A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  Köhler managed to elude his pursuers in the Caribbean, but usually with only the barest margin of coal, and he shifted his field of operations to the less-patrolled Pernambuco area off the northeast coast of Brazil. Here for just under two months he successfully preyed on the rich South American trade route, frequently cruising in company with one or two supply ships (often prizes), spread far apart in line abreast to widen the search. He had no trouble obtaining enough coal from either German-owned or chartered colliers or from prizes. He usually anchored off the Laveira Reef on the Brazilian coast to coal. Köhler eventually decided it would be too dangerous to remain in the area, especially after one of his prizes loaded with passengers and crews from sunken ships that he had sent across the ocean to Teneriffe in the Canary Islands reached port. He therefore decided to head northward to the West Indies and raid Barbados and Fort-de-France, Martinique, and attack the trade route between Trinidad and Barbados. He never arrived. On the evening of 4 November, about 300 miles from Barbados, the fore part of the Karlsruhe was destroyed by an internal explosion—the exact cause was never determined—and the ship sank. Köhler did not survive. The survivors were taken aboard the supply ship Rio Negro, which managed to evade the blockade and return to Germany a month later. The Germans kept the loss of the Karlsruhe a strict secret, and it was March 1915 before the British could confirm that the raider was gone. In the interim they expended considerable effort searching for the phantom ship. The Karlsruhe accounted for sixteen ships (fifteen British, one Dutch) for a total of 72,805 gross tons. The official history Seaborne Trade is once again complacent; the Karlsruhe had damaged only a small portion of total Allied trade, and she had not interrupted trade the way the Emden had done. This may be true, but there were no grounds for complacency. The British and French measures against her, such as searching suspected anchorages in the West Indies, the coast of South America, or as far away as the Canary Islands, the Azores, and even the west coast of Africa, were singularly ineffective. The Allies were spared further loss not from their own efforts but by what was—from their point of view—a lucky accident.29

  The other German warships abroad when the war began accomplished relatively little as far as cruiser warfare was concerned. The Dresden was on her way home from the east coast of Mexico when war came, and she was ordered to work her way down the coast of South America and attack trade off the Plate. The Dresden had sunk only two ships when the Admiralstab on 8 September ordered her into the Pacific to work in company with the Leipzig. The Dresden was working her way up the Chilean coast, with little success, when she learned that Spee’s squadron was heading eastward across the Pacific, and she joined it at remote Easter Island on 12 October. The Dresden’s fate was now linked to that of Spee’s squadron, although working as a part of it she sank another two British steamers, making a total of four steamers and 12,927 tons.30

  Fregattenkapitän Haun of the Leipzig also might have accomplished more. He was on the western coast of Mexico when the war broke out. His first inclination was to rejoin Spee, but he quickly realized this was impossible and decided to operate against British trade on the Pacific Coast of North America. There was little to oppose him, only the very old Canadian cruiser Rainbow operating out of Esquimalt and, on the coast of Mexico, the old and weak sloops Algerine (launched in 1895, six 4-inch guns) and Shearwater (launched in 1900, six 4-inch guns). The sloops, suitable for the colonial or policing duties they were engaged in, were too weak to fight a modern adversary and too slow (13 knots) to run away. They might have provided the Leipzig (completed in 1906, ten 4.1-inch [10.5-cm] guns, 22.4 knots) with a cheap victory if they had encountered her. There was considerable anxiety at the Admiralty over their fate, particularly as it was at first erroneously believed that the Nürnberg was operating in company with the Leipzig. The two would also have been more than a match for the old Rainbow (completed in 1893, two 6-inch, six 4.7-inch guns, 20 knots). The two little sloops were out of contact, making very slow progress northward, but because nothing was heard of them, the Admiralty, concerned they might have been lost, ordered the Newcastle from Asian waters to North America.

