Our long, tenuous blockade-line north of the Orkneys, largely composed of armed merchant-cruisers with supporting warships at intervals, was of course always liable to a sudden attack by German capital ships, and particularly by their two fast and most powerful battle-cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. We could not prevent such a stroke being made. Our hope was to bring the intruders to decisive action.
Late in the afternoon of November 23 the armed merchant-cruiser Rawalpindi, on patrol between Iceland and the Faroes, sighted an enemy warship which closed her rapidly. She believed the stranger to be the pocket-battleship Deutschland, and reported accordingly. Her commanding officer, Captain Kennedy, could have had no illusions about the outcome of such an encounter. His ship was but a converted passenger liner with a broadside of four old 6-inch guns, and his presumed antagonist mounted six 11-inch guns, besides a powerful secondary armament. Nevertheless he accepted the odds, determined to fight his ship to the last. The enemy opened fire at 10,000 yards, and the Rawalpindi struck back. Such a one-sided action could not last long, but the fight continued until, with all her guns out of action, the Rawalpindi was reduced to a blazing wreck. She sank some time after dark, with the loss of her captain and 270 of her gallant crew.
In fact it was not the Deutschland but the two battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau which were engaged. These ships had left Germany two days before to attack our Atlantic convoys, but having encountered and sunk the Rawalpindi, and fearing the consequences of the exposure, they abandoned the rest of their mission and returned at once to Germany. The Rawalpindi’s heroic fight was not therefore in vain. The cruiser Newcastle, near by on patrol, saw the gun-flashes, and responded at once to the Rawalpindi’s first report, arriving on the scene with the cruiser Delhi to find the burning ship still afloat. She pursued the enemy, and at 6.15 p.m. sighted two ships in gathering darkness and heavy rain. One of these she recognised as a battle-cruiser, but lost contact in the gloom, and the enemy made good his escape.
The hope of bringing these two vital German ships to battle dominated all concerned, and the Commander-in-Chief put to sea at once with his whole fleet. By the 25th fourteen British cruisers were combing the North Sea, with destroyers and submarines co-operating and with the battle-fleet in support. But fortune was adverse; nothing was found, nor was there any indication of an enemy move to the west. Despite very severe weather the arduous search was maintained for seven days, and we eventually learnt that the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau had safely re-entered the Baltic. It is now known that they passed through our cruiser line patrolling near the Norwegian coast on the morning of November 26. The weather was thick and neither saw the other. Modern radar would have ensured contact, but then it was not available. Public impressions were unfavourable to the Admiralty. We could not bring home to the outside world the vastness of the seas or the intense exertions which the Navy was making in so many areas. After more than two months of war and several serious losses we had nothing to show on the other side. Nor could we yet answer the question, “What is the Navy doing?”
The attack on our ocean commerce by surface raiders would have been even more formidable could it have been sustained. The three German pocket-battleships permitted by the Treaty of Versailles had been designed with profound thought as commerce-destroyers. Their six 11-inch guns, their 26-knot speed, and the armour they carried had been compressed with masterly skill into the limits of a 10,000-ton displacement. No single British cruiser could match them. The German 8-inch-gun cruisers were more modern than ours, and if employed as commerce-raiders would also be a formidable threat. Besides this the enemy might use disguised heavily-armed merchantmen. We had vivid memories of the depredations of the Emden and Koenigsberg in 1914, and of the thirty or more warships and armed merchantmen they had forced us to combine for their destruction.
There were rumours and reports before the outbreak of the new war that one or more pocket-battleships had already sailed from Germany. The Home Fleet searched but found nothing. We now know that both the Deutschland and the Graf Spee sailed from Germany between August 21 and 24, and were already through the danger zone and loose in the oceans before our blockade and northern patrols were organised. On September 3 the Deutschland, having passed through the Denmark Strait, was lurking near Greenland. The Graf Spee had crossed the North Atlantic trade route unseen and was already far south of the Azores. Each was accompanied by an auxiliary vessel to replenish fuel and stores. Both at first remained inactive and lost in the ocean spaces. Unless they struck they won no prizes. Until they struck they were in no danger.
