CHAPTER 10
Framed by ancient hills and cooled by fresh breezes from the sea, the German town of Tsingtao on the north China coast prepared for summer. At the beginning of June 1914, the gardens were in bloom and all was in order in this distant outpost of the German empire. Constructed in only seventeen years, the European town seemed older and more settled than that. The broad roads were shaded by acacias, the brick houses had red-tiled roofs reminiscent of Central Europe, the modern Prinz Heinrich and Strand hotels were filled with visitors from Germany, England, and America. There was an impressive library, an observatory, a grammar school where Chinese children learned German, a high school where they would be taught trades, the yellow brick German-Asiatic Bank, and the famous Tsingtao brewery, then—and still today—producing exceptional beer. Above the trees rose the towers of Christ Church and of the station of the Shantung Railway, which communicated with the rich German-administered coal mines in the interior. Europeans could stroll on the Kaiser Wilhelm Embankment, go to the racecourse, or swim from the pebbly bathing beach on Empress Augusta-Victoria Bay. Hills with green meadows, pine woods, mountain streams, bamboo groves, and plantations of mulberry trees where silkworms were raised encircled the town. In the hills, too, a new Chinese quarter had been built, “to keep the native population as far as possible away” from the Europeans.
This German colony on the Yellow Sea, 6,000 miles from Berlin, had been created by an investment of 50 million marks for a single purpose: to serve as the base of a cruiser squadron of the Imperial Navy. The site had been selected by the founder of the navy himself, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, during his brief tour of command at sea before Kaiser William II summoned him home to manage the building of the High Seas Fleet. In the spring of 1896, Tirpitz had cruised up and down the China coast and had selected this harbor on the Shantung peninsula. The German government offered to buy the territory, but the Chinese, although militarily impotent following their defeat by Japan in 1895, refused. Then, by one of those happy coincidences that sometimes assist in overcoming obstacles to imperial ambition, two German Catholic missionaries were murdered in the province on November 1, 1897. “We must take advantage of this excellent opportunity,” announced the kaiser in Berlin, “before another great power either dismembers China or comes to her aid! Now or never!” The German East Asia Squadron appeared in the bay, German marines were landed, and, on March 6, 1899, Germany was granted a ninety-nine-year lease on the port and its hinterland. “Thousands of German Christians will breathe again when they see the ships of the German navy in their vicinity,” the kaiser exulted. “Hundreds of German merchants will shout with joy in the knowledge that the German empire has at long last set foot firmly in Asia. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese will shiver if they feel the iron fist of the German empire lying firmly on their neck. I am determined to show once and for all that the German emperor is a bad person with whom to take liberties or have as an enemy.”
Now, in early June 1914, four German warships, painted white against the Pacific sun, lay in the Tsingtao roadstead. The mission of these vessels, the armored and light cruisers of the East Asia Squadron of the Imperial Navy, was to police the kaiser’s possessions scattered across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In the central Pacific, there were the Marianas, the Carolines, the Marshall Islands, and Samoa, some annexed outright, some purchased in 1899 from an impoverished Spain after the naval disaster at Manila Bay had rendered the Spaniards powerless in the Pacific. To the south lay other German colonies: the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, German New Guinea, Neu Pommern (which British maps called New Britain), and Neu Mecklenberg (formerly New Ireland). The guarding of these territories—a collection of volcanic islands, coral atolls, and swatches of jungle—was the responsibility of the East Asia Squadron. If war broke out against France or Russia, the East Asia Squadron was expected to do well. If war came with Japan—routinely described by the kaiser as the land of “yellow monkeys,” or the “Yellow Peril”—little success was anticipated against the powerful Japanese fleet. Against Great Britain, war was not contemplated.
The two largest warships moored in Tsingtao harbor, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, made up the core of the German squadron. These armored cruisers were sisters: seven years old, 11,400 tons, capable of 22 knots, and carrying eight 8.2-inch guns and six 5.9-inch guns. In firing exercises, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had twice won the Kaiser’s Cup as the best gunnery ships in the German navy. There were good reasons for this: the ships of the East Asia Squadron were manned by special, long-service crews and Admiral von Spee, the squadron commander, was a gunnery expert. According to the admiral, these two ships could fire three salvos in one minute. Three modern light cruisers, Emden, Leipzig, and Nürnberg, were also under Spee’s command. Roughly similar, all completed between 1906 and 1908, they were around 3,500 tons, reached speeds approaching 25 knots, and carried ten 4.1-inch guns. At the beginning of June 1914, Emden and Leipzig were at Tsingtao, while Nürnberg was off the west coast of Mexico. On June 7, Leipzigsailed from Tsingtao on a transpacific voyage to relieve Nürnberg.
The admiral commanding the East Asia Squadron was, in many ways, unusual in the Imperial Navy. An aristocrat in a fleet primarily officered by men from the middle class, a devout Catholic whose peers were largely Protestant, Vice Admiral Count Maximilian von Spee was sufficiently learned in the natural sciences to have made of them almost a second career. His appearance was conspicuous. He was tall—the tallest man in the squadron—and broad-shouldered and had a back as straight “as if he had swallowed a broom handle.” He had blue eyes, a straight nose, bushy gray eyebrows, and a white clipped beard. Energetic, resolute, patient, and calm, he had a single vice: an addiction to bridge.
