The outbreak of war between Britain and Germany on 4 August 1914 found the main battle fleets concentrated in their home bases. The German High Seas Fleet was in harbour in its North Sea ports, the British Grand Fleet at anchor in the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow, within the Orkney Islands off the north of Scotland. The Grand Fleet exceeded the High Seas Fleet in strength by twenty-one dreadnought battleships and four battlecruisers to thirteen dreadnoughts and four battlecruisers. Both navies also had numbers of obsolete pre-dreadnoughts, the newer with the battle fleets, the older elsewhere; the Germans kept theirs in the Baltic, the British at Portland where they blocked the English Channel. The Grand Fleet’s base at Scapa Flow had been chosen so as to deny the Germans exit from the North Sea.11
Both fleets also had large numbers of heavy and light cruisers and destroyers, the British considerably more than the Germans. While the latter kept theirs mostly with the High Seas Fleet, the British from the outset based many at Harwich, in the southern North Sea, whence they patrolled aggressively toward the German coast. They were constantly on the alert lest the Germans “came out,” though their strategy was to do so only if they were certain of being able to beat a safe retreat. The Royal Navy wanted to destroy the Kaiser’s navy; it, by contrast, sought merely to hold the British “at risk.” It did so as long as it remained intact and in harbour; but while it stayed there, the naval situation in home waters was a perfect stalemate.
Only in more distant seas was there the possibility of an unforeseen encounter in the old Nelsonian style. The Mediterranean was such an arena of uncertainty, and there, right at the beginning, Germany’s Mittelmeerdivision, a rather grandiose title for a force of two ships established in 1912, achieved a dramatic success. The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau eluding the efforts of the British Mediterranean Fleet to neutralise them, succeeded in gaining Constantinople and joining the Turkish navy. At the beginning of November they sailed into the Black Sea to bombard Russian ports, thus inaugurating Turkey’s war with Russia and so with its British and French allies. One outcome of this development would be the Gallipoli campaign; another was the court-martial of Admiral Troubridge “for failure to pursue the chase of His Imperial German Majesty’s ship Goeben, being an enemy then flying.”12 Troubridge was acquitted but never again employed afloat. It was an appalling humiliation for a descendant of one of Nelson’s most trusted captains, and it was to have repercussions that went far beyond the Mediterranean.
Some memory of Troubridge’s misjudgement may indeed have influenced another British cruiser admiral at the outset of the Second World War, when a “superior force,” the German 11-inch-gun pocket battleship Graf Spee, was cornered by one heavy and two light British cruisers, Exeter, Ajax and Achilles, off Montevideo, Uruguay, at the mouth of the River Plate. The British then did what Troubridge was accused at his court-martial of not doing, so disposing themselves that, by manoeuvre, they nullified the Graf Spee’s superiority in range and weight of shell and forced it into flight.
Graf Spee was so christened at her launch in memory of Germany’s other leading distant-water admiral of 1914, the commander of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, Maximilian Graf von Spee. A south German aristocrat, a Catholic, von Spee differed in character from the cold east Prussian Protestants who dominated the German army. Sensitive and warm-hearted, he was revered by his officers and men; but they also recognised his fighting spirit and his dedication to the German imperial idea; in those aspects he was as much a subject of the Kaiser as Hindenburg, Ludendorff and von Lettow-Vorbeck, the charismatic German commander in east Africa, with whose brilliantly evasive campaign in the bush his own buccaneering exploits at sea were to be intertwined.
In August 1914 Germany’s distant cruiser force consisted of eight ships: five formed the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron proper, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Leipzig, Nürnberg and Emden, based at Tsingtao in China. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were “armoured cruisers,” as the type was then known, mounting a main armament of eight 8.2-inch guns and capable of twenty knots; both had been launched in 1907, and they were the crack gunnery ships of the Kaiser’s overseas fleet. Leipzig, Nürnberg and Emden were light cruisers, launched in 1906–8, effectively unarmoured but mounting ten 4.1-inch guns and capable of twenty-four knots. Of the same type were Königsberg, based in east Africa, and Dresden, which was cruising off the Atlantic coast of South America. At the moment of the war’s outbreak, Leipzig was off the Pacific coast of Mexico, on station to protect German nationals during the current civil war; Nürnberg was en route to relieve her but was nearer China than her destination. Emden had just left Tsingtao, on news of the heightening tension in Europe, and was steaming to meet the main squadron in the Central Pacific. Her role had been to protect and organise the colliers which were to join von Spee if a cruiser campaign were to begin.
