Hitler's Spy Chief (4 page)

A certain chivalry was an essential feature of the relationship and was never far from the surface, even when both navies fought each other as determined opponents from the first weeks of the war.

The opening sequence of events saw the tremendous engagements of the Coronel and the Falklands Islands: the first a devastating blow to the Royal Navy's pride, the second, a swift and decisive revenge. At the Coronel, a German squadron had destroyed a British force under Admiral Cradock in a humiliating action, all the more painful for it being so unexpected. At the Falklands, six weeks later, the Royal Navy pursued her revenge, sinking all but one of the German ships.

Both battles were, however, punctuated by fulsome respect on the part of both sides for their opponents' courage. These were, after all, old style engagements between worthy foes where gunfire and seamanship, unaided by aircraft, unencumbered by civilians, counted for everything in waters still free at that stage from mines and submarines. In these battles, effective gunnery killed hundreds in seconds. Broadsides fired at close range played havoc among crowded groups of men as they were mown down in heaps
by shell splinters. Those who might have contemplated jumping overboard knew the water would numb them in seconds. Only the strongest mixture imaginable of courage, discipline and skill could enable such embattled humanity to fight on. Yet time and again the officers and men of a navy that had barely existed thirty years earlier showed that they were as capable of'fighting and dying like Englishmen' as their opponents.

The reports of the engagement by British officers repeatedly testify to the courage of the enemy, while the Germans were no less chivalrous in their turn.

Thus, after Graf von Spee's squadron had destroyed Admiral Cradock's cruiser squadron at the Coronel, with the deaths of several hundred sailors including Cradock himself, a German consul who proposed a toast to ‘the damnation of the British Navy' found himself suddenly frozen by the glare of his German naval guests.

Von Spee's response cut the cheerful victory celebration atmosphere with the skill of the surgeon's knife. ‘I drink', he said, ‘to the memory of a gallant and honourable foe.'
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Von Spee had known Cradock well before the war and both men enjoyed each other's company.
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Coincidentally, both men had premonitions of their deaths: Cradock, talking to the Governor at the Falklands, Von Spee
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accepting a bouquet at Valparaiso. It should not be forgotten that both navies had cooperated on a number of occasions in the run-up to 1914, especially in South American waters when gunboats and showing the flag were an essential part of the old powers' economic and political influence in the new world. As Commander Pochhammer, the senior surviving German officer after the Falklands battle, wrote to Admiral Sturdee: ‘We regret, as you do, the course of the war, as we have personally learned to know well during peacetime the English navy and her officers.'
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Sturdee replied to Pochhammer: ‘We so much admire the good
gunnery of your ships. Unfortunately the two countries are at war; the officers of both navies who can count friends in the other navy, have to carry out their country's duties which your Admiral, Captain and officers worthily maintained to the end.'
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In his official report, which was censored, as the face of the foe in wartime must show no humanity, Sturdee went even further: referring to the battered and blazing
Gneisenau
which though under a hail of fire from three ships on different bearings continued firing with what armament was still in action, even scoring a last hit on Sturdee's flagship
Invincible
as Sturdee gave orders to his ships to cease fire. He wrote: ‘They fought magnificently and their discipline must have been superb … we were all good friends after the fight and both agreed we did not want to fight at all but had to.'
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These remarks alone testify to an intimacy and mutual admiration between German and British naval officers that transcended the variables of conflict and underline the strength of an already well-established relationship which had no counterpart at a military level between the two countries.

From the carnage of the Falkland Islands, one German ship, however, had made its escape: the cruiser
Dresden
, pursued doggedly but ineffectively by HMS
Glasgow
. Aided by darkness, mist and above all speed, this light cruiser managed by her survival to just take a bit of the icing off Admiral Sturdee's victory. For the next four months the
Dresden
was to become the focus of tremendous Royal Naval activity. It was to be many weeks before the full victory of the Falkland Islands could be enjoyed by any of its protagonists, whose mutual jealousies the
Dresden
seemed destined to exacerbate at every turn.

