Tragedy and Revenge: The Battles of Coronel and the Falklands 1914

320 pages

Rear Admiral Guy Liardet

The Coronel and Falklands battles were the first in a war that was to see a fundamental evolution in the manner that naval power was executed. Ever since, they have been an itch under the skin of Royal Navy people, even to those less interested in the niceties of naval history. How could the largest and most powerful navy in the world that had just won the ‘Dreadnought competition’ allow Admiral Cradock’s force to be so comprehensibly and tragically defeated with a death toll of over 1,660? Were Fisher’s battlecruisers a stroke of genius or a complete fluke?

Steve Dunn’s special interest is the Royal Navy of the late 19th century and the First World War. This is his 15th book. Readers may recall my recent review of his The Spectre of Invasion which comprehensively discussed our persistent but unwarranted neurosis about a German invasion of the British Isles. Tragedy begins here with the story of pre-war Anglo-German relationships between naval officers – guarded but friendly – abruptly terminated by the declarations of war. This book deals with events in the Caribbean and South Atlantic with chases between Cradock’s ships and German commerce raiders. At this time much of Great Britain’s economy and that of the Empire depended upon maritime trade and any disruption affecting movements, willingness to sail and insurance rates, was very serious. Dunn describes the success of the famous Emden which “properly handled” and with her private collier, sank 70,825 gross tons of Allied shipping, including two warships, and paralysed trade around the major Indian supply routes until caught and sunk by HMASSydney. In the Caribbean, Cradock while chasing the faster Karlsruhe, found without doubt that while theorists were debating the relationship between armour, speed and guns, speed was critical.

Throughout these and subsequent operations, coal was fundamentally important. An attraction of this history book is the entertaining mass of contemporary photographs, many from the author’s collection, which include numerous shots of ‘three or four-piper’ warships,  showing the need for forced draught by convection for coal-fired furnaces. The Germans had made local arrangements with friendly powers while various international laws about neutral nations allowed one-day visits and coaling with three months between visits. The Admiralty operated a skein of colliers and our diplomatic service was always on the chase for sources of coal.  As an example, after Coronel, Admiral von Spee’s collection of ships totalled eleven, including captured and neutral colliers.

Wireless telegraphy and messaging by undersea cables was erratic. RN ships often had to call in at a port to gather texts.  Ship-to-ship ranges varied. Dunn records instances of inept backseat driving by the Admiralty and, after Coronel, a long and detailed instruction to the efficient and imaginative Falklands governor on how to defend Port Stanley who had already done all that and better.  Here were early examples of the unsettled command and control structure between Admiralty and operators in the field that have since been so much picked over by naval historians.

When the Japanese invested the Germans at Tsingtao, von Spee was deprived of his base, so set off across the Pacific, damaging various French colonies on the way, and fetching up at Valparaiso. Cradock was based at Port Stanley in the Falklands and was ordered by the Admiralty to patrol up the west coast of South America, he worrying about the strength of his force and seeking to have other ships added, in particular the modern, fast, armoured cruiser Defence with four 9.2-inch guns which could easily have been spared from the east coast.  Quite by chance off Coronel the two groups met, Cradock being surprised to find both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau present, thinking he was seeking only one light cruiser. The Germans were sister ships, heavy cruisers with 8.3-inch guns and well crewed by trained regulars.  As regards Cradock’s force, it is difficult to see how anyone in the Admiralty thought such to be appropriate to defend this critical trade route. Good Hope was an armoured cruiser launched in 1901 and quickly made out of date, with two 9.2-inch guns and manned mainly by reservists, cadets, coastguardsmen and volunteers. With the similar Monmouth, they had been “plucked off the dockyard wall” out of “care and maintenance.” Otranto was a hastily converted liner, one of the many Armed Merchant Cruisers (AMCs). The only modern ship in Cradock’s armoury was the light cruiser Glasgow with two 6-inch guns, many four inch, but with a speed of 25 knots. The obsolete battleship Canopus with its 12-inch guns, slow speed and suspect machinery was 300 miles away.

The battle was a massacre with Good Hope and Monmouth sunk with all hands.  Cradock had ordered Otranto and Glasgow to escape.