Tirpitz, the creator of the German navy, had disapproved of spending on cruisers. In the memorandum he wrote in June 1897, on which Imperial Germany’s naval programme was based, he wrote that “commerce raiding and transatlantic war against England is so hopeless, because of the shortage of bases on our side and the superfluity on England’s side, that we must ignore this sort of war.”13 He was later to alter his view but it determined the composition and disposition of the German fleet in 1914, very much to Britain’s advantage. It was also objectively correct. Britain had piecemeal, over 250 years, accumulated a constellation of bases across the world, including—among those which were to figure importantly in the coming cruiser war—Hong Kong in China, Singapore in the East Indies, Aden in Arabia, the Cocos and Keeling group in the Indian Ocean and the Falklands in the South Atlantic. There were hundreds more, providing cable and often wireless facilities and also, of even greater significance, coaling stocks.
Oil had just begun to supplant coal as the fuel source in the most modern warships; the turbines in Britain’s new fast battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class were oil-fired. Most, however, remained dependent on coal. That required a return to base at less than weekly intervals or, even more tiresomely, a rendezvous with a collier and the tedious, difficult business of transferring hundreds of tons of coal from deck to deck, either in an anchorage or, should weather permit, in the open sea. The Royal Navy, with its multiplicity of coaling stations, could spare itself the trouble of coaling at sea. The German cruisers, in the weeks to come, would cruise encumbered by accompanying colliers or be forced to arrange rendezvous with detached colliers in remote inlets.
Despite the difficulties, and despite the disapproval of Tirpitz, Germany’s overseas navy was committed to the war against commerce from the moment of the declaration. Orders stated that “in the event of a war against Great Britain, or a coalition including Great Britain, ships abroad are to carry out cruiser warfare unless otherwise ordered. Those vessels which are not suitable for cruiser warfare are to fit out as auxiliary cruisers. The areas of operations are the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific . . . Our ships abroad cannot count in wartime either on reinforcements or large quantities of supplies . . . The aim of cruiser warfare is to damage enemy trade; this must be effected by engaging equal or inferior enemy forces, if necessary.”14 The Kaiser’s personal instructions to cruiser commanders went further, urging them to seek an honourable outcome in all circumstances, where honour was understood to mean fighting to the last. Earlier orders, not cancelled, held out the hope, however, of inflicting defeat on potential enemies in foreign waters, citing in 1907 the superiority enjoyed by the Asiatic Squadron over the French, Russian and even British forces in its area. That was optimistic but not unrealistic, as events would show. Germany’s colonial navy in the years before the war formed a cohesive unit of high quality, both in personnel and material. The same could not be said of its local opponents, who, though numerically superior, counted on too many old ships manned by second-class crews to be reckoned really formidable.
What was undeniable was the vulnerability of the enemy’s trade. Germany, with 2,090 steamships, was the world’s second largest mercantile power, a fact often overlooked in discussion of its reasons for building the High Seas Fleet. Its merchant fleet was, however, vastly exceeded in size by the British, with 8,587 steamships; when those of its empire were added, they amounted to 43 per cent of the world’s shipping. They sailed every sea along every trade route, carrying not only the majority of the world’s trade but also supplies essential to the home country’s survival, including two-thirds of its foodstuffs.15 The Admiralty, moreover, had come to disbelieve in convoy, which had occupied so much of the Royal Navy’s energies in the French Wars of 1793–1815. Apart from troop convoys, it had no plans to protect merchant shipping in 1914 and made none until the crisis of the U-boat war in 1917. It trusted to the vastness of the oceans to protect merchantmen, sailing independently, at the war’s outbreak and for three years thereafter.
It also expected, of course, that its own distant squadrons would hunt down and destroy enemy commerce raiders should they interfere. Despite the concentration of the navy’s most modern warships of all classes in or near the North Sea, enough still remained to assure Britain’s worldwide naval presence in the distant waters of its eight historic overseas stations: China, New Zealand, Australia, North America and West Indies, South America, Africa, Mediterranean, and East Indies. Some of the ships on station when war broke out—river gunboats and obsolete cruisers—were unfit for oceanic operations. Those capable to stand in the line of battle included the old battleship Triumph, armoured cruisers Minotaur and Hampshire and light cruisers Newcastle and Yarmouth on the China station; the modern light cruiser Glasgow on the South American station; the old battleship Swiftsure, the light cruiser Dartmouth and the obsolete light cruiser Fox on the East Indies station; and on the Australian and New Zealand stations the modern battlecruiserAustralia and the light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne of the Royal Australian Navy and the obsolete light cruisers Encounter and Pioneer. Australia and New Zealand (which had paid for the battlecruiser New Zealand, serving with the Grand Fleet in home waters) had agreed that their navies’ ships should come under Admiralty control in war circumstances.
