by John Keegan
By late October, the Admiralty in London was beside itself with rage at Emden’s exploits. It was not only that von Müller had turned himself into a hero, almost as much admired by British seafarers as by neutrals and his own countrymen. His depredations were seriously interfering with the strategic as well as mercantile traffic of the empire, besides damaging the prestige of the Royal Navy, mistress of the seas, and of Britain’s imperial officials. Shipping clung to port all over the Indian Ocean, afraid to put to sea, while Königsberg was also operating independently. The security of the imperial convoys, bringing the Australian, New Zealand and Indian armies to the war in Europe, was severely compromised. The effort to run down the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, lost in the wastes of the South Pacific, was hampered by the activity of a single light cruiser, against which dozens of British, French, Russian and Japanese warships were deployed without effect.
The degree of Allied frustration is conveyed by a minute written by Winston Churchill on 1 October:
Three transports, empty but fitted for carrying cavalry, are delayed in Calcutta through fear of Emden. This involves delaying transport of artillery and part of a cavalry division from Bombay . . . I am quite at a loss to understand the operations of Hampshire . . . What has happened to Yarmouth? Her operations appear to be entirely disjointed and purposeless . . . if the Königsberg is caught, the three light cruisers hunting her should turn over to the Emden . . . It is no use stirring about the oceans with two or three ships. When we have got cruiser sweeps of eight or ten vessels ten or fifteen miles apart there will be some good prospect of utilising information as to the whereabouts of the Emden in such a way as to bring her to action . . . I wish to point out to you [the First Sea Lord and others] that an indefinite continuance of the Emden’s captures will do great damage to the Admiralty reputation.33
Churchill’s anger was justified, as the search for both Emden and the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron was ill co-ordinated, divided as it was between several Royal Navy stations—the China, the South America, the Australia and the East Indies—and four navies, the British, Japanese, French and Russian; the search was further hampered by the personal and mechanical deficiencies of the French and Russians. Yet Churchill, all the same, was living in the past. His formula for a “cruiser sweep”—disposing eight ships at the limit of visual range and proceeding in line abreast—was no different from Nelson’s and covered no larger an area, only about ninety-six miles wide and twenty-four deep, reckoning visual range from the masthead to be about twelve miles. As the Indian Ocean from Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies to the east coast of Africa is over 3,000 miles across, the statistical chance of finding Emden was very slim indeed, since von Müller scrupulously observed wireless silence; he used his wireless to listen, not send. That helped him to evade pursuit. Although intercepted signals—the call sign (QDM) of Hampshire had become familiar—could not yield a bearing, since the technique of radio direction-finding had still to be discovered, the strength of the signal gave some indication of range and so could be used to manoeuvre away from a pursuer.
Emden’s real safety, however, lay in the vastness of the seas, and in late October von Müller decided on a shift to waters he had not yet raided, right across the Indian Ocean in the corner formed by the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. To get there he proposed to coal first off Sumatra, from the captured Buresk, and then in the remote Cocos and Keeling Islands, opposite the Sundai Strait between Sumatra and Java. That move was in the nature of a deception, to suggest to the enemy that he was heading for Australia.
Buresk, when found on 31 October, brought worrying news. Both Pontoporos and Markomannia, his original colliers, had been taken by HMS Yarmouth. Since their crews knew nothing of his new plan, however, von Müller remained confident; he sent another captured collier, Exford, to await him at North Keeling Island, whither he slowly followed. Part of his plan was, before coaling, to destroy the wireless and cable station on Direction Island, part of the Cocos and Keeling group, both to cover his movements and to heighten British anxiety. In the early morning of 9 November Emden’s steam pinnace and two cutters were loaded with armed sailors, under the command of Kapitänleutnant von Mücke, and sent ahead to destroy the wireless mast and cable terminals. Emden followed.
The Cocos and Keeling Islands were a romantic anomaly, a private colony owned by the Clunies Ross family under grant from Queen Victoria. Their only importance to the British empire was as a communication point in the wireless and cable system; it was run by technicians of the Eastern Telegraph Extension Company. British telegraph technicians in distant islands saw themselves in 1914, however, as agents of imperial rule, and those on Direction Island were men of fibre. Before von Mücke’s party got ashore, but after von Müller had uncharacteristically transmitted a badly timed signal to Buresk to join him, they wirelessed, “What code? What ship?” Emden at once began jamming, but the station managed to get off two more signals, repeated several times, first “strange ship in entrance,” then “SOS, Emden here” just as von Mücke arrived.
Von Müller had made a disastrous mistake. The previous day Emden had picked up a call sign which was rightly interpreted to be that of an enemy warship; but her operators estimated the sender to be 200 miles distant and departing southward. Von Müller therefore judged her to be steaming to German Southwest Africa, where dissident Boers had raised an anti-British rebellion. The signal’s importance was therefore discounted. It was, in fact, of crucial and fatal significance. Direction Island knew that it had come from HMS Minotaur, an armoured cruiser, and it was to her, on picking up Emden’s transmission to Buresk, that it signalled.
Minotaur was not close; she had, however, been sailing in company with the Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki and Her Majesty’s Australian ships Melbourne and Sydney, light cruisers like Emden but exceeding her in speed and firepower. They were the escort to the first of the imperial convoys to leave Australia and, since Minotaur’s departure, were maintaining wireless silence. The convoy commander briskly decided to detach Sydney, which was only two hours’ steaming from Direction Island, and sent a visual signal. Sydney departed at twenty-six knots.
Aboard Emden more mistakes were being made. Had von Müller warned von Mücke at once he might have gathered in his landing party and still escaped; it would have been a near thing but possible. Both men, however, wanted the destruction of the wireless and cable station to be done thoroughly, so both tarried. Even when smoke appeared on the horizon, von Müller decided it was from the summoned Buresk; a masthead report was of two masts and a single funnel, which fitted. Between 9 and 9:15 a.m., however, the picture altered, ominously: there were several funnels, which could only mean a warship. Von Müller sounded the ship’s siren repeatedly, rang the alarm bell, hoisted the international code flag A, meaning that he was weighing anchor. As the pinnace put off, however, Emden began to move. The landing party made desperate gestures. Emden slowly gathered speed. By 9:17 she had gained the open sea, and her crew were going to action stations.
Sydney, with eight 6-inch guns to Emden’s ten 4.1-inch, and a two-knot advantage in speed, was bound to win the coming encounter unless her crew failed the test; but they belonged to an even younger navy than the German and were determined to prevail. Moreover, Emden had left all ten of her principal gunlayers ashore. Fire was opened at 9:40, by Emden; she hit with her third salvo. Thereafter, Sydney’s heavier weight of shell began to count. At ten o’clock she caused major damage; during the next hour she shot Emden to pieces. The Germans stood resolutely to their guns, expending 1,500 shells, but by 11:15 most of her armament was knocked out, and von Müller drove the wreck ashore on North Keeling Island. The survivors, spared the awful fate of Cradock’s men in the freezing seas of the southeast Pacific, remained aboard until made prisoner by Sydney next day.
That was not quite the end of the Emden saga. Before Sydney could return to Direction Island, von Mücke had commandeered a trading schooner he found in the harbour, emb
arked his landing party and sailed off to Sumatra. There he found a German collier, working in the local trade, which he appropriated from her co-operative captain. In her he and his Emden men crossed the Indian Ocean to Yemen, in south Arabia, a possession of Germany’s Turkish ally. Leaving his ship, he commandeered some native craft and sailed up the Red Sea, then transferred to camels, fought a battle against the Bedouin and won, got on to the Hejaz railway—to be destroyed by Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab Revolt—and so arrived to a hero’s welcome at Constantinople, the Turkish capital, on 23 May 1915. Most of the party he had brought from Direction Island survived to tell their extraordinary tale.
THE BATTLE OF THE FALKLANDS
Wireless, in the end, had proved Emden’s downfall. Her captain had observed all the correct rules of keeping silence. It was his urge to add to his ship’s laurels by attacking the communication outpost at Direction Island that cast him under the heavier guns of the enemy.
