Part 1: The Warships
| Cruiser | Prizes Taken | GRT |
| Nürnberg | 40 | 113,730 |
| Emden | 16 | 82,938 |
| Karlsruhe | 17 | 76,609 |
| Leipzig | 16 | 64,600 |
| Dresden | 4 | 12,930 |
| Königsberg | 1 | 6,601 |
| Scharnhorst & Gneisenau | 1 | 3,836 |
| Geier | 0 | 0 |
| | |
Nürnberg,
The light cruiser
Nürnberg under the command of Karl Von Schönberg clearly ranks highest in the number of prizes and tonnage taken by a warship, at 40 vessels and 113,730 GRT. However, this number seems somewhat arbitrary. The voyage of
Nürnberg merged seamlessly into the voyage of the auxiliary cruiser
Niagara when
Nürnberg became too damaged to continue. Between them, Captain Von Schönberg commanded cruisers that captured or sank 48 vessels with 143,630 GRT.
One could make the case that Lieutenant Otto Von Spee was under the direct command of Von Schönberg while in the waters of British Columbia. Lieutenant Von Spee sank 19 vessels, totaling 49,500 GRT, while commanding
Prinz Rupert and
Prinzessin Charlotte. If that total is added to those of
Nürnberg and
Niagara, then Von Schönberg sank or captured 67 vessels totaling 193,130 GRT. This would place Von Schönberg at the top of the scoring list, surpassing both voyages of the Möwe combined. But before we become too attached to this idea, convention and prize law dictate that the captain of a vessel is credited with the prizes taken by that vessel, and furthermore the historical Karl Von Schönberg is remembered as a man who would not stop short of giving full recognition to the accomplishments of his junior officers.
Some less than charitable scholars have suggested that
Nürnberg’s prize total (as well as that of
Leipzig and
Prinzessin Charlotte) is inflated by including tugs and barges, and since those vessels “shouldn’t really count,”
Nürnberg’s total prizes should be reduced by 12 vessels and 13,500 GRT. This would put Nürnberg in third place behind Möwe and Wolf, and almost tied with Emden. But tugs and barges were one of the primary means of transport in coastal British Columbia at the time, and to this day. Von Schönberg attacked coastal shipping, and that was what he found. Furthermore, while some of the barges
Nürnberg sank were empty, two of them were loaded with refined copper. Indeed, the barge
Louisiana that
Nürnberg sank in Observatory Inlet was carrying 1200 tons of refined copper, and may have been the single most valuable prize sunk on the entire voyage.
As well as sinking the greatest tonnage of shipping of all the warships,
Nürnberg did the lion’s share of destroying coastal industry in British Columbia. Particularly important were the burning of the copper mills at Anyox and Britannia. The mines soon came back into production, but while the mills were being rebuilt the raw ore had to be shipped to alternate smelters in the Kootenays, in the south-east of the province. This was made more difficult by the shortage of shipping, the loss of dock facilities at the mine sites and in all the major ports that could receive the ore, and in the case of Anyox, the destruction of the Grand Trunk Pacific rail bridge cutting the port of Prince Rupert off from the rest of the province. Rebuilding was in turn slowed by the loss of shipyards in Vancouver, Victoria, and Prince Rupert, and competition for labour that was attempting to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The monetary loss is hard to calculate, but the knock-on effects ran through the entire Canadian economy as late as 1916.
Nürnberg’s daring foray into the inland waters of British Columbia became thinkable only because of the dearth of Royal Navy or Canadian Navy warships on the coast.
HMCS Rainbow was known to be in the region, but not considered by Von Schönberg to be a threat, and he believed he had decoyed the Canadian cruiser away to the north with false radio messages from the captured auxiliary
Prinzessin Sophia. Von Schönberg only found out about the Canadian submarines
CC-1 and
CC-2 on the evening before the raid on the Georgia Strait ports, and gambled that he could avoid the submarines with the cruisers’ speed, incorrectly it turned out. The naval assets diverted from other tasks to hunt
Nürnberg were minor, to the chagrin of British Columbia’s authorities. Despite pleas from local government, Royal Navy warships in the Pacific were too far away and already all dedicated to protecting ANZAC troop convoys from the threat of Admiral Von Spee’s main force, whose whereabouts were unknown.