Though numerous—fourteen in all—these warships were of mixed quality. Australia could sink any German colonial cruiser at no risk to herself at all, but she was to be tied, at the outset, to convoying the troopships of the Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force; Dartmouth, Sydney and Melbourne were the equal of the modern German light cruisers; the British armoured cruisers, Minotaur and Hampshire, were obsolescent and not up to the German class. Armoured cruisers had become an anomaly: too weak to fight battlecruisers, too slow to catch light cruisers, capable only of combat with others of their own class. It was to be the Royal Navy’s misfortune in the coming cruiser war that its armoured cruisers were the inferior of the German, inferior as both were to the new battlecruiser class.
In the early weeks of the war, Britain was to send reinforcements to the overseas stations. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commanding on the North America and West Indies stations, received the armoured cruisers Suffolk, Berwick, Essex andLancaster;none was to take part in the cruiser war, but their sister ship Monmouth was. Detached to South America, she eventually joined the squadron Cradock was to form for anti-cruiser action. So did Good Hope, another armoured cruiser detached to him, into which, on 15 August, he shifted his flag. His final reinforcements were the old battleship Canopus, launched in 1896—its 12-inch guns were manned by elderly reservists, and its engine-room was supervised by a chief engineer who, as events would reveal, was mentally unfit for service—and the Otranto, an armed merchant cruiser. Armed merchant cruisers—to serve, with very mixed results, in both world wars—were liners or fast freighters, fitted with guns and crewed by naval officers and ratings, which admiralties expected to give useful service as convoy escorts or commerce raiders. In favourable circumstances some did; in others they proved deathtraps.
The Germans had also commissioned armed merchant cruisers; indeed, to its merchant fleet of high-speed liners of such companies as Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutsche-Lloyd belonged some of the fastest passenger ships in the world. At the outbreak most instantly took refuge in neutral ports, particularly in North and South America; but their captains, who frequently belonged, as many of their sailors did, to the German naval reserve, stood ready to join the German raiding force when opportunity offered. When guns and ammunition could be transferred to them, as was to happen, they became effective units in the commerce war.
Other elements in the commerce war were ships of the French, Russian and Japanese navies. France, with bases in Indo-China and the Pacific islands, had several cruisers and destroyers in Asiatic waters, including the Dupleix and Montcalm; Russia, not a serious Pacific naval power since its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, nevertheless had one or two units deployed; Japan, which entered the war against Germany on 23 August, altered the balance of naval power in the Pacific to Germany’s disadvantage altogether. Japan, whose army had been trained by Germany, had no quarrel with the Kaiser’s empire at all. Its declaration of hostilities was narrowly selfish. It correctly anticipated that, by aligning itself with Britain and France, it was likely to acquire possession of the German island chains of the Marianas, Carolines and Bismarcks. It did so; in the short term, the adherence of Japan to the anti-German alliance was also of great importance in limiting the German cruiser threat. In the long term, Japan’s annexation of Germany’s central and south Pacific islands laid the basis for its successful aggression against the European and American Pacific empires in 1941–42. Rabaul, in particular, Germany’s main base in the Papuan archipelago, was to become Japan’s principal place d’armes in the struggle with the Americans and Australians for New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in 1942–43.
Japan began its war against Germany by laying siege to Tsingtao on 2 September. It was to last until 7 November. The garrison, which knew resistance was hopeless, nevertheless fought with great tenacity. Two local defence gunboats, S.90 and Jaguar, engaged the landing fleet; the defenders manned the redoubts, only gradually giving ground under heavy bombardment. The fortress commander had been cut off from the outside world since 14 August, when the British cable ship Patrol had cut the cables to Shanghai and Tschifu.16 His garrison, mainly naval infantrymen, had also lost any hope of escape with the departure of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron some weeks earlier. Admiral Graf von Spee, after an exchange of dinners with his British counterparts, had parted from them on 14 June, on the friendliest terms, to cruise the German Pacific islands with the heavy ships. In the last weeks of July, as news of the heightening crisis in Europe reached him, he persuaded Berlin to cancel an order for Nürnberg to return to Tsingtao, calling her instead to meet him at Ponapé, an outlier of the Caroline Islands. There, on 4 August, he learnt that Britain had declared war but also that “Chile is a friendly neutral” and that “Japan will remain neutral.”17
On this partially correct information, von Spee now decided his immediate course of action. Before leaving Tsingtao, he had instructed von Müller, captain of the Emden, that his principal role was to protect the colliers which assured the squadron’s mobility. In the event of “strained relations,” they were to leave Tsingtao and proceed to Pagan Island, in the Marianas. Emden was to seek to rejoin him. In the knowledge that Britain’s forces on the China station included a battleship and that HMAS Australia, capable of obliterating his whole squadron, was operating to the south, he set course for Pagan on 5 August and there on the 12th was joined by Emden, the armed merchant cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the provision ship Yorck. They brought four colliers; it was a warning of the dangers surrounding them that four others had been sunk or captured on passage by the British battleship Triumph and the armoured cruiser Minotaur—aboard which von Spee had dined companionably in June.
