The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  The mighty new ships astonished war planners of other nations: their seams were welded, not sealed with rivets, and they were built with more aluminum than usual in order to be lighter. They were not powered by conventional steam turbines but by fifty-four-thousand-horsepower diesel engines that could cruise ten thousand miles without refueling.

  Captain Hans Wilhelm Langsdorff knew he commanded a special vessel. To make up for the restrictions placed on the German Navy by the World War I treaty, each Panzerschiff had to serve the purpose of many ships. They could outspeed more powerful vessels and outgun most vessels at sea. At one time Langsdorff had considered becoming a priest, but he also wanted to go to sea so badly that, like Wilhelm Canaris, he defied his father’s wishes and became an Imperial Navy cadet. At age forty-five, he was captain of one of the most valuable vessels in the Kriegsmarine, the navy of the Reich.

  Langsdorff’s assigned region of operation: south of the equator. His mission: Go after enemy commerce ships or ships with cargo that would serve the enemy, especially Britain, which was utterly dependent for survival on imports by sea. Strip the commercial vessels and take them as prizes, or destroy. Do not engage fighting ships of any flag. Hitler invaded Poland on the first of September. In the following weeks, Langsdorff received orders to begin his mission. The first victim of a pocket battleship in World War II was in South American waters, the British tramp steamer Clement.

  “Ship on the port bow!” called the Clement’s lookout on the morning of September 30. A warship was the last thing on the mind of the Clement’s third officer while sailing off the northeast coast of Brazil, bound for Bahia. But he looked through the glass and there it was, a ship bearing straight at them at high speed, water jumping from the sides of its bow. He advised the ship’s master below through the speaking tube. “Captain, there’s a man-o’-war…”

  When the officers couldn’t identify the ship, they thought it must be His Majesty’s light cruiser Ajax, known to be in southern waters, and the captain went back below to put on a jacket to receive visitors. As he came topside again a seaplane flew from the deck of the oncoming ship, soared overhead, and peppered the Clement with machine-gun fire. Someone saw markings on the wings. “My God, it’s a Jerry!”

  The Clement’s radio operator began transmitting “RRR,” code for “I am being attacked by aircraft,” but a signal went up on the attacking ship, in English: “Stop. No wireless transmitting.” No sooner did the captain of the Clement stuff the ship’s confidential papers into a weighted bag and drop them into the sea, giving lifeboats the order to launch, than a piquet boat arrived and ordered him to scuttle.

  Except for strafing the Clement, the Germans acted graciously. Langsdorff placed the captain and chief officer on a passing Greek vessel and ordered a radio message broadcast asking other ships to “Please save” the other men, giving the position of their lifeboats. Within two days, all were safe. The Clement’s men reported to the Admiralty with a variety of descriptions of the ship that ended their voyage, but all agreed it had no markings. Yet some had noticed the name Admiral Sheer painted on the piquet boat. British admirals put out the word that pocket battleship Admiral Sheer, Hitler’s secret weapon, now roamed the Atlantic coast of South America.

  But Langsdorff had more than one trick up his sleeve. Not only did he surprise the Clement and have it scuttled in a model operation, without loss of life, he had also sown confusion among the British by faking the name of his ship, having the piquet boat painted with the name of his sister pocket battleship. Soon the British Admiralty and its allies would believe there were two of the dreaded Panzerschiffe on the seas, because when Langsdorff attacked his next prey less than a week later, on October 5, he showed his ship’s true name, the Admiral Graf Spee.

  When the Graf Spee came upon the British cargo ship Newton Beech, her captain had just managed to jettison the ship’s documents and change out of his pajamas. He figured whatever came next would be better faced in uniform.

  Langsdorff placed the Newton Beech under a prize crew and received the captives politely, then ordered them into clean quarters where they were fed from the same mess as his own crew. He interviewed the captain in his quarters. Langsdorff knew the rules of war mandated decent treatment of prisoners, and besides, by all accounts he was an affable and naturally gracious gentleman, about whom none of his prisoners would complain—and there would be many prisoners. Two days later another British ship, this one carrying sugar, was overcome by the Graf Spee so quickly that instead of dropping the ship’s papers into the weighted bag, which the captain feared might be recovered, he ran below and threw them into the furnace. Langsdorff’s ship was getting crowded.

