CHAPTER XI The Career of Von Spee

At the beginning of hostilities the strategic position in the Pacific and Indian oceans should have been one that could have caused no possible naval anxiety to the Allies. Japan had at once thrown in her lot with us, and as we had squadrons in the China Seas, in the Indian Ocean, and in Australasia there was, when the forces of our eastern allies are added to them, a total naval strength incalculably greater than that at the disposal of the enemy. But this fact notwithstanding, there was for some months extraordinary uncertainty, and the arrangements adopted by the Admiralty permitted a serious attack to be made on our shipping and involved a tragic disaster to a British squadron. The facts of the case are far from being completely known, but the main features of the original situation and its development make it possible to draw certain broad inferences, which are probably correct.

In the summer of 1914 the German sea forces at Tsing-Tau consisted of two armoured cruisers, two light cruisers, certain destroyers and gun-boats. Leaving the destroyers and gun-boats behind, Von Spee in the month of June abandoned his base at Tsing-Tau, and, after calling at Nagasaki, made for the German possessions in the Caroline Islands. His flag flew in Scharnhorst, and this ship with her sister vessel Gneisenau constituted his main strength. He had the two light cruisers, Leipzig and Emden, in his company, and on July 20, when the situation was becoming166 acute, he ordered Nürnberg, which was at San Francisco, and Dresden, which was at Vera Cruz, at the other side of the American continent, to join him. Nürnberg reached him in a couple of weeks; Dresden not till the end of October. By mid-August, then, his force consisted of two armoured cruisers, each with a broadside of six 8-inch and three 6-inch guns, and three light cruisers armed only with 4-inch. Of the light cruisers Emden and Nürnberg had a speed of between 25 and 26 knots; Leipzig of about 23 or 24. The fighting value of the armoured cruisers was approximately equal to that of Minotaur and Defence and probably superior to that of the Warrior class. The German 8-inch guns fired a projectile only slightly lighter than the British 9.2, so that, gun for gun, there should have been little to choose between them; while from the point of view of the control of fire, the broadside of six homogeneous guns could probably be used quite as effectively as a mixed armament of four 9.2’s and five 7.5’s, and more so than one of four 9.2’s and two 7.5’s. To engage such a squadron with the certainty of success, therefore, at least three British armoured cruisers of the latest type would have been required.

Neither of the British squadrons in eastern waters possessed the combination of speed and power that would have made them superior to Von Spee’s force. Vice-Admiral Jerram, in the China station, had under his command Triumph, Minotaur, Hampshire, Newcastle, and Yarmouth. But Triumph was not in commission at the outbreak of war, and, though armed with 10-inch guns, she was three knots slower than the German cruisers. Sir Richard Peirse’s command in the East Indies consisted of Swiftsure, a sister ship of Triumph; Dartmouth, a cruiser of the same167 class as Newcastle; and Fox, a cruiser of old and slow type. Neither squadron, then, could have sought for Von Spee with any hope of bringing him to action, if he choose to avoid it, or with any certainty of defeating him, if he accepted battle. Australia possessed a navy of her own of vastly greater force than either of these outpost forces of the mother-country. Of ships finished, commissioned, and ready for sea, it consisted of Australia, a battle-cruiser of the Indefatigable class; two protected cruisers of the Dartmouth type, Sydney and Melbourne; and Encounter, a sister ship of Challenger, with destroyers and submarines. A fast light cruiser, Brisbane, and some destroyers were building. In the Japanese Navy the Allies had, of course, resources out of all proportion to the enemy’s strength.

When war became imminent Admiral von Spee, as we have seen, left his base for the Polynesian islands. He did this because it was obvious that he could not keep Tsing-Tau open in face of the strength that the combined Japanese and British forces could bring to bear against it, and to have been trapped would have been fatal. The same reasons that made him abandon Tsing-Tau forbade his trying to keep possession of Rabaud in the Bismarck Archipelago. He faced his future, then, without a base—just as Suffren did in 1781. There were several elements peculiar to the situation that made this possible. In the coast towns of Chile and Peru the Germans had a very large number of commercial houses and agents, and there were German ships in every South American port. Their trade with the islands was considerable and, no doubt long before war, it had been arranged that, on receiving the right warning, a great deal of shipping should be equipped and mobilized to supply the German squadron. The widely scattered German outposts afforded also a168 service hardly less valuable than coal and food. They constituted an intelligence organization that was indispensable. Having no base, and no source of supply other than these German houses in South America and the islands, it was inevitable that Von Spee should look to the east, and not to the west, in any operations that he undertook, if those operations were to be extended and made by a squadron, and not by detached ships. In discussing, then, the strategy which the German Admiralty pursued, these facts must not be lost sight of.

Of warlike policies he had a choice of two. He might either keep his ships together and embark on a war of squadrons, or he could scatter his ships and devote himself to commerce destruction. In the first case, as we have seen, he could only look for objectives in the east. In the alternative the greatest fields of his operations were either north of the Carolines, where the Chinese trade could be attacked; or northwest, where the Asiatic and Australian trades converge to Colombo; or still farther to the west, where the whole eastern trade runs into the mouth of the Red Sea. To the eastward there was no focal point of trade where great results could have been achieved—unless indeed he took his ships round the Horn to attack the River Plate trade or, better still, the main route that passes Pernambuco. It was an obvious truth of the situation that, according as the attack on trade promised great results, so would that attack encounter the greatest dangers, for it seemed to be a certainty that the focal points would be the best protected. The most frequented of these, the approaches to the Red Sea, were also the furthest from his source of supply, and had he in fact resolved upon commerce destruction, his ships would have had to maintain themselves, as did Emden, by coaling169 and re-victualling out of the prizes that they took. The advantage of scattering and going for the trade ruthlessly would have been the virtual certainty of inflicting very formidable damage indeed of an economic kind. The advantage of keeping his squadron together was the chance of some coup that would turn the scale—even if only for a time—in his country’s favour. The disadvantages of the first policy were that there was the certainty that each ship would ultimately be run down and destroyed by superior force, and grave risk that one or more ships would be paralyzed by want of supplies, before a sufficient destruction of trade could justify the sacrifice. The weakness of the second was that, as a squadron, his ships might accomplish nothing at all.

I have so far discussed the German Admiral’s alternatives as if they had been debated at the time when war became certain. But it can be taken for granted that the principles on which he acted were not solely his own, but had determined German policy in this matter long before. And, in the main, the decisive arguments probably arose from the character of his force.

Writing in 1905, Admiral Sir Reginald Custance exposed the whole tissue of fallacies on which the policy of building armoured cruisers had been based. The main duties of cruising ships are, first, to assist in winning and maintaining command of the sea, by acting as scouts and connecting links between the battle squadrons, and, secondly, to exercise command, once it has been established by the attack on and defence of trade. For the successful discharge of these functions the essential element is that the cruisers should be numerous. So long as their speed is equal, or superior, to that of the enemy cruisers, there is no reason why their individual strength should be greatly170 or at all superior. The armoured variety represents, roughly speaking, the value of three cruisers of ordinary type, and is manned by a crew almost proportionately larger. When first designed, it was possible to build these large cruisers of a speed superior to that of the smaller vessels, and having this monopoly, the French invented the type in pursuance of the idea that a sea war that consisted chiefly of attacks on commerce, promised brighter prospects than one which could not succeed unless based on battle-fleet supremacy. But this monopoly vanished nearly twenty years ago. For cruising purposes proper, then, this bastard type, while individually enormously more powerful than the light cruiser, was slower and so could not cover even one-third of the ground of its equivalent value in the smaller vessels. Over nine-tenths of the field of cruising, then, it represents a loss of between 60 and 70 per cent. of war efficiency, and this merely from its size.

But because size means cost and because cost has certain definite influences on the human appreciation of values, it was confidently prophesied that no one in command of a number of units of this value could fail to give an undue consideration to the importance of conserving them. Armoured cruisers, in short, would never be treated as cruisers at all, but would be kept in squadrons, just as capital ships are kept, partly to ensure a blow of the maximum strength, if to strike came within the possibilities of the situation, much more, however, for the protective value of mutual support, for fear of an encounter with superior force. This protective tendency would obviously have a further and much more disastrous effect upon the cruising value of such vessels. It would simply mean that, instead of each doing one-third of what three smaller171 cruisers of the same value might have done, they would really do no cruising, properly so called, at all; and not only this, but would probably monopolize the work of two or three small cruisers to act as special scouts of a squadron so composed, so diverting these units in turn from their proper duties. If any one will take the trouble to read the chapter in Barfleur’s “Naval Policy” dealing with this topic, he will find in Von Spee’s conduct an exact exemplification of what that accomplished and gallant author suggested must happen. Von Spee’s policy, in other words, was probably settled for him by the logic of the situation and the doctrine which prevailed to create it.

Von Spee actually did, then, what it was fully anticipated he would do. He kept his ships together and travelled slowly eastward, maintaining himself in absolute secrecy from the outbreak of war until November 1. What were his exact hopes in the policy pursued, and what the consideration that led him to adopt it? His hopes of achieving any definite strategic result can only have been slender. The composition of his force was so well known that he could hardly have supposed it possible that he would ever meet a squadron of inferior strength. He cannot, then, primarily have contemplated the possibility of any sort of naval victory. Failing this, he may have had various not very precisely defined ideas in his mind. There was to begin with the possibility of picking up a sufficient number of German reservists off the South American coast to have made it possible, not only to attack and seize the Falkland Islands, but actually to have occupied them by an extemporized military force. This, as we know, he did attempt. He might further have contemplated crossing the South Atlantic to the Cape, with a view to supporting an insurrection of the Boers, if that172 materialized, or in any event of backing up the German colonists, who would be open to attack. Or, having struck a blow at the Falkland Islands, he might have sent his ships on a final mission in raiding the Atlantic trade. So long as his squadron was afloat, there were many possibilities—and always a certainty that it would force counter concentration on his opponents and thereby embarrass them in the task of searching for him.

But one thing was certain. He could not combine squadron war with commercial war. Emden he detached in August to attack the trade in the Indian Ocean. But the only support he could lend her was such immunity from pursuit as would result from the concentration he forced upon the British forces. It is highly probable that, had he sent all his ships on the same mission, he would have had at least a month’s run before effective measures could be taken, if only for the fact, possibly unknown to him, that so large a part of the Allied forces were being devoted to convoying the Australian troops.
CORONEL

But whatever the risks and difficulties of trade war, the uncertainties of doing anything at all as a squadron were really greater, and the final fate of his ships more certain. Whatever his hopes of striking a blow for his country’s profit or prestige, he could hardly, even in his most sanguine moments, have anticipated anything so extraordinary as Admiral Cradock’s attack on him on November 1.

The full story of this ill-fated British force is still to be told. Nor can what we know be made fully intelligible until we have at least the actual words of Admiral Cradock’s instructions. But certain inferences from his actions show that whatever those instructions were, his173 own understanding of them is not in doubt at all. Briefly, the facts of the case are these:

Shortly after the outbreak of war Admiral Cradock transferred his flag from Suffolk to Good Hope and made his way round the Horn, taking Monmouth, Glasgow, and the liner Otranto with him. The old battleship, Canopus, was despatched from home to join his flag, and actually caught him up some time before the action. The Canopus needed time either for refitting, to coal, or to re-provision, and the Admiral, instead of waiting for her, pursued his way north with his original three ships.

Before Canopus joined the flag the last letters written by the officers and men of the squadron were posted, and in one of these a member of his staff stated that the general feeling was that the ships were inadequate to the task set before them, and so far, at least, as their mission was concerned, the naval supremacy of Great Britain was not being employed to any useful purpose.

Certain truths with regard to the force that Cradock took north, and of the force that he attacked, should be borne in mind. Good Hope, Monmouth, and Glasgow were as a squadron, markedly faster than Von Spee’s squadron. Whether the Otranto was capable of more than 22 or 23 knots I do not know; but the three warships certainly had the heels of the Germans. It is, then, obvious that if Admiral Cradock’s staff regarded themselves and their ships as inadequate or in danger, it cannot have been because, had the enemy attacked them, they would have been unable to escape. It is next equally obvious that had the Admiral kept Canopus with him, while the pace of the squadron would have been brought down from 23 knots to 15, its fighting value, as measured by broadside power, would have been very much greater than Von174 Spee’s. That Von Spee at least thought so is clear from his published letters.

