German Raiders of the First World War: Kaiserliche Marine Cruisers and the Epic Chases

208 pages

Mike Farquharson-Roberts PhD (Mar Hist)

At the outbreak of the First World War the German hochseeflotte – High Seas Fleet – was anything but that, bottled up in the southern North Sea and Baltic by the Grand Fleet. Indeed, Churchill the First Lord of the Admiralty in a speech on 21 September 1914 said that the Germans appeared unwilling to fight and would have to be “dug out like rats from a hole.”[1]

However, the Germans did have deployed cruisers. In the Mediterranean there were SMS Goeben, (by British designation a battlecruiser) and a light cruiser SMS Breslau. The former was due to be relieved by her sister ship Moltke but the outbreak of war prevented it.

At Tsing Tao (now Qingdao) in China there was a German colony and a dockyard. (It even had a brewery, which still produces the eponymous beer). Based there were two heavy cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau under Vice Admiral von Spee and some light cruisers making up the East Asian squadron.

Before the war the Germans had exercised the deployment of two battleships and a cruiser for six months, crossing the Atlantic as far south as Argentina and some of their large merchant marine carried as cargo guns to allow their deployed conversion into Armed Merchant Cruisers. They intended that their deployed cruisers would conduct commerce raiding. To meet the threat of commerce raiding, the Royal Navy had the great advantage of being a world-wide navy, with crucially coaling and wireless stations all over the globe. British (and allied) warships could thus readily refuel and communicate. This advantage was not available to the Germans who had limited supplies of coal, either at neutral ports, from pre-positioned supply ships or from captures. A recurring feature of this book is German captains’ pressing need for coal and poor communications.

From August to November 1914 the foreign based cruisers and the auxiliaries had an effect disproportionate to their numbers, necessitating many more ships to hunt them down. They had a major effect on world trade and even the war itself; Goeben and Breslau ended up in Turkey and influenced the Turkish entry into the war on the side of the central powers. von Spee transited the Pacific while the allies searched for him. He then sank two British armoured cruisers at Coronel before himself being sunk off the Falkland Islands.

The SMS Emden intercepted 30 merchant vessels, capturing or sinking the 17 British flagged vessels of that number. She also shelled the oil storage tanks in Madras (now Chennai) harbour, and sank the Russian cruiser Zhemchug at anchor in Penang (her captain was ashore with his mistress), SMS Karlsruhe took 16 ships in the South Atlantic, Konigsberg shelled Zanzibar and sank HMS Pegasus. Her presence in the Arabian Gulf virtually froze trade through the Suez Canal for a time and Leipzig’s cruise in the north Pacific led to fear of an invasion in Canada. However, the scare, at times almost a panic, ended after three months with the sinking of the various ships. The book gives excellent accounts of the short but eventful operational lives of the raiders supported by a selection of photographs, some well known, but many less so.

The conclusion makes for very interesting reading. At the outbreak of war, the German admiralty did not see submarines as the weapon they were to become. After all they entered the war with only 29 submarines (they had less than the Royal Navy which had 72). Looking at the disproportionate cost and poor results compared with the submarine offensive the German admiralty concluded that kreuzerkrieg, despite one significant victory and annoying interference with trade was less effective than submarine warfare.

This book is excellent and is strongly recommended.

[1] After the loss of the Hogue, Aboukir and the Cressy a few days later the King remarked that “the rats came out of their own accord and to our cost.”