  Over the next six weeks the Graf Spee took six more ships, sometimes sailing under its own ensign, sometimes under a French flag that Langsdorff carried for the purpose of sneaking up on vessels friendly to the Allies. Once, he sailed around the Horn of Africa and attacked an oil tanker, the Africa Shell, south of Madagascar. An alarmed Whitehall believed the British Navy was facing another front in its struggle with Panzerschiffe, not only the Atlantic but also the Indian Ocean. Twenty-five British and French warships in nine task forces were already on the hunt, the largest sea search in history until that time. The British drew forces away from places where they were needed in order to find the Graf Spee and, they believed, the Admiral Scheer.

  The captain of the Africa Shell joined the other prisoners. Langsdorff saw to it that the rest of the crew was in boats rowing to shore, just two miles away. He had the tanker drained for its oil and destroyed, then doubled back to the Atlantic and picked off more vessels. He made good use of the speed of the Panzerschiff, remarkable for its size—up to twenty-seven knots, about thirty-two miles per hour. And he used its marvelous innovation: an early version of radar that allowed a captain to see over the horizon, to spot ships still invisible to human eyes even with binoculars of the finest glass.

  Langsdorff took more than fifty thousand tons of shipping—nine vessels—in twelve weeks without loss of life among his crew or opponents. All of that changed on the fateful morning when the Admiral Graf Spee met three British battleships: the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter and the light cruisers HMNZS Achilles, manned chiefly by New Zealanders including some Maori, and the Ajax.

  Commodore Henry Harwood, who commanded the British Navy’s South America Division, was captain of the Ajax and led the three-ship force. He had been hunting the marauder for two months. Given new intelligence about the date, time, and position of a Graf Spee attack in the Atlantic, coupled with Harwood’s knowledge of the South American sea lanes, the commodore brilliantly calculated the time and place when the German ship was next likely to appear: December 13, 1939, off the great estuary where the Plate River between Uruguay and Argentina empties into the South Atlantic.

  “Attack on sight by day or by night,” he ordered.

  At 6:04 a.m. on the day Harwood had divined, a thunderous volley of explosions heralded the beginning of the first sea battle of World War II, the Battle of the River Plate. Why Langsdorff engaged the British force despite orders to avoid battle has never been explained—he would have spied them with his long-seeing radar before they saw him, with time to turn and flee. The Achilles and the flagship Ajax tailed the Graff Spee on one side, the heavy cruiser Exeter attacked on the other.

  Langsdorff had more firepower. He lost time and favorable position when he made turns to shell the smaller cruisers, however, when he might have given everything he had to blow the Exeter out of the water and then address the other vessels. When he laid down a smokescreen, the Achilles and the Ajax used the obscurity to their advantage, gaining distance on the Graf Spee.

  Soon after the first shots, a German officer looked down into the hold where the prisoners were being held. “Gentlemen, I am afraid I must leave you to your own devices today,” he said, closing the hatch and bolting it from the outside. A gun turret shook with unbearable noise just above the prisoners’ heads. For hours they s
uffered an emotional quandary, hoping for the Germans’ defeat but fearing that one tremendous hit could send them to the bottom.

  Sixty-one men were lost on the Exeter—more than on the other ships. When an exploding shell created a peephole for the prisoners on the Graf Spee, they looked out and saw disinfectant being poured over the dead bodies of German sailors stacked on deck.

  Langsdorff was only slightly wounded in the face from flying wood splinters, but he saw dead crew members all around. His water desalination apparatus was destroyed, the onboard refinery that processed crude oil into the fuel that he needed to get back to Germany was badly damaged. The injured needed tending to save their lives. He made upriver for the neutral port of Montevideo.

  Harwood sent out a call for other British ships to trap the pocket battleship at the river’s mouth, but the closest ship that could help was a full two days away. The big Exeter, badly disabled, sailed to the Falklands for repairs. Only the Achilles and the Ajax stood watching in place lest the Graf Spee try to escape. There was no guarantee, however, that two light cruisers could block the Graf Spee if its captain was determined to break through again to the sea.

  Now began the three days that truly determined the outcome of the Battle of the River Plate. Victory would go to the side that best handled the auxiliary armament of modern war: propaganda, political maneuvering, deliberately false information. The British put out the word that a force of numerous ships was bottling in the Graf Spee, waiting to attack the Panzerschiff. It wasn’t true, but the BBC and U.S. reporters who flew in to cover the big event repeated the false “news” without confirmation. Langsdorff wanted to see for himself, but his ship’s aircraft was out of commission and no one would rent him a plane—Uruguay was “neutral,” but favored Britain. Captain Dietrich Niebuhr, the naval attaché at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires, flew in to arrange for aid and repairs because the good citizens of Montevideo did not want to help.

  To make sure that the Graf Spee was stalled for as long as possible in port, the British minister to Uruguay, Eugen Millington-Drake, made clever use of an item of international law stipulating that no warship may leave a neutral port within twenty-four hours of the departure of a merchant vessel. Millington-Drake called an emergency meeting of British merchant captains in Montevideo and arranged for them to set sail one per day, effectively preventing Langsdorff from departing. By the third day, more than twenty thousand onlookers—the men in hats and ties, the women in fine dresses—were crowding the long quay at Montevideo, eager for the first shots to be fired. Across the globe, millions read about the standoff in newspapers, and millions more followed the drama on the radio, the first time a war event was broadcast live to the world. News came from London that the king had honored Commodore Harwood with a knighthood.

  On shore in Montevideo, Hans Langsdorff led a procession of notables, officers, and men to bury the thirty-seven men of the German crew who had died. The British prisoners whom Langsdorff had carried were freed the first hour the Graf Spee landed, but they returned to accompany the cortege, in honor of the pocket battleship’s captain. Langsdorff sprinkled a handful of earth on each casket.

  In the late afternoon of December 18, Langsdorff ordered the Graf Spee moved to a side channel of the river, out of the shipping lanes. Accompanied by officers and two Argentine tugs, he supervised the placement of explosives that would destroy the vessel, and had them detonated at sunset. Langsdorff wanted to stay aboard and go down with the ship, but was dissuaded by his officers. The Admiral Graf Spee, one of the marvels of the German Navy, named for the hero who overcame the British at the Battle of Coronel during World War I, went up in a huge ball of flame and burned for two days.

  The German crew, over a thousand men, went across the Plate River to Argentina, where they were interned. On December 20, having assured himself of arrangements for his men, Langsdorff climbed the stairs of the naval center on a downtown corner of Buenos Aires, an old building faced with white columns, a pure and elegant facade. In his quarters he spread the battle ensign of the Graf Spee neatly upon the floor—not a flag with a swastika but a banner that evoked the Imperial Navy. In full dress uniform, he lay upon the cloth and with a gray Mauser pistol shot himself in the head.

  In the German cemetery on the edge of Buenos Aires, Hans Langsdorff is buried at the center of a row of graves with handsome but modest tombstones belonging to officers from the Graf Spee, the grounds around them kept neat and trim. When I was there on an afternoon in 2017, there were freshly cut flowers on a few of the graves, including Langsdorff’s. Next door, under elms in the English cemetery, a long, black marble wall is incised with the names of 861 Anglo-Argentines who lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars. An archivist at the nearby Recoleta Cemetery told me she believed that at one time all the cemeteries on the long street were open, one to another, but that between the wars walls went up between them.

  In 2011, when I visited the cemetery in Montevideo where the dead of the Graf Spee lay buried under simple metal crosses, I had found myself wondering what made Langsdorff destroy his ship and then take his own life. The Uruguayans, pressured by the British and protective of their neutral status, had finally ordered the Graf Spee to leave the port, and the German captain had no choice under international law.

