Because of his knowledge of languages, it was Canaris who conducted negotiations with the foreign delegations and groups and undertook a number of potentially dangerous shore excursions on behalf of his captain. He and Nieden advised the commander during this difficult military and diplomatic mission; it was Canaris’s baptism by fire. When Tampico fell to the rebel forces on 14 May 1914, President Huerta stepped down. Diplomats worked out an Anglo-German evacuation operation in which Dresden would take Huerta and his war minister; the cruiser Bristol would take their families. Huerta and his entourage arrived at Puerto Mexico by special train in mid-July52 by which time the British Government had withdrawn its support. Eventually everybody was accommodated aboard Dresden and taken to Jamaica, where Huerta expressed his thanks to the Kaiser and distributed gifts, giving Canaris his revolver.53 On 24 July 1914 news was received of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, and at Port-au-Prince Fregattenkapitän Fritz Lüdecke took over command again with orders to sail the cruiser home.54
2
The Epic Last Voyage of the Dresden
On the evening of 31 July 1914 Lüdecke received the signal ‘Do not return home. Prepare to carry out anti-shipping warfare according to mobilisation orders.’1 Lüdecke and Canaris examined the contents of the blue envelope containing the secret instructions. Canaris summoned senior officers to the wardroom to form the prescribed ‘ship’s committee’.2 The Admiralty Staff required Dresden and other ships in the region to hunt for enemy merchant vessels along the eastern seaboard of the American continent in order to disrupt trade routes and lines of supply. Lüdecke was short of coal and requested a rendezvous with a supply ship at the small Brazilian island of Rocas-Riff before proceeding to the River Plate to prey on Allied shipping as it left Uruguay and Argentina.3
Senior radio-telegraphist Hermann Heil monitored the US radio station Sayville, which received reports from Europe for the press of the neutral USA, and from these transcripts Canaris and Signals Officer Leutnant Otto Schenk constructed a gloomy situation report.4 By 5 August 1914 Germany was at war with Great Britain, France and Russia. The Imperial Navy had as an opponent the world’s strongest naval power, and Dresden would soon face hostile warships, the ships with which she had been cooperating shortly before in Mexico. Lüdecke was well informed about the latter situation: they were listening in to the wireless traffic of the cruisers Suffolk, Berwick and Bristol.5
In 1898 naval attachés in German embassies and consulates had begun setting up a secret web of Etappenstationen – naval intelligence posts – recruiting foreign shipping agents, ships’ chandlers and coal suppliers in an attempt to guarantee at least a basic availability of provisions and coal for German warships in the event of war. Such a post would normally be run by a naval officer who kept the links oiled6 and who would receive intelligence from pro-German agents. In 1908 Canaris had helped set up such espionage units in Brazil and Argentina. In times of war it was crucial that the Etappe-system functioned smoothly and secretly, for the British secret service operated a worldwide network in which all British brokerage firms and most ships’ captains and consular officials were involved.7
On 6 August 1914 near the Amazon Delta, Dresden stopped the British steamer Drumcliffe. This ship had sailed before the general mobilisation and her captain swore that he knew nothing of any war, even though he had a wireless installation aboard. Lüdecke chose to believe his British colleague and allowed the freighter to proceed under a clause of the 1907 Hague Treaty that forbade the seizure or sinking of an enemy merchant ship if her captain was unaware that a state of war existed. After this encounter, Lüdecke addressed his crew as to the ‘gravity of the situation’ and warned them: ‘So long as we can move through the water, no enemy will tread our decks. We will never strike the flag! Therefore – at the enemy! Either we shall win, or we will die.’8 Everybody knew the overwhelming strength of the enemy, and that the way home was cut off.
