Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (19 page)

Against the appearance of von Spee in the South Atlantic, the Admiralty began to dispose ships as early as the first week of September. Local circumstances, particularly the Mexican civil war, had brought about a concentration of ships in the Caribbean during August. Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commanding on the North American station, signalled on 3 September, “
Good Hope
[armoured cruiser] . . . visiting St. Paul’s Rocks, and will arrive Pernambuco 5th September for orders,
Cornwall
[armoured cruiser] is in wireless touch proceeding south.
Glasgow
[light cruiser] reports proceeding with
Monmouth
[armoured cruiser] and
Otranto
[armed merchant cruiser] to Magellan Straits [Cape Horn], where number of German ships reported, presumably colliers, and where concentration of German cruisers from China, Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean appears positive.”
¹⁹
Cradock’s signal was a remarkably shrewd appreciation by a commander not privy to Admiralty intelligence. Pernambuco, the eastward point of Brazil, abutted the main trade routes from Argentina, whence came much of Britain’s beef. St. Paul’s Rocks, off Pernambuco, were an obvious coaling area for German commerce raiders; they were to be much used as a refuelling rendezvous by U-boats during the Second World War. South American ports were full of colliers chartered by local German agents to resupply the commerce raiders, as Cradock indicated.

Cradock then became distracted by his inability to locate
Dresden
and another German light cruiser,
Karlsrühe.
About
Karlsrühe
he need not have worried; after disappearing from view among the remoter islands of the West Indies, she was blown up by a spontaneous explosion in her magazines on 4 November, a fact not known in Britain for three months, though speculation as to her whereabouts would continue to complicate Cradock’s thinking during September and October.
Dresden
remained a real menace. To guard against her entering the Pacific, Admiral Cradock sent
Glasgow, Monmouth
and
Otranto
to the Magellan Straits, at the tip of South America, in early September. Meanwhile,
Dresden,
having sunk a British collier off the River Plate, itself transferred to the Magellan Straits and then, on advice from the German Admiralty “to operate with the
Leipzig,”
sailed into the Pacific on 18 September. News of
Dresden
’s movements prompted Cradock, disastrously as it would turn out, to take
Good Hope,
his flagship, south to the Magellan Straits also, where he met
Glasgow
and
Monmouth
on 14 September.

Communication between Europe and South American waters was complex. The British Admiralty used its intact cable network to send messages to Cerrito, in Uruguay, whence they were wirelessed onwards to the low-power wireless station in the Falkland Islands; that assured reasonably rapid touch with ships in the South Atlantic. Signalling into the South Pacific was more difficult. The Falklands station could not usually reach the Pacific, because of atmospherics and the barrier of the Andes, so warships had to be sent into port at regular intervals to collect cable telegrams, a tedious procedure entailing many delays. The Germans wirelessed from Nauen, as far as its range would carry, to their consuls, who then communicated by cable with German merchant ships in the port nearest to von Spee’s position. South American governments being lax about neutrality regulations, their merchant captains then wirelessed signals onwards and retransmitted those received by the same route homeward.

On 14 September, the Admiralty sent Cradock a long signal that laid the basis for his squadron’s and his own destruction:

There is a strong possibility of
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
arriving in the Magellan Straits or on the west coast of South America . . . Leave sufficient force to deal with
Dresden
and
Karlsrühe
. Concentrate a squadron strong enough to meet
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau,
making Falkland Islands your coaling base.
Canopus
is now en route to Albrohos,
Defence
is joining you from the Mediterranean. Until
Defence
joins, keep at least
Canopus
and one “County” class [i.e.
Glasgow
or similar] with your flagship. As soon as you have superior force, search the Magellan Straits with squadron, being ready to return and cover the River Plate or, according to information, search north as far as Valparaiso. Break up German trade and destroy the German cruisers.
²⁰

This was a strategic rather than tactical directive, and of very wide scope. It committed Cradock to cover both the Atlantic coast of South America, as far north as the River Plate in Uruguay, a merchant shipping focal point, and the Pacific coast as far as the other focal point of Valparaiso in Chile. It instructed him to conduct both commerce warfare and an anti-cruiser campaign. It promised him a ship,
Defence,
which was later to be retained in the Mediterranean; had it come to him, he could not have been outgunned. It represented
Canopus,
an obsolete battleship, as an equivalent, which it was not. It implicitly expected Cradock to produce a victory.

The signal, when sent, disguised the Admiralty’s complete ignorance of von Spee’s whereabouts. All it knew was that he was somewhere in the southeastern Pacific, between Fanning Island—a fact established by the destruction of that lonely island’s wireless and cable station—and Cape Horn, an exercise in location subject to error by a factor of thousands of miles and hundreds of degrees of longitude and latitude. On 16 September there was a correction: “situation changed.
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
off Samoa on 14th September . . . left steering N.W. [back towards the Bismarcks] . . . German trade on west coast of America to be attacked at once . . . Cruisers need not be concentrated. Two cruisers and an armed liner would appear sufficient for Magellan Straits and West Coast. Report what you propose about
Canopus.
”
²¹

The report from Samoa was the outcome of von Spee’s ill-judged visit two days earlier. It might have resulted in disaster, had the Australian fleet been present. Two weeks later he had transferred to the remote Marquesa Islands, last outpost of the French empire in the Pacific. There he was able to coal again in sheltered waters and load fresh food, from islanders who had not yet heard of the European war. Then he set off to even more remote places, first Easter Island, then Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe’s legendary marooning place. At Easter Island he was joined by
Dresden
and
Leipzig
which, proceeding independently by guesswork, arrived there to meet him during 1–5 October. The first he knew of their approach was by intercepting wireless signals between them.

Meanwhile Cradock, whose communications with the Admiralty were to be increasingly misunderstood, as theirs with him were to be also, was searching for
Dresden
along the Atlantic coast of South America. He was alerted to the fact that he was in the wrong ocean only when, on 25 September, he met a British ship which had been chased by her on 18 September, near Cape Horn. Feeling that he was now on the scent, Cradock immediately led his squadron to the Magellan Straits (the normal means of passage between the two great oceans) and put in at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas, where the British consul confirmed that
Dresden
had indeed been about, using nearby Orange Bay as a base. Finding nothing there, Cradock then reversed course; a complicated toing-and-froing followed, during which he returned in his flagship
Good Hope
to the Falklands, leaving his accompanying armed merchant cruiser
Otranto
behind, but, once arrived, almost immediately sent
Glasgow
and
Monmouth
back to join
Otranto
at Punta Arenas, with orders—in accordance with Admiralty instructions as he understood them—to conduct cruiser warfare on the Pacific coast of Chile. At the Falklands, however, Cradock heard by wireless from
Otranto
that she had overheard German naval wireless signals, which set her off again to Orange Bay, where German sailor scrawls of a “Kilroy was here” sort confirmed
Dresden
’s presence only a few days earlier. Finding no actual German presence, however, he returned once more to the Falklands.

Cradock, who was to be widely blamed for future disaster, was in an unenviable situation. He was acutely aware of ambient danger—the presence of von Spee’s big ships, probably in the Pacific but perhaps seeking to break into the Atlantic; the lurking menace of the German light cruisers, preying on British trade; the lack of a British base anywhere in his theatre of responsibility, except the Falklands, which did not offer control of Pacific waters; the penetration of the whole Patagonian region by German settlers and officials, all willing and ready to resupply the Kaiser’s ships, shelter their colliers and spy on the Royal Navy; and, as a background to his difficulties, the awful Cape Horn weather which, even in what was the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, brought constant gales, sleet, snow and mountainous seas. To cap all, he was oppressed by his difficulties of communication with his masters in London. They in turn, oppressed by fear of a break-out by the High Seas Fleet, were trying to work a worldwide strategy without touching their gold reserve of modern battleships and battlecruisers locked up in northern Scotland, instead hoping that obsolete units left over from the Victorian navy could keep Germany’s best cruisers on overseas stations at bay. It did not help the management of British naval strategy that the Admiralty’s political chief, Winston Churchill, was currently attempting to direct in person a private war on the north coast of Belgium or that the Royal Navy’s professional head, Louis of Battenberg, was under attack by the popular press as a German princeling, an attack which would shortly lead to his removal from office.

In the circumstances, Cradock appears to have tried to straddle two oceans and two incompatible Admiralty demands: to protect British trade in the Atlantic and to destroy the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron in the Pacific, if that was where it was. Little wonder that his movements in the first days of October appeared confused. However, on his return to the Falklands after his second search of Orange Bay, he received an Admiralty message on 7 October that at last threw light on von Spee’s whereabouts and gave him more or less clear instructions.