Spee was born in Copenhagen on June 22, 1861, the fifth son of a Danish mother and a Prussian father, Count Rudolf, whose roots went back to 1166. The family’s Catholic religion was unusual, Prussia and Denmark both being strongholds of Protestantism; nevertheless, this faith was long-standing. One sixteenth-century von Spee had been a Jesuit poet. Maximilian had been privately tutored in a family castle and then in Switzerland before he entered the navy at sixteen. As a junior officer serving off the coast of the German colony of Cameroon in Africa, he contracted rheumatic fever, which left him with permanent rheumatism. He married and had two sons, Otto and Heinrich, and a daughter, Huberta. His service in predreadnought battleships and cruisers brought him his reputation as a gunnery specialist, and he became captain of the battleship Wittelsbach, Chief of Staff to the Admiral, North Sea Station, and second in command of the Scouting Groups of the High Seas Fleet. In November 1913, he was promoted to vice admiral and sent to command the East Asia Squadron. Otto and Heinrich, both naval officers, came to the Far East to serve with him, Otto as a lieutenant on Nürnberg, Heinrich on board Gneisenau.
During the months before war broke out, Spee led his squadron from port to port, steeling himself against an endless sequence of receptions, lawn parties, banquets, and balls. European life in the colonies did not suit him. “The women seemed a simple, unsophisticated lot,” he wrote to his wife after a reception in Batavia. “Only one seemed to have any pretensions to sophistication, a Mrs. M., an American, I believe.” At Singapore, “the English officers and their wives were quite wild, doing the newest American dances . . . they are almost indecent.” At Manila, the tango, performed by Americans, was performed “almost indecently. It needs supervision.” Worst of all were German diplomatic receptions where, as one of the hosts, he was required to stand and receive guests. “To my shame,” he confessed to his wife, “I lied at least eight hundred times last night. You say, ‘It is my greatest pleasure to meet you,’ while you are thinking how much better it would have been if they had stayed at home.” Aboard ship, Spee’s rank condemned him to a certain isolation, but he would sometimes smoke a cigar in the wardroom and was always happy to join in a game of bridge. As a commander, he inspired loyalty as well as respect. He was willing to ask for advice, but having made a decision, he expected obedience. If his decision was wrong, he would admit it—later.
This summer, there was a sense of anticipation in the harbor and colony of Tsingtao. It was the custom before the war for German and British warships on foreign stations to work together and assist one another. The Royal Navy allowed the German East Asia Squadron to dry-dock ships at its Hong Kong base, and an annual exchange of ceremonial and social visits had become routine. In 1913, when the German squadron had been at Hong Kong, German officers were entertained aboard the British armored cruiserMonmouth. Now, in June 1914, the hosts were to become the guests and the armored cruiser Minotaur, flagship of the British Far Eastern Squadron, carrying the squadron’s commander, Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Martyn Jerram, were coming to visit Tsingtao. The German squadron looked forward to seeing this British warship. Minotaur and her two sisters, Defence and Shannon, each 3,000 tons heavier than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, had been built in specific response to the construction of the two German ships. As it was, they were the last armored cruisers ever built. Within a year of their completion, Fisher’s faster and more powerful dreadnought battle cruisers were going to sea.
On June 12, Minotaur, dark gray and bristling with twelve gun turrets, was welcomed in Tsingtao harbor. Her officers dined on Scharnhorst and danced with German women on the deck of Gneisenau. The deck was trimmed with bunting, plants, and electric lights; the dance floor, set beneath the elevated muzzles of the after turret guns, was shielded from the night air by heavy canvas curtains; platters of meats, cakes, bread, and butter, and glasses of wine and beer, were spread on the wardroom tables. Ashore, British sailors competed with Germans in relay races, boxing matches, soccer (the British won, 5–2), and a tug-of-war (won by the Germans). British officers were escorted on automobile excursions into the countryside to visit Buddhist temples and hilltop summer houses. The “brotherhood of the sea” was invoked in speeches and toasts. Even so, Gneisenau’s second in command noted, “I do not think we were far wrong in the belief that they desired a little glimpse at our readiness for war.” And after Minotaursailed, it was widely reported that one English officer had admired the town and harbor and then, smiling at his host, declared, “Very nice place, indeed! Two years more and we have it.”
In Tsingtao, the British visit was a preliminary to the month’s most significant event: the German East Asia Squadron’s departure on a three-month cruise through the central and southwestern Pacific. The voyage was to proceed along a chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Marshalls to the easternmost point of the cruise, German Samoa. From there, the ships would turn southwest to Fiji, Bougainville, the Bismarck Archipelago, and New Guinea. The return to Tsingtao was scheduled for September 20, whereupon many officers would return home across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway and, after two years of China service, be home in Germany in time for Christmas. Admiral von Spee particularly looked forward to the Pacific voyage; he was an amateur naturalist and an ingrained collector, and the cruise would be his first opportunity to observe many varieties of plants and species of birds and fish. He was also especially happy that the cruise would reunite him with his friend Captain Julius Maerker, the new captain of Gneisenau. Not only was Maerker a naturalist, he also was devoted to bridge.