The Rio de Janeiro Etappe, which Lüdecke had contacted, had ordered him to coal at Rocas and use the cover-name of the Norddeutsche Lloyd steamer Sierra Salvada. Bad weather and adverse currents compelled Lüdecke to ask the Etappe to advance the time for the rendezvous, and he then signalled the collier Corrientes under Kapitän Mehring to sail and recoal Dresden at sea. Mehring refused; he did not know what ship the Sierra Salvada was and suspected a British warship was attempting to lure him out of port. Eventually the identification problem was solved when correct answers were given to questions about Dresden’s officers in 1911 – Corrientes’ first officer, Julius Fetzer, was a boatswain in the Naval Reserve and had served on Dresden that year.9 Dresden coaled 515 tonnes in a small bay on the Brazilian coast near Jericoacoara. This was not much, for the cruiser needed 170 tonnes daily, and coal would remain the major problem.10 Fetzer was taken aboard Dresden as an ‘auxiliary Leutnant’ and appointed prize officer. He knew Patagonian waters well and on the basis of his knowledge of the terrain would become a close colleague of Canaris in helping set up the network of Etappe agents.11
In company with Corrientes, Dresden criss-crossed the steamer tracks east of Brazil, but the British were sailing other routes. Lüdecke returned to Rocas to coal from the Hamburg America Line (HAPAG) steamer Baden with 12,000 tonnes in her bunkers. During the operation both ships sustained minor damage while coming alongside in the rough seas and provisions and coal in sacks had to be transferred over by launch.12 Later, the colliers Persia and Prussia also arrived at Rocas to assist. On 14 August 1914 Dresden, Baden and Prussia headed for the Brazilian island of Trinidade in search of the vanished British trade route. The next day they came across the British steamer Hyades, which made a dash for safety after seeing the German flag, but the ship was sunk after the crew had been removed to Prussia. Stoker Stockler wrote:
I could not forget that dismal scene. I could see that other crewmen felt the same. We had come to know the inexorable face of war. Perhaps one day Dresden would also twist and turn like a wounded animal before she disappeared into the deep . . . nobody believed he would ever see Germany again. The sinking of Hyades was for us a premonition of our own sinking.13
Prussia went directly to Rio to land the crew of the Hyades, who immediately told the British about Dresden. On 24 August Dresden sank the British collier Holmwood after removing the crew. British masters became uneasy about sailing from the River Plate and their Admiralty brought heavy pressure on the shipping companies to prevent the sea trade of the region becoming paralysed. They also sent to South American waters two armoured cruisers, Good Hope and Monmouth, as well as an armed passenger ship, Otranto, to search for Dresden.14 Lüdecke needed a sheltered anchorage to repair Dresden’s structural damage, but the eastern Patagonian coast had no suitable hiding place. Only twenty-four hours were possible in an Argentine port before the British would know the whereabouts of the cruiser they had been feverishly seeking. An officer from the collier Santa Isabel was sent to Punta Arenas at the tip of Patagonia to arrange for food, clothing and other requirements, to obtain shipping intelligence and forward reports to the Etappe and the Admiralty Staff in Berlin.
Canaris had the necessary contact addresses, not only in Brazil and Argentina, but also in Chile. He expanded the circle of agents and set up an offshore message re-transmission system15 using ships of Norddeutsche Lloyd, HAPAG and the Kosmos Line fitted with wireless telegraphy. Their task was to make night-time calls at Corall, Coronel, Talcahuano and Valparaiso to collect telegrams ashore and to signal the contents from offshore to German warships at sea, a device to side-step the laws of neutrality. The system worked, and later the entire cruiser squadron operating in South American waters relied on the network of Canaris’s spies and report ships.16
On 5 September 1914 Dresden and her collier Baden put into Orange Bay at Hoste Island near False Cape Horn for a ten-day stay to repair. On 11 September the collier Santa Isabel arrived. Leutnant Neilung brought news that the British cruisers Good Hope, Monmouth and Glasgow were operating off the western end of th
e Strait of Magellan, probably searching for Dresden. The Admiralty Staff in Berlin recommended that Dresden should pair up with Leipzig in the Pacific, and on 16 September Dresden sailed alone to make the rendezvous.
