Castles of Steel (39 page)

And then, at last,
Emden
was caught. On November 9, Müller approached the Cocos Islands, where the operators of the cable station saw him coming and sounded an alarm. A large Australian troop convoy bound for the Red Sea and Egypt happened to be passing fifty-five miles to the north and heard the signal. The escorting Australian light cruiser
Sydney,
3 knots faster, 2,000 tons heavier, and with bigger guns than the
Emden,
was dispatched, and within two and a half hours, the
Emden,
burning and wrecked, was driven onto a reef, where Müller surrendered. He and his officers were allowed to keep their swords and were sent to Malta as prisoners for the rest of the war. Once her raiding career was over, public anxiety in Britain metamorphosed into admiration greater than that accorded to any other German warship in the Great War. “It is almost in our heart to regret that the
Emden
has been captured or destroyed,” said the
Daily Telegraph.
“The war on the sea will lose something of its piquancy, its humour and its interest now that the
Emden
is gone.”

CHAPTER 11
Admiral Cradock’s Voyage

Once
Goeben
and
Breslau
had disappeared into the Dardanelles, Admiral von Spee and his squadron became the dominant overseas preoccupation of the British Admiralty. The threat was shadowy but ominous: a powerful force of enemy warships had vanished into the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. With Spee at large, many of Britain’s distant possessions and overseas trade routes were at risk, and it was impossible to tell where the German admiral would strike. “The map of the world in the Admiralty War Room measured nearly twenty feet by thirty,” Winston Churchill wrote after the war. “Being a seaman’s map, its center was filled by the greatest mass of water on the globe: the enormous areas of the Pacific filling upwards of three hundred square feet. On this map the head of a pin represented the full view to be obtained from the masts of a ship on a clear day.” At all possible danger points, Britain must be ready, but as Churchill explained, “we could not be strong enough every day, everywhere, to meet him.” Therefore, he said, “as the days succeeded one another and grew into weeks, taking the Caroline Islands as the center, we could draw daily widening circles, touching ever more numerous points where they might suddenly spring into action.” But the circles remained empty.

One solution would have been to take the offensive, to give priority to locating the East Asia Squadron, to assemble a force that would hunt through every archipelago until it found Spee and completed his destruction. This course was not chosen. Oddly, it was not that the Admiralty did not have sufficient ships of sufficient strength for this purpose. The German East Asia Squadron was recognized in Whitehall as an efficient and powerful unit with excellent morale, led by an experienced and skilled commander. Even so, the forces available to the British Admiralty were superior and, properly deployed, should have had success. In the Pacific, Great Britain, her empire, and her allies could call upon a modern dreadnought battle cruiser, two small battleships, a dozen armored cruisers, five modern light cruisers, and numerous other ships.

At the outbreak of war, these ships were deployed in three squadrons. The China Squadron, based at Hong Kong under Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Martyn Jerram, consisted of the armored cruisers
Minotaur
and
Hampshire,
two light cruisers, and the predreadnought battleship
Triumph. Minotaur,
Jerram’s flagship, just back from visiting Admiral von Spee at Tsingtao, was newer, bigger, and faster than
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
and carried heavier guns. The armored cruiser
Hampshire
was older and less strong, but the light cruisers
Newcastle
and
Yarmouth
were far superior in size, speed, and gun power to
Emden
and
Nürnberg. Triumph
was a curiosity. Originally built for Chile, she was smaller than
Minotaur
and, at 18 knots, slower than
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau.
Her value lay in her four 10-inch and fourteen 7.5-inch guns. As war approached,
Triumph
lay demobilized in a Hong Kong dockyard. An urgent message from the First Lord brought her back to life, but a crew could not easily be found. Jerram quickly demobilized four Yangtze River gunboats, snatching the officers and men from their decks and placing them on the battleship, but this was not enough. An effort to recruit Chinese stokers produced not a single man. In the end, volunteers were solicited from Hong Kong’s military garrison and two officers and 106 men of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry boarded the battleship and were incorporated into the crew. On the East Indies Station at Singapore, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Peirse commanded the battleship
Swiftsure,
a sister of
Triumph,
and two light cruisers. His main responsibilities lay westward, toward the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. In addition, at the outbreak of war the French Admiralty placed the armored cruisers
Montcalm
and
Dupleix
under British command and the Russians did the same with their old light cruisers
Askold
and
Zhemchug.

These British squadrons were hodgepodges of ships, mixing old and new, big and little, fast and slow, strong and weak; this was the result of Admiralty uncertainties and compromises as to what could be spared from home waters and who the enemy in the Pacific was likely to be. The squadrons thus were very different from Spee’s homogeneous force; neither the China nor the East Indies Squadron alone could have brought the German admiral to ac-tion if he chose to avoid it, or have been certain of defeating him if he chose to fight. But these squadrons were not all that was available to the Admiralty. The strongest naval force in the Pacific (aside from the fleet of Japan, which was neutral when war began) belonged to the Dominion of Australia. And the Australian squadron based at Sydney and commanded by Rear Admiral Sir George Patey included the dreadnought battle cruiser
Australia,
an
Indefatigable
-class vessel constructed in Britain.
Australia,
with her eight 12-inch guns and 26 knots of speed, might by herself defeat
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
—although simply by separating and steaming in opposite directions, one of the German ships could have escaped. Two modern 5,600-ton, 26-knot light cruisers,
Sydney
and
Melbourne,
each carrying eight 6-inch guns, and two older light cruisers completed Patey’s squadron. In combination, these three British empire squadrons heavily outnumbered Spee’s force, and if they had been ordered to hunt down and destroy the East Asia Squadron, its life surely would have been short.

But British warships and admirals in the Pacific had been given conflicting responsibilities during August and early September 1914. The paramount concern of the British government in the first weeks of the war was to help stem the onslaught of the German army rushing down on Paris. Everything Britain could do to assist the French had to be done. Most of the British regular army was hurried to the Continent. Within a few weeks, tens of thousands of Dominion troops had been offered by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and every effort had to be made to bring them to Europe. But, with German surface raiders on the oceans, these troops had to move in convoys escorted by warships. The East Indies Squadron, for example, was immediately assigned to escorting troops westward from India and none of its ships were free to help seek out and destroy Admiral von Spee. In addition, the Admiralty and government, encouraged by the Australian and New Zealand governments, were busy playing the old imperial game of colony-grabbing, endeavoring to occupy as much of Germany’s overseas territory as possible. In part, this was an effort to reward the Dominions for their loyalty to the mother country. But there was more to it. Well in advance, the British Admiralty had planned—in the case of war with Germany—to dismantle the German colonial empire. Months before war came, the Admiralty had invited Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to send expeditions to New Guinea, Yap, Nauru, and Samoa, knowing that these expeditions would have to be escorted by naval forces. Thus stimulated, New Zealand’s eye fell on the German islands to her northeast, particularly German Samoa, lying on her trade route to the west coast of America. Australia wished to snap up the whole of German New Guinea and other possessions administered from Rabaul, including the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands. Both governments saw these acquisitions as a means of rallying public support for the dispatch of the Anzac expeditionary forces to Europe, and they were quick in insisting on these projects: on August 8, the New Zealand government informed the Admiralty that if a naval escort could be furnished, the expedition to attack Samoa could start on August 11. Churchill assented. Simultaneously, an expedition organized by the Australian government was forming to invade and seize German New Guinea. Admiral Patey’s force, including
Australia,
was assigned to escort these two seaborne expeditions. Locating Spee’s armored cruisers, therefore, was given third priority, behind convoying troops to Europe and plucking ripe colonial plums.

On August 30, Patey, with
Australia, Melbourne,
and
Montcalm,
arrived off Apia, the capital of German Samoa, where, without resistance, he put ashore an occupying force of New Zealand troops. On September 15, he landed the Australian expedition at Rabaul. Thereafter, Patey was told, he was to escort the Australian troop convoy to Europe, at least as far as Aden on the Red Sea. But on September 14,
Scharnhorst
was reported at Samoa, and on September 24,
Australia
and
Montcalm
were released to hunt for Admiral von Spee. They had proceeded only 200 miles toward the Marshalls and Carolines when they learned that on September 22,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
had bombarded Papeete. Tahiti was 5,000 miles away; to coal and provision for a voyage of this length, Patey returned again to Rabaul. On October 2, he finally sailed for the Fiji Islands. Arriving there on October 12, but forbidden to go farther east, Patey spent the next three weeks defensively patrolling the Fiji–New Zealand trade route. Apparently, the Admiralty did not consider that if Spee was headed for South America, it might be useful to put
Australia
on his trail. Patey himself never agreed with the Admiralty’s priorities. Long before September 15, when Spee was first located at Samoa, he was certain that the East Asia Squadron’s most likely destination was South America. Jerram, too, had wished to begin the war by seeking out Spee. As early as August 17, he had signaled the Admiralty: “Probably
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau
. . .
Nürnberg
are now together. . . . Possible objective of German squadron . . . Pacific coast of America.”

There was another, even more powerful Allied naval force in the Pacific: the Japanese fleet. Japan entered the war on August 23, 1914, with a navy of three dreadnoughts, including
Kongo,
and fifteen other battleships. Until the Japanese came in, the Admiralty had thought it possible that Admiral von Spee might return to Tsingtao, but once Japan declared war, this idea evaporated. And by the time the Japanese had joined the search for Spee, he had vanished. Japan’s priority, in any case, was different from Britain’s. On August 15, Tokyo gave Berlin an ultimatum to surrender Tsingtao within seven days. The Germans refused, Japan declared war, and a siege of the port began. From Berlin, the kaiser ordered the garrison to fight to the end, thinking to strengthen its courage by telegramming: “God be with you in the difficult struggle. I think of you.” Meanwhile, Japanese squadrons proceeded to occupy German possessions in the Marshalls and Carolines. Only late in October, when these other assignments had been completed and Tsingtao was about to fall, were Japanese ships specifically ordered to join the hunt for Admiral von Spee. By then, he was on the other side of the Pacific.

Far more important to the Admiralty and the British war effort than anything that could happen on the west coast of South America—indeed, anywhere in the Pacific Ocean—was the protection of British trade in the North and South Atlantic. Across this ocean moved a larger volume of shipping than anywhere else in the world. The critical nature of trade with the United States and Canada was obvious, but the importance of securing the wide avenue of commerce from Buenos Aires and Montevideo on the river Plate to Europe was almost equal. At the outbreak of war, the threat to Britain’s trade in the western Atlantic amounted to two fast German light cruisers,
Dresden
and
Karlsruhe,
supplemented by the possibility that some of the fast German civilian liners that had taken refuge in harbors in the United States might emerge as armed merchant cruisers. For the British and the German navies, the sudden coming of war had meant a rapid reshuffling of relationships. In peacetime, the two had displayed in the western Atlantic the same unusual blend of comradeship and wariness seen on the coast of China. During the 1914 revolution in Mexico,
Dresden
had patrolled in concert with warships of the Royal Navy for the protection of European citizens and property. A light cruiser of 3,200 tons with an armament of ten 4.1-inch guns and two torpedo tubes,
Dresden
was the only German warship in the western Atlantic at that time. But she was due for relief; on July 25, she met her replacement, the new light cruiser
Karlsruhe
of 4,800 tons and twelve 4.1-inch guns, at Port-au-Prince. As a result, when war was declared, Germany had two light cruisers in the western Atlantic. Both ships received orders to attack British trade.

To meet this threat, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commander of the British navy’s North American and West Indies Station, had been given four old County-class armored cruisers:
Suffolk, Berwick, Essex,
and
Lancaster,
plus the modern light cruiser
Bristol.
Soon after mobilization, these ships were reinforced by five more cruisers from England. Four were old armored cruisers:
Carnarvon, Cornwall, Cumberland,
and
Monmouth,
commissioned from the Reserve Fleet and sent overseas without opportunity to evolve into efficient fighting units. Still another obsolescent cruiser,
Good Hope,
was detached from the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow and sent to Cradock, who made her his flagship.