Gneisenau left Tsingtao first, sailing in bright sunshine on the morning of June 20; Scharnhorst would follow three days later. Gneisenau paused in Nagasaki to coal; the officers bought silk to carry home for Christmas. From Japan, the ship steamed south, crossing the Tropic of Cancer and entering the tropics on June 26. Daily, the sun was higher at noon and the temperature rose. Awnings were spread over sections of the deck and the crew was issued straw hats and warned about sunburn. The tropical nights came quickly and, under a multitude of stars, officers and men sat on deck, enjoying the cooler air and talking quietly. On the twenty-ninth, still in wireless touch with Tsingtao, the crew of Gneisenau learned of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
From Pagan Island at the northern end of the Marianas chain, Gneisenau moved on to Saipan, the capital of the German Marianas, and then to Rota, where some officers went ashore to shoot goats beneath the coconut trees. Leaving Rota, Gneisenau steamed past Guam, which “alone of the Marianas has a good natural harbor and belongs to the Americans,” noted a German officer. On July 6, the ship entered the vast Truk atoll in the mid-Carolines. Here, behind a wall of white spray created by ocean waves thundering against the encircling reef of coral, lay an immense turquoise lagoon sprinkled with volcanic islands with peaks rising to a thousand feet. Scharnhorst was already there and together the two ships began to coal. The work, impossible in the noonday heat, was done at night, creating surreal effects as the white steam rising from the hoisting cranes mixed with clouds of black coal dust, swirled in the searchlights of the warships and slowly drifted across the calm water. Every day, decorated native canoes surrounded the anchored ships offering fruits, native fabrics, and handmade artifacts. Sometimes dancers, gleaming with palm oil and covered with flowers, came on board to pound their feet, clap their hands, and slap their thighs in rhythm, while from the turret tops, upper works, and masts, German sailors looked down and grinned.
Admiral von Spee found Truk a naturalist’s wonderland. Exploring the islands and the shallow waters of the lagoon, he studied the structure of the coral and admired the rare mammals and fishes, the brightly colored birds, the butterflies, the flowers and other tropical plants. It was a delicious distraction, but the temporary naturalist remained an admiral. At Truk, Spee received a stream of messages from Berlin. On July 7, the Naval Staff warned him that “the political situation is not entirely satisfactory.” Understanding that his Pacific cruise would have to be modified, the admiral decided to await developments at Ponape, 400 miles east of Truk. He also ordered Emden, still at Tsingtao, to postpone her scheduled cruise up the Yangtze. The two armored cruisers left Truk on July 15 and, at noon on July 17, approaching Ponape from the southwest, the Gneisenau’s second in command saw “a glorious sight . . . the massive mountains of Ponape bathed in brightest sunshine and all around us as far as the eye could reach, the sea was covered with chains of mountainous waves, keeping pace with our course. . . . The green and brown masses of the mountain gradually dissolved into forest and rock, encircled by a single white wreath. This was the outer reef against which break[s] ceaselessly the foaming spray of the huge waves of the Pacific Ocean. . . . Through the roar of the swell, we came into calmer waters.” The two ships spent two weeks at Ponape, anchored off villages where the German flag floated above the palm trees. On shore, the sailors discovered pools of fresh water for bathing and washing clothes. Officers climbing Nankjob peak looked down on the cobalt-shaded ocean stretching to the horizon, the foam-flecked reef of coral enclosing the blue-green water of the lagoon, the brown huts with red roofs dotted between mangroves and palms, the natives fishing from canoes. White clouds sailing across a limitless blue sky suddenly gave way to fierce tropical squalls. Strong winds howled, the clouds turned black, and water fell in dense, thick columns.
On July 27, while Spee was at Ponape, the Naval Staff informed him of Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia. “Strained relations between Dual Alliance and Triple Entente. . . . Samoan cruise will probably have to be abandoned. Nürnberg has been ordered to Tsingtao. Everything else is left to you.” The admiral, realizing that it was wrong to send Nürnberg, then at Honolulu, to Tsingtao, which the British and possibly the Japanese were likely to attack, countermanded Berlin’s order and told Nürnberg to meet him at Ponape. Meanwhile, at Tsingtao, his supply ships were being loaded. Emden, assigned to escort them, sailed on July 31 with the large, elegantly furnished North German Lloyd liner Yorck, the armed merchant cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, and eight colliers.
On the night of August 1, the message “threatened state of war” reached Spee at Ponape. The navy’s procedure on receipt of this signal was the same whether a ship was at Kiel or in the mid-Pacific; the vessel was stripped for battle and all peacetime and nonessential belongings were sent ashore. On Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, wood paneling and tapestries were torn from the wardroom walls, and sofas, stuffed armchairs, carpets, and sideboards were taken ashore. Two items were allowed to remain inGneisenau’s wardroom: a piano and a picture of the kaiser hanging on the wall. The admiral’s dining room was denuded of silverware, pictures, chairs, and carpets. Each officer was permitted to keep only a writing table and a chair. Trunks were packed with formal dress coats, brocaded jackets, and gold-striped breeches for ceremonial occasions, and all sports clothing and equipment. From each small cabin came the collected gifts and souvenirs: bronze and porcelain vases, Japanese temple lanterns, ivory carvings, silks, bows, arrows, spears. “The whole beautiful world through which we had passed . . . flashed be-fore us as we packed away all these treasures,” said an officer. On Sunday, August 2, a message came that Germany was at war with Russia and on the night of the fifth, the squadron heard that “the British had elected to side with our enemies. Against France and Russia it would have been a merry war for which we were perfectly ready,” said Gneisenau’s second in command, but Britain’s action was a “piece of treachery . . . a perfidy . . . unleashed against us.”