The northwestern Pacific was clearly becoming too dangerous a theatre for the East Asiatic Squadron; it was shortly to become even more dangerous when, on 23 August, Japan entered the war. The Imperial Japanese Navy, which had defeated the Russian with spectacular completeness in 1905, now comprised three dreadnoughts and four battlecruisers, all recently built in Japanese yards, seven heavy cruisers and scores of other cruisers and destroyers. Japan was not yet quite a first-class naval power, as she would become within twenty years. She could, nevertheless, devour Germany’s Asiatic fleet. It was time for von Spee to be off. With the British to the west and south, the Japanese to the north and the Australians to the south, he correctly decided to head southeast, towards Chile, where there were many German nationals and businesses, much sympathy for Germany’s cause and a labyrinth of uncharted inlets in which a marauding fleet might hide.
Before departing, however, von Spee agreed to a division of his force. Dividing force is a violation of a cardinal military principle. It was one that applied particularly strictly to von Spee. By keeping his ships together, he obliged his enemies to do likewise, which reduced their chances both of finding him and of falling upon German merchantmen plying the ocean. With only four ships—Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg and Emden—under command, and while awaiting Leipzig and Dresden to join, logic required he maintain the strongest possible force. Nevertheless, he succumbed to the persuasion of Emden’s captain. Von Müller argued that, by cruising detached with the squadron’s fastest ship into the Indian Ocean, he could spread widespread confusion and do serious damage to Britain’s interests, particularly along the coasts closest to its greatest imperial possession, India. On the afternoon of 13 August, von Spee sent von Müller a written order: “You are hereby allocated the Markommania [a collier] and will be detached on the task of entering the Indian Ocean and waging cruiser warfare as best you can.”18 Thus began the Emden epic, as dramatic as any passage in the history of Nelson’s frigate captains and a story that was to electrify friend and foe alike in the coming months of naval operations.
It was therefore with only three warships that von Spee set out on his traverse of the Pacific, across 120 degrees of longitude, to offer his challenge to Britain’s naval power in the southern oceans; also in company were the armed merchant cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, eight colliers and supply ships and the armed merchantman Cormoran, formerly the Russian ship Ryaezan, captured by Emden on passage from Tsingtao and equipped with guns taken from a redundant coastal warship. The squadron’s first destination after leaving Pagan on 13 August was Eniwetok, in the Marshalls, nearly forty years later to be the scene of an American nuclear test. Von Spee coaled in the atoll’s lagoon between 19 and 22 August, then sailed for Majuro, also in the Marshalls. En route he detached Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Cormoran to raid commerce; the former was to rejoin him later; the latter, out of coal, was forced to seek internment in the American island of Guam. He also sent Nürnberg to Honolulu, already an American possession, with signals to be forwarded by cable to Berlin. His calculation here was sharp. As Nürnberg had last been seen by outsiders on the Mexican coast, and news of her joining the main squadron had not been broadcast, her arrival at Honolulu would not reveal his whereabouts.
Nürnberg rejoined von Spee at the remote Christmas Island on 2 September, having meanwhile visited nearby Fanning Island to cut the British cable between Fiji and Honolulu. The action risked giving away his position and, indeed, during the next month, von Spee displayed an uncharacteristic recklessness. At Christmas Island he decided to sail to Samoa, now no longer German, since it had been captured by a New Zealand expeditionary force the previous month. He accepted that he might be confronted by superior force, perhaps even the Australia, but apparently took the view that, by approaching at dawn, he could prevail by the use of torpedoes, a very sanguine hope. In fact the harbour at Apia was empty and he sailed away, but left behind a trace of his presence. Another 500 miles to the east he called at Suvarov Island, hoping to coal, but was driven off by heavy seas, so proceeded to Bora Bora in the French Society Islands, where the inhabitants had not as yet heard of the war. They supplied him with fresh food while the ships coaled. His next objective was Papieté, capital of French Tahiti. There, however, news of the war had reached the garrison, which set fire to the coal stocks and put up resistance. There was no wireless station; but, as von Spee drew away, the governor sent a ship to Samoa with a report, which reached the Admiralty on 30 September.
Berlin was out of touch with the squadron since, with the loss of Rabaul in the Bismarcks to the Australians, the rear link to Nauen had been broken. It had therefore decided not to attempt to control von Spee’s movements or strategy, but the German naval high command expected him to proceed to South America and perhaps thence, via Cape Horn, into the Atlantic. The British Admiralty, by contrast, was principally concerned by the danger that von Spee might move east, to operate in Australasian waters or the Indian Ocean, where the great “imperial convoys,” bringing Australian, New Zealand and Indian soldiers to Europe, were setting sail. Its anxieties were much heightened by the success of von Müller on Emden, who, while von Spee made his leisurely way eastward across the Pacific, was cutting a swathe through Britain’s merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean.
