia Artillery or the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps, scores were wounded. Some were left maimed for life. That the Island’s total population stood at just 19,000 in 1914 puts the scale of their sacrifice into the starkest possible perspective.

On Sunday a service of thanksgiving took place at the Anglican Cathedral to honour those young Bermudians who fought and died in the First World War. Held almost 100 years to the day William Smith lost his life in the bleak waters of the North Sea, it commemorated those who paid in blood, pain and sorrow for the errors, miscalculations and bullheaded obstinacy of their elders.

Their story is a timeless example of courage, duty and human dignity. But it also points to the hellish consequences which can ensue when blinkered statesmen and antiquated generals do indeed make war an extension of politics without first having a full command of all the facts or a full appreciation of the likely results.

With the world currently standing on the brink of any number of seemingly open-ended conflicts, these were two lessons we urgently needed to be reminded of lest we indeed forget.

“If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.” –

Rudyard Kipling