Wireless, in the end, had proved Emden’s downfall. Her captain had observed all the correct rules of keeping silence. It was his urge to add to his ship’s laurels by attacking the communication outpost at Direction Island that cast him under the heavier guns of the enemy.
A similar urge would seal the fate of von Spee’s squadron. After his spectacular victory over Cradock at Coronel, von Spee enjoyed a brief triumph at Valparaiso. It was an odd setting for a celebration of defeat of British naval power, despite the presence of a large German colony, for the seafront of the Chilean port was, then as now, dominated by a monument to Chile’s principal naval hero, commander of her fleet in the war of independence against Spain, the British admiral Cochrane.
Moreover, strong though German influence was in Chile, the republic’s government was anxious to preserve its credentials of neutrality. Von Spee was told, on his arrival, that he would be held to the legal limitation of twenty-four hours for a visit, by not more than three ships. Von Spee took Scharnhorst, Gneisnau and Nürnberg into harbour, detaching Dresden and Leipzig to the island of Más Afuera, so far offshore that he correctly calculated he could there breach neutrality regulations with impunity. While in Valparaiso, where thirty-two German merchantmen were sheltering, he received cabled instructions from Berlin. These warned him that enemy warships were operating all over the Central Pacific, West Indies and South Atlantic and advised him to concentrate his ships and attempt to “break through for home.”34
The Berlin telegram, and news received from local Germans, persuaded him that he had no choice but to leave the South Pacific. British and Australian ships barred the way westward into the Indian Ocean; powerful Japanese squadrons were gathering in the Central Pacific islands; British and French forces blocked the exit from the Panama Canal into the Caribbean. Though there were even stronger enemy concentrations in and at the head of the Atlantic, his only chance of escape lay in the hope of evading them, perhaps covered by bad weather, in a dash up the South Atlantic towards northern waters. He was encouraged in that view by a further message from Berlin, brought to him on 18 November from Valparaiso, which suggested that units of the High Seas Fleet might be sailed to escort him into the North Sea; this message was disingenuous to the point of dishonesty, for the German Admiralty had already learnt, by painful experiment, how closely the Royal Navy controlled the channels which von Spee would have to negotiate.
Von Spee seems understandably to have been plagued by doubt in the days after Coronel. Committed to a break-out into the South Atlantic round Cape Horn, he dawdled on his way southward. He coaled as he could from colliers despatched by German agents into the maze of bays and fiords that penetrate the Chilean coast above Cape Horn. As he meandered southward, he gathered news of the collapse of the Kaiser’s overseas empire. Von Spee knew that the Pacific possessions, in New Guinea, Samoa, the Bismarcks, the Marianas, the Carolines, had already fallen into the hands of the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Japanese. Now he learnt that German Africa was falling away also. Perhaps he retained a hope that the Boer rebellion in German Southwest Africa would distract British naval strength; it would affect his judgement about the Royal Navy’s deployment of force into the South Atlantic.
On 6 December, when at Picton Island near Cape Horn, von Spee decided to make a descent on the British colony of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. He gave as his reason to his captains that the squadron could destroy the coal stocks there, and the wireless station, and that intelligence gave no indication of British warships being in the vicinity; he believed that those available had gone to South Africa. He also hoped to capture the governor in retaliation for the New Zealanders’ capture of the governor of German Samoa.
Governors apart, a matter of pique, von Spee’s arguments for attacking the Falklands suggest a failure of judgement; perhaps he had been too long at sea, too long in the loneliness of command. The attack was only likely to attract attention to his whereabouts, without doing damage to the enemy. It was not a rational decision. It was to result in the destruction of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, in circumstances horribly equivalent to those of its victory over Admiral Cradock, his ships and men.
Coronel had outraged the British people and the Royal Navy. As soon as the news of the defeat was received, Winston Churchill, political head of the Admiralty as First Lord, and Admiral Fisher, its professional chief as First Sea Lord, had agreed that there must be revenge. Admiral Stoddart, nominally commander of the 5th Cruiser Squadron but effectively acting as senior naval officer in South American waters, was ordered to position a collection of cruisers astride the trade routes off Brazil on 4 November. On the same day another and exceptional order was issued. Churchill had first thought of detaching one of the precious battlecruisers from the Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow, to be supported by the armoured cruiser Defence, which Admiralty dithering had earlier denied Cradock. Now Fisher, First Sea Lord again since 1 November, demonstrated his legendary dynamism. He persuaded Churchill that the situation in the far south required making doubly sure and that two battlecruisers should be sent, not one. Invincibleand Inflexible were directed to sail at once, to coal at Channel ports and then to proceed to the South Atlantic. They were first to coal again in Portugal, then proceed to Albrohos Rocks, off Brazil, where they would rendezvous with Stoddart’s cruisersCarnarvon, Cornwall, Kent andGlasgow; Glasgow, the sole survivor of the Battle of Coronel, was currently at Rio de Janeiro, repairing damage. Stoddart’s squadron also included the armed liners Macedonia and Orama. Once assembled, the ships would proceed south, under the command of Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, who was bringing the battlecruisers.