Against the appearance of von Spee in the South Atlantic, the Admiralty began to dispose ships as early as the first week of September. Local circumstances, particularly the Mexican civil war, had brought about a concentration of ships in the Caribbean during August. Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commanding on the North American station, signalled on 3 September, “Good Hope [armoured cruiser] . . . visiting St. Paul’s Rocks, and will arrive Pernambuco 5th September for orders, Cornwall [armoured cruiser] is in wireless touch proceeding south. Glasgow [light cruiser] reports proceeding with Monmouth [armoured cruiser] and Otranto [armed merchant cruiser] to Magellan Straits [Cape Horn], where number of German ships reported, presumably colliers, and where concentration of German cruisers from China, Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean appears positive.”19 Cradock’s signal was a remarkably shrewd appreciation by a commander not privy to Admiralty intelligence. Pernambuco, the eastward point of Brazil, abutted the main trade routes from Argentina, whence came much of Britain’s beef. St. Paul’s Rocks, off Pernambuco, were an obvious coaling area for German commerce raiders; they were to be much used as a refuelling rendezvous by U-boats during the Second World War. South American ports were full of colliers chartered by local German agents to resupply the commerce raiders, as Cradock indicated.
Cradock then became distracted by his inability to locate Dresden and another German light cruiser, Karlsrühe. About Karlsrühe he need not have worried; after disappearing from view among the remoter islands of the West Indies, she was blown up by a spontaneous explosion in her magazines on 4 November, a fact not known in Britain for three months, though speculation as to her whereabouts would continue to complicate Cradock’s thinking during September and October. Dresden remained a real menace. To guard against her entering the Pacific, Admiral Cradock sent Glasgow, Monmouth and Otranto to the Magellan Straits, at the tip of South America, in early September. Meanwhile, Dresden, having sunk a British collier off the River Plate, itself transferred to the Magellan Straits and then, on advice from the German Admiralty “to operate with the Leipzig,” sailed into the Pacific on 18 September. News of Dresden’s movements prompted Cradock, disastrously as it would turn out, to take Good Hope, his flagship, south to the Magellan Straits also, where he met Glasgow and Monmouth on 14 September.
Communication between Europe and South American waters was complex. The British Admiralty used its intact cable network to send messages to Cerrito, in Uruguay, whence they were wirelessed onwards to the low-power wireless station in the Falkland Islands; that assured reasonably rapid touch with ships in the South Atlantic. Signalling into the South Pacific was more difficult. The Falklands station could not usually reach the Pacific, because of atmospherics and the barrier of the Andes, so warships had to be sent into port at regular intervals to collect cable telegrams, a tedious procedure entailing many delays. The Germans wirelessed from Nauen, as far as its range would carry, to their consuls, who then communicated by cable with German merchant ships in the port nearest to von Spee’s position. South American governments being lax about neutrality regulations, their merchant captains then wirelessed signals onwards and retransmitted those received by the same route homeward.
On 14 September, the Admiralty sent Cradock a long signal that laid the basis for his squadron’s and his own destruction:
There is a strong possibility of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau arriving in the Magellan Straits or on the west coast of South America . . . Leave sufficient force to deal with Dresden and Karlsrühe. Concentrate a squadron strong enough to meet Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, making Falkland Islands your coaling base. Canopus is now en route to Albrohos, Defence is joining you from the Mediterranean. Until Defence joins, keep at least Canopus and one “County” class [i.e. Glasgow or similar] with your flagship. As soon as you have superior force, search the Magellan Straits with squadron, being ready to return and cover the River Plate or, according to information, search north as far as Valparaiso. Break up German trade and destroy the German cruisers.20
This was a strategic rather than tactical directive, and of very wide scope. It committed Cradock to cover both the Atlantic coast of South America, as far north as the River Plate in Uruguay, a merchant shipping focal point, and the Pacific coast as far as the other focal point of Valparaiso in Chile. It instructed him to conduct both commerce warfare and an anti-cruiser campaign. It promised him a ship, Defence, which was later to be retained in the Mediterranean; had it come to him, he could not have been outgunned. It represented Canopus, an obsolete battleship, as an equivalent, which it was not. It implicitly expected Cradock to produce a victory.
