Castles of Steel (40 page)

In the first month of war, Admiral Cradock reached several conclusions about his assignment. He realized from observation and intelligence that the German liners were not coming out of New York. And he learned that both German light cruisers were operating far to the south of his normal station:
Karlsruhe
was reported at Curaçao and
Dresden
off the mouth of the Amazon, where her presence was raising anxiety among shippers and traders down the coast of South America. The Admiralty agreed that the threat in the North Atlantic was diminished; accordingly, on September 3 a new South American Station was created, with Cradock in command. His assignment was to move down the coast of South America to protect merchant shipping in the South Atlantic and to find and sink
Dresden.
Protection of the West Indies and the upper South Atlantic and responsibility for dealing with the threat of
Karlsruhe
were transferred to Rear Admiral A. C. Stoddart, who was to have
Carnarvon, Cumberland,
and
Cornwall.

The force with which Cradock was to carry out his South Atlantic mission was thoroughly ragtag.
Good Hope,
his flagship, was twelve years old and displaced 14,100 tons. When she was new and first put to sea, she had several distinctions. “She was the fastest cruiser afloat, having done over 24 knots on trial,” said her gunnery officer, Lieutenant Ernle Chatfield, later captain of the battle cruiser
Lion.
And “we were the first new ship to be painted grey all over.” Even so, considering the large size of her hull,
Good Hope
was laughably undergunned, with two 9.2-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns, half of the latter mounted in broadside batteries so close to the water that they could not be fired in a heavy sea. When Fisher became First Sea Lord, he complained that “the guns . . . on the main deck are practically useless. We know this from experience. Half the time they cannot see the . . . [target] for want of view and the other half they are flooded out by the sea.” Not yet old,
Good Hope
was, in fact, already obsolete. She had been made so not only by the advent of battle cruisers but by the appearance of more modern armored cruisers only a few years younger, for example,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau. Good Hope
had been consigned to the Third Fleet with other old armored cruisers of her era, then suddenly was recommissioned on mobilization with a crew of whom 90 percent were reservists. When she steamed out of Portsmouth on August 2, a Salvation Army band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” In the three months that followed, her untrained crew carried out only one full-caliber shoot. “It certainly is the limit,” a regular navy gunnery officer wrote later, “taking a ship like that off the dockyard wall, giving her four rounds [per gun] of practice, and then putting her up against a ship like
Scharnhorst.
”

Good Hope
at least carried two heavy 9.2-inch guns, but Cradock’s other armored cruiser,
Monmouth,
an eleven-year-old, 10,000-ton County-class armored cruiser, carried no heavy guns at all. Here, Fisher’s bitter comment was “Sir William White designed the County class but forgot the guns.” In fact,
Monmouth
carried fourteen 6-inch guns, but they were old and had no greater range than the 4.1-inch guns of the modern German light cruisers. Worse, many of
Monmouth
’s guns were sheltered behind gun-port doors only a few feet above the water; in a heavy sea, the doors had to remain shut or the waves would come in. Not infrequently at night, the men on the starboard forward main deck gun would ask permission to shut the gun port, normally kept open for night defense stations, because they were being washed out by the sea. Like many other ships,
Monmouth
was a victim of haste and improvisation in the Admiralty’s mobilization. About to be scrapped, she was hurriedly recommissioned on August 4, crewed with naval reservists, coast guardsmen, boy seamen, and naval cadets and dispatched to the South Atlantic. When
Monmouth
met the new light cruiser
Glasgow
at sea on August 20,
Glasgow
’s officers were appalled. “Sighted
Monmouth
at eleven a.m.,” wrote one
Glasgow
officer. “She had been practically condemned as unfit for further service, but was hauled off the dockyard wall commissioned with a scratch of coast guardsmen and boys. There are also twelve little naval cadets who are keen as mustard. She left England on August 4, she is only half equipped and is not in a condition to come six thousand miles from any dockyard as she is kept going only by super-human efforts.” Still another vessel added to Cradock’s polyglot squadron was the 12,000-ton converted Orient Lines liner
Otranto,
sent off to war with six 4.7-inch guns.
Otranto
’s mission was to hunt down converted German merchant ships of her own kind; no one intended that she should fight enemy warships.