Sturdee was fiercely disliked by Fisher, who had allowed him to go only to get him out of the Admiralty, where he had been serving as Chief of Staff. He was, nevertheless, a good choice, a complete professional, a devotee of tactical theory and a man of powerful character. He had grasped, moreover, the cardinal importance of maintaining wireless silence. Alerted to the disturbing fact, as he steamed southward, that French wireless stations in west Africa were transmitting Allied warships’ callsigns, he instructed the operators aboard Invincible and Inflexible that “the utmost harm may be done by indiscreet use of wireless. The key is never to be pressed unless absolutely necessary.” In practice, he had less success in controlling wireless insecurity than he may have realised. By stopping to coal at the Portuguese port of St. Vincent, he revealed his big ships’ presence in the Atlantic, and the news was duly passed on by operators of the Western Telegraph Company to their colleagues in South America. German agents thus learnt of the arrival of Sturdee’s ships at Albrohos Rocks on 24 November; by an inexplicable oversight, however, the news was not communicated to Berlin, and so it did not reach von Spee, then still off southern Chile, where he would have been given it by local German officials. Even worse, though the German consul in Buenos Aires also got word of Sturdee’s movements on 24 November, he did not telegraph it across the Andes to Valparaiso but sent the news by steamer, to Punta Arenas, where it would take a week to arrive and which the German squadron did not in practice visit.
Von Spee’s bad luck was compounded by bad judgement. Instead of making best speed into the Atlantic, on his chosen homeward journey, he tarried around and off Cape Horn, loading coal he did not really need; his decision to attack the Falklands might have been taken several days earlier, in which case he would not have found Sturdee’s avenging battlecruisers awaiting him. It was further bad luck for von Spee that Sturdee, too, had tarried on his voyage south, coaling in a leisurely way at Albrohos Rocks and engaging in target practice against a towed target, which fouled one of Invincible’s propellers with its wire; a diver had to be sent down to clear the obstruction, causing further delay. As a result it was not until 7 December that the squadron arrived at Port Stanley, the Falklands harbour, when von Spee might have come and gone as much as a week earlier. That it did so without the Germans having any inkling of its proximity was due to Sturdee’s one substantial effort to preserve intelligence security, his order that any wireless messages were to be transmitted by Bristol or Glasgow, whose presence in the area was known to the enemy.35
Glasgow, since escaping from the disaster of Coronel, had already been once to the Falklands, in company with the doddering Canopus, left her there, gone on to Rio de Janeiro to dock thanks to Brazilian complaisance, and was now on a return journey. Once arrived, in company with Invincible and Inflexible, and the other cruisers Carnarvon, Kent, Cornwall and Bristol, Glasgow’s captain and crew found the situation at sleepy Port Stanley transformed. Under prodding from the Admiralty, via the local wireless station, the colony had been put into a state of defence. Canopus had been beached, in a mud berth that allowed her 12-inch guns to command the entrance and its approaches, her marines had been sent ashore to stiffen the local militia, her light guns had been dismounted to provide dockside firepower, and the mouth of the harbour had been closed by electrically controlled mines.
After 7 December, when Sturdee’s ships entered the anchorage, it was therefore impossible for Port Stanley to be taken, the governor to be kidnapped, the coal stacks to be burnt or the wireless station to be destroyed. Those dangers, by then, were for the British secondary considerations. The question was whether von Spee could be caught.
Von Spee was working to a different agenda. His decision to attack the Falklands had also been influenced by the calculation that he could re-coal on a major scale from Port Stanley’s stocks and that, by firing the residue and causing other destruction, he could deprive the Royal Navy of its most important base in the South Atlantic, including its communication centre. From the intelligence available, he discounted the possibility of a superior British force being present; the last wireless report he received, on the night of 6 December, from the collier Amasie, said that the harbour was empty except for Canopus. The report was then correct; that it was falsified by Sturdee’s arrival within the next twenty-four hours is a perfect demonstration of the primacy of real-time intelligence.
