Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (18 page)

Though numerous—fourteen in all—these warships were of mixed quality.
Australia
could sink any German colonial cruiser at no risk to herself at all, but she was to be tied, at the outset, to convoying the troopships of the Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force;
Dartmouth, Sydney
and
Melbourne
were the equal of the modern German light cruisers; the British armoured cruisers,
Minotaur
and
Hampshire,
were obsolescent and not up to the German class. Armoured cruisers had become an anomaly: too weak to fight battlecruisers, too slow to catch light cruisers, capable only of combat with others of their own class. It was to be the Royal Navy’s misfortune in the coming cruiser war that its armoured cruisers were the inferior of the German, inferior as both were to the new battlecruiser class.

In the early weeks of the war, Britain was to send reinforcements to the overseas stations. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commanding on the North America and West Indies stations, received the armoured cruisers
Suffolk, Berwick, Essex
and
Lancaster;
none was to take part in the cruiser war, but their sister ship
Monmouth
was. Detached to South America, she eventually joined the squadron Cradock was to form for anti-cruiser action. So did
Good Hope,
another armoured cruiser detached to him, into which, on 15 August, he shifted his flag. His final reinforcements were the old battleship
Canopus,
launched in 1896—its 12-inch guns were manned by elderly reservists, and its engine-room was supervised by a chief engineer who, as events would reveal, was mentally unfit for service—and the
Otranto,
an armed merchant cruiser. Armed merchant cruisers—to serve, with very mixed results, in both world wars—were liners or fast freighters, fitted with guns and crewed by naval officers and ratings, which admiralties expected to give useful service as convoy escorts or commerce raiders. In favourable circumstances some did; in others they proved deathtraps.

The Germans had also commissioned armed merchant cruisers; indeed, to its merchant fleet of high-speed liners of such companies as Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutsche-Lloyd belonged some of the fastest passenger ships in the world. At the outbreak most instantly took refuge in neutral ports, particularly in North and South America; but their captains, who frequently belonged, as many of their sailors did, to the German naval reserve, stood ready to join the German raiding force when opportunity offered. When guns and ammunition could be transferred to them, as was to happen, they became effective units in the commerce war.

Other elements in the commerce war were ships of the French, Russian and Japanese navies. France, with bases in Indo-China and the Pacific islands, had several cruisers and destroyers in Asiatic waters, including the
Dupleix
and
Montcalm;
Russia, not a serious Pacific naval power since its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, nevertheless had one or two units deployed; Japan, which entered the war against Germany on 23 August, altered the balance of naval power in the Pacific to Germany’s disadvantage altogether. Japan, whose army had been trained by Germany, had no quarrel with the Kaiser’s empire at all. Its declaration of hostilities was narrowly selfish. It correctly anticipated that, by aligning itself with Britain and France, it was likely to acquire possession of the German island chains of the Marianas, Carolines and Bismarcks. It did so; in the short term, the adherence of Japan to the anti-German alliance was also of great importance in limiting the German cruiser threat. In the long term, Japan’s annexation of Germany’s central and south Pacific islands laid the basis for its successful aggression against the European and American Pacific empires in 1941–42. Rabaul, in particular, Germany’s main base in the Papuan archipelago, was to become Japan’s principal
place d’armes
in the struggle with the Americans and Australians for New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in 1942–43.

Japan began its war against Germany by laying siege to Tsingtao on 2 September. It was to last until 7 November. The garrison, which knew resistance was hopeless, nevertheless fought with great tenacity. Two local defence gunboats,
S.90
and
Jaguar,
engaged the landing fleet; the defenders manned the redoubts, only gradually giving ground under heavy bombardment. The fortress commander had been cut off from the outside world since 14 August, when the British cable ship
Patrol
had cut the cables to Shanghai and Tschifu.
¹⁶
His garrison, mainly naval infantrymen, had also lost any hope of escape with the departure of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron some weeks earlier. Admiral Graf von Spee, after an exchange of dinners with his British counterparts, had parted from them on 14 June, on the friendliest terms, to cruise the German Pacific islands with the heavy ships. In the last weeks of July, as news of the heightening crisis in Europe reached him, he persuaded Berlin to cancel an order for
Nürnberg
to return to Tsingtao, calling her instead to meet him at Ponapé, an outlier of the Caroline Islands. There, on 4 August, he learnt that Britain had declared war but also that “Chile is a friendly neutral” and that “Japan will remain neutral.”
¹⁷

On this partially correct information, von Spee now decided his immediate course of action. Before leaving Tsingtao, he had instructed von Müller, captain of the
Emden,
that his principal role was to protect the colliers which assured the squadron’s mobility. In the event of “strained relations,” they were to leave Tsingtao and proceed to Pagan Island, in the Marianas.
Emden
was to seek to rejoin him. In the knowledge that Britain’s forces on the China station included a battleship and that HMAS
Australia,
capable of obliterating his whole squadron, was operating to the south, he set course for Pagan on 5 August and there on the 12th was joined by
Emden,
the armed merchant cruiser
Prinz Eitel Friedrich
and the provision ship
Yorck.
They brought four colliers; it was a warning of the dangers surrounding them that four others had been sunk or captured on passage by the British battleship
Triumph
and the armoured cruiser
Minotaur
—aboard which von Spee had dined companionably in June.