At dawn on August 6, Spee’s last day at Ponape, Nürnberg appeared at the entrance to the lagoon. During the morning, men from other ships helped the light cruiser to coal, and a herd of pigs was slaughtered onshore and meat and fresh water were ferried out. At noon, the admiral and his two sons went ashore to offer confession to the Catholic Apostolic Vicar of the Marianas and Carolines. At 5:00 p.m., Scharnhorst and Gneisenau passed out through the reef into the long ocean swell and headed northwest. In order to rendezvous with the supply ships coming down from Tsingtao, Spee had decided to retrace his steps to Pagan Island, a thousand miles to the north.
The German ships now observed wartime routine. The crews were divided into two watches, with the off-duty watch always sleeping fully dressed. Lookouts posted in the crow’s nests scanned the horizon; some of the guns were constantly manned. The heat was intense; at midday, the sun beat down so fiercely that it was impossible to place a hand on any exposed iron part of the ship. Two hours every afternoon were devoted to weapons drill, followed by a break for coffee, then a meal; then half the crew went to sleep. “The monotonous noise of the screws churning the water went on interminably, the ship rose and fell on the billows . . . in this way, day after day passed during our long traverse of the Pacific Ocean and time and space seemed to us illimitable,” wrote an officer onGneisenau. At dawn on Au-gust 11, the two volcanoes of Pagan Island rose out of the sea, and that morning they anchored. Later that day, the armored cruisers were joined by Emden, Prinz Eitel Friedrich, the colliers from Tsingtao, and a flock of chartered coastal steamers bringing fresh water, live cattle and pigs, mountains of potatoes, fresh vegetables, flour, beer, wine, and tobacco.
While his ships coaled and provisioned at Pagan, Admiral von Spee pondered how and where they should be used. There were many possibilities. The vastness of the Pacific offered the shelter of space; once he had vanished no one could say where he was or where he might reappear. There were, of course, constraints on his actions. He was cut off from Tsingtao, his only base; he had no place to dry-dock his ships or to make more than temporary repairs; he could depend only on his own resources. In Winston Churchill’s simile, “Von Spee was a cut flower in a vase; fair to see, yet bound to die.” His most pressing and permanent problem was coal. German agents in ports around the rim of the Pacific were already working to buy coal and charter colliers to rendezvous with him, but the worldwide network of the British Admiralty kept watch on every port, every ton of coal, and every likely collier.
Admiral von Spee, in choosing his theater of operations, had to consider where he could hurt the enemy most and where he could survive the longest. He had two tactical alternatives. He could break up the squadron and scatter his ships so that each could wage individual trade warfare and commerce destruction. Or he could keep his ships together and embark on squadron warfare against the enemy navy. It would be difficult to do both; an attempt to combine squadron war with trade war would inhibit, and might well doom, both. It was the inclusion in the squadron of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau that made trade warfare almost impossible. The essential element of a lone raider was speed, not size. Spee’s three fast light cruisers were superbly equipped for trade warfare: they could catch and sink any merchantman in the world and they could outrun almost any enemy warship. But the big, powerful armored cruisers, each more than three times as heavy and with a crew over twice as large as that of a light cruiser, burned too much coal. Had the Naval Staff intended the East Asia Squadron for trade warfare, six additional light cruisers would have been far more useful than two armored cruisers. A further consideration was that if the admiral scattered his ships, they might do considerable damage, but ultimately each raider would be hunted down by a superior enemy. The advantage in keeping his squadron together was that, in combination, his ships had a better chance of survival. The weakness was that, operating together, they might achieve nothing at all.
But the German Naval Staff had not structured the East Asia Squadron to make war on commercial trade. Its mission had been to represent Imperial Germany in the Far East. Display, visual impact, respect, and prestige were qualities associated with big ships and heavy guns, not with light cruisers, however fast. Further, Maximilian von Spee, a proud man, a vice admiral in the Imperial Navy, the commander of the only remaining overseas squadron of the German fleet, had no thought of wasting Scharnhorst andGneisenauas lone commerce raiders. Already, Spee had indicated his poor opinion of the value of trade warfare by summoning Leipzig, Nürnberg, and Emden to join him in the central Pacific, thereby concentrating rather than scattering the combat power of his squadron.
The Naval Staff in Berlin had realized that once war broke out it would be difficult to communicate with German warships overseas; flag officers and captains, therefore, were instructed to use their own initiative. “In event of a war against Great Britain,” read the Imperial Navy War Orders, “ships abroad are to carry on cruiser warfare unless otherwise ordered. . . . The aim . . . is to damage enemy trade; this must be effected by engaging equal or inferior enemy forces, if necessary.” To this general instruction, the kaiser had added personal advice and exhortation. From the moment war breaks out, he said, each captain “must make his own decisions. . . . Above all things, the officer must bear in mind that his chief duty is to damage the enemy as severely as possible. If he succeeds in winning an honorable place for his ship in the history of the German Fleet, I assure him of my imperial favor.” A few weeks later, when the Naval Staff in Berlin was as much in the dark as to Spee’s whereabouts as the British Admiralty in London, a German staff appreciation reasserted the independence of commanders at sea: “It is impossible to judge from here . . . it is useless to issue any orders . . . we are ignorant of the Commander-in-Chief’s [Spee’s] dispositions . . . any interference on our part might be disastrous. The Commander-in-Chief must have complete liberty of action.”
Nürnberg, arriving at Ponape from Honolulu on August 5, reported that the British China Squadron had concentrated at Hong Kong. Admiral Jerram’s squadron was by no means superior to Spee’s, but Jerram was not the only potential enemy to the west. Even before Britain’s ally Japan declared war on August 23, it was clear to Spee that, if he returned north to Tsingtao, he might have to face the Japanese fleet. Accordingly, he rejected going west, to China. He could go south to the German base at Rabaul in the Bismarck Archipelago, and beyond toward Australia. But somewhere to the south also was the dreadnought battle cruiser Australia carrying eight 12-inch guns, and Spee had no desire to fight this fast, powerful ship. And even if he did not meet the battle cruiser, there was little he could do in the south. Australia’s principal harbors and cities were too heavily defended to be bombarded, and to waste ammunition dueling with shore batteries would be foolish. He could fire on open towns and embarrass the Dominion and British governments, but this would produce no military results. And in the south he would be able to obtain coal only from whatever ships he might chance upon—too precarious a source for a squadron the size of his.
Another possibility was the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, where he could attack busy trade routes. He might commit slaughter on the Australian and New Zealand troop convoys moving toward the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and Europe, but he did not know their schedules or the strength of the naval forces that would be escorting them. And here, too, he would have difficulty finding coal. To supply his entire squadron from prizes would be impossible and the prospect of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau drifting helplessly, their coal bunkers empty and their boilers cold, had no appeal. Admiral von Spee ruled out going west.
The east remained. In the distant east, across the Pacific, on the coast of South America, there was British trade to be disrupted. Here, there was no Japanese fleet and no British squadron to oppose him. The coast of the Americas, North and South, presented an 8,000-mile stretch of neutral nations from the southern Canadian border down to Cape Horn. Many of these nations would sell him coal. Further, if he continued east around the Horn into the South Atlantic, the important South American trade routes to Europe lay open to attack. And once out in the Atlantic Ocean, he might even find his own way home to the North Sea.
The prospect of finding help in the coastal towns of South America was especially attractive. Chile, with its large German population, had many German businesses and commercial houses. In every Chilean port, German merchant ships were anchored, unable to leave, but fitted with wireless facilities and available for use as supply ships, colliers, or communications relay points for the German East Asia Squadron. In Chile, the German ships, business enterprises, consulates, and embassies and their network of communication facilities and intelligence operations surpassed even those of the well-organized British. Above all—and this was the overriding factor—in Chile, Spee would find it easy to obtain coal. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau each had a capacity of 2,000 tons of coal. At 10 knots, each ship burned a hundred tons a day and could steam for twenty days. At 20 knots, the figures were 500 tons a day and four days. No captain, however, wished his bunkers to get too low; it was a general rule in all navies to keep the bunkers at least half full at all times. This dictated to Spee a coaling stop every eight or nine days. He already had ruled out the Indian Ocean because, as he wrote in his war diary, “we have no coaling bases in the Indian Ocean and no agents whom we can get in touch with. If we proceed towards the American coast, we shall have both at our disposal.”
August 13, 1914, was Maximilian von Spee’s fifty-third birthday. That morning, he summoned his captains on board Scharnhorst and, standing before a large map of the Pacific, told them what he planned to do. The squadron would remain together, he said. Given the likelihood of Japan’s entry into the war, it would not return to Tsingtao. Instead, they would go to the west coast of South America where, owing to German influence, they would enjoy better facilities for supply and communication with home. On the American coast, they would face no enemy warships and, if the war lasted long enough, they would have a chance from there of breaking through for home.
Typically, Admiral von Spee asked his captains for their opinions. Karl von Müller of Emden suggested an amendment to the admiral’s plan: “If coaling the whole squadron in East Asian, Australian and Indian waters presents too great difficulties, I asked might we consider the dispatch of at least one light cruiser to the Indian Ocean.” Müller proposed his own ship, Emden, the squadron’s most modern and fastest. Spee thought about it and agreed; a single light cruiser could coal from captured steamships, a squadron could not. That evening, the East Asia Squadron sailed from Pagan for the coral atoll of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. Early the next morning, with rain falling, seamen on the other ships were surprised to see Emden and one of the colliers suddenly turn out of the formation. The signal “We wish you success” ran up Scharnhorst’s halyard, and Müller replied, “I thank Your Excellency for the confidence placed in me.” Once the light cruiser had disappeared to the south, the squadron learned that Emden was bound for the Indian Ocean.
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg, the armed merchant cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, the liner Yorck, and eight supply ships moved slowly eastward toward Eniwetok, traveling at the 7- to 10-knot speed of the supply ships. Even so, on one ship carrying livestock, the animals were so hurled about in the swell that many bones were broken and, bellowing and bleating, they were pushed into the sea. The ships held frequent battle drill, loading and reloading the guns, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau aiming at each other as targets. At the end of the day, the officers watched the sunset and then retreated to the wardroom to gather around the piano, while the men sang or smoked in the moonlight.
At noon on August 19, the German squadron approached Eniwetok, a green fringe of palms and sun-baked beach between the sky and the water. Behind lay an immense coral atoll and a vast lagoon sufficient to shelter an immense number of ships. Here Spee remained for three days, relatively secure in the knowledge, gained from intercepted wireless traffic, that the nearest enemy force, an Australian squadron, was far to the southwest. But he had no other news; on August 11, the German wireless station on Yap in the western Carolines had been destroyed by the British cruiser Minotaur. In order to maintain a tenuous contact with Berlin, Spee sent Nürnberg back to Honolulu to pick up newspapers and mail and to advise the Naval Staff by cable, “I shall proceed to Chile . . . arriving at Juan Fernández on Octo-ber 15.” Meanwhile, his caravan of ships departed Eniwetok on August 22 and continued its progress across “the seemingly limitless desert of the Pacific Ocean.” The crews were baked by the equatorial sun; the thermometer often recorded 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The nights were worse. “In the evening,” wrote Captain Maerker of Gneisenau, “the portholes have to be closed and blacked out so that the heat becomes unbearable. Then of course there is nothing to do but think and that’s bad.”
