Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  [Sadly, the statues offered the inhabitants little protection against the perils of this world. An early-eighteenth-century population of 4,000 had plunged to 175 by the end of the nineteenth; internecine warfare, Peruvian slavers, and smallpox were responsible. In 1888, when Chile annexed the island, the survivors were confined to a single village and given 5,000 acres to farm for their subsistence. The remaining 30,000 acres of grasslands were assigned to the grazing of cattle and sheep.]

  At the other end of the island, these questions were of such consuming interest to a group of visiting Britons, the members of an archaeological expedition headed by the husband-and-wife team of Scoresby and Katherine Routledge, that they did not bother to cross the island to look at the German ships. Mrs. Routledge, hard at work, declared that she had no intention of riding for four hours “to gaze at the outside of German men of war.” Her concern, rather, was that the visiting officers would come to visit their site, “and being intelligent Germans, would photograph our excavations. We therefore . . . covered up our best things.”

  Spee rested at Easter Island for six days. At five p.m. on October 18, with his coal bunkers full and his storage lockers replenished, with lambs and calves penned on his decks, he left for Más Afuera, one of the Juan Fernández group of volcanic islands, 450 miles from the Chilean coast. Leipzig, sent ahead to reconnoiter, reported that Más Afuera was clear. Eight days and

  1,500 miles later, on the morning of October 26, the German squadron reached Más Afuera. On the island’s northwest side, a sheer wall of rock rose 3,000 feet straight from the sea. At the base of this gigantic cliff lay the island’s best anchorage, a little underwater ledge no deeper than twenty-five or thirty fathoms beyond which the bottom plunged thousands of feet to the ocean floor. Here, the ships cautiously took soundings and anchored. From their decks, the seamen looked up at the volcanic cliff, the steep, thickly wooded slopes cut by zigzag paths, and the thousands of goats nibbling the dry grass. Because Más Afuera was inhabited only by fishermen and their families, Von Spee ignored its Chilean nationality. One afternoon while the squadron was coaling in the damp air and heavy swell, the admiral went ashore to observe the island’s seabirds and bring back some of its early-blooming spring plants.

  Admiral von Spee remained at Más Afuera for three days and two nights. Then, in bright moonlight on the night of October 28, the Germans steamed away, leaving behind the massive figure of the rock cliff, which for a long time was visible across the water. A day and a half later, when the ships were forty miles west of the port of Valparaíso, “in glorious sunlight, we saw the snow-capped summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain of the Andes, rising above the haze of the coast.” The Pacific voyage of the East Asia Squadron was over.

  Admiral von Spee had crossed the great ocean, but up to this point, his achievement—beyond the worry he had caused the British Admiralty—had been minimal. He had done no military damage and, because there was no British trade in the regions he had traversed, he had taken no prizes. His voyage had been a technical success; his ships had steamed 12,000 miles through tropical heat without engine trouble; he had kept them supplied, and the morale of his men remained excellent. But, in three months of war, he had done little to contribute to the German cause. From this failure, however, one ship of the East Asia Squadron was excluded. This was Emden.

  The light cruiser Emden was the most successful German commerce raider of the Great War. Her forty-one-year-old captain, Karl von Müller, demonstrated what could be done by a fast, modern ship commanded by a man of outstanding ability. Tall and blond, with delicate features and a quiet manner, Müller displayed the qualities Britons liked to associate with their own naval officers: daring, skill, courage, and chivalry. For almost three months after its detachment from Spee’s squadron—that is, from August 14 until November 9—this 3,500-ton ship, operating in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, ravaged Allied shipping and paralyzed trade along the east coast of India. A single light cruiser compelled the Admiralty to keep ships in ports and provide strong escorts for Anzac troop convoys. During these seventy days, Müller intercepted twenty-nine Allied and neutral merchantmen, sinking sixteen British merchant ships, a Russian cruiser, and a French destroyer. He was ingenious: Emden had three funnels; Müller quickly made a fourth out of canvas, disguising his ship as an English four-funneled light cruiser. He was scrupulously courteous, even courtly, to his prisoners. No seaman taken from the ships he sank was harmed; all were sent into port on another intercepted ship at the first opportunity. When the captain of one British merchant ship about to be sunk with explosives asked whether he could bring his harmonium to safety, Müller obliged, although the German sailors assigned the task grumbled about “furniture removal.” Two French sailors killed in action against Emden were wrapped in tricolor flags and buried at sea with military honors and a gun salute. Müller presided and made a speech about fallen heroes.

