Indignation at the defeat at Coronel was enhanced in the homeland by the humiliations currently being suffered at the hands of von Spee’s detached commerce raider, von Müller’s Emden. Since parting company with the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron at Pagan Island in the Marianas, east of the Philippines, on 13 August, von Müller had slowly made his way westward into the Indian Ocean, where he correctly estimated the richest pickings were to be found. The passages between the islands of the Dutch East Indies were a major shipping route, leading from Calcutta and Singapore to Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Indian Ocean itself was a British lake, always filled with liners and merchantmen and now also with government-chartered ships carrying men and war materials from the ports of the Indian empire to Egypt and Europe.
Von Müller began what was to prove the most sensational commerce-raiding campaign since the eighteenth century at modest tempo. Having been warned out of Dutch imperial but neutral waters by a local coast-defence battleship in late August, he made his way into the Indian Ocean by 5 September, en route avoiding HMS Hampshire, a more powerful cruiser, whose presence he detected by wireless interception, but meanwhile capturing a neutral ship, Pontoporos, loaded with British government coal. He took her into company, to join his own collier, Markomannia. On 10 September he captured, plundered and sank Indus, a troop transport which had not yet loaded her passengers. Indus had a wireless set, unusual for a ship of only 3,993 tons, but von Müller got control of the bridge before she could send off a warning. On 11 September, Kabinga was the victim. Von Müller used her to offload his captives and sent her away, the beginning of a chivalrous practice that would win him international admiration, even from his enemies. On 13 September, Emden intercepted Killin, loaded with poor-quality coal; she was sunk by gunfire. The same day Diplomat, a fine ship carrying tin, was intercepted and sunk. Her loss affected prices on the London commodity market.
Emden’s next encounter was with a neutral, the Italian Loredano, which was released. As soon as it was out of sight of the Germans, at the entrance to the port of Calcutta, it signalled by semaphore to the British City of Rangoon, which had wireless, news of its experience. City of Rangoon wirelessed back to the Calcutta authorities, who held up three ships leaving port, and passed the intelligence on. Via the Royal Navy’s intelligence officer at Colombo, the naval base in the island of Ceylon, it reached the Admiralty in London on 14 September and was relayed to Admiral Jerram, commanding at the China station, on the night of the 15th–16th. Next day HMS Hampshire, which Emden had eluded in the Dutch East Indies at the beginning of the month, was sailed from Singapore in pursuit, together with HMS Yarmouth; also alerted were HMS Minotaur and the Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki and cruiser Chikuma. All five ships mounted heavier guns than Emden, and several could exceed her speed.
None, however, got a smell of her in the course of a concerted search, although Emden kept close to the shipping lanes. On 14 September she sank the empty British merchantman Trebboch and, soon afterwards, the Clan Matheson, which was run down while attempting to escape. The need then was to coal, and von Müller set off towards the Andaman Islands, in the middle of the Bay of Bengal, to load from Pontoporos, which was still in company. En route Emden intercepted wireless signals announcing his recent sinkings, some from the released Kabinga. Near Rangoon he stopped but released a neutral Norwegian ship, Dovre, which warned him of the presence of two French cruisers, Dupleix and Montcalm, and two British armed merchant cruisers.
Von Müller, feeling the pressure of the chase in the upper Bay of Bengal, now decided to steam south to attack the oil storage tanks at the port of Madras. This was a gesture of sheer bravado, tweaking the lion’s tail, and it risked an encounter with one of the stronger ships searching for him; but, as he wrote in his after-action report, “I had this shelling in view simply as a demonstration to arouse interest among the Indian population, to disturb English commerce, to diminish English prestige.”32 On the night of 22 September, the Emden approached to within 3,000 yards of the harbour, illuminated the six storage tanks of the Burmah Oil Company by searchlight and opened fire. In ten minutes five of the six tanks were hit and 346,000 gallons of fuel destroyed. Emden then retreated into the darkness and got clean away.
During the next five weeks, from 23 September to 28 October, Emden had an extraordinary run of luck, though luck was combined with cunning and skill. Von Müller, who closely questioned any captive who would talk, and pored over shipping news in captured newspapers, planned his wanderings across the shipping lanes with care and forethought. His intention in late September was to head back to the Dutch East Indies, where local agents would have arranged for him to coal and resupply out of sight of the authorities in that vast archipelago. After the success of his raid on Madras, however, he decided on a sweep of the shipping lanes in the western Indian Ocean, which carried the traffic from British Africa and the Suez Canal to the Bay of Bengal and the China Seas. The remote atolls of the Chagos, Laccadive and Maldive Islands also provided shelter for coaling, and he contrived to keep a collier with him. He was soon to capture several more, among the thirteen ships he took in this period. Most he sank, finding them either in ballast or loaded with cargo he could not use, but on 27 September he took Buresk, loaded with 6,600 tons of the best Welsh coal destined for the Royal Navy’s China station, and on 19 October the Exford, with 5,500 tons. The cargoes of these two ships were sufficient, if he could escape pursuit, to keep him cruising for a whole year. He took them into convoy, having sent Markomannia off to the Dutch islands to await his arrival. The ships he did not sink were loaded with captives and sent off to British ports; most cheered the “Gentleman-of-War” on parting company.