The squadron’s next stop was Majuor, an atoll at the southeastern edge of the Marshall Islands. This was another spacious lagoon, another expanse of shallow turquoise water distinguished from the dark blue of the outside ocean, another beach of hot sand with palm trees stirring in the hot wind. Here, on August 26, Spee learned of Japan’s declaration of war. Here, too, he was joined two days later by the armed merchant cruiser Cormoran, which had escaped from Tsingtao, escorting two cargo steamers and two other store ships. In all, the admiral now had 16,593 tons of coal and 3,000 tons of water in reserve. When he sailed for Christmas Island on August 29, the German cruisers carried coal in sacks on their decks.
Admiral von Spee continued slowly east across the wide, empty ocean, his progress marked only by the long trails of black smoke pouring from his funnels. On September 1, the squadron crossed the 180th meridian, adding a calendar day, which permitted oneGneisenau officer to celebrate his birthday twice. On the seventh, they reached Christmas Island—on the equator, a British possession intermittently visited by gatherers of copra. Here, Nürnberg rejoined them, having paused at Fanning Island to cut the British cable running from the Fiji Islands to Hawaii. From Honolulu, Nürnberg brought news. She had learned that on August 30, Apia, the capital of German Samoa, had been occupied by New Zealand troops. Von Spee summoned another council of captains and proposed a surprise descent on Samoa in hopes of catching British vessels anchored in the harbor.
The squadron left Christmas Island on September 9 and crossed the equator the next day. Samoa, their destination, was a range of volcanic islands, some of the peaks rising 4,000 feet out of the sea. A strait separates the two large islands of Samoa; the eastern island was American, the western had been German. With luck, a surprise attack by Spee’s squadron might catch in the bay several steamers engaged in supplying provisions for the newly arrived New Zealand garrison. With even better luck, the battle cruiserAustraliamight be found at anchor; if so, Spee planned to attack her with torpedoes. But when he reached Apia before dawn on September 14, the anchorage was deserted except for a three-masted American schooner and a smaller sailing vessel. To send sailor landing parties ashore and attempt to recapture the island would have been too costly in casualties and ammunition; the Germans steamed away without firing a shot. When Spee heard the Apia wireless station, out of range of his guns, broadcasting his position, he decided on the simplest of naval ruses: he first turned and steamed to the northwest; then once out of sight of land, he again headed east. The success of this deception was to have terrible consequences for the British navy.
Admiral von Spee’s next stopping point was the isolated, British-owned Suvorov Island, 500 miles east of Samoa, but finding that a huge ocean swell prevented coaling, he continued another 700 miles to Bora-Bora, an island of the Tahiti group in the lush French Society Islands. Bora-Bora, with its volcanic mountains, dense foliage, and settled population, was a welcome change from the flat, sun-baked, deserted coral atolls they had left behind. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau anchored off Bora-Bora, displaying no national flag. The French authorities, believing the visitors were English, sent out a police officer in a boat flying the tricolor and offered to help “the British admiral.” The policeman met only German officers who spoke English or French, and the subterfuge continued as other representatives of the local government came on board to present a huge bouquet of flowers, pass along war news, and, in response to gentle questioning, describe the defenses of Papeete. The Germans paid with gold for coal, pigs, poultry, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and several oxen, slaughtered immediately. In the afternoon, as the cruisers weighed anchor, a large French flag was hoisted in a farewell salute from the shore. In reply, the Germans politely raised the German naval ensign.
From Bora-Bora, Spee continued on to Papeete, the port and capital of Tahiti. Papeete, its harbor and town lying in the shadow of 7,000-foot volcanic peaks, was known to be defended; as the German squadron approached on the morning of September 22, the cruisers prepared to lower boats for an armed landing. But the French had been warned from Bora-Bora: all navigation aids in the harbor had been removed; the town’s inhabitants had fled to the hills; all supplies of coal that Spee might use had been set afire, and a huge black cloud was spreading over the harbor. Spee fired briefly at the anchored French gunboat Zélée, which capsized and sank. From the hills, French artillery fired back, their white puffs of smoke showing amidst the trees until Spee’s gunners silenced them. Afterward, the French sent a steamer to Samoa to report the attack, but not until Septem-ber 30 did the news reach London.
From Tahiti, Spee took his squadron 850 miles farther east, to the French Marquesas. Arriving off the island of Nuku Hiva on September 26, he remained for seven days, coaling and stocking fresh provisions. The crews went ashore to bathe in fresh water and the admiral paid a courtesy visit on the Catholic mission and collected more specimens of tropical plants.