On 4 October the wireless station at Suva, in British Fiji, had picked up a message from
Scharnhorst
in the German mercantile code, reading, “
Scharnhorst
on the way between the Marquesas and Easter Island.”
²²
As is now known, the information was correct. The Admiralty anyhow instructed Cradock on 7 October “to be prepared to have to meet them in company . . .
Canopus
should accompany
Glasgow, Monmouth
and
Otranto,
the ships to search and protect trade in combination . . . If you propose
Good Hope
to go, leave
Monmouth
on the east coast.”
²³

The question nevertheless remains whether the Admiralty was yet able to read
Scharnhorst
’s code transmissions. A copy of the German mercantile code had indeed been seized in Australian waters early in the war but it did not apparently reach the Admiralty until the end of October.
²⁴
Perhaps the book was already being used locally. More mysterious are Cradock’s reactions to the Admiralty’s quite clear instructions of 7 October. In his reply on the 8th, he showed that he recognised the likelihood of von Spee’s heavy ships being joined by the light cruisers, making a formidable force. He also advised that he had summoned his old slow battleship
Canopus
to join him at the Falklands, where he intended “to concentrate and avoid division of forces.” Yet despite his resolve not to divide his forces, he had sent
Glasgow, Monmouth
and
Otranto
into the Pacific, under the feebly limiting instruction “not to go north of Valparaiso until German cruisers are located.” He also enquired after the whereabouts of
Defence,
previously promised to him but retained in the Mediterranean; and he was clearly unsettled by the idea that von Spee might go north, pass through the Panama Canal, if the Americans would so permit, and thus either get home to Germany or open up another commerce war in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the last two weeks of October, the Admiralty and Cradock got disastrously, ultimately tragically, at cross-purposes. The Admiralty made new dispositions in the Atlantic designed to backstop Cradock if von Spee evaded him and broke out of the Pacific; they included the deployment of
Defence
—at last—and other cruisers from the African station under Admiral Stoddart to the Brazilian bulge. London was also counting on the disposition of the Japanese fleet in the central and western Pacific to limit von Spee’s ability to do harm in that ocean. Over the deployment of strength in what was to prove the critical area—the South Pacific between Valparaiso and Cape Horn—the Admiralty and its admiral on the spot succeeded in misunderstanding each other.

The grit in the works was the condition of
Canopus
and Cradock’s misunderstanding of his authority over
Defence
.
Defence
was an ultimate example of the armoured cruiser idea, bigger, faster, as heavily armoured and more heavily gunned than either
Scharnhorst
or
Gneisnau;
had she joined Cradock, as he believed she would, she would have seen off either of her German equivalents.
Canopus,
though a battleship, was inferior to all three armoured cruisers, British and German alike. She was thinly armoured, and her 12-inch guns barely outranged those of the Germans. Moreover, her timorous chief engineer had persuaded her captain and Cradock that she could not make better than twelve knots, a cripple’s speed. Cradock accordingly went on ahead from the Falklands into the Pacific, signalling the Admiralty on 27 October that “
Canopus
’s slow speed” made it “impracticable to find and destroy the enemy squadron. Consequently have ordered
Defence
to join me . . .
Canopus
will be employed on necessary convoying of colliers.”
²⁵
Unfortunately, the Admiralty misinterpreted the picture, concluding—by a misunderstanding of the role of
Canopus
or of Cradock’s intentions—that von Spee’s squadron was blocked. If he went north he would fall under the guns of the powerful Japanese fleet. If he went south he would eventually run into Cradock’s cruisers, which the Admiralty appeared to believe would have
Canopus
in company. It was apparently disbelieved that Cradock would risk an engagement without the support of her 12-inch guns. It therefore concluded that “the situation on the west coast [of South America] is safe” and ordered
Defence,
which had both the speed and guns to defy von Spee, to remain in the Atlantic. Cradock, a sailor in the Elizabethan tradition who was determined not to repeat Milne’s mistake during the
Goeben
and
Breslau
episode of letting any German opponent escape, pushed ahead with his collection of weak ships, leaving
Canopus
to limp along 300 miles behind. In the late afternoon of 1 November, the two squadrons made contact off the Chilean port of Coronel.