  Perhaps Langsdorff believed that a fleet indeed waited to attack the Graf Spee if he tried to plow through to the sea and that more lives would be lost. He could hardly have left the ship intact where it lay, or it would surely end in the hands of the British. In photos of the burial of the crew members, the German sailors, officers, even a priest extend their arms in the Nazi salute for the final farewell; only Langsdorff, in dress whites, does not, giving instead the naval salute. Could he not have imagined returning to the Reich? Was his honor so besmirched? Did he fear punishment from the Fuehrer? Or was he shaken by the loss of so many men? Around me in the graveyard I noticed the ages of those buried: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

  * * *

  The Battle of the River Plate began the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign of World War II, from 1939 to 1945. Graf Spee, Exeter, and Ajax are names that echo in the memory of naval history. The encounter of two forgotten vessels, however, the Liberty ship Richard Caswell and the German submarine U-513, is more like the clash experienced by most men who plied the seas off South America during those years. They were the kinds of vessels that ran along the coasts regularly—ships carrying troops and trade items vital to the war, and the attack submarines that pursued them. Each sailed from its home port for weeks, their voyages typical for vessels of their kind, toward a deadly meeting off the coast of Brazil.

  In June 1943, the Richard Caswell headed out of the harbor in Wilmington, North Carolina, crewmen standing at ease on the aft deck with hands behind backs under a hot sun. The ship sailed down the Cape Fear River to the sea as the sound of screeching gulls overcame the brave strains of “The Washington Post March.” Boy Scouts stood at the edge of the pier, hands at smooth foreheads in a salute they would not drop until the Richard Caswell disappeared. Master Solomon Suggs, standing on the bridge, probably marveled that towns still came out after a year and a half of watching ships go to war.

  Liberty ships like the Richard Caswell, named for a Revolutionary War hero, were being produced fast, designed for hard hauling and short lives—about five years. They were a key line of defense against Hitler’s strategy to strangle the life out of England, bringing food to the island, and they also brought supplies to the United States. Manned by the U.S. Merchant Marines, generally civilians and union men, Liberty ships carried not only food but also raw materials like timber and rubber and rare metals needed to make war such as tungsten and magnesium. And they carried troops, the essential human cargo. A merchant ship was as fundamental to the war effort as a bomber, the most important vessel on the U-boats’ target list. Nazi war planners estimated that the destruction of 150 merchant ships a month would defeat England. I
n the previous year, 1942, the Axis had sunk 1,661 ships, mostly merchants, 1,151 of them destroyed by submarines.

  That is why U.S. shipyards were turning out Liberty ships at speeds never before seen, just forty-one days per ship sometimes, although the record was four days, fifteen and a half hours for a single craft out of Richmond, California. Unlike German crewmen who were present during the construction of their subs, from the laying down of the keel to installing the final light switches, the U.S. merchant crews received their ships at launching from laborers new to the marine construction workforce, blacks, and especially women. Rosie the Riveter and Wanda the Welder labored around the clock by the thousands in Mobile, Portland, New Orleans, Savannah, Sausalito, and a dozen other places. The steel magnate Henry Kaiser oversaw half a dozen companies managing Liberty ship production using the assembly-line methods of Henry Ford.

  The Wilmington docks were gone from the Richard Caswell’s view. “First officer, dismiss your men,” Suggs said.

  They broke rank, among them men who had never left their hometowns until the war. The slowest to move were the Black Gang, the handful of men who knew that the vast and noisy engine room below would be even hotter than topside. They had been baptized with their name when ships were powered by burning coal, and they spent their days covered in carbon dust. They were engineers but also oilers, firemen, and wipers who tended pistons and valves, main engines and auxiliaries, day and night. Black Gangers Tommy Pike and Benjamin Groutner headed down for their shift.

  Fourteen U.S. Navy personnel were aboard under separate command to defend crew and cargo from attack, and they scattered too. Some went to man the two forward guns, others the single aft gun.