Why didn’t Cradock run away? The Royal Navy doesn’t run away.  Cradock was also much influenced by the shame on the navy brought by Troubridge’s failure to engage the powerful battlecruiser Goeben, allowing her to passage the Dardanelles and ‘become Turkish’. It will be remembered by this readership that by leading the Turkish navy with Goeben and Breslau in an attack on Russian ports including Odessa, Admiral Souchon unilaterally decided the Turkish Question, enlisting Turkey on the side of Germany. Cradock did not live to see Troubridge’s court martial for a lack of nerve, but the disgrace was widely felt.

The Admiralty was worried that von Spee would raid and capture the Falklands and ordered the shaky battleship Canopus to beach tactically inside Port Stanley and the battered Glasgow to escape to the River Plate if she could or moor inside Canopus.

In the face of a strong Anglo-Japanese force being mustered in the north-west and the probable Royal Navy reprisals, von Spee considered his options. 40% of his ammunition had been expended at Coronel. He decided to try and return home, relying on the High Seas Fleet to protect him over the dangerous North Sea waters. After mustering and coaling his entire squadron of five warships and a trail of colliers and supply ships at Valparaiso, he set off for Cape Horn. He surprised his staff by proposing an attack on the Falklands to destroy the wireless system, capture the governor and set fire to the coal, an offensive plan to demonstrate the German naval honour that had been shown in the Pacific. Many thought this a strategic error; it would be better to go north to the Plate and harass British shipping. Von Spee is recorded as expressing pessimism; he predicted he would soon be “following Cradock.”

Luck played its part in the subsequent events. Fisher was resurrected as First Sea Lord vice Prince Louis Battenburg, ill and with an unfortunate German name. Fisher within 24 hours selected two battlecruisers from the Home Fleet, they being one of his pet ideas with the speed to catch and defeat anything less than a post-Dreadnought battleship. Sturdee, unpopular, not overly gifted, had been given explicit instructions by an Admiralty driven by public ire about various naval failures to find and sink von Spee’s two cruisers with no geographic limits and to make the Falklands his provisional base. He was well supported by intelligence which gave him a good picture of the German squadron’s movements.  He arrived at Port Stanley on 7 December, a month after Coronel.

Dunn records several routes by which von Spee should have been warned by intelligence about Sturdee’s squadron, but was not. He arrived at Port Stanley the next day and was surprised and no doubt horrified to sight the masts of two battlecruisers in harbour, they having just completed coaling.

The subsequent battle of the Falklands was dominated by the superior speed and artillery of the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible, resulting in the sinking of the flagship Scharnhorst with all hands and Gneisenau with only 187 survivors out of some 800.  The German cruisers Leipzig and Nurnburg were pursued by Kent, Cornwall and Glasgow and sunk, but Dresden escaped.  On March 12 Dresden was eventually discovered in Chilean waters, bombarded by three cruisers, surrendered, blew up and sank.

Part 3 of this comprehensive history is titled ‘Remembrance’ and catalogues the very numerous memorials to Cradock’s courage and his sailors. Dunn’s ‘Conclusion’ has Fisher’s rather hyperbolic analysis about what might have happened to our war effort, given sources of nitrates for explosives, if von Spee had not been checked. There’s plenty of blame to be spread around.  Battle reports from von Spee, Sturdee and Captain Luce of the survivor Glasgow are followed by appendices containing statistics of casualties and merchant ship sinkings as well as a particularly interesting report by Lt Cdr Rudolf Verner, the gunnery officer of Inflexible.   This battle is widely noted for its prodigious expenditure of ammunition and it will be recognised by many readers here that naval gunnery over 10,000 yards only came in between 1905 and 1912 with director firing.  Some readers will recall the 1913 controversy between the Dreyer Table and the Pollen Fire Control System which contributed to the Admiralty Fire Control Clock. These battlecruisers had the Dreyer Table system, less mathematically complete than Pollen, and Verner writes, “First, owing to the great range and fairly frequent alterations of course, I had the feeling that I was perpetually ranging and had no grip on the target.”  He complains about smoke obscuration at high speed when to windward and makes a number of recommendations, remarking at one point that the low velocities and high elevation of German 8.3-inch turret guns had “put salvoes over us when we could not reply at 16,200 yards on our sights.”

This is an admirable book, beautifully produced by Seaforth Publishing. I am full of praise for the thoroughness of Dunn’s research and his ability to stand up the social, military and diplomatic mores of those times.  Highly recommended.