The chase that followed saw rather less generous exchanges of views between the Admiralty and Sturdee than those reserved for a gallant enemy. Rarely had such a search resulted in such a fraying of tempers at all levels of the Admiralty executive.

Captain Luce, commanding HMS
Glasgow
, had correctly noted that only the ‘swiftest of actions could wipe the stain of dishonour from the Royal Navy's record' which the Coronel had inflicted. But there was more to it than that. Cradock's orders from the Admiralty, whose First Lord was Winston Churchill, had been so ineptly worded that the defeat of his inferior force by Admiral Graf von Spee was as much the result of a breakdown in Royal Naval staff machinery as superior German gunnery.

Churchill, who as First Lord left little conduct of naval operations to the First Sea Lord, is to this day largely held to blame.
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The naval staff set up by him and Battenberg in 1913 had broken down miserably in the opening weeks of the campaign. Cradock was so ambivalently instructed that he felt compelled to give action even though his forces were unequal to achieving any decisive success. The subsequent victory at the Falkland Islands, six weeks later, only partly washed away the memory of this disastrous miscalculation.

Churchill's reputation had suffered. At an only slightly less exalted level, Admiral ‘Jackie' Fisher, First Sea Lord, was also under tremendous pressure. The successful action of the Falklands did little to ease this. The sudden glory of his rival, Vice Admiral Sturdee, and his brilliant seamanship at the Falklands, threw Fisher's earlier staff ineptitude into sharp relief.

The escape of the
Dresden
from the Falklands engagement was thus a thorny issue. For Churchill, as long as the
Dresden
survived there was an ugly reminder of the defeat at the Coronel and an untidy blemish on the victory of the Falklands. For Fisher these considerations were mixed however with a degree of vindictive
schadenfreude
towards Sturdee, whose failure to find the
Dresden
could be used untiringly to detract from his earlier success. As long as Fisher could play up Sturdee's lack of success in finding the
Dresden
, the greater the chance that his own earlier technical shortcomings would not be explored in further detail.

As a result, an unusual amount of traffic, much of it heated, was
generated by the failure – for more than three months – of the Royal Navy to track down the
Dresden
. Thus Fisher could signal Jellicoe, commander of the main batde fleet, of Sturdee: ‘His criminal ineptitude in not sending a vessel to Punta Arenas has disastrously kept from you light cruisers now hunting the Dresden.'

This tone was reinforced in Fisher's signals to Sturdee, which kept up a veritable barrage of complaints about the failure to find the
Dresden
. Yet Sturdee gave as good as he got. Long explanations of his movements, justifying his failure to find the quarry, were signalled to the Admiralty, culminating in a memorably impertinent signal from a subordinate to a superior officer which even the usual terseness of encrypted correspondence failed to disguise:

‘l submit.' signalled Sturdee, ‘my being called upon in three separate telegrams to give reasons for my subsequent action is unexpected.'

Fisher responded with equal brevity: ‘The last paragraph of your signal is improper and such observations must not be repeated.' Nor did Sturdee's difficulties with Fisher end with his re-posting to England. On his return to London, Fisher kept him waiting for two hours and then saw the ‘hero of the Falklands' for a mere five minutes, during which he made no mention of the battle but dwelt only on the failure to catch the
Dresden
. Upon hearing later that day that Sturdee had been invited to Buckingham Palace by the King to give an account of the batde, Fisher promptly ordered Sturdee to depart for Scapa Flow immediately with the clear intention of preventing the audience. Regrettably of such bitter and ungenerous rivalries are great sea lords sometimes made.

Whether Captain Luce on the
Glasgow
was aware of this unedifying exchange is not known. He had his own reasons for setding scores with the
Dresden
. At the Coronel, Luce had had to flee from von Spee and during the subsequent Falklands battle, he had been detailed to pursue the
Dresden
when she broke off the engagement, but had lost her. He had thus been involved in every part of the humiliating saga.