A similar urge would seal the fate of von Spee’s squadron. After his spectacular victory over Cradock at Coronel, von Spee enjoyed a brief triumph at Valparaiso. It was an odd setting for a celebration of defeat of British naval power, despite the presence of a large German colony, for the seafront of the Chilean port was, then as now, dominated by a monument to Chile’s principal naval hero, commander of her fleet in the war of independence against Spain, the British admiral Cochrane.
Moreover, strong though German influence was in Chile, the republic’s government was anxious to preserve its credentials of neutrality. Von Spee was told, on his arrival, that he would be held to the legal limitation of twenty-four hours for a visit, by not more than three ships. Von Spee took Scharnhorst, Gneisnau and Nürnberg into harbour, detaching Dresden and Leipzig to the island of Más Afuera, so far offshore that he correctly calculated he could there breach neutrality regulations with impunity. While in Valparaiso, where thirty-two German merchantmen were sheltering, he received cabled instructions from Berlin. These warned him that enemy warships were operating all over the Central Pacific, West Indies and South Atlantic and advised him to concentrate his ships and attempt to “break through for home.”34
The Berlin telegram, and news received from local Germans, persuaded him that he had no choice but to leave the South Pacific. British and Australian ships barred the way westward into the Indian Ocean; powerful Japanese squadrons were gathering in the Central Pacific islands; British and French forces blocked the exit from the Panama Canal into the Caribbean. Though there were even stronger enemy concentrations in and at the head of the Atlantic, his only chance of escape lay in the hope of evading them, perhaps covered by bad weather, in a dash up the South Atlantic towards northern waters. He was encouraged in that view by a further message from Berlin, brought to him on 18 November from Valparaiso, which suggested that units of the High Seas Fleet might be sailed to escort him into the North Sea; this message was disingenuous to the point of dishonesty, for the German Admiralty had already learnt, by painful experiment, how closely the Royal Navy controlled the channels which von Spee would have to negotiate.
Von Spee seems understandably to have been plagued by doubt in the days after Coronel. Committed to a break-out into the South Atlantic round Cape Horn, he dawdled on his way southward. He coaled as he could from colliers despatched by German agents into the maze of bays and fiords that penetrate the Chilean coast above Cape Horn. As he meandered southward, he gathered news of the collapse of the Kaiser’s overseas empire. Von Spee knew that the Pacific possessions, in New Guinea, Samoa, the Bismarcks, the Marianas, the Carolines, had already fallen into the hands of the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Japanese. Now he learnt that German Africa was falling away also. Perhaps he retained a hope that the Boer rebellion in German Southwest Africa would distract British naval strength; it would affect his judgement about the Royal Navy’s deployment of force into the South Atlantic.
On 6 December, when at Picton Island near Cape Horn, von Spee decided to make a descent on the British colony of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. He gave as his reason to his captains that the squadron could destroy the coal stocks there, and the wireless station, and that intelligence gave no indication of British warships being in the vicinity; he believed that those available had gone to South Africa. He also hoped to capture the governor in retaliation for the New Zealanders’ capture of the governor of German Samoa.
Governors apart, a matter of pique, von Spee’s arguments for attacking the Falklands suggest a failure of judgement; perhaps he had been too long at sea, too long in the loneliness of command. The attack was only likely to attract attention to his whereabouts, without doing damage to the enemy. It was not a rational decision. It was to result in the destruction of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, in circumstances horribly equivalent to those of its victory over Admiral Cradock, his ships and men.
Coronel had outraged the British people and the Royal Navy. As soon as the news of the defeat was received, Winston Churchill, political head of the Admiralty as First Lord, and Admiral Fisher, its professional chief as First Sea Lord, had agreed that there must be revenge. Admiral Stoddart, nominally commander of the 5th Cruiser Squadron but effectively acting as senior naval officer in South American waters, was ordered to position a collection of cruisers astride the trade routes off Brazil on 4 November. On the same day another and exceptional order was issued. Churchill had first thought of detaching one of the precious battlecruisers from the Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow, to be supported by the armoured cruiser Defence, which Admiralty dithering had earlier denied Cradock. Now Fisher, First Sea Lord again since 1 November, demonstrated his legendary dynamism. He persuaded Churchill that the situation in the far south required making doubly sure and that two battlecruisers should be sent, not one. Invincible and Inflexible were directed to sail at once, to coal at Channel ports and then to proceed to the South Atlantic. They were first to coal again in Portugal, then proceed to Albrohos Rocks, off Brazil, where they would rendezvous with Stoddart’s cruisers Carnarvon, Cornwall, Kent and Glasgow; Glasgow, the sole survivor of the Battle of Coronel, was currently at Rio de Janeiro, repairing damage. Stoddart’s squadron also included the armed liners Macedonia and Orama. Once assembled, the ships would proceed south, under the command of Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, who was bringing the battlecruisers.
Sturdee was fiercely disliked by Fisher, who had allowed him to go only to get him out of the Admiralty, where he had been serving as Chief of Staff. He was, nevertheless, a good choice, a complete professional, a devotee of tactical theory and a man of powerful character. He had grasped, moreover, the cardinal importance of maintaining wireless silence. Alerted to the disturbing fact, as he steamed southward, that French wireless stations in west Africa were transmitting Allied warships’ callsigns, he instructed the operators aboard Invincible and Inflexible that “the utmost harm may be done by indiscreet use of wireless. The key is never to be pressed unless absolutely necessary.” In practice, he had less success in controlling wireless insecurity than he may have realised. By stopping to coal at the Portuguese port of St. Vincent, he revealed his big ships’ presence in the Atlantic, and the news was duly passed on by operators of the Western Telegraph Company to their colleagues in South America. German agents thus learnt of the arrival of Sturdee’s ships at Albrohos Rocks on 24 November; by an inexplicable oversight, however, the news was not communicated to Berlin, and so it did not reach von Spee, then still off southern Chile, where he would have been given it by local German officials. Even worse, though the German consul in Buenos Aires also got word of Sturdee’s movements on 24 November, he did not telegraph it across the Andes to Valparaiso but sent the news by steamer, to Punta Arenas, where it would take a week to arrive and which the German squadron did not in practice visit.
Von Spee’s bad luck was compounded by bad judgement. Instead of making best speed into the Atlantic, on his chosen homeward journey, he tarried around and off Cape Horn, loading coal he did not really
need; his decision to attack the Falklands might have been taken several days earlier, in which case he would not have found Sturdee’s avenging battlecruisers awaiting him. It was further bad luck for von Spee that Sturdee, too, had tarried on his voyage south, coaling in a leisurely way at Albrohos Rocks and engaging in target practice against a towed target, which fouled one of Invincible’s propellers with its wire; a diver had to be sent down to clear the obstruction, causing further delay. As a result it was not until 7 December that the squadron arrived at Port Stanley, the Falklands harbour, when von Spee might have come and gone as much as a week earlier. That it did so without the Germans having any inkling of its proximity was due to Sturdee’s one substantial effort to preserve intelligence security, his order that any wireless messages were to be transmitted by Bristol or Glasgow, whose presence in the area was known to the enemy.35
Glasgow, since escaping from the disaster of Coronel, had already been once to the Falklands, in company with the doddering Canopus, left her there, gone on to Rio de Janeiro to dock thanks to Brazilian complaisance, and was now on a return journey. Once arrived, in company with Invincible and Inflexible, and the other cruisers Carnarvon, Kent, Cornwall and Bristol, Glasgow’s captain and crew found the situation at sleepy Port Stanley transformed. Under prodding from the Admiralty, via the local wireless station, the colony had been put into a state of defence. Canopus had been beached, in a mud berth that allowed her 12-inch guns to command the entrance and its approaches, her marines had been sent ashore to stiffen the local militia, her light guns had been dismounted to provide dockside firepower, and the mouth of the harbour had been closed by electrically controlled mines.
After 7 December, when Sturdee’s ships entered the anchorage, it was therefore impossible for Port Stanley to be taken, the governor to be kidnapped, the coal stacks to be burnt or the wireless station to be destroyed. Those dangers, by then, were for the British secondary considerations. The question was whether von Spee could be caught.