Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Later, Captain Schönberg wrote: “I fired until the Monmouth had completely capsized, which . . . proceeded very slowly and majestically, the brave fellows went under with flags flying, an indescribable and unforgettable moment as the masts with the great top flags sank slowly into the water. Unfortunately, there could be no thought of saving the poor fellows. First, I believed that I had an enemy before me, secondly the sea was so high that hardly a boat could have lived in it. Moreover, all my ship’s boats were secured before the action.” Even so, after the battle, many of Nürnberg’s officers were ill at ease about their slaughter of a helpless enemy. “It was terrible to have to fire on poor fellows who were no longer able to defend themselves,” said Lieutenant Otto von Spee, the admiral’s son. “But their colors were still flying and when we ceased fire for several minutes they did not haul them down.”

  The battle was over. Nürnberg signaled the flagship, “Have sunk enemy cruiser,” and Spee replied, “Bravo, Nürnberg!” There were no survivors from Monmouth or Good Hope. Sixteen hundred British seamen had died. Christopher Cradock, his wish fulfilled, was one of them.

  By 10:15 p.m., Spee decided that Good Hope, Glasgow, and Otranto had escaped. The last two were of little concern, and he believed that Good Hope was so heavily damaged that she would either sink or make for Valparaíso for repairs, in which case he hoped to persuade the Chilean government to disarm and intern her. But there remained the British battleship sighted off Punta Arenas; from signals intercepted by Scharnhorst he knew that the battleship was coming north. Deciding not to risk an encounter with this ship, Von Spee himself turned north at 10:20 p.m.

  On Monday morning, November 2, the day after the battle, the sun was shining, the wind had dropped, the sea was calm, and the ships of the East Asia Squadron, steaming at 10 knots, gently rose and fell in the following swell. In the clear air, the Germans could see the distant coastline of Chile and, more important, far and wide an empty ocean. When Spee ordered a diligent search for the shattered hulk of Good Hope or any evidence of her sinking, the observations made by Leipzig’s crew finally reached him. Admiral von Spee now knew that he had command of the sea in the southeast Pacific. To acknowledge the victory, he gave his ships the opportunity to close his flagship and cheer him, responding, “With God’s help, a glorious victory. I express my thanks and congratulations to the crews.” Assessing the damage to his squadron, Spee found that Scharnhorst had been hit only twice and that both shells had failed to explode. One British 6-inch shell had hit forward on the starboard side above the armored belt, making a hole three feet square and penetrating to a storeroom—but it did not explode. “The creature just lay there,” wrote Spee, “as a kind of greeting.” A second shell hit a funnel without doing serious damage. The four shells that struck Gneisenau had not seriously harmed her. The three German light cruisers had not been hit. Not a single German officer or seaman had been killed; three men from Gneisenau had been slightly wounded. For Spee, the most serious consequence of the battle was that he had expended half of his ammunition. At Coronel, Scharnhorst had fired 422 8.2-inch shells and had only 350 left; Gneisenau had fired 244 and had 528 left. The ammunition had been well spent; even in the heavy sea, the gunnery of the armored cruisers had been superb. Scharnhorst, for example, scored at least thirty-five direct hits on Good Hope. But the fact was that there were no more projectiles to feed to the guns, short of Wilhelmshaven or Kiel.

  In a private letter written the day after the action, Spee analyzed his victory:

  Good Hope, though bigger than Scharnhorst, was not so well armed. She mounted heavy guns, but only two, while Monmouth succumbed to Gneisenau because she had only 6-inch guns. The English have another ship like Monmouth hereabouts and in addition, it seems, a battleship of the Queen class carrying 12-inch guns. Against the latter we can hardly do anything. Had they kept their force together, we should probably have got the worst of it. You can hardly imagine the joy which reigns among us. We have at least contributed something to the glory of our arms—although it might not mean much on the whole in view of the enormous number of English ships.

  At dawn on Tuesday, November 3, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Nürnberg entered the bay of Valparaíso. As international law prohibited more than three warships of a belligerent nation visiting a neutral port at the same time, Leipzig and Dresden remained at sea, escorting colliers to Más Afuera. Entering the roadstead in the morning sunshine, the German sailors saw the town spread around the bay, the hills behind, and, in the distance, the high mountains. The harbor was filled with ships, thirty-two of them German merchant vessels driven to seek refuge by the war. News of the victory spread quickly and the large German population of Valparaíso was enthusiastic. The German ambassador to Chile, Dr. Eckart, and the consul general, Dr. Gumprecht, boarded Scharnhorst, followed by officers of the German merchant ships, who crowded the decks. Hundreds of men from the merchant ships offered themselves for enrollment in the squadron, even as stokers. One hundred and twenty-seven were accepted.