On September 30 the British liner Clement, of 5,000 tons, sailing independently, was sunk by the Graf Spee off Pernambuco. The news electrified the Admiralty. It was the signal for which we had been waiting. A number of hunting groups were immediately formed, comprising all our available aircraft-carriers, supported by battleships, battle-cruisers, and cruisers. Each group of two or more ships was judged to be capable of catching and destroying a pocket-battleship.
In all, during the ensuing months the search for two raiders entailed the formation of nine hunting groups, comprising twenty-three powerful ships. Working from widely-dispersed bases in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, these groups could cover the main focal areas traversed by our shipping. To attack our trade the enemy must place himself within reach of at least one of them.
The Deutschland, which was to have harassed our lifeline across the North-west Atlantic, interpreted her orders with comprehending caution. At no time during her two and a half months’ cruise did she approach a convoy. Her determined efforts to avoid British forces prevented her from making more than two kills, one being a small Norwegian ship. Early in November she slunk back to Germany, passing again through Arctic waters. The mere presence of this powerful ship upon our main trade route had however imposed, as was intended, a serious strain upon our escorts and hunting groups in the North Atlantic. We should in fact have preferred her activity to the vague menace she embodied.
The Graf Spee was more daring and imaginative, and soon became the centre of attention in the South Atlantic. Her practice was to make a brief appearance at some point, claim a victim, and vanish again into the trackless ocean wastes. After a second appearance farther south on the Cape route, in which she sank only one ship, there was no further sign of her for nearly a month, during which our hunting groups were searching far and wide in all areas, and special vigilance was enjoined in the Indian Ocean. This was in fact her destination, and on November 15 she sank a small British tanker in the Mozambique Channel, between Madagascar and the mainland. Having thus registered her appearance as a feint in the Indian Ocean, in order to draw the hunt in that direction, her captain—Langsdorff, a high-class person—promptly doubled back and, keeping well south of the Cape, re-entered the Atlantic. This move had not been unforeseen; but our plans to intercept him were foiled by the quickness of his withdrawal. It was by no means clear to the Admiralty whether in fact one raider was on the prowl or two, and exertions were made both in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. We also thought that the Spee was her sister ship, the Scheer. The disproportion between the strength of the enemy and the counter-measures forced upon us was vexatious. It recalled to me the anxious weeks before the action at Coronel and later at the Falkland Islands in December 1914, when we had to be prepared at seven or eight different points, in the Pacific and South Atlantic, for the arrival of Admiral von Spee with the earlier edition of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. A quarter of a century had passed, but the puzzle was the same. It was with a definite sense of relief that we learnt that the Spee had appeared once more on the Cape-Freetown route, sinking the Doric Star and another ship on December 2 and one more on the 7th.
From the beginning of the war Commodore Harwood’s special care and duty had been to cover British shipping off the River Plate and Rio de Janeiro. He was convinced that sooner or later the Spee would come towards the Plate, where the richest prizes were offered to her.
He had carefully thought out the tactics which he would adopt in an encounter. Together, his 8-inch cruisers Cumberland and Exeter, and his 6-inch cruisers Ajax and Achilles, the latter being a New Zealand ship manned mainly by New Zealanders, could not only catch but kill. However, the needs of fuel and refit made it unlikely that all four would be present “on the day”. If they were not the issue was disputable. On hearing that the Doric Star had been sunk on December 2, Harwood guessed right. Although she was over 3,000 miles away he assumed that the Spee would come towards the Plate. He estimated with luck and wisdom that she might arrive by the 13th. He ordered all his available forces to concentrate there by December 12. Alas, the Cumberland was refitting at the Falklands; but on the morning of the 13th Exeter, Ajax, and Achilles were in company at the centre of the shipping routes off the mouth of the river. Sure enough, at 6.14 a.m. smoke was sighted to the east. The longed-for collision had come.
Harwood, in the Ajax, disposing his forces so as to attack the pocket-battleship from widely-divergent quarters and thus confuse her fire, advanced at the utmost speed of his small squadron. Captain Langsdorff thought at first glance that he had only to deal with one light cruiser and two destroyers, and he too went full speed ahead; but a few moments later he recognised the quality of his opponents, and knew that a mortal action impended. The two forces were now closing at nearly fifty miles an hour. Langsdorff had but a minute to make up his mind. His right course would have been to turn away immediately so as to keep his assailants as long as possible under the superior range and weight of his 11-inch guns, to which the British could not at first have replied. He would thus have gained for his undisturbed firing the difference between adding speeds and subtracting them. He might well have crippled one of his foes before any could fire at him. He decided, on the contrary, to hold on his course and make for the Exeter. The action therefore began almost simultaneously on both sides.
Commodore Harwood’s tactics proved advantageous. The 8-inch salvoes from the Exeter struck the Spee from the earliest stages of the fight. Meanwhile the 6-inch cruisers were also hitting hard and effectively. Soon the Exeter received a hit which, besides knocking out B turret, destroyed all the communications on the bridge, killed or wounded nearly all upon it, and put the ship temporarily out of control. By this time however the 6-inch cruisers could no longer be neglected by the enemy, and the Spee shifted her main armament to them, thus giving respite to the Exeter at a critical moment. The German battleship, plastered from three directions, found the British attack too hot, and soon afterwards turned away under a smoke-screen with the apparent intention of making for the River Plate. Langsdorff had better have done this earlier.
After this turn the Spee once more engaged the Exeter, hard hit by the 11-inch shells. All her forward guns were out of action. She was burning fiercely amidships and had a heavy list. Captain Bell, unscathed by the explosion on the bridge, gathered two or three officers round him in the after control-station, and kept his ship in action with her sole remaining turret, until at 7.30 failure of pressure put this too out of action. He could do no more. At 7.40 the Exeter turned away to effect repairs and took no further part in the fight.
9*
The Ajax and Achilles, already in pursuit, continued the action in the most spirited manner. The Spee turned all her heavy guns upon them. By 7.25 the two after-turrets in the Ajax had been knocked out, and the Achilles had also suffered damage. These two light cruisers were no match for the enemy in gun-power, and, finding that his ammunition was running low, Harwood in the Ajax decided to break off the fight till dark, when he would have better chances of using his lighter armament effectively, and perhaps his torpedoes. He therefore turned away under cover of smoke, and the enemy did not follow. This fierce action had lasted an hour and twenty minutes. During all the rest of the day the Spee made for Montevideo, the British cruisers hanging grimly on her heels, with only occasional interchanges of fire. Shortly after midnight the Spee entered Montevideo, and lay there repairing damage, taking in stores, landing wounded, transhipping personnel to a German merchant ship, and reporting to the Fuehrer. Ajax and Achilles lay outside, determined to dog her to her doom should she venture forth. Meanwhile on the night of the 14th the Cumberland, which had been steaming at full speed from the Falklands, took the place of the utterly crippled Exeter. The arrival of this 8-inch-gun cruiser restored to its narrow balance a doubtful situation.
On December 16 Captain Langsdorff telegraphed to the German Admiralty that escape was hopeless. “Request decision on whether the ship should be scuttled in spite of insufficient depth in the estuary of the Plate, or whether internment is to be preferred.”
At a conference presided over by Hitler, at which Raeder and Jodl were present, the following answer was decided on:
“Attempt by all means to extend the time in neutral waters.… Fight your way through to Buenos Aires if possible. No internment in Uruguay. Attempt effective destruction if ship is scuttled.”
Accordingly during the afternoon of the 17th the Spee transferred more than seven hundred men, with baggage and provisions, to the German merchant ship in the harbour. Shortly afterwards Admiral Harwood learnt that she was weighing anchor. At 6.15 p.m., watched by immense crowds, she left harbour and steamed slowly seawards, awaited hungrily by the British cruisers. At 8.54 p.m., as the sun sank, the Ajax’s aircraft reported: “Graf Spee has blown herself up.” Langsdorff was broken-hearted by the loss of his ship and shot himself two days later.