Real time benefited Sturdee perhaps undeservedly. Had he cracked on from Albrohos Rocks instead of shepherding his flock of cruisers southward in line of search abreast, he would have arrived at Port Stanley in ample time to have been observed and for von Spee to have been warned off. Having escaped that bad outcome, he now risked another by persisting in his lack of hurry inside Port Stanley harbour, a strange characteristic in a man so forceful. By breakfast on 8 December, only Carnarvon and Glasgow had fully refuelled; the two battlecruisers still had colliers alongside; Kent had not begun to replenish, while Cornwall and Bristol both had engines open for maintenance. It was to an unprepared squadron that at four minutes before eight Glasgow hoisted the flags signifying “enemy in sight.”
The alert had first come from Sapper Hill, one of the heights surrounding Port Stanley that were to be assaulted by the soldiers of the British Task Force sixty-six years later in 1982.36 Von Spee, whose surety of touch had been so complete at the outset of his war cruise, had now added a final and fatal addition to his cumulative list of misjudgements; instead of sending forward his light cruisers, whose speed would have permitted escape from the trap, and a warning to the rest of the squadron, he used Gneisenau as his lead ship, with the faster Nürnberg as companion. As a result, two ships jointly unable to defend themselves or to outrun pursuit ran headlong into disaster.
Von Spee, trundling along astern in Scharnhorst, had ordered his squadron to clear for action as early as 5:30 that morning. By 8:30 the captain of Gneisenau, then well ahead, made out smoke rising over Port Stanley but concluded that the coal stocks were being fired, as they had been by the French on the squadron’s descent on Tahiti three months earlier. He also got the colony’s wireless mast in view. Not until 9:00 a.m. did he learn from an officer stationed in the foretop that other masts were visible, tripod ships’ masts in Port Stanley harbour. Tripod masts meant only one thing: British big-gun ships.
Maercker, the captain of Gneisenau, had always doubted von Spee’s belief that any big British ships in southern waters were bound for Africa, where German troops and Boer rebels were waging colonial warfare. His disbelief was now to be confirmed. First, asGneisenau hove into range, Canopus opened fire from its mud berth with its ancient 12-inch guns. At over 11,000 yards, fragments of shell hit Gneisenau’s after-funnel. She and Nürnberg had already turned away and begun to work up speed; but asNürnbergloyally stuck by the bigger ship, both were limited to 20 knots. They were soon under pursuit by Kent, a 23-knot armoured cruiser, then by the light cruiser Glasgow, 25 knots, and Carnarvon. Cornwall, a sister ship, was the last to leave, soon working up to 22 knots. Before her had gone the battlecruisers, both capable of 28 knots.
Von Spee, on hearing the report of tripod masts, had apparently concluded that British battleships were present, perhaps Iron Duke and Orion class, with a best speed of 20 to 21 knots; he may, even after his misjudged arrival, have calculated that he could get away. Gneisenau’s hasty withdrawal had conferred half an hour’s, perhaps a whole hour’s, start, and there was always the chance, in sub-Arctic latitudes, of running into concealing fog. The East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron stretched out, Scharnhorst andGneisenauboth striving to exceed 20 knots.
Maercker had actually wanted to fight, and there was logic in that urge. The German armoured cruisers might have inflicted disabling damage if they had attacked right at the outset. The anchorage was crowded, it was apparent that few of the British ships had steam up, most were lightly armoured or not armoured at all and even Inflexible and Invincible, the first and therefore oldest battlecruisers in the fleet, were not much better protected than Good Hope and Monmouth had been. Von Spee, however, had answered his request to press forward with the signal “Do not accept action, head east at full speed.”37 By 9:45, when the battlecruisers cleared Port Stanley, the German squadron was heading for the horizon.
It was a sunny day, as the evening of Coronel had been, but time favoured von Spee even less than it had Cradock. In the sub-Arctic summer, eight hours of daylight promised. At 10:20 Sturdee hoisted the Nelsonian signal “General Chase”; it was indeed older than Nelson. By 10:50 Sturdee, conscious of having time in hand and not wishing to scatter his squadron, slackened the battlecruisers’ speed so that the slower ships could keep up. They nevertheless continued to overhaul the enemy, and it was clear that the battlecruisers’ big guns would soon tell. At 12:50, having meanwhile sent the crews to lunch, Sturdee ordered, “Engage the enemy.”
Inflexible and Invincible opened fire at an estimated range of 16,500 yards; Glasgow, the only ship able to keep pace with them, did not have that reach. When the range came down to 15,500 yards, von Spee ordered his light cruisers to disengage—as Cradock had so ordered Glasgow at Coronel—and they turned away and made for South America. They were followed by Kent, Cornwall and Glasgow; Carnarvon was now managing to keep up with the battlecruisers.