  Many of the squadron’s officers went ashore, where they visited German bookstores and cafés and admired the “pretty, black-eyed women.” Admiral von Spee did not share in the general enthusiasm. “When I went ashore to call on the local admirals, there were crowds at the landing place,” he said. “Cameras clicked and people cheered. The local Germans wanted to celebrate, but I positively refused.” Nevertheless, he yielded to Gumprecht’s pressure and walked with thirty of his officers to the city’s German Club. This solid yellow building was an outpost of dark wood and German respectability whose hallways and paneled dining rooms were hung with full-length portraits of Kaiser William I, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and Field Marshal Moltke, the victor of the Franco-Prussian War. Spee and his officers dutifully signed the guest book, then mounted the grand staircase to find themselves confronting a large bust of Kaiser William II, mustache bristling. Under a grand chandelier in the reception hall, the admiral was polite for over an hour until a “drunken, mindless idiot raised a glass and said, ‘Damnation to the British Navy!’ ” Spee gave him a cold stare and declared that neither he nor his officers would drink to such a toast. Instead, he said, “I drink to the memory of a gallant and honorable foe,” put down his glass, picked up his cocked hat, and walked to the door. Outside, in the bright sunlight, a woman stepped forward to present him with a bouquet of flowers. “They will do nicely for my grave,” he said, refusing them. That night, although the masts and decks of the German warships were brilliantly illuminated as in peacetime, Spee did not sleep. He had no illusions as to what was coming. “I am quite homeless,” he confided to an old friend, a retired naval doctor who lived in Valparaíso. “I cannot reach Germany; we possess no other secure harbor; I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can until my ammunition is exhausted or a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me.”

  The British consul at Valparaíso learned of Spee’s presence off the Chilean coast on November 2, but he did not know then that a battle had taken place the day before. The consul’s telegram reporting the appearance of the German squadron reached London on November 3, whereupon Fisher, now First Sea Lord, urgently prodded his colleagues to improve the precarious position in which he supposed Cradock to be. That evening, the Admiralty finally sent the orders for which Cradock had waited so long: “Defence has been ordered to join your flag with all dispatch. Glasgow should keep in touch with the enemy. You should keep in touch with Glasgow concentrating the rest of your squadron including Canopus. It is important that you should effect your junction with Defence at earliest possible moment.” In light of the Admiralty’s previous signals to Cradock and of what now had happened, this message offered grim humor. “All dispatch . . . earliest possible moment”—Montevideo is 4,000 miles by sea from Valparaíso; at a constant speed of 15 knots and allowing for coaling stops, it would have taken the Defence two weeks to join Cradock. As Churchill later confessed, “We were already talking to the void.”


  The first news of the battle arrived at the Admiralty on the morning of November 4, in the form of sparse accounts from German sources. The following day, the Admiralty issued a preliminary public statement, which was published in that evening’s newspapers: “The Admiralty have no official confirmation [of the news from Germany]. The Admiralty cannot accept these facts as accurate at the present time for the battleship Canopus, which had been specially sent to strengthen Admiral Cradock’s squadron and would have given him a decided superiority, is not mentioned in them.” The next day, the sixth, the Admiralty amplified its disclosure, saying that reports received by the Foreign Office from Valparaíso “state that a belligerent warship is ashore on the Chilean coast and it is possible that this may prove to be the Monmouth. . . . The action appears . . . to have been most gallantly contested, but in the absence of the Canopus, the enemy’s preponderance of force was considerable.” Already, the Admiralty was establishing its line of defense: had the Canopus been present, the disaster would not have occurred.

  When more complete accounts arrived and were published, the British public was shocked. Some newspapers blamed Cradock: Why, with an obviously inferior force, had he given battle? Where was Canopus? Other papers and voices asked why the Admiralty had assigned and permitted Cradock to fight a powerful squadron with an inadequate force. This, overwhelmingly, was the navy’s view. “Can you imagine anyone sending such a mixed and unsuitable mob down for the job?” asked Glasgow’s gunnery officer. In the navy, the defeat at Coronel was reckoned in terms of human life and diminished naval prestige rather than as a serious strategic blow. The sinking of two obsolete, second-rate cruisers amounted to a tiny reduction of British naval strength, but 1,600 men including the admiral had died; in exchange, three Germans had been wounded. And Coronel came only six weeks after the loss of Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy. In the two disasters, 3,000 British sailors had died.

  Professionally, the question became not Why was the battle lost? but Why was it fought? Who blundered, the admiral or the Admiralty? Captain William Sims, an Anglophile American naval officer who, when his country entered the war twenty-nine months later, would become the senior U.S. naval officer in Europe, declared that “the British have allowed their . . . old cruisers to be caught in the presence of a much more powerful enemy and have suffered the penalty. They have committed the grave mistake of despising the enemy.” Beatty had no doubt as to where responsibility lay: “Poor old Kit Cradock has gone, poor old chap,” he wrote to Ethel. “He had a glorious death, but if only it had been in victory instead of defeat. . . . His death and the loss of his ships and the gallant lives in them can be laid to the door of the incompetency of the Admiralty. They have . . . broken over and over again the first principles of strategy.”

