Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (22 page)

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.

Von Spee was working to a different agenda. His decision to attack the Falklands had also been influenced by the calculation that he could re-coal on a major scale from Port Stanley’s stocks and that, by firing the residue and causing other destruction, he could deprive the Royal Navy of its most important base in the South Atlantic, including its communication centre. From the intelligence available, he discounted the possibility of a superior British force being present; the last wireless report he received, on the night of 6 December, from the collier
Amasie,
said that the harbour was empty except for
Canopus.
The report was then correct; that it was falsified by Sturdee’s arrival within the next twenty-four hours is a perfect demonstration of the primacy of real-time intelligence.

Real time benefited Sturdee perhaps undeservedly. Had he cracked on from Albrohos Rocks instead of shepherding his flock of cruisers southward in line of search abreast, he would have arrived at Port Stanley in ample time to have been observed and for von Spee to have been warned off. Having escaped that bad outcome, he now risked another by persisting in his lack of hurry inside Port Stanley harbour, a strange characteristic in a man so forceful. By breakfast on 8 December, only
Carnarvon
and
Glasgow
had fully refuelled; the two battlecruisers still had colliers alongside;
Kent
had not begun to replenish, while
Cornwall
and
Bristol
both had engines open for maintenance. It was to an unprepared squadron that at four minutes before eight
Glasgow
hoisted the flags signifying “enemy in sight.”

The alert had first come from Sapper Hill, one of the heights surrounding Port Stanley that were to be assaulted by the soldiers of the British Task Force sixty-six years later in 1982.
³⁶
Von Spee, whose surety of touch had been so complete at the outset of his war cruise, had now added a final and fatal addition to his cumulative list of misjudgements; instead of sending forward his light cruisers, whose speed would have permitted escape from the trap, and a warning to the rest of the squadron, he used
Gneisenau
as his lead ship, with the faster
Nürnberg
as companion. As a result, two ships jointly unable to defend themselves or to outrun pursuit ran headlong into disaster.

Von Spee, trundling along astern in
Scharnhorst,
had ordered his squadron to clear for action as early as 5:30 that morning. By 8:30 the captain of
Gneisenau,
then well ahead, made out smoke rising over Port Stanley but concluded that the coal stocks were being fired, as they had been by the French on the squadron’s descent on Tahiti three months earlier. He also got the colony’s wireless mast in view. Not until 9:00 a.m. did he learn from an officer stationed in the foretop that other masts were visible, tripod ships’ masts in Port Stanley harbour. Tripod masts meant only one thing: British big-gun ships.

Maercker, the captain of
Gneisenau,
had always doubted von Spee’s belief that any big British ships in southern waters were bound for Africa, where German troops and Boer rebels were waging colonial warfare. His disbelief was now to be confirmed. First, as
Gneisenau
hove into range,
Canopus
opened fire from its mud berth with its ancient 12-inch guns. At over 11,000 yards, fragments of shell hit
Gneisenau
’s after-funnel. She and
Nürnberg
had already turned away and begun to work up speed; but as
Nürnberg
loyally stuck by the bigger ship, both were limited to 20 knots. They were soon under pursuit by
Kent
, a 23-knot armoured cruiser, then by the light cruiser
Glasgow,
25 knots, and
Carnarvon. Cornwall,
a sister ship, was the last to leave, soon working up to 22 knots. Before her had gone the battlecruisers, both capable of 28 knots.

Von Spee, on hearing the report of tripod masts, had apparently concluded that British battleships were present, perhaps
Iron Duke
and
Orion
class, with a best speed of 20 to 21 knots; he may, even after his misjudged arrival, have calculated that he could get away.
Gneisenau
’s hasty withdrawal had conferred half an hour’s, perhaps a whole hour’s, start, and there was always the chance, in sub-Arctic latitudes, of running into concealing fog. The East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron stretched out,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
both striving to exceed 20 knots.

Maercker had actually wanted to fight, and there was logic in that urge. The German armoured cruisers might have inflicted disabling damage if they had attacked right at the outset. The anchorage was crowded, it was apparent that few of the British ships had steam up, most were lightly armoured or not armoured at all and even
Inflexible
and
Invincible,
the first and therefore oldest battlecruisers in the fleet, were not much better protected than
Good Hope
and
Monmouth
had been. Von Spee, however, had answered his request to press forward with the signal “Do not accept action, head east at full speed.”
³⁷
By 9:45, when the battlecruisers cleared Port Stanley, the German squadron was heading for the horizon.

It was a sunny day, as the evening of Coronel had been, but time favoured von Spee even less than it had Cradock. In the sub-Arctic summer, eight hours of daylight promised. At 10:20 Sturdee hoisted the Nelsonian signal “General Chase”; it was indeed older than Nelson. By 10:50 Sturdee, conscious of having time in hand and not wishing to scatter his squadron, slackened the battlecruisers’ speed so that the slower ships could keep up. They nevertheless continued to overhaul the enemy, and it was clear that the battlecruisers’ big guns would soon tell. At 12:50, having meanwhile sent the crews to lunch, Sturdee ordered, “Engage the enemy.”

Inflexible
and
Invincible
opened fire at an estimated range of 16,500 yards;
Glasgow,
the only ship able to keep pace with them, did not have that reach. When the range came down to 15,500 yards, von Spee ordered his light cruisers to disengage—as Cradock had so ordered
Glasgow
at Coronel—and they turned away and made for South America. They were followed by
Kent, Cornwall
and
Glasgow; Carnarvon
was now managing to keep up with the battlecruisers.

Between 1:20 and 2 p.m., they were engaged very effectively by the Germans, whose 8.2-inch guns actually outranged the British 12-inch, though they could do little damage. Von Spee’s ships also benefited from the funnel smoke that impaired British range-taking. By clever manoeuvering, von Spee was for a period able to close to a distance at which his secondary armament could hit. His bravado alarmed Sturdee, who could not risk damage to his ships when they were so far from dockyard, and he bore away. Not until after three o’clock, by which time his turret crews and gunnery direction officers had begun to get the measure of the enemy, did he shorten the range again. Then his heavier weight of shell began to tell, and by 4 p.m.
Scharnhorst
had suffered so many 12-inch hits that she was clearly soon to sink. Her upper works were torn and twisted, and fires raged within her hull. Von Spee turned towards the enemy to attempt a final response with torpedoes, but at 4:17, with the sea lapping her deck,
Scharnhorst
turned over and sank.