Lüdecke had received information from agents ashore that the Pacific Steam Navigation Company ship Ortega was proceeding south towards Cape Horn. She had thirty French reservists aboard and was intending to sail through the Strait of Magellan into the South Atlantic. Upon sighting Dresden, Ortega made an audacious escape by heading into the Nelson Channel, which had never been surveyed; Lüdecke could not attack the transport because she was in neutral waters. Ortega reported the presence of Dresden by wireless and the Chilean naval station at Talcahuano repeated the alarm. Since it was now known that two German cruisers, Dresden and Leipzig, were at large off the coast of Chile, the Allies curtailed their shipping severely. Lüdecke also received the text of an enciphered top-secret telegram advising that the East Asia Cruiser Squadron of Vizeadmiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee, of which nothing had been heard since the outbreak of war, was heading for the Chilean coast and was expected there at the end of October.
Lüdecke steered north to meet Leipzig after sending Santa Isabel into Valparaiso where Leutnant Neilung was to arrange for the future supply to von Spee’s squadron and develop Canaris’s espionage system.17 On the night of 30 September, when it was reported that a British naval force under Admiral Christopher Cradock consisting of the armoured cruisers Good Hope (his flagship) and Monmouth, the small cruiser Glasgow and the AMC Otranto were heading for the west coast of Chile, both Dresden and Leipzig turned westwards to link up with von Spee’s squadron.
Dresden anchored at Easter Island on 11 October and von Spee with the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau arrived the next day; when Leipzig put in with her three colliers, there were twelve German ships in the neutral islands.18 The commanders of Leipzig and Dresden informed Admiral Spee as to the situation on the Chilean coast. A strong British force was searching for them, and Canaris’s spies had just signalled that Monmouth and Glasgow had coaled and reprovisioned at Valparaiso. ‘The presence of strong enemy naval forces along the coast makes it impossible for the cruisers to carry out their original orders, the pursuance of commerce warfare,’ Graf Spee wrote in his war diary. ‘This therefore no longer applies and the destruction of the enemy force takes its place.’19 His objective was now to strike before the British task force increased in size and prevented his break-through into the South Atlantic.20
Leipzig was detached eastwards as a lure, sending out radio signals to give the impression that she was acting alone and seeking contact. Glasgow monitored the transmissions and Admiral Cradock formulated a plan to ensnare Leipzig, sending Glasgow into the small port of Coronel south of Valparaiso to gather further intelligence. By chance the British cruiser was identified by two German spies who reported her to the Etappe at Valparaiso, and on the morning of 1 November 1914 Admiral Spee received a signal: ‘British small cruiser anchored in Coronel roadstead 31 October at o7oohrs.’21
Admiral Cradock was looking for Leipzig, and Admiral Spee was bearing down on Glasgow: at 1617hrs on 1 November 1914 the Scharnhorst lookouts sighted the leading two ships of the British squadron,22 Good Hope and Monmouth, and a few minutes later the third, Glasgow, came into sight.23 During the next two hours, in Force 7–8 winds, the two squadrons assumed their respective battle lines, the Germans gaining the favourable inshore position for gunnery where they were difficult to distinguish against the Andes while the British ships were silhouetted against the setting sun. Firing began at ten kilometres’ range, with one salvo every fifteen seconds. Around 192ohrs Good Hope received a salvo amidships from Scharnhorst, as a result of which she caught fire, sinking an hour later, taking with her all aboard, including Admiral Cradock; no rescue efforts could be made because of the sea conditions. The cruiser Monmouth was severely damaged by Gneisenau and drifted away to be sunk later with all hands by the small cruiser Nürnberg. Though hit by shells from Dresden and Leipzig, Glasgow and Otranto escaped.