It had been this failure which had tied up ships desperately needed elsewhere, because the
Dresden
, through a series of brilliant deceptions and counter deceptions, had always managed to outwit the Royal Navy. As Fisher acidly noted: ‘If the
Dresden
gets to the Bay of Bengal, we shall owe a lot to Sturdee.'

In a sequence of dazzling false trails, the intelligence officer of the
Dresden
had not only refuelled and resupplied his ship, he had drawn off significant enemy forces, including HMS
Inflexible, Glasgow
and
Bristol
, all needed by the Grand Fleet in the North Sea. Moreover, he had bamboozled Royal Naval intelligence officers throughout Latin America and led a clutch of British agents, informers and consular officers a merry paper dance which had only served to highlight the shortcomings of naval intelligence as conducted by the Admiralty in London and its ships in the South Atlantic.

The intelligence officer on the
Dresden
responsible for this, from the Royal Navy's point of view, increasingly humiliating game of hide and seek, was barely into his twenties. Lieutenant Canaris was gifted linguistically – fluent in six languages – and comfortable in the ways of Spanish America, where he had served in the years before 1914 on the completion of his training as a cadet at Kiel in 1911.

Bribing local officials one day, sending false signals the next, Canaris was already making his first, admittedly cameo, but irritating appearance in the sights of the Royal Navy even before Luce's HMS
Glasgow
found the long sought-after silhouette of the
Dresden
that chilly March day in Cumberland Bay. Canaris' feints and counter-feints had already left a score of misleading and inaccurate signals referring to the movements of the
Dresden
.

Following the defeat at the Falklands, Berlin had suggested the
Dresden
try to return to Europe via the Atlantic, an option which her captain,
Lüdecke, understandably saw as tantamount to suicide. Briefed by Canaris, however, Captain Lüdecke decided instead to put a different plan into action, which involved setting course in a northerly direction 200 miles off the Chilean coast. The
Dresden
would intercept what enemy merchantmen she could before finding refuge in the neutral waters of Chile.

Canaris' immediate need was coal, but the German supply ships would not answer his signals. By 12 December the light cruiser had reached Punta Arenas. Here Canaris was able to persuade the local authorities to allow her to remain for as long as it took to fill her empty bunkers. By a happy chance, the signal of the Chilean government which, under British pressure, denied the
Dresden
the right of coaling at all did not reach the authorities at Punta Arenas until the following day; not the last stroke of luck to assist Canaris.
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In any event, Canaris was not keen to stay any longer than absolutely necessary. He knew that the ship's presence would be reported by the British consul, Captain Milward, and indeed it was: no fewer than five warships were sent to trap her.

As soon as the Admiralty learnt of Lüdecke's escape from Punta Arenas, Sturdee was signalled to ‘Press your chase' and, should Sturdee have entertained any other alternatives to finding and sinking the
Dresden
, the signal noted that the ‘Object is destruction not internment.'

But while the Royal Navy searched up and down the waters off Patagonia, the
Dresden
sought refuge in the lonely Hewett Bay and then the even more remote Christmas Bay. In Punta Arenas the intrepid Milward received news of the German ship's presence but his signal was discounted by both the Admiralty and Stoddart, who had taken over from Sturdee on the latter's return to England. In both cases Canaris had, by planting false information on local British agents, ‘persuaded' his pursuers that he was somewhere else.

On 14 February the pursuit calmed down for the
Dresden
as she encountered a violent snowstorm, but by 19 February she was able to carry on cruiser warfare and sink the
Conway Castle
and its cargo of 2,400 tons of barley destined for Australia, predictably provoking another harsh encrypted reprimand for Stoddart from Fisher.

By this time there had been many reported sightings of the
Dresden
, including one by HMS
Kent
. But once again she slipped the net, causing yet another senior naval officer, this time the captain of the
Kent
, J. D. Allen, considerable anger and frustration. A few days later, after receiving news of his C.B. for his part in the Falklands Battle, Allen would write: ‘I felt no pleasure, as our failure to catch the
Dresden
was too recent. I should rather have sunk her than have every honour there is.'
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