Without Canopus, then, Cradock would have been safe if he had run away. With Canopus he would have been reasonably safe if he had awaited the enemy’s attack. The significance of the letter which I have alluded to is that it was written by a man to whom neither of these contingencies seemed to be open. The superiority in speed which would always have made it possible for Cradock to evade Von Spee was also the one quality of his ships that gave him capacity to attack the Germans if they showed any signs of avoiding action. No doubt, if the Germans would have awaited action by a squadron which included the Canopus Admiral Cradock’s chances might have been brilliant. But if he started out to look for Von Spee with a 15-knot squadron, his chances for acting swiftly on any information that came his way would have been greatly reduced; and to have limited his advance to 15 knots would have been handing over the initiative in the matter entirely to the enemy.

Bearing these elements in mind and noting first that the British Admiral deliberately left Canopus behind; next, that at two o’clock in the afternoon of November 1, when the presence of an enemy was suspected to the north, he at once ordered all ships to close on Good Hope, and continued when the squadron was formed, to advance against the enemy, and that then, when he saw him, in spite of the bad weather and bad light, at once announced that he intended to attack him, the inference is irresistible that he thought it his duty to find and attack the enemy, and that he refused to interpret the sending of Canopus to mean that he could judge for himself whether or not he was in sufficient force to attack. He acted, that is to say, as175 no man would act unless he believed his mission to be of a peremptory and quite unmistakable kind.

So much, I think, is clear from the few known facts of the case. Whether Admiral Cradock was right in so interpreting his orders is, of course, another matter. Of that no one can judge until the orders themselves are published, and then only those who are familiar with the precise meaning of the phrases employed. Of the instructions themselves, then, I express no opinion. I am only concerned with the light that Admiral Cradock’s actions throw on his own interpretation of them.

Two official descriptions of the action have been published, Captain Luce’s, and the Graf von Spee’s despatches. There are further the private letters of the German Admiral, of his son Otto, and that of a lieutenant of the Glasgow. All of these are in substantial agreement in their statement of the facts—an unusual thing, to be explained perhaps quite simply. The British officers naturally told the truth about the fate of the squadron; and the German success was so complete that there was no reason for the Government to exaggerate or garble the straightforward and not ungenerous statements of the German sailors. It is to Von Spee’s credit that he declined any public rejoicings by the German colony at Valparaiso, when he visited that port directly after the action to secure the internment of Good Hope, of whose fate he was uncertain.

The story of the fight is simple enough. Admiral Cradock formed his ships in line with Good Hope leading, then Monmouth, then Glasgow. Otranto he ordered away as soon as battle became imminent, and Glasgow shortly afterwards. Von Spee criticizes the British Admiral for not attacking the two armoured cruisers during the half176 hour that elapsed between the formation of the Fleet while Nürnberg and Dresden were coming up full speed to join the line. At 6:30 the two lines were on nearly parallel and southerly courses at a distance of about 14,700 yards. Twenty minutes later Von Spee had closed the range about 1,200 yards, and he then altered course a point towards the enemy, and this, in a quarter of an hour, brought the range to about 11,000 yards. He then opened fire and, five minutes later, got his first hit with a salvo on Good Hope. He had the best of the light, and it was obvious to him that the British gunnery suffered more from the heavy seas than did his own. As in neither squadron could any but the upper-deck guns be used, the Germans had an overwhelmingly superior armament in action—their twelve 8-inch guns having nothing opposed to them except the two 9:2 of Good Hope and the upper-deck 6-inch guns of Good Hope and Monmouth. Inferior metal and the more difficult conditions soon told their tale. In the quarter of an hour during which the German Admiral closed the range from 11,000 yards to less than 7,000, he says “both the British cruisers were practically covered by the German fire, whereas Scharnhorst was hit only twice, and Gneisenau only four times.” The German Admiral now sheered off, and it looks as if Admiral Cradock had then begun to close. An English account supposes that Good Hope was drifting and not under control. Anyhow, the range, in spite of the German change of course, was reduced by another 1,200 yards, and the Germans thought that the British Admiral contemplated a torpedo attack. About fifty minutes after the action commenced there was an enormous explosion in Good Hope which had been on fire some time. The people in Glasgow for a time thought it was the German flagship that had177 gone, so short had the range become. Neither of our armoured cruisers fired after this, and the Germans seem to have lost sight of Good Hope altogether, in spite of her proximity. Monmouth, listing badly and on fire, turned to keep bows on to the sea, and Von Spee sent his light cruisers in pursuit of her. She kept her flag flying to the last and was sunk, an hour and a half after Good Hope blew up, by a short range attack by Nürnberg.