The northwestern Pacific was clearly becoming too dangerous a theatre for the East Asiatic Squadron; it was shortly to become even more dangerous when, on 23 August, Japan entered the war. The Imperial Japanese Navy, which had defeated the Russian with spectacular completeness in 1905, now comprised three dreadnoughts and four battlecruisers, all recently built in Japanese yards, seven heavy cruisers and scores of other cruisers and destroyers. Japan was not yet quite a first-class naval power, as she would become within twenty years. She could, nevertheless, devour Germany’s Asiatic fleet. It was time for von Spee to be off. With the British to the west and south, the Japanese to the north and the Australians to the south, he correctly decided to head southeast, towards Chile, where there were many German nationals and businesses, much sympathy for Germany’s cause and a labyrinth of uncharted inlets in which a marauding fleet might hide.

Before departing, however, von Spee agreed to a division of his force. Dividing force is a violation of a cardinal military principle. It was one that applied particularly strictly to von Spee. By keeping his ships together, he obliged his enemies to do likewise, which reduced their chances both of finding him and of falling upon German merchantmen plying the ocean. With only four ships—
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nürnberg
and
Emden
—under command, and while awaiting
Leipzig
and
Dresden
to join, logic required he maintain the strongest possible force. Nevertheless, he succumbed to the persuasion of
Emden
’s captain. Von Müller argued that, by cruising detached with the squadron’s fastest ship into the Indian Ocean, he could spread widespread confusion and do serious damage to Britain’s interests, particularly along the coasts closest to its greatest imperial possession, India. On the afternoon of 13 August, von Spee sent von Müller a written order: “You are hereby allocated the
Markommania
[a collier] and will be detached on the task of entering the Indian Ocean and waging cruiser warfare as best you can.”
¹⁸
Thus began the
Emden
epic, as dramatic as any passage in the history of Nelson’s frigate captains and a story that was to electrify friend and foe alike in the coming months of naval operations.

It was therefore with only three warships that von Spee set out on his traverse of the Pacific, across 120 degrees of longitude, to offer his challenge to Britain’s naval power in the southern oceans; also in company were the armed merchant cruiser
Prinz Eitel Friedrich,
eight colliers and supply ships and the armed merchantman
Cormoran,
formerly the Russian ship
Ryaezan,
captured by
Emden
on passage from Tsingtao and equipped with guns taken from a redundant coastal warship. The squadron’s first destination after leaving Pagan on 13 August was Eniwetok, in the Marshalls, nearly forty years later to be the scene of an American nuclear test. Von Spee coaled in the atoll’s lagoon between 19 and 22 August, then sailed for Majuro, also in the Marshalls. En route he detached
Prinz Eitel Friedrich
and
Cormoran
to raid commerce; the former was to rejoin him later; the latter, out of coal, was forced to seek internment in the American island of Guam. He also sent
Nürnberg
to Honolulu, already an American possession, with signals to be forwarded by cable to Berlin. His calculation here was sharp. As
Nürnberg
had last been seen by outsiders on the Mexican coast, and news of her joining the main squadron had not been broadcast, her arrival at Honolulu would not reveal his whereabouts.

Nürnberg
rejoined von Spee at the remote Christmas Island on 2 September, having meanwhile visited nearby Fanning Island to cut the British cable between Fiji and Honolulu. The action risked giving away his position and, indeed, during the next month, von Spee displayed an uncharacteristic recklessness. At Christmas Island he decided to sail to Samoa, now no longer German, since it had been captured by a New Zealand expeditionary force the previous month. He accepted that he might be confronted by superior force, perhaps even the
Australia,
but apparently took the view that, by approaching at dawn, he could prevail by the use of torpedoes, a very sanguine hope. In fact the harbour at Apia was empty and he sailed away, but left behind a trace of his presence. Another 500 miles to the east he called at Suvarov Island, hoping to coal, but was driven off by heavy seas, so proceeded to Bora Bora in the French Society Islands, where the inhabitants had not as yet heard of the war. They supplied him with fresh food while the ships coaled. His next objective was Papieté, capital of French Tahiti. There, however, news of the war had reached the garrison, which set fire to the coal stocks and put up resistance. There was no wireless station; but, as von Spee drew away, the governor sent a ship to Samoa with a report, which reached the Admiralty on 30 September.

Berlin was out of touch with the squadron since, with the loss of Rabaul in the Bismarcks to the Australians, the rear link to Nauen had been broken. It had therefore decided not to attempt to control von Spee’s movements or strategy, but the German naval high command expected him to proceed to South America and perhaps thence, via Cape Horn, into the Atlantic. The British Admiralty, by contrast, was principally concerned by the danger that von Spee might move east, to operate in Australasian waters or the Indian Ocean, where the great “imperial convoys,” bringing Australian, New Zealand and Indian soldiers to Europe, were setting sail. Its anxieties were much heightened by the success of von Müller on
Emden,
who, while von Spee made his leisurely way eastward across the Pacific, was cutting a swathe through Britain’s merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean.