by John Keegan
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, as Gneisenau 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 as Nürnberg loyally 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 and Gneisenau both 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 the Emden, 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.
CHAPTER FIVE
Crete: Foreknowledge No Help
THE WIRELESS WAR of August to December 1914, in the far Atlantic and South Pacific, was the most dramatic intelligence episode of the Great War. Historians of the Eastern Front were later to suggest that Germany’s crushing victory ov
er the Russians at Tannenberg, in east Prussia, in 1914 was brought about by Russian wireless laxity; Rennenkampf and Samsonov, the commanders of the invading Russian First and Second Armies, were accused of transmitting to each other the positions they intended to reach next day en clair (without encoding or enciphering their messages). More detailed research suggests that the Germans were guilty of equal laxity and that the cause in both armies was not carelessness but a lack of trained cipher clerks.1
The course of the campaign of 1914 in the West is not held to have been affected by intelligence failures, since few important messages were sent by wireless; the French, using the Eiffel Tower in Paris as a transmitter, jammed German wireless comprehensively but without discernible effect. During the years of static warfare that followed, neither wireless messaging nor interference played any significant part, since the available equipment was ill-adapted to trench conditions and most communication, both strategic and tactical, was conducted by hand-carried paper, as was traditional, or by telegraph or telephone. Some overhearing, by erratic earth-conduction, was found to be possible, but its use was short-term and tactical at best.
Wireless interception by navies was of greater significance, although both the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet became scrupulous at observing wireless silence. The British, ever on the alert for warnings of the Germans “coming out” into the North Sea, garnered every message that they could. On the only occasion, however, when advance warning might have made a difference, the superbitas of the Royal Navy’s traditional officer class robbed the fleet of advantage. The Chief of the Operations Division, Rear-Admiral Thomas Jackson, visited the naval intelligence division in the Admiralty, known as OB 40 (Old Admiralty Building Room 40) on 31 May 1916 to ask where its direction-finders (direction-finding had improved since 1914) placed the German signal DK, call sign of the German High Seas Fleet’s flagship. He was told, correctly, that the location was Wilhelmshaven and departed without explaining his reason for asking. Jackson was the sort of seagoing naval officer who did not share his thoughts with the non-combatant intelligence staff, composed as it was of such lesser beings as naval schoolmasters, university linguists and academic mathematicians. Had he explained why he wanted to know where DK was, he would have been told that the German flagship left its call sign at home when proceeding to sea, to disguise its movements, and adopted another. On the basis of his half-clever question, Jackson therefore telegraphed Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, to assure him that the High Seas Fleet was still in harbour. As a result, Jellicoe eventually heard that the Germans were “out” from Beatty, commander of his battlecruisers, which had been sailed south on other information. He was then at sea himself, but making less than best speed in order to conserve fuel, so that he was late meeting the enemy battleships off Jutland, late fighting the battle and late cutting off their retreat. Admiral Jackson’s disinclination to take the codebreakers into his confidence robbed the Grand Fleet of a major opportunity to scupper the German navy for good.2