  The worst that could be said of Cradock was that he was impetuous, a trait for which, along with courage, he was well known. Luce of Glasgow said, “He had no clear plan or doctrine in his head, but was always inclined to act on the impulse of the moment. . . . Cradock was constitutionally incapable of refusing or even postponing action if there was the smallest chance of success.” Beatty, Cradock’s friend of many years, added ruefully, “I fear he saw red and did not wait for his proper reinforcement, the Canopus.” Churchill’s explanation to Jellicoe was that Cradock had “let himself be caught or has engaged recklessly with only Good Hope and Monmouth.” This became the official Admiralty version, which Churchill presented to the Cabinet. It was adopted by that body at its November 4 meeting, and Asquith subsequently reported it to the king. Indeed, the condemnation went further: Cradock was declared to have been acting in disobedience of express orders to concentrate his whole squadron including Canopus and to run no risk of being caught by a superior force.

  The principal exponent of this position was Winston Churchill, who, even after the war, rejected all criticism of his role in the Coronel disaster. “I cannot accept for the Admiralty any share of the responsibility for what followed,” the former First Lord declared. “The first rule of war is to concentrate superior strength for decisive action and to avoid division of forces or engaging in detail. . . . With Canopus, Admiral Cradock’s squadron was safe. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would never have ventured to come within range of her four 12-inch guns. To do so would have been to subject themselves to very serious damage without any prospect of success. The old battleship, with her heavy armor and artillery, was in fact a citadel around which all our cruisers in those waters could find absolute security.” In the view of the former First Lord, the whole responsibility for what happened at Coronel rested on Cradock, who, he insisted, had been expressly instructed to operate in company with Canopus. Churchill bore down hard on this point: “It ought not to be necessary to tell an experienced admiral to keep concentrated and not to be brought to action in circumstances of great disadvantage by superior forces. Still, in telegram after telegram, the importance of not being separated from Canopus, especially sent him for his protection, was emphasized.” In fact, however, this command was not emphasized—indeed, it was not even mentioned—in the Admiralty’s October 28 signal to Cradock, which came in response to the admiral’s announcement that he had relegated Canopus to convoy duty. Later, Churchill conceded that with Canopus holding them back it would have been impossible for Cradock’s cruisers to catch the Germans, but he argued that at least the presence of the battleship would have prevented the Germans from catching and killing the British ships. From within the shelter of this floating fortress, Churchill declared, Cradock could have raised the alarm. Then, once the Admiralty had been informed of Spee’s whereabouts, “we could instantly concentrate upon them from many quarters.” Logical in retrospect, this was neither the substance nor the tenor of the orders sent to Cradock in the weeks preceding Coronel.

  Cradock, of course, did not see Canopus as a citadel or a place of shelter; he saw her as an incubus. From his point of view, it was not the old battleship’s guns that mattered; it was her speed. He had been told that she could make no more than 12 knots. That her engineer commander was deranged and that, aided by a following sea and a gale wind, she made 15 knots in a frantic effort to reach the battle area, are immaterial; Cradock was never to know. What he did know was that if he followed the tactics prescribed by the Admiralty—drawing the Germans south to fight a battle involving Canopus—he might well find himself placed in the dreadful position of watching the enemy circle around him and steam unmolested around the Horn. There, naked, lay the main British coaling station in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands. Nor was that all. For if Spee, arriving in the South Atlantic, could announce to the world that he had come simply by steaming around a Royal Navy squadron too cowardly to fight, the shame would be unbearable. It would never be forgotten that a Royal Navy squadron had refused battle—or that the officer in command was Christopher Cradock.

  Cradock, in short, was not the man to seek “absolute security” in the shelter of a “citadel.” He had been told that he had a “sufficient force” to deal with Spee. Because Canopus could not keep up, he had informed the Admiralty that he was leaving her behind. Apparently aware of this, the Admiralty had not revoked its order to search and fight. Perhaps if Cradock had received the Admiralty’s November 3 telegram in time, he would have understood that his mission had been changed from searching and fighting to shadowing and reporting. In that case, he might have ordered the speedy Glasgow to investigate the smoke off the Chilean coast that afternoon while he himself fell back on Canopus. And then—perhaps—sheltered beneath the guns of the old battleship, he might have been content merely to signal that Spee’s squadron had been located. But this Admiralty telegram was dispatched from London forty-eight hours after the battle and Cradock’s death. The admiral knew that afternoon that the odds were against him, but he believed that he had no choice. “The Defence had been refused him and he was as good as told that he was skulking at Port Stanley,” said a Glasgow officer. “What else was there for him to do except go and be sunk? H
e was a very brave man and they were practically calling him a coward. If we hadn’t attacked that night, we might never have seen them again and then the Admiralty would have blamed him for not fighting.” This was Cradock’s meaning when he wrote to Meux, “I will take care I do not suffer the fate of poor Troubridge.”