Castles of Steel (37 page)

While his ships coaled and provisioned at Pagan, Admiral von Spee pondered how and where they should be used. There were many possibilities. The vastness of the Pacific offered the shelter of space; once he had vanished no one could say where he was or where he might reappear. There were, of course, constraints on his actions. He was cut off from Tsingtao, his only base; he had no place to dry-dock his ships or to make more than temporary repairs; he could depend only on his own resources. In Winston Churchill’s simile, “Von Spee was a cut flower in a vase; fair to see, yet bound to die.” His most pressing and permanent problem was coal. German agents in ports around the rim of the Pacific were already working to buy coal and charter colliers to rendezvous with him, but the worldwide network of the British Admiralty kept watch on every port, every ton of coal, and every likely collier.

Admiral von Spee, in choosing his theater of operations, had to consider where he could hurt the enemy most and where he could survive the longest. He had two tactical alternatives. He could break up the squadron and scatter his ships so that each could wage individual trade warfare and commerce destruction. Or he could keep his ships together and embark on squadron warfare against the enemy navy. It would be difficult to do both; an attempt to combine squadron war with trade war would inhibit, and might well doom, both. It was the inclusion in the squadron of
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
that made trade warfare almost impossible. The essential element of a lone raider was speed, not size. Spee’s three fast light cruisers were superbly equipped for trade warfare: they could catch and sink any merchantman in the world and they could outrun almost any enemy warship. But the big, powerful armored cruisers, each more than three times as heavy and with a crew over twice as large as that of a light cruiser, burned too much coal. Had the Naval Staff intended the East Asia Squadron for trade warfare, six additional light cruisers would have been far more useful than two armored cruisers. A further consideration was that if the admiral scattered his ships, they might do considerable damage, but ultimately each raider would be hunted down by a superior enemy. The advantage in keeping his squadron together was that, in combination, his ships had a better chance of survival. The weakness was that, operating together, they might achieve nothing at all.

But the German Naval Staff had not structured the East Asia Squadron to make war on commercial trade. Its mission had been to represent Imperial Germany in the Far East. Display, visual impact, respect, and prestige were qualities associated with big ships and heavy guns, not with light cruisers, however fast. Further, Maximilian von Spee, a proud man, a vice admiral in the Imperial Navy, the commander of the only remaining overseas squadron of the German fleet, had no thought of wasting
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
as lone commerce raiders. Already, Spee had indicated his poor opinion of the value of trade warfare by summoning
Leipzig, Nürnberg,
and
Emden
to join him in the central Pacific, thereby concentrating rather than scattering the combat power of his squadron.

The Naval Staff in Berlin had realized that once war broke out it would be difficult to communicate with German warships overseas; flag officers and captains, therefore, were instructed to use their own initiative. “In event of a war against Great Britain,” read the Imperial Navy War Orders, “ships abroad are to carry on cruiser warfare unless otherwise ordered. . . . The aim . . . is to damage enemy trade; this must be effected by engaging equal or inferior enemy forces, if necessary.” To this general instruction, the kaiser had added personal advice and exhortation. From the moment war breaks out, he said, each captain “must make his own decisions. . . . Above all things, the officer must bear in mind that his chief duty is to damage the enemy as severely as possible. If he succeeds in winning an honorable place for his ship in the history of the German Fleet, I assure him of my imperial favor.” A few weeks later, when the Naval Staff in Berlin was as much in the dark as to Spee’s whereabouts as the British Admiralty in London, a German staff appreciation reasserted the independence of commanders at sea: “It is impossible to judge from here . . . it is useless to issue any orders . . . we are ignorant of the Commander-in-Chief’s [Spee’s] dispositions . . . any interference on our part might be disastrous. The Commander-in-Chief must have complete liberty of action.”