Von Müller now decided on another provocative gesture, a descent on Penang, in the British Malay States, which he had been informed was used by enemy warships. So it was; in the early morning of 28 October Emden found in the harbour the Russian light cruiser Zhemchug, the French light cruiser d’iberville and the French destroyers Fronde, Mousquet and Pistolet. Zhemchug, whose captain had gone ashore on pleasure, was quite unprepared to defend itself and was overwhelmed by gunfire and torpedo.D’iberville, Fronde and Pistolet were in dockyard and out of action. Mousquet put up a brave fight but was sunk with a few salvoes. Emden picked up the survivors, later transferred to a stopped British steamer, and made off into Dutch waters.
By late October, the Admiralty in London was beside itself with rage at Emden’s exploits. It was not only that von Müller had turned himself into a hero, almost as much admired by British seafarers as by neutrals and his own countrymen. His depredations were seriously interfering with the strategic as well as mercantile traffic of the empire, besides damaging the prestige of the Royal Navy, mistress of the seas, and of Britain’s imperial officials. Shipping clung to port all over the Indian Ocean, afraid to put to sea, whileKönigsberg was also operating independently. The security of the imperial convoys, bringing the Australian, New Zealand and Indian armies to the war in Europe, was severely compromised. The effort to run down the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, lost in the wastes of the South Pacific, was hampered by the activity of a single light cruiser, against which dozens of British, French, Russian and Japanese warships were deployed without effect.
The degree of Allied frustration is conveyed by a minute written by Winston Churchill on 1 October:
Three transports, empty but fitted for carrying cavalry, are delayed in Calcutta through fear of Emden. This involves delaying transport of artillery and part of a cavalry division from Bombay . . . I am quite at a loss to understand the operations of Hampshire . . . What has happened to Yarmouth? Her operations appear to be entirely disjointed and purposeless . . . if the Königsberg is caught, the three light cruisers hunting her should turn over to the Emden . . . It is no use stirring about the oceans with two or three ships. When we have got cruiser sweeps of eight or ten vessels ten or fifteen miles apart there will be some good prospect of utilising information as to the whereabouts of the Emdenin such a way as to bring her to action . . . I wish to point out to you [the First Sea Lord and others] that an indefinite continuance of the Emden’s captures will do great damage to the Admiralty reputation.33
Churchill’s anger was justified, as the search for both Emden and the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron was ill co-ordinated, divided as it was between several Royal Navy stations—the China, the South America, the Australia and the East Indies—and four navies, the British, Japanese, French and Russian; the search was further hampered by the personal and mechanical deficiencies of the French and Russians. Yet Churchill, all the same, was living in the past. His formula for a “cruiser sweep”—disposing eight ships at the limit of visual range and proceeding in line abreast—was no different from Nelson’s and covered no larger an area, only about ninety-six miles wide and twenty-four deep, reckoning visual range from the masthead to be about twelve miles. As the Indian Ocean from Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies to the east coast of Africa is over 3,000 miles across, the statistical chance of finding Emden was very slim indeed, since von Müller scrupulously observed wireless silence; he used his wireless to listen, not send. That helped him to evade pursuit. Although intercepted signals—the call sign (QDM) of Hampshire had become familiar—could not yield a bearing, since the technique of radio direction-finding had still to be discovered, the strength of the signal gave some indication of range and so could be used to manoeuvre away from a pursuer.
Emden’s real safety, however, lay in the vastness of the seas, and in late October von Müller decided on a shift to waters he had not yet raided, right across the Indian Ocean in the corner formed by the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. To get there he proposed to coal first off Sumatra, from the captured Buresk, and then in the remote Cocos and Keeling Islands, opposite the Sundai Strait between Sumatra and Java. That move was in the nature of a deception, to suggest to the enemy that he was heading for Australia.