The signal, when sent, disguised the Admiralty’s complete ignorance of von Spee’s whereabouts. All it knew was that he was somewhere in the southeastern Pacific, between Fanning Island—a fact established by the destruction of that lonely island’s wireless and cable station—and Cape Horn, an exercise in location subject to error by a factor of thousands of miles and hundreds of degrees of longitude and latitude. On 16 September there was a correction: “situation changed. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Samoa on 14th September . . . left steering N.W. [back towards the Bismarcks] . . . German trade on west coast of America to be attacked at once . . . Cruisers need not be concentrated. Two cruisers and an armed liner would appear sufficient for Magellan Straits and West Coast. Report what you propose about Canopus.”21
The report from Samoa was the outcome of von Spee’s ill-judged visit two days earlier. It might have resulted in disaster, had the Australian fleet been present. Two weeks later he had transferred to the remote Marquesa Islands, last outpost of the French empire in the Pacific. There he was able to coal again in sheltered waters and load fresh food, from islanders who had not yet heard of the European war. Then he set off to even more remote places, first Easter Island, then Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe’s legendary marooning place. At Easter Island he was joined by Dresden and Leipzig which, proceeding independently by guesswork, arrived there to meet him during 1–5 October. The first he knew of their approach was by intercepting wireless signals between them.
Meanwhile Cradock, whose communications with the Admiralty were to be increasingly misunderstood, as theirs with him were to be also, was searching for Dresden along the Atlantic coast of South America. He was alerted to the fact that he was in the wrong ocean only when, on 25 September, he met a British ship which had been chased by her on 18 September, near Cape Horn. Feeling that he was now on the scent, Cradock immediately led his squadron to the Magellan Straits (the normal means of passage between the two great oceans) and put in at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas, where the British consul confirmed that Dresden had indeed been about, using nearby Orange Bay as a base. Finding nothing there, Cradock then reversed course; a complicated toing-and-froing followed, during which he returned in his flagship Good Hope to the Falklands, leaving his accompanying armed merchant cruiser Otranto behind, but, once arrived, almost immediately sent Glasgow and Monmouth back to join Otranto at Punta Arenas, with orders—in accordance with Admiralty instructions as he understood them—to conduct cruiser warfare on the Pacific coast of Chile. At the Falklands, however, Cradock heard by wireless from Otranto that she had overheard German naval wireless signals, which set her off again to Orange Bay, where German sailor scrawls of a “Kilroy was here” sort confirmed Dresden’s presence only a few days earlier. Finding no actual German presence, however, he returned once more to the Falklands.
Cradock, who was to be widely blamed for future disaster, was in an unenviable situation. He was acutely aware of ambient danger—the presence of von Spee’s big ships, probably in the Pacific but perhaps seeking to break into the Atlantic; the lurking menace of the German light cruisers, preying on British trade; the lack of a British base anywhere in his theatre of responsibility, except the Falklands, which did not offer control of Pacific waters; the penetration of the whole Patagonian region by German settlers and officials, all willing and ready to resupply the Kaiser’s ships, shelter their colliers and spy on the Royal Navy; and, as a background to his difficulties, the awful Cape Horn weather which, even in what was the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, brought constant gales, sleet, snow and mountainous seas. To cap all, he was oppressed by his difficulties of communication with his masters in London. They in turn, oppressed by fear of a break-out by the High Seas Fleet, were trying to work a worldwide strategy without touching their gold reserve of modern battleships and battlecruisers locked up in northern Scotland, instead hoping that obsolete units left over from the Victorian navy could keep Germany’s best cruisers on overseas stations at bay. It did not help the management of British naval strategy that the Admiralty’s political chief, Winston Churchill, was currently attempting to direct in person a private war on the north coast of Belgium or that the Royal Navy’s professional head, Louis of Battenberg, was under attack by the popular press as a German princeling, an attack which would shortly lead to his removal from office.
In the circumstances, Cradock appears to have tried to straddle two oceans and two incompatible Admiralty demands: to protect British trade in the Atlantic and to destroy the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron in the Pacific, if that was where it was. Little wonder that his movements in the first days of October appeared confused. However, on his return to the Falklands after his second search of Orange Bay, he received an Admiralty message on 7 October that at last threw light on von Spee’s whereabouts and gave him more or less clear instructions.