HMS Newcastle was dispatched to British Columbia from Japan at her best cruising speed and arrived as quickly as possible, albeit 8 days too late.
HIJMS Izumo responded from her station off the Mexican coast, but could not acts until Japan declared war on August 23rd, which was in the evening of the 22nd local time. By then,
Nürnberg had already been scuttled.
After Von Schönberg moved his flag to
Niagara, few if any Entente naval ships were dispatched to try and catch him specifically. Craddock’s squadron was chasing Admiral Von Spee’s main force off Southern Chile. Patey assembled a squadron off Mexico that included, at its peak,
Australia, Newcastle, Izumo, Asama, and
Hizen, but this squadron was guarding the western approaches to the Panama Canal, looking for Von Spee senior, and only incidentally threatened
Niagara when they happened to be operating in the same waters. When
Niagara fatally encountered
Orama and
Kent, the Royal Navy ships were part of a force that was searching for
Dresden.
Nürnberg did not cause any merchant shipping stops herself. Von Schönberg did suffer the effects of a shipping stop in response to
Liepzig’s appearance off San Francisco, with Entente ships holding in British Columbia ports. But then he rendered the shipping stop moot by steaming into the very Canadian ports where the merchants were sheltering.
Niagara also suffered a shortage of prey caused by shipping stops off South America, first in response to
Leipzig, then in response to the British loss at Coronel.
It is hard to imagine Von Schönberg having better luck than he did. Nürnberg managed to ravage the coast of British Columbia almost without opposition. Very few what-if scenarios that would have Von Schönberg doing better invite our imagination. But the almost complete lack of modern defences were extremely favourable to Von Schonberg being lucky. Nurnberg could have had much more bad luck. The grounding in the fog August 16 could have ended the voyage in Observatory Inlet right then, for instance.
Niagara was unlucky to blunder into Royal Navy patrols twice off Chile, and lucky to escape twice. The third time Von Schönberg was caught, but one can hardly imagine his luck holding out forever.
The photographs taken by Vancouver Sun reporter Grace Milligan of
Nürnberg charging through Vancouver harbour became some of the definitive photographs of the war, and rarely does a history book on the war get published that does not contain some of those photos. In the day the photographs were widely reproduced around the world, and served as powerful propaganda for the German cause, much to the horror of the photographer.
Emden
Fregattenkapitan Karl Von Müller exhibited élan, initiative, and guile commanding
Emden on her wild ride through the Indian Ocean. In addition to sinking or capturing 16 ships with 82,938 GRT, Emden bombarded the Burmah Oil Company storage tanks at Madras and sank the Russian cruiser
Zemchug and French destroyer
Mousquet in Penang harbor. Müller’s actions were very consciously designed to have a propaganda effect. He wrote of the Madras attack, “I had this shelling in view simply as a demonstration to arouse interest among the Indian population, to disturb English commerce, to diminish English prestige.” (Keegan) The British, perceiving Emden to be everywhere and nowhere at once, instituted multiple shipping stops in response. In
Emden’s first month operating in the Bay of Bengal , exports from India, jewel in the crown of the British Empire, declined by over 60%, a both intolerable and unsustainable situation for the British war effort. According to The Frankfurter Zeitung, Dec 12 1914, Emden “caused direct material damage of 80 million marks according to estimates, while the damage caused by the stagnation of English shipping and the driving (up) of war premiums resulted in even higher figures.”
The British responded by sending warships to try and catch Emden.
HMS Hampshire, Yarmouth, Minotaur, and
HIJMS Chikuma and
Ibiki were part of the search, while
HMAS Pyramus, Pysche, Melbourne, and
Australia, HMS Philomel, and the French
Montcalm escorted troop convoys in the South Pacific to protect against the threat from
Emden and Von Spee’s main force. Some sources have up to 60 warships total searching for
Emden at one point, and,
Naval Staff Monograph (Historical) Review of German Cruiser Warfare 1914-1918 says “an average of one Japanese battlecruiser, four armoured cruisers, four light cruisers and two armed merchant cruisers were searching for
Emden at any one time.” Ultimately, a convoy escorted by
Ibiki, Melbourne and
Sydney received a distress call from the wireless station at Cocos Island that Emden was attacking, and the rest is history.