Both ships could, of course, quite honourably have saved themselves once their case had become hopeless, had their officers chosen to surrender. But it was with no thought of surrendering that they had engaged, and the stoic heroism of their end is the noblest legacy they could have left to their fellow countrymen. Glasgow kept with Monmouth as long as she could; but her orders from the Admiral had been explicit, and it was obvious that she could not single-handed engage the undamaged German squadron, nor be of the slightest service to Monmouth had she attempted to do so. Captain Luce, quite rightly therefore, retreated from the scene.

A private letter, written a day after the action by the German Admiral, throws an interesting light on the situation. After recounting the unimportant character of the damage suffered by his ships, he adds, “I do not know what adverse circumstances deprived the enemy of every measure of success.... If Good Hope,” he wrote “escaped she must, in my opinion, make for a Chilean port on account of her damages. To make sure of this I intend going to Valparaiso to-morrow with Gneisenau and Nürnberg, and to see whether Good Hope could not be disarmed by the Chileans. If so, I shall be relieved of two powerful opponents. Good Hope, though bigger than Scharnhorst, was not so well armed. She mounted178 heavy guns, but only two, while Monmouth succumbed to Scharnhorst’s as she had only 6-inch guns. The English have another ship like Monmouth hereabouts and, in addition, as it seems, a battleship of the Queen class carrying 12-inch guns. Against the latter we can hardly do anything. Had they kept their force together, we should probably have got the worst of it. You can hardly imagine the joy which reigned among us. We have at least contributed something to the glory of our arms, although it may not mean much on the whole and in view of the enormous number of English ships.”

Viewing this action apart from the circumstances that led up to it and the magnificent spirit and self-sacrifice displayed, its technical and historical interest lies chiefly in the fact that it is the only instance in the war in which an inferior force has sought action with one incomparably stronger. The weaker, not only sought battle, but apparently executed no defensive man?uvres of any kind whatever. We shall find, for instance, no parallel in Coronel to the tactics of Von Spee at the Falkland Islands, or to those of Admiral Scheer at Jutland. And it is perhaps remarkable that the British Admiral, once having determined on action which he must have known would be desperate, did not either at once attempt to close the enemy at full speed, so as to give his very inferior artillery and his torpedoes a chance of inflicting serious damage on the enemy while daylight lasted, or delay closing until bad light would make long-range gunnery impossible, in a mêlée at point blank. Anything might have happened, and it was to the weaker side’s interest to leave as much as possible to chance.

It is hardly conceivable that the total result of the action could have been different so far as the British179 squadron is concerned. But it is permissible to speculate as to whether the Germans might not have suffered more, had either of the above plans been followed. The reasoning which dictated Admiral Cradock’s tactics can, of course, never be known.

A matter of considerable technical interest is, that though two armoured cruisers kept firing for a considerable period, it is quite clear from Von Spee’s despatch that their fire was completely ineffective. Everyone has agreed in explaining this largely by the extreme difficulty of gunnery conditions, but it is surely highly probable that the chief cause is to be found in the fire of the German ships having, so far as the power of offence is concerned, put Good Hope and Monmouth out of action within very few minutes of action beginning. All accounts agree in the Scharnhorst’s salvo having found Good Hope within five minutes, and it is not likely that Monmouth fared any better at the hands of Gneisenau. What seems to me remarkable is the length of time the ships kept afloat after being militarily useless. The explosion in Good Hope took place after she was in action fifty minutes, and it is not known when she sank. The Monmouth survived the opening salvoes by two hours and twenty minutes, and to the last seemed to have her engines in perfect working order. It is impossible, I think, to resist the inference, that all the German hitting, except the shell that caused the explosion in Good Hope, was done in the first few minutes of action, while the light was at its best, though the range was at its longest.