On 4 October the wireless station at Suva, in British Fiji, had picked up a message from Scharnhorst in the German mercantile code, reading, “Scharnhorst on the way between the Marquesas and Easter Island.”22 As is now known, the information was correct. The Admiralty anyhow instructed Cradock on 7 October “to be prepared to have to meet them in company . . . Canopus should accompany Glasgow, Monmouth and Otranto, the ships to search and protect trade in combination . . . If you propose Good Hope to go, leave Monmouth on the east coast.”23
The question nevertheless remains whether the Admiralty was yet able to read Scharnhorst’s code transmissions. A copy of the German mercantile code had indeed been seized in Australian waters early in the war but it did not apparently reach the Admiralty until the end of October.24 Perhaps the book was already being used locally. More mysterious are Cradock’s reactions to the Admiralty’s quite clear instructions of 7 October. In his reply on the 8th, he showed that he recognised the likelihood of von Spee’s heavy ships being joined by the light cruisers, making a formidable force. He also advised that he had summoned his old slow battleship Canopus to join him at the Falklands, where he intended “to concentrate and avoid division of forces.” Yet despite his resolve not to divide his forces, he had sent Glasgow, Monmouth and Otranto into the Pacific, under the feebly limiting instruction “not to go north of Valparaiso until German cruisers are located.” He also enquired after the whereabouts of Defence, previously promised to him but retained in the Mediterranean; and he was clearly unsettled by the idea that von Spee might go north, pass through the Panama Canal, if the Americans would so permit, and thus either get home to Germany or open up another commerce war in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the last two weeks of October, the Admiralty and Cradock got disastrously, ultimately tragically, at cross-purposes. The Admiralty made new dispositions in the Atlantic designed to backstop Cradock if von Spee evaded him and broke out of the Pacific; they included the deployment of Defence—at last—and other cruisers from the African station under Admiral Stoddart to the Brazilian bulge. London was also counting on the disposition of the Japanese fleet in the central and western Pacific to limit von Spee’s ability to do harm in that ocean. Over the deployment of strength in what was to prove the critical area—the South Pacific between Valparaiso and Cape Horn—the Admiralty and its admiral on the spot succeeded in misunderstanding each other.
The grit in the works was the condition of Canopus and Cradock’s misunderstanding of his authority over Defence. Defence was an ultimate example of the armoured cruiser idea, bigger, faster, as heavily armoured and more heavily gunned than eitherScharnhorst or Gneisnau; had she joined Cradock, as he believed she would, she would have seen off either of her German equivalents. Canopus, though a battleship, was inferior to all three armoured cruisers, British and German alike. She was thinly armoured, and her 12-inch guns barely outranged those of the Germans. Moreover, her timorous chief engineer had persuaded her captain and Cradock that she could not make better than twelve knots, a cripple’s speed. Cradock accordingly went on ahead from the Falklands into the Pacific, signalling the Admiralty on 27 October that “Canopus’s slow speed” made it “impracticable to find and destroy the enemy squadron. Consequently have ordered Defence to join me . . . Canopus will be employed on necessary convoying of colliers.”25 Unfortunately, the Admiralty misinterpreted the picture, concluding—by a misunderstanding of the role of Canopus or of Cradock’s intentions—that von Spee’s squadron was blocked. If he went north he would fall under the guns of the powerful Japanese fleet. If he went south he would eventually run into Cradock’s cruisers, which the Admiralty appeared to believe would have Canopus in company. It was apparently disbelieved that Cradock would risk an engagement without the support of her 12-inch guns. It therefore concluded that “the situation on the west coast [of South America] is safe” and ordered Defence, which had both the speed and guns to defy von Spee, to remain in the Atlantic. Cradock, a sailor in the Elizabethan tradition who was determined not to repeat Milne’s mistake during the Goeben and Breslau episode of letting any German opponent escape, pushed ahead with his collection of weak ships, leaving Canopus to limp along 300 miles behind. In the late afternoon of 1 November, the two squadrons made contact off the Chilean port of Coronel.
Wireless had already revealed to them each other’s presence. Cradock’s progress up the coast had been reported to von Spee by German merchant ships in southern ports, while the British had been picking up distinctive German Telefunken transmissions for some days. While von Spee now knew, however, that Cradock was approaching with several ships, Cradock had been misled by the Germans’ clever use of Leipzig’s wireless alone to believe that only one German cruiser lay in his path.26 He appears to have thought that the von Spee squadron as a whole was moving northward towards the Galapagos Islands, with a view to traversing the Panama Canal from west to east. In order to verify his supposition, and to send and receive telegrams by cable, he detachedGlasgow,his fast light cruiser, to Coronel on 31 October, with orders to rejoin next day.27
Had Glasgow arrived a few hours later, or stayed a little longer, the impending defeat might have been averted. In London, where the veteran Admiral Sir John Fisher had just resumed the post of First Sea Lord, the Admiralty was revising its assessment of the South American situation, had seen the danger that portended, had ordered Defence to join Cradock post-haste and had stressed that he should meanwhile not fight without Canopus. Glasgow sailed too soon to bring Cradock his fresh instructions. When she rejoinedGood Hope, Monmouth and Otranto, the squadron was receiving strong German wireless signals, apparently transmitted at close range. Since current technology did not permit direction-finding, Cradock decided to form a line of search, with his ships disposed fifteen miles apart—intervals scarcely altered since Nelson’s line-of-sight days—and began to look for the transmitting source.