Müller was certainly lucky, as lucky as Von Schönberg. He was lucky to capture the Russian liner Ryazan on the second day of the war, lucky to take a number of colliers as prizes to supplement his own, and lucky to arrive at the British island of Diego Garcia in October and find the British garrison was not aware the war had been raging for two months, allowing him to stay and give Emden an overhaul. That his luck ran out at Cocos Island simply attests to the nature of luck. Müller also stayed at large for so long due to staying constantly in motion, and following no pattern, making his movements unpredictable.
Or as The German Official History says: “Müller delivered his blows where they would have the greatest political and economic effect. His sudden appearance and disappearance at the scene of operations and a correct appreciation of the enemy’s counter moves enabled him not only to achieve success in each individual operation, but also to render his capture difficult. It was not luck, but the capacity for forming an accurate estimate of the situation from the scanty information obtainable from prizes and intercepted wireless, that were responsible for his achievements in spite of all the enemy’s endeavours to catch him. Far from keeping to any fixed scheme, Captain Von Müller instantly dropped a predetermined course of action when circumstances rendered a change of plan desirable.”
Had Müller been in the enviable position of Von Schönberg, with some certainty that enemy warships were at least several days over the horizon, he could have slowed down at times and capitalized on opportunities to run up his score. Madras was protected by shore batteries, so
Emden did need to flee after bombarding the oil tanks there, but Penang harbor had no fortifications. After sinking
Zemchug and
Mousquet, Penang’s only defenders were the obsolete and lightly armed French cruiser
D’Iberville, destroyer
Fronde and one other destroyer. All of the French warships were moored with engine problems and no steam up, and were advertising their locations with inaccurate gunfire. After disposing of the French warships,
Emden could have, at leisure, turned her attention to the nine large Entente liners and freighters in the harbor, including two Admiralty colliers, and the just arriving ammunition ship
Glen Turret, could have bombarded the Asiatic Petroleum Company tank farm and the railway yards, dragged the telegraph cable, or otherwise done as he pleased.
The saga of Emden appeared in the newspapers of the world as a serial drama, a “what will he do next?” underdog story of the little ship that even the mighty Royal Navy could not subdue, and so served a valuable propaganda function, as Müller had intended. This is true to the extent that
Emden became a word in the Tamil, Sinhala, and Malayam languages originally denoting “a person of daring against all odds at all circumstances,” but later coming to mean “a person who could get things done or who can think on his feet and complete a difficult task,” or more generically a crafty or scrappy character.
Karlsruhe
Despite taking more prizes than Emden, (17) of only nominally less GRT, (76,609) Fregattenkapitän Erich Köhler’s voyage in Karlsruhe ranks much lower in the estimation of military historians, and seems to have completely escaped the public imagination. As well as capturing her prizes,
Karlsruhe armed and transferred crew to the
Kronpinz Wilhelm, enabling the raiding career of the most successful of the armed liners. Taken together,
Karlsruhe and
Kronpinz Wilhelm took prizes to rival the score of
Nürnberg and
Niagara.
One major difference between the voyages of
Emden and
Karlsruhe was that
Karlsruhe, operating off Brazil, did not invoke any merchant shipping stops, so her effect was limited to the ships she actually captured.
Karlsruhe did tie up Admiral Stoddart’s badly stretched Cruiser Force D of the 5th Cruiser Squadron while she was active. After her loss, because the Germans managed to keep her demise secret, the ghost of Karlsruhe kept 11 Royal Navy cruisers busy searching the empty seas for her from November 1914 until March 1915, surely the most efficient use of Kaiserliche Marine resources to waste the Royal Navy energy in the entire war.
In contrast to the luck of Von Schönberg and Müller, Köhler’s luck was almost unbelievably abysmal. He did at least manage to escape from
HMS Suffolk and
Bristol on the second day of the war, as he should have with the faster ship. But then, in the middle of a successful war cruise,
Karlruhe was lost, and Köhler killed, by a spontaneous magazine explosion. Such explosions did happen, the Royal Navy lost
HMS Vanguard and
Natal to them during the War, and the Imperial Japanese Navy lost
Mutsu to one in World War Two, but these ships were at anchor. As far as I can determine,
Karlsruhe was the only wartime loss by any navy to a spontaneous magazine explosion at sea on war patrol during the age of steel.