The Battle of Coronel was an unexpected victory for the Imperial Navy and inflicted on the Royal Navy its first major defeat since the days of Nelson. The British lost 1,700 men, German casualties were two minor injuries and light damage to the two armoured cruisers. The three small cruisers emerged unscathed,24 and the victory ensured von Spee temporary naval supremacy along the west coast of South America, of which he planned to take immediate advantage. On 2 November Canaris wrote to his mother: ‘I was very pleased at the conduct of our crew. I never saw the slightest excitement amongst any of them. They were calmer than for inspections or exercises in peace time.’ The words were phrased to set his dear mother’s mind at rest, for Canaris saw the situation more realistically: ‘Certainly a fine success which gives us a breathing space and perhaps also has some influence on the overall situation. Let us hope it continues like that.’25 He feared, so he told Lüdecke, that the jubilation over the unexpected victory ‘might blind people to the fact that the Royal Navy will not allow the world to enjoy its defeat under any circumstances. Whoever understands Great Britain correctly knows its will to resist, its tenacity and even its lust for vengeance out of hurt pride.’26 A battle had been won, but not the war. The circumstances could quickly turn against them.
Von Spee entered Valparaiso on 3 November to gain information about the war situation and contact the German diplomatic authorities. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Nürnberg anchored inshore; Dresden and Leipzig remained outside the harbour since only three warships of a belligerent could be present simultaneously in a neutral harbour. Eventually they visited the harbour on 13 November, mainly to dispel the British claim that they had been sunk at Coronel. It resembled a State visit; the German consul-general travelled up from Santiago and – in dress uniforms, blue trousers with a gold stripe, cocked hat, sabre and full medal decorations – Lüdecke and Canaris met the Chilean Fleet commander and then, followed by a great crowd, went on to be presented to the naval governor, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Navy and finally the consul. That evening a great ball was held at the Deutscher Verein in Valparaiso.
After this short visit the squadron headed for Cape Horn.27 At Picton Island at the eastern end of the Beagle Channel, von Spee made a three-day stop, a delay that was to prove decisive for the fate of the squadron. Shortly before departing the island on 6 December, he allegedly made a surprising declaration to his commanders: ‘After leaving Picton the squadron will sail for the Falklands. On the night of 7 December, Gneisenau and Nürnberg will form the vanguard. At 0800 on 8 December they must be at the entrance to Port Stanley, disembark the landing troops, destroy the telegraph station, set the coal dump afire and take the British governor hostage.’28 Rumours that the British naval units covering the Falklands had sailed to put down a new Boer uprising in South Africa had led von Spee to believe that the islands were undefended. The commanders of Dresden, Gneisenau and Leipzig protested at the plan, pleading that he should give the Falklands a wide berth on the grounds that his intelligence about the British was faulty, but von Spee was not to be dissuaded.29
He had underestimated the British desire to avenge Coronel. The navy minister, Churchill, and the first sea lord, Fisher, had sent Vice-Admiral Sturdee, former chief of staff at the Admiralty, south with the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible to destroy the German cruiser squadron.30 On the evening of 7 December 1914 they arrived at Port Stanley together with the armoured cruisers Carnarvon, Kent and Cornwall, the light cruisers Glasgow and Bristol, and the AMC Macedonia.31
Towards 0900hrs on 8 December 1914, as they approached Port Stanley from the south, Kapitän Maercker of Gneisenau, forming the vanguard with Nürnberg, reported the presence of a British squadron, with capital ships among them.32 The sky was cloudless, visibility unlimited, and unless the weather changed the German ships had no hope of escape. A general chase ensued to the south, the British eventually opening fire at 1255hrs with a salvo c
lose to Nürnberg. The three small cruisers were ordered to run while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau fought the capital ships. At 1617hrs Scharnhorst sank with all hands, including Admiral von Spee, and the squadron staff; Gneisenau went down at about 1800 with all but 187 men of her crew; Nürnberg went under at 1927hrs leaving ten survivors; Leipzig sank at 2035hrs with eighteen survivors.33 Altogether Germany lost six ships and 2,200 men at the Falklands. Of the warships committed, only Dresden escaped, a nuisance and potential threat to the British that remained to be erased.
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