Buresk, when found on 31 October, brought worrying news. Both Pontoporos and Markomannia, his original colliers, had been taken by HMS Yarmouth. Since their crews knew nothing of his new plan, however, von Müller remained confident; he sent another captured collier, Exford, to await him at North Keeling Island, whither he slowly followed. Part of his plan was, before coaling, to destroy the wireless and cable station on Direction Island, part of the Cocos and Keeling group, both to cover his movements and to heighten British anxiety. In the early morning of 9 November Emden’s steam pinnace and two cutters were loaded with armed sailors, under the command of Kapitänleutnant von Mücke, and sent ahead to destroy the wireless mast and cable terminals.Emdenfollowed.
The Cocos and Keeling Islands were a romantic anomaly, a private colony owned by the Clunies Ross family under grant from Queen Victoria. Their only importance to the British empire was as a communication point in the wireless and cable system; it was run by technicians of the Eastern Telegraph Extension Company. British telegraph technicians in distant islands saw themselves in 1914, however, as agents of imperial rule, and those on Direction Island were men of fibre. Before von Mücke’s party got ashore, but after von Müller had uncharacteristically transmitted a badly timed signal to Buresk to join him, they wirelessed, “What code? What ship?” Emden at once began jamming, but the station managed to get off two more signals, repeated several times, first “strange ship in entrance,” then “SOS, Emden here” just as von Mücke arrived.
Von Müller had made a disastrous mistake. The previous day Emden had picked up a call sign which was rightly interpreted to be that of an enemy warship; but her operators estimated the sender to be 200 miles distant and departing southward. Von Müller therefore judged her to be steaming to German Southwest Africa, where dissident Boers had raised an anti-British rebellion. The signal’s importance was therefore discounted. It was, in fact, of crucial and fatal significance. Direction Island knew that it had come from HMS Minotaur, an armoured cruiser, and it was to her, on picking up Emden’s transmission to Buresk, that it signalled.
Minotaur was not close; she had, however, been sailing in company with the Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki and Her Majesty’s Australian ships Melbourne and Sydney, light cruisers like Emden but exceeding her in speed and firepower. They were the escort to the first of the imperial convoys to leave Australia and, since Minotaur’s departure, were maintaining wireless silence. The convoy commander briskly decided to detach Sydney, which was only two hours’ steaming from Direction Island, and sent a visual signal.Sydney departed at twenty-six knots.
Aboard Emden more mistakes were being made. Had von Müller warned von Mücke at once he might have gathered in his landing party and still escaped; it would have been a near thing but possible. Both men, however, wanted the destruction of the wireless and cable station to be done thoroughly, so both tarried. Even when smoke appeared on the horizon, von Müller decided it was from the summoned Buresk; a masthead report was of two masts and a single funnel, which fitted. Between 9 and 9:15 a.m., however, the picture altered, ominously: there were several funnels, which could only mean a warship. Von Müller sounded the ship’s siren repeatedly, rang the alarm bell, hoisted the international code flag A, meaning that he was weighing anchor. As the pinnace put off, however, Emden began to move. The landing party made desperate gestures. Emden slowly gathered speed. By 9:17 she had gained the open sea, and her crew were going to action stations.
Sydney, with eight 6-inch guns to Emden’s ten 4.1-inch, and a two-knot advantage in speed, was bound to win the coming encounter unless her crew failed the test; but they belonged to an even younger navy than the German and were determined to prevail. Moreover, Emden had left all ten of her principal gunlayers ashore. Fire was opened at 9:40, by Emden; she hit with her third salvo. Thereafter, Sydney’s heavier weight of shell began to count. At ten o’clock she caused major damage; during the next hour she shotEmden to pieces. The Germans stood resolutely to their guns, expending 1,500 shells, but by 11:15 most of her armament was knocked out, and von Müller drove the wreck ashore on North Keeling Island. The survivors, spared the awful fate of Cradock’s men in the freezing seas of the southeast Pacific, remained aboard until made prisoner by Sydney next day.
That was not quite the end of the Emden saga. Before Sydney could return to Direction Island, von Mücke had commandeered a trading schooner he found in the harbour, embarked his landing party and sailed off to Sumatra. There he found a German collier, working in the local trade, which he appropriated from her co-operative captain. In her he and his Emden men crossed the Indian Ocean to Yemen, in south Arabia, a possession of Germany’s Turkish ally. Leaving his ship, he commandeered some native craft and sailed up the Red Sea, then transferred to camels, fought a battle against the Bedouin and won, got on to the Hejaz railway—to be destroyed by Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab Revolt—and so arrived to a hero’s welcome at Constantinople, the Turkish capital, on 23 May 1915. Most of the party he had brought from Direction Island survived to tell their extraordinary tale.