This then leads to the question, if
Karlsruhe had not exploded in a bolt from the blue, what would happen next? At the time of her loss, Köhler was steaming towards Barbados. The British strongholds of Jamaica and Bermuda were defended by batteries of 9.2 inch guns, but the important port of Bridgetown Barbados had no coastal artillery and was not at the time defended by any warships. Had
Karlsruhe reached her destination, Barbados would likely have suffered the same fate that Von Schönberg inflicted on coastal British Columbia, and that Müller served to Madras and Penang. Köhler could then have continued on to ravage Martinique, and the shipping lanes from Trinidad. These actions would surely have netted
Karlsruhe more prizes, and perhaps established her a more prominent place in the history books.
Leipzig
Fregattenkapitän Johannes Haun’s cruiser is tied with
Emden and
Karlsrhue for number of prizes (16), and falls in the middle of the pack of the warships for GRT taken, at 64,600. The smaller GRT count for the same number of prizes reflects the fact the
Leipzig did most of her effective anti-commerce work in coastal waters, where the vessels tended to be smaller, although she did capture two vessels of over 10,000 GRT.
Leipzig’s actions in the war fall into four distinct periods. The first, from the declaration of war August 4 to August 19, she cruised off the coast of Mexico and California, and took no prizes, but caused an Entente merchant shipping stop from Prince Rupert to Panama for that period. Second, August 20-22, Haun rendezvoused with Von Schönberg in British Columbia and savaged coastal industry and shipping, where he took most of his prizes. Third, August 23-October 17,
Leipzig undertook solo commerce warfare off Central and South America and took several more prizes, as well as causing more shipping stops. Finally, October 18 until the Battle of the Falkland Islands December 8, Leipzig functioned as a scout and screen for the main force of Admiral Von Spee’s squadron, and took more of a traditional naval fleet role.
It was
Leipzig that captured the New Zealand liner
Niagara, that went on to become Von Schönberg’s auxiliary cruiser.
Leipzig also caused a number of colliers and the coal loading facilities at the ports of Nanaimo and Union Bay to be burned to prevent capture, which created a major hardship for the industry of British Columbia in the months following. She destroyed a copper mill and loading facility at Van Anda, which incrementally added to the copper supply crisis created by
Nürnberg. The bombardment of the pulp mill at Powell River undoubtedly inflicted economic damage on the Canadian economy, as did
Nürnberg’s destruction of three other pulp mills, but the damage this action did to the war making capacity of the British Empire was limited, except perhaps the resulting shortage of paper making it more difficult for staff to fill out reports. The Germans were under the misapprehension that the cellulose in wood pulp was used in making gun cotton, as was the German practice, but British production of nitrocellulose used wool exclusively for this purpose.
Captain Haun’s appearance in San Francisco at the beginning of the war, meeting with the mayor and presenting Leipzig’s mascot Japanese bear cubs to the city zoo, provided a positive diplomatic function that helped provide a balance to the dominant British-centric perspective on the war, and a boost to the sizable German-American population who were feeling uneasy at the direction the newspaper reporting was taking.
Leipzig applied the coup de grace to two damaged British cruisers,
HMS Monmouth and
HMCS Rainbow. The wider effect of
Leipzig’s part in sinking
HMCS Rainbow is open for some debate. Like all of the Entente warships sunk by German cruisers overseas in the first months of the war,
Rainbow was obsolescent, and inadequate for her assigned wartime role. Yet, the heroism displayed by Commander Walter Hose and the crew of
Rainbow in her final battle, literally in front of a hometown crowd watching from shore, had a pivotal role in the forge of nation building for Canada.
Rainbow’s loss in the Battle of Esquimalt became to the Royal Canadian Navy what the victory at Vimy Ridge is to the Canadian Army. A national coming of age tale. Commander Hose went on to become Admiral, and was as responsible as anyone for the modern Canadian Navy. He may have followed the same career path had
Rainbow missed any action, and made her overdue last voyage to the scrapyard. But it is hard to imagine a Canadian history robbed of the mythic power of
Rainbow’s final brave moments. So it can be said, in a sense, that Captains Karl Von Schönberg and Johannes Haun are the fathers of the Royal Canadian Navy.
In a further ironic reversal, the sinking of
Monmouth along with Craddock’s flagship
Good Hope at Coronel, presented the greatest Royal Navy loss since the War of 1812, and galvanized the Admiralty to pry two battlecruisers loose from their role with the Grand Fleet and send them to the ends of the earth to avenge the losses. Had Von Spee simply avoided Craddock, or damaged his ships and withdrawn, he would have been unlikely to ended up facing
Invincible and
Inflexible a month later in the waters off the Falkland Islands.