  The effects on shipping were serious; according to the official history of seaborne trade, rumors of the two German cruisers “paralysed shipping from Vancouver to Panama,” and when the Leipzig appeared off San Francisco on 11 August, cruising just out of sight of shore, she was able to “establish a virtual blockade of the port,” detaining twenty-five British steamers, and, “somewhat illogically,” even holding up traffic at Yokohama and Asian ports. The Leipzig demonstrated the ability of a single cruiser at a focal point to dislocate traffic. The crisis was short lived. The second German cruiser Nürnberg was actually on her way to rejoin Spee. The impending entry of Japan into the war meant that the Japanese armored cruiser Idzumo—protecting Japanese interests on the coast of Mexico—was free to act against the Germans, for whom even a successful encounter with the Rainbow might involve damage far from a friendly base. Haun left San Francisco on the 18th, after a day in port to coal, and steamed south. British trade on the west coast quickly revived. The Leipzig hid in the bays and inlets of Lower California before receiving orders to go south to join Spee at Easter Island, where she arrived on 14 October. During this time the Leipzig sank only two ships, as well as another two after joining Spee. The total for her career in cruiser warfare was therefore four ships and 15,299 tons.31

  The remaining German warships abroad accomplished little. The gunboat Geier made a long voyage from the east coast of Africa across the Indian Ocean and Pacific, eluding capture, but capturing and disabling only one British steamer in the eastern Carolines—whose crew later repaired their engine and escaped—before she reached Honolulu and was interned. The Emden’s prize converted into an auxiliary cruiser, the Cormoran, spent much of her career seeking coal and supplies, made no captures, and was finally interned by the Americans at Guam. The little gunboat Eber steamed from the West African coast across the Atlantic to the isolated island of Trinidada, where she transferred her guns to the new Hamburg Sud-Amerika line’s Cap Trafalgar (18,710 tons), which had been requisitioned by the German naval attaché in Buenos Aires. The Eber’s commander, Korvettenkapitän Julius Wirth, assumed command of the new auxiliary cruiser, but her career was brief. Before Cap Trafalgar could make any captures, the armed merchant cruiser Carmania (19,524 tons) found her coaling at Trinidada on 14 September, and after a hotly contested action in which the Carmania herself was badly damaged, the Cap Trafalgar was sunk. By this time the Eber had taken refuge in Bahia, where she was interned by the Brazilians.32

  The only German auxiliary cruiser to fulfill the classic expectations of a raider and successfully put to sea from a home port in Germany after the war began—besides the Berlin, whose mines had accounted for the Audacious—was the North German Lloyd liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (14,349 tons), which had won the Blue Riband for fastest crossing of the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage in 1897. She sailed on 4 August before the blockade was fully in place and passed around to the north of Iceland before heading for the area off the Canary Islands. Her career at sea seemed dominated by an insatiable demand for coal; she captured and sank only two ships and a small trawler—two other steamers were stopped and released—for a total of 10,683 tons before she was caught coaling on the African coast in neutral Spanish waters at Rio de Oro by the cruiser Highflyer on 26 August. The cruiser’s commander, Captain Henry T. Buller, undoubtedly violated Spanish neutrality in attacking and inflicting sufficient damage to cause her crew to scuttle the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse while she was in Spanish waters. Once the raider had been safely eliminated, the British government in its note of apology to Spain argued that the German raider had used the anchorage as a base for nine days and had been met there by supply ships and colliers. The Spanish had been unable to enforce their neutrality, and to have left the German ship untouched would have been to invite similar violations of neutrality by German raiders in isolated anchorages a
nd bays throughout the world.33