Between 1:20 and 2 p.m., they were engaged very effectively by the Germans, whose 8.2-inch guns actually outranged the British 12-inch, though they could do little damage. Von Spee’s ships also benefited from the funnel smoke that impaired British range-taking. By clever manoeuvering, von Spee was for a period able to close to a distance at which his secondary armament could hit. His bravado alarmed Sturdee, who could not risk damage to his ships when they were so far from dockyard, and he bore away. Not until after three o’clock, by which time his turret crews and gunnery direction officers had begun to get the measure of the enemy, did he shorten the range again. Then his heavier weight of shell began to tell, and by 4 p.m. Scharnhorst had suffered so many 12-inch hits that she was clearly soon to sink. Her upper works were torn and twisted, and fires raged within her hull. Von Spee turned towards the enemy to attempt a final response with torpedoes, but at 4:17, with the sea lapping her deck, Scharnhorst turned over and sank.
There were no survivors, as there had been none from Monmouth and Good Hope. With Gneisenau still energetically in action, the British could not pause to lower boats, and they swept on to leave whoever had not succumbed to fire and explosion to drown in the icy seas. Among the victims were von Spee and his sons.
Maerker, in Gneisenau, now had to defend himself against three enemies, the two battlecruisers and Carnarvon. His plight was hopeless, but he refused the call to surrender. The new German navy was trying to win a reputation for doggedness to equal that of the old mistress of the seas. At 6 p.m., as 200 survivors of the original 850 cheered the Kaiser, the sea overwhelmed the fireswept deck on which they stood, and Gneisenau turned over. The British ships rescued 190; Maerker was not one of them.
Kent, Cornwall and Glasgow, the only ship to have fought in both the South American battles of 1914, rapidly overhauled the German light cruisers that von Spee had ordered to save themselves. Leipzig was sunk by Glasgow and Cornwall; her flag still flew, and only eighteen of her crew survived. Nürnberg was sunk by Kent, twelve of her crew were picked up but only seven survived exposure to the freezing Atlantic. Of more than 2,000 sailors in Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg and Leipzig, almost all had been killed or died in action. The balance sheet with Coronel was nearly exact.
Dresden, for the moment, eluded her pursuers and was to remain beyond their reach for another three months. At first she hid in the maze of inlets that penetrate the Chilean coast above Cape Horn. Her captain waited in vain for colliers to resupply her. Eventually he went north into the Pacific, hunted by the British cruisers, which he evaded or outran. In early March 1915, however, the intelligence department of the Admiralty was sent an intercepted German telegram by an agent in Chile which, when decoded, revealed that Dresden was awaiting coaling off Coronel. Glasgow and Kent, co-ordinating their movements by wireless, eventually found Dresden at Más a Tierra—with Más Afuera it forms the island group of Juan Fernandez—on 14 March and closed. The German ship had only eighty tons of coal left and was at anchor, without hope of escape; a last wireless message from Berlin, relayed via Chile, had given Captain Lüdecke permission to seek internment. The British did not wait for the Chilean authorities to intervene. Glasgow opened fire and, though it was returned, inflicted in a few minutes sufficient damage to force Lüdecke to raise a white flag. As firing ceased, he sent a boat to parley for surrender, his object being to gain sufficient time to scuttle. By a bizarre coincidence, the officer he chose was Lieutenant Canaris, who, during the Second World War, was to direct the Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service. Luce, the captain of Glasgow, refused to negotiate, but Canaris won enough delay to allow flooding and explosive charges to send Dresden to the bottom. He and the surviving members of her crew were subsequently taken into internment by the Chilean navy.
The German cruiser campaign in distant waters was over—very nearly. Königsberg, which had never belonged to the East Asiatic Squadron, was to survive until July 1915, holed up in the swampy delta of the Rufiji River in German East Africa, where it would eventually be destroyed by the gunfire of two shallow-draught monitors, Severn and Mersey, directed by the observation of aircraft, the whole force having been sent from England at great expense and difficulty earlier in the year.
The cruiser campaign had never threatened to undermine Britain’s control of the seas. It had not even seriously damaged British maritime trade. The total of ships sunk by Emden and Karlsrühe, the most effective raiders, was thirty-two, gross tonnage 143,630; that was to be set against a total of nineteen million tons of British shipping plying the seas. Two of Germany’s armed merchant cruisers, the liners Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinz Eitel Friedrich, had done almost as well, sinking 93,946 gross tons. The East Asian Cruiser Squadron proper had sunk no merchantmen at all.