He believed he was seeking a single ship. Ironically, von Spee, who was now nearby, had the same impression. Having left his island coaling base of Más Afuera, part of the Juan Fernandez group, in the Pacific between Coronel and Valparaiso, on 27 October, he had cruised for three days off the coast, awaiting Cradock’s arrival, but on receipt of news of Glasgow’s visit, moved to cut her off, as he believed, from the main squadron. He, too, was deploying his ships in a line of search when his smoke was sighted byGlasgow, which had just taken up station in Cradock’s formation. A few minutes later the British ships were seen by the German, and both squadrons moved to form a line of battle.28
News of the presence of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was wirelessed by Glasgow to Cradock over the fifty miles of sea that separated them. The admiral might have decided even then to avoid action. Monmouth and Good Hope were faster than the German armoured cruisers, Glasgow no slower than the German light cruisers. Cradock might have turned away and escaped, but he was encumbered by Otranto, which would have had to be sacrificed; and there were other considerations of honour. The Royal Navy always fought. Cradock ordered his ships to form on Glasgow and headed towards the Germans.
A South Pacific summer in Cape Horn latitudes can be a bitter season. So it was on 1 November 1914. Though the sky was clear and the sun bright, a Force 6 wind was blowing, seas were breaking over the smaller ships and the air was very cold. Cradock’s tactical scheme at the outset of the action was to keep out of range until the sinking sun behind him blinded the German gunners. Von Spee hoped to close the range as soon as the twilight protected his ships but silhouetted the British on the western horizon. At eighteen minutes past six, Cradock wirelessed Canopus, 250 miles away, “I am now going to attack the enemy”; it may have been meant as a farewell message.
The Germans, who were waiting for the sun to sink, did not open fire for nearly an hour; meanwhile, the two squadrons slowly converged on a southerly course. About seven o’clock, an officer in Glasgow recorded, “We were silhouetted against the afterglow with a clear horizon behind us to show up the splashes from falling shells while the [enemy] ships were smudged into low black shapes scarcely discernible against the background of gathering darkness.”29 The German big guns, twelve in all, outranged all butGood Hope’s two 9.2-inch; the British 6-inch guns did not have the range to touch Scharnhorst or Gneisenau, which carefully kept their distance. “Sharply silhouetted against the red gold evening sky,” Good Hope and Monmouth were hit repeatedly, and an officer on Glasgow recorded that “by 1945, by which time it was quite dark, Good Hope and Monmouth were obviously in distress. Monmouth yawed off to starboard burning furiously . . . Good Hope . . . was firing only a few of her guns. The fires on board were increasing their brilliance. At 1950 there was a terrible explosion . . . between her mainmast and her after funnel; the gust of flames reached a height of over 300 feet, lighting up a cloud of debris that was flung still higher in the air. She lay between the lines a low black hull lighted by a dull glow. No one . . . actually saw her founder, but she could not have survived many minutes.”30
Monmouth, though the weaker ship, was still fighting and was able to reply to Glasgow’s lamp-signal enquiring “Are you all right?” with the message “I want to get stern to sea. I am making water badly forward.” Those were her last words. Glasgow observed that “[she was] badly down by the bows, listing to port with the glow of her ignited interior brightening the portholes below her quarterdeck.”
At that point Glasgow’s captain decided to leave the scene, on the grounds that a warning needed to be taken to Canopus, steaming up from the south at her best speed; the radio waves were filled by German jamming. As Glasgow fled, seventy-five flashes of shell-fire directed against Monmouth were counted before the horizon blanked off observation. That was not the last sight of the sinking ship. Shortly before nine o’clock the light cruiser Nürnberg found her “with her flag still flying” and reopened the attack. “TheMonmouth still kept her flag flying and turned towards the Nürnberg, either to ram or to bring her starboard guns to bear. Captain von Schönberg therefore opened fire again . . . The unprotected parts of the Monmouth’s hull and also her deck were torn open by the shells. She heeled over further and further and at 2128 she slowly capsized and went down. Von Schönberg subsequently learned that two officers, who had been standing on deck, heard the Monmouth’s officers call the men to the guns; [they] were apparently engaged in stopping leaks.”31
Loss of life in Good Hope and Monmouth was total: of the 1,600 men aboard, those not killed in the gunnery duel drowned in the darkness of the cold South Pacific. Three Germans were wounded; Glasgow, though hit five times, had suffered no casualties at all. Nor had Otranto, which had prudently withdrawn from the action, apparently with Cradock’s endorsement, early on. She was quite unfit to have taken part. The two survivors escaped southward at best speed to find Canopus and, in company, make their way back to the Falklands. The Battle of Coronel, 1 November 1914, was the first British naval defeat since the American war of 1812 and the first defeat of a formation of British ships since the Virginia Capes in 1781. News of it appalled the Royal Navy, the British public, the Admiralty but above all, those in high command, Churchill and Fisher. From the moment they got word of the disaster, they were bent on revenge.