  Emden began her marauding career in the Bay of Bengal and between September 10 and September 14 sank eight steamers on the approaches to Calcutta before the Admiralty realized that the ship had left the Pacific. Müller’s enterprise flourished so magnificently that at one point, said one of his officers, “we had five or six vessels collected at one spot. You could just see the tops of the funnels of one, the next was under the water right up to her decks, the next was still fairly normal, just rolling from side to side as she filled with water.” All vessels trading in the bay were immediately held in port. In darkness on the night of September 22, Müller approached to within 3,000 yards of the port city of Madras, switched on his searchlights, and during half an hour fired 125 shells at the Burmah Company’s oil tanks, destroying nearly half a million gallons of kerosene. On October 28, he entered Penang roads at dawn and torpedoed and sank an anchored Russian cruiser. The following day in the open sea, he sank a French destroyer by gunfire.

  The British public, seeing that a few German cruisers were apparently doing whatever they chose on the oceans and sinking British merchantmen day after day, was astonished and indignant. Total losses of British tonnage were infinitesimal relative to the nation’s huge maritime resources—Emden and Karlsruhe, the other successful raider, between them sank 39 merchant ships out of 4,000 vessels at sea, 176,000 tons out of 16 million—but the public demanded to know why, given British naval supremacy, this was happening at all. “The Emden’s company have proved their gallantry,” wrote the London Daily Chronicle. “We admire the sportsmanship of their exploits as much as we heartily wish that the ship may soon be taken.” The Admiralty offered a variety of excuses but, as the naval historian Arthur Marder has written, “the chief reason is that the sea is very large and afforded ample opportunities, with its many archipelagos, for the game of hide and seek.”

  And then, at last, Emden was caught. On November 9, Müller approached the Cocos Islands, where the operators of the cable station saw him coming and sounded an alarm. A large Australian troop convoy bound for the Red Sea and Egypt happened to be passing fifty-five miles to the north and heard the signal. The escorting Australian light cruiser Sydney, 3 knots faster, 2,000 tons heavier, and with bigger guns than the Emden, was dispatched, and within two and a half hours, the Emden, burning and wrecked, was driven onto a reef, where Müller surrendered. He and his officers were allowed to keep their swords and were sent to Malta as prisoners for the rest of the war. Once her raiding career was over, public anxiety in Britain metamorphosed into admiration greater than that accorded to any other German warship in the Great War. “It is almost in our heart to regret that the Emden has been captured or destroyed,” said the Daily Telegraph. “The war on the sea will lose something of its piquancy, its humour and its interest now that the Emden is gone.”

  CHAPTER 11 Admiral Cradock’s Voyage

  Once Goeben and Breslau had disappeared into the Dardanelles, Admiral von Spee and his squadron became the dominant overseas preoccupation of the British Admiralty. The threat was shadowy but ominous: a powerful
force of enemy warships had vanished into the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. With Spee at large, many of Britain’s distant possessions and overseas trade routes were at risk, and it was impossible to tell where the German admiral would strike. “The map of the world in the Admiralty War Room measured nearly twenty feet by thirty,” Winston Churchill wrote after the war. “Being a seaman’s map, its center was filled by the greatest mass of water on the globe: the enormous areas of the Pacific filling upwards of three hundred square feet. On this map the head of a pin represented the full view to be obtained from the masts of a ship on a clear day.” At all possible danger points, Britain must be ready, but as Churchill explained, “we could not be strong enough every day, everywhere, to meet him.” Therefore, he said, “as the days succeeded one another and grew into weeks, taking the Caroline Islands as the center, we could draw daily widening circles, touching ever more numerous points where they might suddenly spring into action.” But the circles remained empty.

  One solution would have been to take the offensive, to give priority to locating the East Asia Squadron, to assemble a force that would hunt through every archipelago until it found Spee and completed his destruction. This course was not chosen. Oddly, it was not that the Admiralty did not have sufficient ships of sufficient strength for this purpose. The German East Asia Squadron was recognized in Whitehall as an efficient and powerful unit with excellent morale, led by an experienced and skilled commander. Even so, the forces available to the British Admiralty were superior and, properly deployed, should have had success. In the Pacific, Great Britain, her empire, and her allies could call upon a modern dreadnought battle cruiser, two small battleships, a dozen armored cruisers, five modern light cruisers, and numerous other ships.