Nürnberg,
arriving at Ponape from Honolulu on August 5, reported that the British China Squadron had concentrated at Hong Kong. Admiral Jerram’s squadron was by no means superior to Spee’s, but Jerram was not the only potential enemy to the west. Even before Britain’s ally Japan declared war on August 23, it was clear to Spee that, if he returned north to Tsingtao, he might have to face the Japanese fleet. Accordingly, he rejected going west, to China. He could go south to the German base at Rabaul in the Bismarck Archipelago, and beyond toward Australia. But somewhere to the south also was the dreadnought battle cruiser
Australia
carrying eight 12-inch guns, and Spee had no desire to fight this fast, powerful ship. And even if he did not meet the battle cruiser, there was little he could do in the south. Australia’s principal harbors and cities were too heavily defended to be bombarded, and to waste ammunition dueling with shore batteries would be foolish. He could fire on open towns and embarrass the Dominion and British governments, but this would produce no military results. And in the south he would be able to obtain coal only from whatever ships he might chance upon—too precarious a source for a squadron the size of his.

Another possibility was the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, where he could attack busy trade routes. He might commit slaughter on the Australian and New Zealand troop convoys moving toward the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and Europe, but he did not know their schedules or the strength of the naval forces that would be escorting them. And here, too, he would have difficulty finding coal. To supply his entire squadron from prizes would be impossible and the prospect of
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
drifting helplessly, their coal bunkers empty and their boilers cold, had no appeal. Admiral von Spee ruled out going west.

The east remained. In the distant east, across the Pacific, on the coast of South America, there was British trade to be disrupted. Here, there was no Japanese fleet and no British squadron to oppose him. The coast of the Americas, North and South, presented an 8,000-mile stretch of neutral nations from the southern Canadian border down to Cape Horn. Many of these nations would sell him coal. Further, if he continued east around the Horn into the South Atlantic, the important South American trade routes to Europe lay open to attack. And once out in the Atlantic Ocean, he might even find his own way home to the North Sea.

The prospect of finding help in the coastal towns of South America was especially attractive. Chile, with its large German population, had many German businesses and commercial houses. In every Chilean port, German merchant ships were anchored, unable to leave, but fitted with wireless facilities and available for use as supply ships, colliers, or communications relay points for the German East Asia Squadron. In Chile, the German ships, business enterprises, consulates, and embassies and their network of communication facilities and intelligence operations surpassed even those of the well-organized British. Above all—and this was the overriding factor—in Chile, Spee would find it easy to obtain coal.
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
each had a capacity of 2,000 tons of coal. At 10 knots, each ship burned a hundred tons a day and could steam for twenty days. At 20 knots, the figures were 500 tons a day and four days. No captain, however, wished his bunkers to get too low; it was a general rule in all navies to keep the bunkers at least half full at all times. This dictated to Spee a coaling stop every eight or nine days. He already had ruled out the Indian Ocean because, as he wrote in his war diary, “we have no coaling bases in the Indian Ocean and no agents whom we can get in touch with. If we proceed towards the American coast, we shall have both at our disposal.”

August 13, 1914, was Maximilian von Spee’s fifty-third birthday. That morning, he summoned his captains on board
Scharnhorst
and, standing before a large map of the Pacific, told them what he planned to do. The squadron would remain together, he said. Given the likelihood of Japan’s entry into the war, it would not return to Tsingtao. Instead, they would go to the west coast of South America where, owing to German influence, they would enjoy better facilities for supply and communication with home. On the American coast, they would face no enemy warships and, if the war lasted long enough, they would have a chance from there of breaking through for home.

Typically, Admiral von Spee asked his captains for their opinions. Karl von Müller of
Emden
suggested an amendment to the admiral’s plan: “If coaling the whole squadron in East Asian, Australian and Indian waters presents too great difficulties, I asked might we consider the dispatch of at least one light cruiser to the Indian Ocean.” Müller proposed his own ship,
Emden,
the squadron’s most modern and fastest. Spee thought about it and agreed; a single light cruiser could coal from captured steamships, a squadron could not. That evening, the East Asia Squadron sailed from Pagan for the coral atoll of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. Early the next morning, with rain falling, seamen on the other ships were surprised to see
Emden
and one of the colliers suddenly turn out of the formation. The signal “We wish you success” ran up
Scharnhorst
’s halyard, and Müller replied, “I thank Your Excellency for the confidence placed in me.” Once the light cruiser had disappeared to the south, the squadron learned that
Emden
was bound for the Indian Ocean.

Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg,
the armed merchant cruiser
Prinz Eitel Friedrich,
the liner
Yorck,
and eight supply ships moved slowly eastward toward Eniwetok, traveling at the 7- to 10-knot speed of the supply ships. Even so, on one ship carrying livestock, the animals were so hurled about in the swell that many bones were broken and, bellowing and bleating, they were pushed into the sea. The ships held frequent battle drill, loading and reloading the guns,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
aiming at each other as targets. At the end of the day, the officers watched the sunset and then retreated to the wardroom to gather around the piano, while the men sang or smoked in the moonlight.

At noon on August 19, the German squadron approached Eniwetok, a green fringe of palms and sun-baked beach between the sky and the water. Behind lay an immense coral atoll and a vast lagoon sufficient to shelter an immense number of ships. Here Spee remained for three days, relatively secure in the knowledge, gained from intercepted wireless traffic, that the nearest enemy force, an Australian squadron, was far to the southwest. But he had no other news; on August 11, the German wireless station on Yap in the western Carolines had been destroyed by the British cruiser
Minotaur.
In order to maintain a tenuous contact with Berlin, Spee sent
Nürnberg
back to Honolulu to pick up newspapers and mail and to advise the Naval Staff by cable, “I shall proceed to Chile . . . arriving at Juan Fernández on Octo-ber 15.” Meanwhile, his caravan of ships departed Eniwetok on August 22 and continued its progress across “the seemingly limitless desert of the Pacific Ocean.” The crews were baked by the equatorial sun; the thermometer often recorded 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The nights were worse. “In the evening,” wrote Captain Maerker of
Gneisenau,
“the portholes have to be closed and blacked out so that the heat becomes unbearable. Then of course there is nothing to do but think and that’s bad.”

The squadron’s next stop was Majuor, an atoll at the southeastern edge of the Marshall Islands. This was another spacious lagoon, another expanse of shallow turquoise water distinguished from the dark blue of the outside ocean, another beach of hot sand with palm trees stirring in the hot wind. Here, on August 26, Spee learned of Japan’s declaration of war. Here, too, he was joined two days later by the armed merchant cruiser
Cormoran,
which had escaped from Tsingtao, escorting two cargo steamers and two other store ships. In all, the admiral now had 16,593 tons of coal and 3,000 tons of water in reserve. When he sailed for Christmas Island on August 29, the German cruisers carried coal in sacks on their decks.

Admiral von Spee continued slowly east across the wide, empty ocean, his progress marked only by the long trails of black smoke pouring from his funnels. On September 1, the squadron crossed the 180th meridian, adding a calendar day, which permitted one
Gneisenau
officer to celebrate his birthday twice. On the seventh, they reached Christmas Island—on the equator, a British possession intermittently visited by gatherers of copra. Here,
Nürnberg
rejoined them, having paused at Fanning Island to cut the British cable running from the Fiji Islands to Hawaii. From Honolulu,
Nürnberg
brought news. She had learned that on August 30, Apia, the capital of German Samoa, had been occupied by New Zealand troops. Von Spee summoned another council of captains and proposed a surprise descent on Samoa in hopes of catching British vessels anchored in the harbor.

The squadron left Christmas Island on September 9 and crossed the equator the next day. Samoa, their destination, was a range of volcanic islands, some of the peaks rising 4,000 feet out of the sea. A strait separates the two large islands of Samoa; the eastern island was American, the western had been German. With luck, a surprise attack by Spee’s squadron might catch in the bay several steamers engaged in supplying provisions for the newly arrived New Zealand garrison. With even better luck, the battle cruiser
Australia
might be found at anchor; if so, Spee planned to attack her with torpedoes. But when he reached Apia before dawn on September 14, the anchorage was deserted except for a three-masted American schooner and a smaller sailing vessel. To send sailor landing parties ashore and attempt to recapture the island would have been too costly in casualties and ammunition; the Germans steamed away without firing a shot. When Spee heard the Apia wireless station, out of range of his guns, broadcasting his position, he decided on the simplest of naval ruses: he first turned and steamed to the northwest; then once out of sight of land, he again headed east. The success of this deception was to have terrible consequences for the British navy.