  The Kronprinz Wilhelm (14,908 tons) and the Prinz Eitel Friedrich (8,797 tons) were the most successful and long lived of these early auxiliary cruisers. The Kronprinz Wilhelm, after being surprised while being armed by the Karlsruhe at the beginning of the war, escaped and proceeded to the vicinity of the Azores, where she coaled from a German collier and then went south to operate in an area roughly 500 by 750 miles in the vicinity of the isolated Brazilian island of Fernando Noronha. Her commander, Kapitänleutnant Thierfelder, former navigating officer of the Karlsruhe, managed to keep his ship under way for over eight months without anchoring. He satisfied most of the former liner’s considerable demands for coal by coaling from eight of his prizes. The coaling was also accomplished at sea while steaming slowly ahead, accepting the risks and damage this entailed as liner and collier came together in the swell. By the time the cruise had ended, this method of coaling had resulted in appreciable damage, with the ship leaking badly and the boilers and engines in a poor state. Thierfelder, his crew suffering from lack of fresh food, finally had to bring his ship into Hampton Roads on 11 April 1915 and was interned on the 26th. The Kronprinz Wilhelm had accounted for fifteen ships (including one ship released with the crews of the prizes), or a total of 60,522 tons.

  The Prinz Eitel Friedrich (Korvettenkapitän Max Thierichens), which began her cruise at Tsingtau, captured and sank eleven ships, representing 33,423 tons, before she limped into Newport News and eventual internment on 11 March 1915. As with the Kronprinz Wilhelm, it was essentially a lack of coal and supplies that ended her career, rather than any countermeasures on the part of the Allies.34 The large liners had not fulfilled their expectations as far as cruiser warfare was concerned, primarily because of their excessive coal consumption. They were also a diminishing asset; the Germans were running out of suitable liners with sufficient speed to employ. The same was true with the supply of colliers that could service them. Neutrality regulations coupled with steady diplomatic pressure on the part of the British and French made the work of the Etappen officers increasingly difficult. When the Germans tried raiding with surface ships again, they used a different type of vessel.

  The British problem of hunting German warships abroad was exacerbated by the conflicting obligations of the Royal Navy to support two other major endeavors in the opening months of the war. Surprisingly, early in the war there were the expeditions against the German colonies. There were also the great imperial convoys, in which sizable numbers of troops were moved about the British Empire. The Royal Navy supported the expeditions when necessary, protected the convoys, and of course hunted for the German warships on the loose, which, in addition to single raiders, included Spee’s powerful squadron. The margin of superiority and the watch on the German fleet in home waters also had to be maintained. The British received some French naval assistance—a small portion of the troop movements were also French—and after the Japanese entered the war, there was significant Japanese naval assistance in the Pacific and Indian oceans; but inevitably, the major part of the burden fell on the Royal Navy, which had to do the job without drawing more than was absolutely necessary on modern warships from the Grand Fleet.

  The question of the German colonies was examined by a special subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence under the presidency of Admiral Sir Henry Jackson. The committee worked under the general guidelines that all operations were to be for the defense of maritime communications rather than territorial conquest and should use local troops rather than dissipate forces from the main theater. Bounded by these limitations, the committee in its report of 5 August recommended as suitable objectives Togoland, with its powerful wireless station at Kamina; the port of Duala in the Cameroons, where there were a number of German steamers that might be converted into raiders; Rabaul, the major port for German New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, to be seized by Australian forces; and Apia, in German Samoa, to be seized by New Zealand forces.35

  These initial and comparatively limited objectives were soon surpassed and, perhaps inevitably, the question of territorial conquest and of seizing prizes to be used for future compensations to balance German gains in Europe overrode the idea of merely protecting maritime communications. When the cabinet discussed the project, Prime Minister Asquith was quoted as describing them as appearing “more like a gang of Elizabethan buccaneers than a meek collection of black-coated Liberal Ministers.”36 Moreover, in the Pacific the expeditions were undertaken before command of the sea was assured, while Spee and his powerful squadron were still loose—indeed, when their exact location was unknown. There were many reasons for this; many might be summed up under the term war fever. There was certainly the enthusiasm of the Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans for gains and the desire to eliminate the German threat from the vicinity of their territory, and of course the fact that no one realized how long the war would last and that prizes had best be seized while opportunity permitted.37

  Togoland, the smallest of the German colonies in Africa, was the easiest to conquer. The port of Lomé was captured on 7 August, and the entire colony surrendered before the end of August. The Cameroons were a much larger colony and a much tougher one to conquer. The British, later joined by the French, began naval operations on the coast in early September and took Duala on the 27th. They then went beyond the initial objective of destroying a German base and entered into a long and difficult campaign in the interior that involved tying down British naval forces (old cruisers and gunboats) near the coast for some months. The last German garrison did not surrender until February of 1916. There was little naval activity in the campaign for German South West Africa, which was not completed until July of 1915.38

  On the other side of Africa, the campaign against German East Africa began badly with the repulse of a landing by Indian troops at Tanga in November 1914, and the commander of the German forces, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, proved to be a master of guerrilla warfare, evading attempts by South African, Belgian, and Portuguese forces to trap him. He had still not surrendered when the war in Europe ended, and a special clause in the Armistice referred specifically to him.39 The campaigns, though, have little naval interest except for the ingenious and successful effort by the British in 1915 to bring two armed launches overland by way of the Belgian Congo to wrest control of Lake Tanganyika from the German flotilla that had enjoyed uncontested superiority on the more than six-hundred-mile-long lake since the beginning of the war. The expedition, only twenty-eight men commanded by Lieutenant-Commander G. Spicer-Simson, overcame formidable natural obstacles to get their launches, whimsically named Mimi and Tou-Tou, in place and succeeded in capturing the German gunboat Kingani on 26 December. The damaged vessel quickly sank but was raised and renamed Fifi in British service. On 9 February 1916, the British flotilla captured the German steamer Hedwig von Wissmann. The two remaining German steamers were eventually run ashore or scuttled in port. The Lake Tanganyika expedition was one of the few bright spots for the British in a generally frustrating and dismal campaign.40

  The capture of the German islands in the Pacific had more significance for the naval war and certainly greater potential for disaster because of the presence of Spee. Rear Admiral Sir George Patey, commander in chief of the Australian Squadron, had the battle cruiser Australia, which with her eight 12-inch guns and 25 knots speed was superior to anything in Spee’s squadron. The Australian Squadron searched the waters around New Britain for the German Squadron on 11 and 12 August, but Patey had to suspend the hunt in order to cover both the New Zealand expedition to Samoa and, afterward, the Australian expedition to New Britain. Patey was reluctant to see these expeditions take place before Spee had been located.

  The New Zealanders were first off the mark, and an expedition of approximately 1,400 troops captured Apia, the main port on the island of Upolu (German Samoa), on the 30th. The New Zealand garrison was landed, covered by three old light cruisers and the Australia, Melbourne,
and Montcalm, but Patey decided that with Spee’s squadron at large, it would be safer to leave no warship in Samoa where it might be overwhelmed. This turned out to be a wise precaution.41

  Patey now faced conflicting demands for his squadron. The large convoy containing the expeditionary force of approximately twenty thousand men which the Australian government had offered to the British for service in the war was in the process of formation and had to be covered on its voyage through the Indian Ocean to Aden. The whereabouts of Spee’s squadron, or isolated German warships such as the gunboat Geier, and the activities of German cruisers such as the Emden and Königsberg posed threats to its safety. However, Patey first had to cover the Australian expedition to Rabaul. The “Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force,” approximately five hundred naval reservists and a battalion of infantry, roughly fifteen hundred troops, began landing on the island of Neu-Pommern (New Britain) on 11 September. There was some scattered but sharp resistance from the German garrison, roughly 61 Europeans and 240 native troops, but the issue was not in doubt and the British flag was formally raised at Rabaul on the 13th.42 These expeditions were minor footnotes to the war, and one might legitimately ask if it would not have been better for the German islands in the Pacific to have been left “to wither on the vine” until they could be seized at a later date after other, more pressing problems had been resolved.