  At the outbreak of war, these ships were deployed in three squadrons. The China Squadron, based at Hong Kong under Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Martyn Jerram, consisted of the armored cruisers Minotaur and Hampshire, two light cruisers, and the predreadnought battleship Triumph. Minotaur, Jerram’s flagship, just back from visiting Admiral von Spee at Tsingtao, was newer, bigger, and faster than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and carried heavier guns. The armored cruiser Hampshire was older and less strong, but the light cruisers Newcastle and Yarmouth were far superior in size, speed, and gun power to Emden and Nürnberg. Triumph was a curiosity. Originally built for Chile, she was smaller than Minotaur and, at 18 knots, slower than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Her value lay in her four 10-inch and fourteen 7.5-inch guns. As war approached, Triumph lay demobilized in a Hong Kong dockyard. An urgent message from the First Lord brought her back to life, but a crew could not easily be found. Jerram quickly demobilized four Yangtze River gunboats, snatching the officers and men from their decks and placing them on the battleship, but this was not enough. An effort to recruit Chinese stokers produced not a single man. In the end, volunteers were solicited from Hong Kong’s military garrison and two officers and 106 men of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry boarded the battleship and were incorporated into the crew. On the East Indies Station at Singapore, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Peirse commanded the battleship Swiftsure, a sister of Triumph, and two light cruisers. His main responsibilities lay westward, toward the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. In addition, at the outbreak of war the French Admiralty placed the armored cruisers Montcalm and Dupleix under British command and the Russians did the same with their old light cruisers Askold and Zhemchug.

  These British squadrons were hodgepodges of ships, mixing old and new, big and little, fast and slow, strong and weak; this was the result of Admiralty uncertainties and compromises as to what could be spared from home waters and who the enemy in the Pacific was likely to be. The squadrons thus were very different from Spee’s homogeneous force; neither the China nor the East Indies Squadron alone could have brought the German admiral to ac-tion if he chose to avoid it, or have been certain of defeating him if he chose to fight. But these squadrons were not all that was available to the Admiralty. The strongest naval force in the Pacific (aside from the fleet of Japan, which was neutral when war began) belonged to the Dominion of Australia. And the Australian squadron based at Sydney and commanded by Rear Admiral Sir George Patey included the dreadnought battle cruiser Australia, an Indefatigable-class vessel constructed in Britain. Australia, with her eight 12-inch guns and 26 knots of speed, might by herself defeat Scharnhorst and Gneisenau—although simply by separating and steaming in opposite directions, one of the German ships could have escaped. Two modern 5,600-ton, 26-knot light cruisers, Sydney and Melbourne, each carrying eight 6-inch guns, and two older light cruisers completed Patey’s squadron. In combination, these three British empire squadrons heavily outnumbered Spee’s force, and if they had been ordered to hunt down and destroy the East Asia Squadron, its life surely would have been short.

  But British warships and admirals in the Pacific had been given conflicting responsibilities during August and early September 1914. The paramount concern of the British government in the first weeks of the war was to help stem the onslaught of the German army rushing down on Paris. Everything Britain could do to assist the French had to be done. Most of the British regular army was hurried to the Continent. Within a few weeks, tens of thousands of Dominion troops had been offered by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and every effort had to be made to bring them to Europe. But, with German surface raiders on the oceans, these troops had to move in convoys escorted by warships. The East Indies Squadron, for example, was immediately assigned to escorting troops westward from India and none of its ships were free to help seek out and destroy Admiral von Spee. In addition, the Admiralty and government, encouraged by the Australian and New Zealand governments, were busy playing the old imperial game of colony-grabbing, endeavoring to occupy as much of Germany’s overseas territory as possible. In part, this was an effort to reward the Dominions for their loyalty to the mother country. But there was more to it. Well in advance, the British Admiralty had planned—in the case of war with Germany—to dismantle the German colonial empire. Months before war came, the Admiralty had invited Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to send expeditions to New Guinea, Yap, Nauru, and Samoa, knowing that these expeditions would have to be escorted by naval forces. Thus stimulated, New Zealand’s eye fell on the German islands to her northeast, particularly German Samoa, lying on her trade route to the west coast of America. Australia wished to snap up the whole of German New Guinea and other possessions administered from Rabaul, including the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands. Both governments saw these acquisitions as a means of rallying public support for the dispatch of the Anzac expeditionary forces to Europe, and they were quick in insisting on these projects: on August 8, the New Zealand government informed the Admiralty that if a naval escort could be furnished, the expedition to attack Samoa could start on August 11. Churchill assented. Simultaneously, an expedition organized by the Australian government was forming to invade and seize German New Guinea. Admiral Patey’s force, including Australia, was assigned to escort these two seaborne expeditions. Locating Spee’s armored cruisers, therefore, was given third priority, behind convoying troops to Europe and plucking ripe colonial plums.