On October 2, when Spee left the Marquesas, sailing southeast, he was leaving behind the sunny climate and lush, flowering landscapes of the tropics. Now, angling down toward the coast of South America, the crews found the temperature cooler and they ceased going barefoot on deck. The length of the voyage was beginning to tell: sand mixed with soda was used instead of soap; dysentery and beriberi began to appear. Spee’s objective was Easter Island, a solitary, volcanic, treeless speck of land lying off all trade routes. On the way, Scharnhorst’s wireless room picked up a signal from the German light cruiser Dresden, 3,000 miles away. Dresden had come around the southern tip of South America from the Atlantic and now was off the west coast of Chile; she signaled that she was probably being followed into the Pacific by the British armored cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth. On October 4, Spee signaled Dresden to join him at Easter Island. Other ears, however, could pick up wireless signals: this message fromScharnhorst was intercepted by a British wireless station at Suva in the Fiji Islands. Passed to London, it provided the Admiralty not only with the East Asia Squadron’s position but also with its destination. Spee, unaware, believed that his long voyage was approaching a successful conclusion. On October 11, writing in his diary at sea, he noted that 5,000 tons of coal were due at Easter Island, to be brought by colliers from San Francisco escorted by the light cruiser Leipzig. “If no enemy ship approaches Easter Island,” he wrote, “we can, with fresh coal, continue [to the coast of Chile] via Juan Fernández.”
Dresden arrived at Easter Island first, during the night of October 11. Admiral von Spee’s squadron arrived the following day, anchoring in Angaroa, also known as Cook’s Bay, on the island’s deserted east coast, away from the little colony. The supply shipsYorckand Göttingen came alongside the armored cruisers, but the long, southwesterly swell rolled the ships day and night, slamming them against each other, impeding coaling and the hoisting out and launching of boats. On October 14, Leipzig rounded the northern point of the island, bringing with her three colliers from San Francisco with 3,000 additional tons of coal.
[Leipzig’s cruise had been relatively uneventful. At the beginning of August 1914, she was at Mazatlán Bay on the west coast of Mexico in company with a British sloop and an American warship. Before hostilities began, Captain Johannes Haun sailed north and ten days later was off the entrance to the Straits of San Juan de Fuca, the gateway to Vancouver and Seattle. On August 11, he coaled at San Francisco and then lay off the Golden Gate for five days, keeping Allied shipping in port. On September 3, the Naval Staff signaled Haun to “transfer cruiser warfare to southwest America and the Atlantic.” Moving south, he operated with little success between the coast of Peru and the Galápagos Islands until October 1, when he received orders from Berlin to rendezvous withDresden.On October 3, Dresden signaled that she was on her way to Easter Island to join Spee and, accordingly, Leipzig also steered for Easter Island.]
Spee’s reinforced squadron was now up to full strength: two armored and three light cruisers.
Easter Island, a possession of Chile, lies 2,200 miles west of South America. Seven miles across at its widest point and thirty-four miles in circumference, the island and its rough grass then supported 250 Polynesian inhabitants, 12,000 sheep, and 2,000 head of cattle. The administrator and nominal governor of the island was the manager of the sheep and cattle ranch, a British subject named Percy Edmonds. The island had no contact with the world other than that provided by a Chilean sailing vessel, which arrived twice a year to carry its beef and wool to market. Without wireless, the islanders knew nothing of the world war; Edmonds, accordingly, was happy to supply Von Spee with fresh meat and vegetables. Cattle were lassoed and slaughtered on the beach, and boatloads of beef and mutton went out to the ships. The Germans also bought livestock for the future, and Gneisenau departed Easter Island with eleven lambs and a calf penned on her steel deck. Edmonds accepted payment in checks payable by a German bank in Valparaíso, which subsequently and “vastly to his astonishment and relief” were honored.
One morning, the admiral and his elder son, Otto, from Nürnberg, went ashore to look at the mysterious statues for which Easter Island is famous. There were scores of these giant, monolithic figures, between twenty and thirty feet high and wearing conical brimmed hats. Most were lying prostrate when the two German visitors saw them, but once they stood in rows on terraces at the water’s edge. Curiously, all originally were looking, not out to sea as commonly imagined, but inland. The largest weighed up to fifty tons. How had they been transported from the mountain quarries? Whom did the faces represent? Gods whom the carvers wished to propitiate? Chiefs who wished to leave an image of themselves behind?
[Sadly, the statues offered the inhabitants little protection against the perils of this world. An early-eighteenth-century population of 4,000 had plunged to 175 by the end of the nineteenth; internecine warfare, Peruvian slavers, and smallpox were responsible. In 1888, when Chile annexed the island, the survivors were confined to a single village and given 5,000 acres to farm for their subsistence. The remaining 30,000 acres of grasslands were assigned to the grazing of cattle and sheep.]
At the other end of the island, these questions were of such consuming interest to a group of visiting Britons, the members of an archaeological expedition headed by the husband-and-wife team of Scoresby and Katherine Routledge, that they did not bother to cross the island to look at the German ships. Mrs. Routledge, hard at work, declared that she had no intention of riding for four hours “to gaze at the outside of German men of war.” Her concern, rather, was that the visiting officers would come to visit their site, “and being intelligent Germans, would photograph our excavations. We therefore . . . covered up our best things.”
Spee rested at Easter Island for six days. At five p.m. on October 18, with his coal bunkers full and his storage lockers replenished, with lambs and calves penned on his decks, he left for Más Afuera, one of the Juan Fernández group of volcanic islands, 450 miles from the Chilean coast. Leipzig, sent ahead to reconnoiter, reported that Más Afuera was clear. Eight days and
1,500 miles later, on the morning of October 26, the German squadron reached Más Afuera. On the island’s northwest side, a sheer wall of rock rose 3,000 feet straight from the sea. At the base of this gigantic cliff lay the island’s best anchorage, a little underwater ledge no deeper than twenty-five or thirty fathoms beyond which the bottom plunged thousands of feet to the ocean floor. Here, the ships cautiously took soundings and anchored. From their decks, the seamen looked up at the volcanic cliff, the steep, thickly wooded slopes cut by zigzag paths, and the thousands of goats nibbling the dry grass. Because Más Afuera was inhabited only by fishermen and their families, Von Spee ignored its Chilean nationality. One afternoon while the squadron was coaling in the damp air and heavy swell, the admiral went ashore to observe the island’s seabirds and bring back some of its early-blooming spring plants.