When Admiral Cradock’s improvised squadron steamed into the South Atlantic,
Glasgow
was already there. The only modern British warship on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean, the three-year-old
Glasgow
was a Town-class light cruiser of 4,800 tons, a sister of
Gloucester,
which had dogged
Goeben.
Designed for 25 knots, she had gone faster when her turbine engines burned coal that had been sprayed with oil. Her armament of two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns made her more than a match for any German light cruiser, and her regular navy crew was as well trained and efficient as any in the German fleet. Beyond this,
Glasgow
had an exceptional captain in John Luce. For two years, he and his ship had been showing the flag and singlehandedly guarding British interests along the east coast of South America, his beat extending from the mouth of the Amazon down to the Straits of Magellan. Under his protection were the vital trade routes supplying Britain with meat and grain from the river Plate, nitrates from Chile, and coffee from Brazil; on any given day in peacetime, hundreds of British and German merchantmen would be moving along these routes. At the end of July 1914,
Glasgow
was in Rio, expecting shortly to return to England. Believing they would soon be home, members of the crew had bought Brazilian parrots to take back with them; sixty birds were housed in cages on deck in the warm South Atlantic air. When the Admiralty telegram warning of war arrived, the crew began stripping away superfluous woodwork and sending armchairs, books, and other personal possessions ashore. The men could not bear to give up their parrots, however, and Luce agreed that the birds could stay. Officers’ civilian clothing received no exemption; only Lieutenant Hirst, the intelligence officer, was allowed to keep his plain clothes. “Later on,” he said, “when leave could be taken, it was amusing to see my whole range of suits going ashore in the officers’ boat, worn by messmates of varying sizes.”

Luce’s primary concern, once war began, was lack of a coaling base. South America during the Great War was a neutral continent except for the colonies of British Guinea on the northeast coast and the British Falkland Islands, 2,000 miles to the south. In peacetime,
Glasgow
could buy coal anywhere. But once hostilities commenced, under international rules of war, a warship could coal and provision only once every three months in any given neutral country; admiralties and captains on both sides preferred to reserve this privilege for emergencies. Even in wartime, there was no difficulty obtaining coal; it could be bought from British firms or through British agents in foreign ports. But
Glasgow
’s operations—and those of other British warships coming south—were certain to be hampered by the lack of a safe harbor where the coal could be transferred from colliers into warships. During the two years Luce had served on the station, he had located two places that, in an emergency, might serve. One was Abrolhos Rocks, a group of rocky islets, surrounded by reefs, fifteen miles off the Brazilian coast, north of Rio and near the main trade route between the Plate and the North Atlantic. The islets, the largest of them three-quarters of a mile long, were uninhabited except for the keeper of a lighthouse, but they belonged to Brazil. However, three miles out to sea from the lighthouse—and thus outside Brazilian territorial waters—an anchorage of sorts had been formed by reefs above or just below the surface. The site was exposed to the southeast trade winds and the prevailing southeasterly swell caused ships alongside each other for coaling to grind together, denting side plates and starting leaks, but there was no alternative. Luce’s other temporary coaling site, also in international waters, lay in an area in the broad, shallow estuary of the Plate itself, seven miles off the coast of Uruguay, where ships could anchor in forty- or fifty-foot water. Beyond that, the British navy had only the harbor of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands.

As Cradock’s squadron steamed down the east coast of South America, the admiral spread his net for
Dresden.
The net came up empty in respect to the fugitive light cruiser but did produce another result. At the end of August, the 19,000-ton Cunard armed merchant liner
Carmania
arrived in the South Atlantic from England, bringing Cradock’s ships a cargo of coal, provisions, and a large quantity of frozen meat. These supplies delivered,
Carmania,
which had been equipped with eight 4.7-inch guns, remained with Cradock. It was in this capacity that the ship was detached from the main force and ordered to reconnoiter Trinidad Island, which the Admiralty suspected was being used as a secret German coaling base. This island, not to be confused with the British island colony of Trinidad in the West Indies, lies about 600 miles east of South America on the same latitude as Rio, and belonged to Brazil. Far from any trade route, it was no more than a mid-ocean group of sharp coral rocks inhabited by seabirds and scuttling land crabs.

Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on September 14, as the ocean was ruffled by a moderate breeze,
Carmania,
coming down from the northeast, sighted three German steamships at anchor in a bay at the western end of the island. One was a large liner, and the others were colliers, their derricks busy transferring coal to the bigger vessel. On seeing
Carmania,
the three ships immediately separated and made off in different directions. The large ship was the new Hamburg–South America Line liner
Cap Trafalgar,
18,710 tons and 590 feet long, whose wartime assignment was to prey on British trade in the South Atlantic. At the outbreak of war,
Cap Trafalgar
had been at Buenos Aires, where she installed heavy lumber to buttress her decks for gun mountings and painted two funnels to resemble the markings of a British Union Castle liner. On September 2,
Cap Trafalgar
had rendezvoused at Trinidad Island with the German gunboat
Eber,
where she mounted two 4.1-inch guns and eight machine guns, and took aboard most of
Eber
’s navy crew of 392 officers and men. Lieutenant Wirth of the Imperial Navy became the liner’s new captain. Thereafter,
Cap Trafalgar
had cruised for ten days looking for British merchantmen, but the air was so filled with British naval wireless signals that Wirth became more concerned about the safety of his ship than with attacking enemy vessels. Now he was back at Trinidad Island to coal.

When
Carmania
appeared,
Cap Trafalgar
decided to run for it and soon was making 18 knots.
Carmania,
designed for 18 knots, could make only 16. Then, for unknown reasons, Wirth changed his mind and decided to fight, and turned
Cap Trafalgar
onto a converging course. At noon, when the distance between the two ships was down to 8,000 yards,
Carmania
opened fire.
Cap Trafalgar
fired back, and the world’s first battle between ocean liners began.
Carmania
had overwhelming superiority in guns, but battle between ships of this size and design was awkward. Neither ship had any kind of coordinated fire control; each gun crew simply fired whenever a target appeared in its sights. On both big liners, the upper deck where the guns were mounted was seventy feet above the hold where the ammunition was stored. As there were no ammunition hoists, the shells had to be carried to the guns by hand.

The range continued to fall. At 4,500 yards,
Carmania
began firing salvos from her port guns and two of these broadsides struck
Cap Trafalgar
on the starboard waterline. The German ship replied as well as she could, but most of her shells went high and
Carmania
was hit mostly in her masts, funnels, derricks, and ventilators. When the range came down to 3,000 yards, the German machine-gunners opened fire and the bullets hammered noisily but harmlessly against the steel sides of
Carmania.
When the barrels of
Carmania
’s port-side 4.7-inch guns—all of them over twenty years old—became red-hot, her captain, Noel Grant, solved the problem by turning his ship around to bring her starboard guns into action.

Within half an hour,
Cap Trafalgar
was on fire forward and was listing to starboard.
Carmania
was also in trouble. A German shell had passed through the captain’s cabin under the forebridge and started a fire; the fire main was cut, so no water was available. With the flames out of control,
Carmania
’s foredeck was abandoned and, in order to steer the ship, orders were relayed through megaphones to a rudder station at the stern. Meanwhile, flames and smoke sucked down the ventilators set the engine-room crews to gasping and choking. Nevertheless,
Carmania
had begun to prevail when Wirth decided to attempt a second escape.
Cap Trafalgar
still had the higher speed and
Carmania,
in pursuit, continued firing until, beyond her maximum range of 9,000 yards, her adversary was out of reach. By 1:30 p.m., the British believed that
Cap Trafalgar
had escaped. The reality was different: Captain Wirth had been killed, the fires burning fore and aft had made the German decks untenable, the ship’s list was increasing. Then, suddenly, the great vessel heeled over, resting her funnels on the surface of the water. At 1:50 p.m.,
Cap Trafalgar
sank, first lifting her stern high in the air. Five boatloads of men pulled away.