Thus ended the first surface challenge to British trade on the oceans. No other raider appeared until the spring of 1940, when a new campaign opened, utilising disguised merchant ships. These could more easily avoid detection, but on the other hand could be mastered by lesser forces than those required to destroy a pocket-battleship.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FRONT IN FRANCE
IMMEDIATELY upon the outbreak of war the British Expeditionary Force, or “B.E.F.”, began to move to France. By mid-October four British divisions, formed into two Army Corps of professional quality, were in their stations along the Franco-Belgian frontier, and by March 1940 six more divisions had joined them, making a total often. As our numbers grew we took over more line. We were not of course at any point in contact with the enemy.
When the B.E.F. reached their prescribed positions they found ready-prepared a fairly complete artificial anti-tank ditch along the front line, and every thousand yards or so was a large and very visible pillbox giving enfilade fire along the ditch for machine and anti-tank guns. There was also a continuous belt of wire. Much of the work of our troops during this strange autumn and winter was directed to improving the French-made defences and organising a kind of Siegfried Line. In spite of frost progress was rapid. Air photographs showed the rate at which the Germans were extending their own Siegfried Line northwards from the Moselle. Despite the many advantages they enjoyed in home resources and forced labour, we seemed to be keeping pace with them. Large base installations were created, roads improved, a hundred miles of broad-gauge railway-line laid. Nearly fifty new airfields and satellites were developed or improved. Behind our front immense masses of stores and ammunition were accumulated in the depots all along the communications. Ten days’ supply was gathered between the Seine and the Somme, and seven days’ additional north of the Somme. This latter provision saved the Army after the German breakthrough. Gradually, in view of the prevailing tranquillity, many ports north of Havre were brought into use in succession and in the end we were making use in all of thirteen French harbours.
In 1914 the spirit of the French Army and nation, burning from sire to son since 1870, was vehemently offensive. Their doctrine was that the numerically weaker Power could only meet invasion by the counter-offensive, not only strategic but tactical at every point. It was now a very different France from that which had hurled itself upon its ancient foe in August 1914. The spirit of revanche had exhausted its mission and itself in victory. The chiefs who had nursed it were lon
g dead. The French people had undergone the frightful slaughter of a million and a half of their manhood. Offensive action was associated in the great majority of French minds with the initial failures of the French onslaught of 1914, with General Nivelle’s repulse in 1917, with the long agonies of the Somme and Passchendaele, and above all with the sense that the fire-power of modern weapons was devastating to the attacker. Neither in France nor in Britain had there been any effective comprehension of the consequences of the new fact that armoured vehicles could be made capable of withstanding artillery fire, and could advance a hundred miles a day. An illuminating book on this subject, published some years before by a Commander de Gaulle, had met with no response. The authority of the aged Marshal Pétain in the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre had weighed heavily upon French military thought in closing the door to new ideas, and especially in discouraging what had been quaintly called “offensive weapons”.
In the after-light the policy of the Maginot Line has often been condemned. It certainly engendered a defensive mentality. Yet it is always a wise precaution in defending a frontier of hundreds of miles to bar off as much as possible by fortifications, and thus economise in the use of troops in sedentary rôles and “canalise” potential invasion. Properly used in the French scheme of war, the Maginot Line would have been of immense service to France. It could have been viewed as presenting a long succession of invaluable sally-ports, and above all as blocking off large sections of the front as a means of accumulating the general reserves or “mass of manœuvre”. Having regard to the disparity of the population of France to that of Germany, the Maginot Line must be regarded as a wise and prudent measure. Indeed, it was extraordinary that it should not have been carried forward at least along the river Meuse. It could then have served as a trusty shield, freeing a heavy, sharp, offensive French sword. But Marshal Pétain had opposed this extension. He held strongly that the Ardennes could be ruled out as a channel of invasion on account of the nature of the ground. Ruled out accordingly it was. The offensive conceptions of the Maginot Line were explained to me by General Giraud when I visited Metz in 1937. They were however not carried into effect, and the Line not only absorbed very large numbers of highly-trained regular soldiers and technicians, but exercised an enervating effect both upon military strategy and national vigilance.
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