Admiral von Spee remained at Más Afuera for three days and two nights. Then, in bright moonlight on the night of October 28, the Germans steamed away, leaving behind the massive figure of the rock cliff, which for a long time was visible across the water. A day and a half later, when the ships were forty miles west of the port of Valparaíso, “in glorious sunlight, we saw the snow-capped summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain of the Andes, rising above the haze of the coast.” The Pacific voyage of the East Asia Squadron was over.
Admiral von Spee had crossed the great ocean, but up to this point, his achievement—beyond the worry he had caused the British Admiralty—had been minimal. He had done no military damage and, because there was no British trade in the regions he had traversed, he had taken no prizes. His voyage had been a technical success; his ships had steamed 12,000 miles through tropical heat without engine trouble; he had kept them supplied, and the morale of his men remained excellent. But, in three months of war, he had done little to contribute to the German cause. From this failure, however, one ship of the East Asia Squadron was excluded. This was Emden.
The light cruiser Emden was the most successful German commerce raider of the Great War. Her forty-one-year-old captain, Karl von Müller, demonstrated what could be done by a fast, modern ship commanded by a man of outstanding ability. Tall and blond, with delicate features and a quiet manner, Müller displayed the qualities Britons liked to associate with their own naval officers: daring, skill, courage, and chivalry. For almost three months after its detachment from Spee’s squadron—that is, from August 14 until November 9—this 3,500-ton ship, operating in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, ravaged Allied shipping and paralyzed trade along the east coast of India. A single light cruiser compelled the Admiralty to keep ships in ports and provide strong escorts for Anzac troop convoys. During these seventy days, Müller intercepted twenty-nine Allied and neutral merchantmen, sinking sixteen British merchant ships, a Russian cruiser, and a French destroyer. He was ingenious: Emden had three funnels; Müller quickly made a fourth out of canvas, disguising his ship as an English four-funneled light cruiser. He was scrupulously courteous, even courtly, to his prisoners. No seaman taken from the ships he sank was harmed; all were sent into port on another intercepted ship at the first opportunity. When the captain of one British merchant ship about to be sunk with explosives asked whether he could bring his harmonium to safety, Müller obliged, although the German sailors assigned the task grumbled about “furniture removal.” Two French sailors killed in action against Emden were wrapped in tricolor flags and buried at sea with military honors and a gun salute. Müller presided and made a speech about fallen heroes.
Emden began her marauding career in the Bay of Bengal and between September 10 and September 14 sank eight steamers on the approaches to Calcutta before the Admiralty realized that the ship had left the Pacific. Müller’s enterprise flourished so magnificently that at one point, said one of his officers, “we had five or six vessels collected at one spot. You could just see the tops of the funnels of one, the next was under the water right up to her decks, the next was still fairly normal, just rolling from side to side as she filled with water.” All vessels trading in the bay were immediately held in port. In darkness on the night of September 22, Müller approached to within 3,000 yards of the port city of Madras, switched on his searchlights, and during half an hour fired 125 shells at the Burmah Company’s oil tanks, destroying nearly half a million gallons of kerosene. On October 28, he entered Penang roads at dawn and torpedoed and sank an anchored Russian cruiser. The following day in the open sea, he sank a French destroyer by gunfire.
The British public, seeing that a few German cruisers were apparently doing whatever they chose on the oceans and sinking British merchantmen day after day, was astonished and indignant. Total losses of British tonnage were infinitesimal relative to the nation’s huge maritime resources—Emden and Karlsruhe, the other successful raider, between them sank 39 merchant ships out of 4,000 vessels at sea, 176,000 tons out of 16 million—but the public demanded to know why, given British naval supremacy, this was happening at all. “The Emden’s company have proved their gallantry,” wrote the London Daily Chronicle. “We admire the sportsmanship of their exploits as much as we heartily wish that the ship may soon be taken.” The Admiralty offered a variety of excuses but, as the naval historian Arthur Marder has written, “the chief reason is that the sea is very large and afforded ample opportunities, with its many archipelagos, for the game of hide and seek.”
And then, at last, Emden was caught. On November 9, Müller approached the Cocos Islands, where the operators of the cable station saw him coming and sounded an alarm. A large Australian troop convoy bound for the Red Sea and Egypt happened to be passing fifty-five miles to the north and heard the signal. The escorting Australian light cruiser Sydney, 3 knots faster, 2,000 tons heavier, and with bigger guns than the Emden, was dispatched, and within two and a half hours, the Emden, burning and wrecked, was driven onto a reef, where Müller surrendered. He and his officers were allowed to keep their swords and were sent to Malta as prisoners for the rest of the war. Once her raiding career was over, public anxiety in Britain metamorphosed into admiration greater than that accorded to any other German warship in the Great War. “It is almost in our heart to regret that the Emden has been captured or destroyed,” said the Daily Telegraph. “The war on the sea will lose something of its piquancy, its humour and its interest now that theEmden is gone.”