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risk that within Britain’s Grand Fleet they bore the nickname “the live-bait squadron.” Hook—who in later life would indeed be promoted to
Captain
Hook—was in his bunk, asleep, when at 6:20 A . M . he was awakened by “a violent shaking” of his hammock. A midshipman was trying to wake him and other cadets, to alert them to the fact that one of the big cruisers, the
Aboukir
, had been torpedoed and was sinking.
    Hook sprinted to the deck, and watched the
Aboukir
begin to list. Within minutes the ship heeled and disappeared. It was, he wrote, “my first sight of men struggling for their lives.”
    His ship and the other intact cruiser, the
Cressy
, maneuvered to rescue the sailors in the water, each coming to a dead stop a few hundred yards away to launch boats. Hook and his fellow crewmen were ordered to throw overboard anything that could float to help the men in the water. Moments later, two torpedoes struck his own ship, the
Hogue
, and in six or seven minutes “she was quite out of sight,” he wrote. He was pulled into one of the
Hogue
’s previously launched lifeboats. After picking up more survivors, the lifeboat began making its way toward the third cruiser, the
Cressy
. But another torpedo was now tearing through the water. The torpedo struck the
Cressy
on its starboard side. Like the two other cruisers, the
Cressy
immediately began to list. Unlike the others, however, the list halted, and the ship seemed as if it might stay afloat. But then a second torpedo struck and hit the magazine that stored ammunition for the ship’s heavy guns. The
Cressy
exploded and sank. Where just an hour earlier there had been three large cruisers, there were now only men, a few small boats, and wreckage. A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.
    Weddigen and his U-boat were of course to blame, but the design of the ships—their longitudinal coal bunkers—contributed greatly to the speed with which they sank and thus the number of lives lost. Once ruptured, the bunkers caused one side of each ship’s hull to fill quickly, creating a catastrophic imbalance.
    The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.
    T HROUGH THE fall and winter of 1914, Germany’s submarines came to occupy more and more of Wilson’s attention, owing to a new shift in German naval strategy that brought with it the steadily worsening threat of entanglement. The
Aboukir
incident, and other successful attacks against British ships, caused German strategists to view submarines in a new light. The boats had proved to be hardier and deadlier than expected, well suited to Germany’s guerrilla effort to abrade the strength of Britain’s Grand Fleet. But their performance also suggested another use. By year’s end, Germany had made the interception of merchant shipping an increasingly important role for the navy, to stanch the flow of munitions and supplies to Allied forces. This task originally had fallen to the navy’s big auxiliary cruisers—former ocean liners converted to warships—but these cruisers had been largely swept from the seas by Britain’s powerful navy. Submarines by their nature offered an effective means of continuing the campaign.
    They also raised the risk that an American ship might be sunkby accident, or that U.S. citizens traveling on Allied vessels might be harmed. Early in 1915, this risk seemed to increase sharply. On February 4, Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an “area of war” in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning.This posed a particularly acute threat to Britain, which, as an