Yet the German cruisers had caused serious alarm to the Admiralty and forced the diversion of very large numbers of warships to distant waters, away from the crucial areas of naval confrontation, the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Of the situation on 12 November, when Inflexible and Invincible were voyaging southward towards the Falklands, Winston Churchill lamented, “the strain on British naval resources in the outer seas was now at its maximum—a total of 102 ships of all classes. We actually could not lay hands on another vessel.” Admittedly, the total included many units that pre-dated the naval revolution, unfit to fight in home waters; but to it must be added French and Russian ships, and Japanese ships, if they were tied to the Pacific. If the maximum German commitment of cruisers to distant waters is reckoned at eight, the strategic return on the ratio was considerable.
Several British and foreign warships had been sunk, Monmouth, Good Hope, Zhemchug, Mousquet, Zelée and others damaged. The imperial convoys bringing Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and Indian troops to Europe had been delayed in sailing, and very many British and friendly neutral ships, carrying essential supplies, had been confined to port for fear of capture or sinking, in places as far apart as San Francisco, Rangoon and Calcutta. Kreuzerkrieg (cruiser warfare) could not be dismissed as a failure.
Yet it had failed in the end. The prestige of the Royal Navy, dented by Coronel, had been completely restored by the victory of the Falklands, while that of the young German navy had, after the brilliant episode of Coronel and the dashing exploits of theEmden,been peremptorily deflated. The Kaiser’s navy ended 1914 as it had begun: a service with a reputation to make.
Why had Kreuzerkrieg failed? The persistent need to coal, which limited the cruisers’ freedom of action, and the drag of accompanying colliers, was one reason; yet Emden had coaled only eight times and was never short. Indeed, shortage of ammunition, rather than of coal, may be thought the German captains’ real difficulty; after Coronel, von Spee’s magazines were half empty and, even had he managed to escape from the Falklands, he would have had insufficient ammunition to fight his way through to home if engaged by British ships in the Western Approaches or the North Sea. The failure to position ammunition ships, as colliers were positioned, may be thought a cardinal error by the German Admiralty.
In the last resort, however, cruiser warfare failed because the Germans could not conceal the movements of their ships. A steady stream of clues as to their whereabouts were picked up, often with great rapidity, sometimes in real time, and circulated with efficiency by the British between the Admiralty, local commands and pursuing naval units on the worldwide wireless and cable network. No delay, such as that which had afflicted Nelson, impeded the chase or obliged a return to base to pick up a lost scent—as after Nelson’s first visit to Alexandria.
There were failures. At the outset von Spee concealed his movements with great skill by observing wireless silence and listening to the transmissions of Allied ships that did not keep quiet; Emden was particularly skilful at evading HMS Hampshire in the Bay of Bengal by steering away from her call sign (QMD), made possible by listening for a weakening of the signal, an anticipation of direction-finding, which current technology did not yet permit. Von Spee was equally skilful, in the days before Coronel, by using a sole ship, Leipzig, to transmit and relay messages, thus disguising the size of his force.38
Cradock failed to detect the deceptions. On the other hand, von Müller brought about his own downfall by his foolhardy decision to attack the Cocos and Keeling Islands, a quite unnecessary act, which ran him straight into the line of sight of the wireless station and provoked the transmission of perhaps the earliest ever piece of real-time intelligence of the electronic age, “strange ship in entrance.” It brought Sydney, with its superior 6-inch guns, down to the harbour in less than two hours.
Cradock was also incautious in the preliminaries to Coronel, his signals between ships revealing to the enemy the presence of his squadron, information amplified by messages from German agents ashore. His incaution was more than replicated, however, by von Spee, who chose to put his trust in inaccurate reports of the emptiness of Port Stanley harbour and then, for the sole purpose of destroying its not very important wireless station, steamed his squadron into a position dominated by the big guns of the British battlecruisers, which had arrived undetected, thanks to scrupulous observation of wireless silence, and from which the inferior speed and firepower of his ships allowed him no escape.
Strategically, the First World War, as a naval war, was to be dominated by the new invention of wireless. Coronel and the Falklands, unlike any other naval battles of 1914–18 though they were, belong to an emerging pattern. Before 1914 fleets at war operated in their search for each other as they had always done, working by line of sight and visual signal. After 1914, intelligence gathered by line of sight could be transmitted to infinite distance at the speed of light. Navies would take time to understand and implement the potentialities of the new technology. Yet it had altered for ever the nature of war at sea. Cradock and von Spee were victims of a failure to understand the new world, Sturdee a perhaps undeserving beneficiary. Less than thirty years after his victory, a new electronic dimension, radar, would almost eliminate the importance of line of sight. The Nelsonian world would have gone for ever.