  On August 30, Patey, with Australia, Melbourne, and Montcalm, arrived off Apia, the capital of German Samoa, where, without resistance, he put ashore an occupying force of New Zealand troops. On September 15, he landed the Australian expedition at Rabaul. Thereafter, Patey was told, he was to escort the Australian troop convoy to Europe, at least as far as Aden on the Red Sea. But on September 14, Scharnhorst was reported at Samoa, and on September 24, Australia and Montcalm were released to hunt for Admiral von Spee. They had proceeded only 200 miles toward the Marshalls and Carolines when they learned that on September 22, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had bombarded Papeete. Tahiti was 5,000 miles away; to coal and provision for a voyage of this length, Patey returned again to Rabaul. On October 2, he finally sailed for the Fiji Islands. Arriving there on October 12, but forbidden to go
farther east, Patey spent the next three weeks defensively patrolling the Fiji–New Zealand trade route. Apparently, the Admiralty did not consider that if Spee was headed for South America, it might be useful to put Australia on his trail. Patey himself never agreed with the Admiralty’s priorities. Long before September 15, when Spee was first located at Samoa, he was certain that the East Asia Squadron’s most likely destination was South America. Jerram, too, had wished to begin the war by seeking out Spee. As early as August 17, he had signaled the Admiralty: “Probably Scharnhorst, Gneisenau . . . Nürnberg are now together. . . . Possible objective of German squadron . . . Pacific coast of America.”

  There was another, even more powerful Allied naval force in the Pacific: the Japanese fleet. Japan entered the war on August 23, 1914, with a navy of three dreadnoughts, including Kongo, and fifteen other battleships. Until the Japanese came in, the Admiralty had thought it possible that Admiral von Spee might return to Tsingtao, but once Japan declared war, this idea evaporated. And by the time the Japanese had joined the search for Spee, he had vanished. Japan’s priority, in any case, was different from Britain’s. On August 15, Tokyo gave Berlin an ultimatum to surrender Tsingtao within seven days. The Germans refused, Japan declared war, and a siege of the port began. From Berlin, the kaiser ordered the garrison to fight to the end, thinking to strengthen its courage by telegramming: “God be with you in the difficult struggle. I think of you.” Meanwhile, Japanese squadrons proceeded to occupy German possessions in the Marshalls and Carolines. Only late in October, when these other assignments had been completed and Tsingtao was about to fall, were Japanese ships specifically ordered to join the hunt for Admiral von Spee. By then, he was on the other side of the Pacific.

  Far more important to the Admiralty and the British war effort than anything that could happen on the west coast of South America—indeed, anywhere in the Pacific Ocean—was the protection of British trade in the North and South Atlantic. Across this ocean moved a larger volume of shipping than anywhere else in the world. The critical nature of trade with the United States and Canada was obvious, but the importance of securing the wide avenue of commerce from Buenos Aires and Montevideo on the river Plate to Europe was almost equal. At the outbreak of war, the threat to Britain’s trade in the western Atlantic amounted to two fast German light cruisers, Dresden and Karlsruhe, supplemented by the possibility that some of the fast German civilian liners that had taken refuge in harbors in the United States might emerge as armed merchant cruisers. For the British and the German navies, the sudden coming of war had meant a rapid reshuffling of relationships. In peacetime, the two had displayed in the western Atlantic the same unusual blend of comradeship and wariness seen on the coast of China. During the 1914 revolution in Mexico, Dresden had patrolled in concert with warships of the Royal Navy for the protection of European citizens and property. A light cruiser of 3,200 tons with an armament of ten 4.1-inch guns and two torpedo tubes, Dresden was the only German warship in the western Atlantic at that time. But she was due for relief; on July 25, she met her replacement, the new light cruiser Karlsruhe of 4,800 tons and twelve 4.1-inch guns, at Port-au-Prince. As a result, when war was declared, Germany had two light cruisers in the western Atlantic. Both ships received orders to attack British trade.