Furthermore, Haun’s good luck December 2, in capturing the collier
SS Drummuir with her cargo of anthracite coal, caused the Squadron to spend 4 days at Picton Island in Beagle Channel transferring the coal to their colliers. Had
Leipzig not spotted
Drummuir the Squadron would have arrived at the Falklands 4 days earlier. Then, the port would only have been defended by a grounded pre-dreadnought
HMS Canopus. The likely chain of events then would have been Von Spee scouting Port Stanley as he did historically, being fired upon by
Canopus, identifying the shell splashes to be from projectiles of at least 12 inches, and withdrawing from the Falklands and continuing on his course back to Germany. What would occur after that has too many variables to plot, but the historical Battle of the Falkland Islands, and Spee’s destruction there, would not have happened.
‘According to the master of the
Drummuir, the loss of that vessel prevented the Germans capturing the Falkland Islands, as the days which were occupied in looting the ship gave Admiral Sturdee time to reach the islands. "I understand," the captain declared in a subsequent statement," that there were men armed ready to occupy the islands as soon as they had been taken by the fleet, and if this is the case, the loss of the
Drummuir was a providential act." Hurd, Archibald,
History of the Great War, The Merchant Navy vol. 1 p.185.
Dresden
Fregattenkapitän Fritz Lüdecke had just taken over as Dresden’s captain and was about to return from Mexico to Germany for a much-needed engine overhaul when war was declared. Instead, Dresden headed south and initiated commerce warfare. She took three prizes off Brazil in the first month of the war. Then she headed further south to Terra del Fuego, where she spent 2 weeks overhauling her engines on remote Hoste Island.
Dresden joined Admiral Von Spee’s Squadron at Easter Island October 12. From that point
Dresden operated as a as a scout and screen for the Squadron. She exchanged gunfire with
HMS Glasgow at Coronel to little effect, and was the only cruiser to survive the Battle of the Falkland Islands.
It was after the Falklands that
Dresden made her greatest real contribution to the war. Between December 9 and March 14, 2015,
Dresden hid out in the myriad channels in southern Chile, and distant offshore islands, tying up 1 battlecruiser,
HMS Inflexible; 3 armoured cruisers,
Carnarvon, Cornwall and
Kent; 3 light cruisers,
Newcastle, Bristol, and
Glasgow, and 3 armed merchant cruisers,
Otranto, Macedonia, and
Orama, all looking for her. During this search for
Dresden,
Kent and
Orama encountered
Niagara by accident just east of the Galapagos, and sank her in the Battle of the Galapagos Islands.
Lüdecke still had in his mind to continue commerce raiding, potentially as far as the Indian Ocean, but was hampered by the poor state of his engines, and shortage of coal. Dresden captured another prize February 27, 1915. She was discovered and chased by
Kent on March 8, but
Kent had to break off for want of coal.
Dresden made it safely to Cumberland Bay, Mas a Tierra, and interned with Chilean authorities March 9, but when the
Glasgow and
Otranto discovered her on March 14, the Royal Navy was not in a mood to recognize Chilean neutrality and shelled
Dresden until she scuttled.
Königsberg
Königsberg started the war on German East Africa station. Before hostilities were declared, the Royal navy cruisers HMS
Astraea,
Hyacinth, and
Pegasus of the Cape Squadron attempted to blockade the Germans in harbor, but Königsberg was the faster ship, and she slipped away. Fregattenkapitän Max Loof started to engage in commerce warfare in the Red Sea, but only manage to take one prize. Königsberg had only a small fleet of colliers supporting her, and fell short of good quality coal. By the end of August Loof needed to overhaul Königsberg’s engines, but first seized the opportunity to ambush and sink
HMS Pegasus in Zanzibar harbor on September 20. Then
Königsberg retreated up the Rufiji River delta to perform the engine overhaul.
Königsberg never left the delta again. The Royal Navy blockaded the mouths of the Rufiji and attempted to work their way into range to sink or disable the cruiser, but the geography of the river conspired against them. Königsberg became a one-ship fleet in being that managed to tie up
HMS Chatham, Dartmouth and Weymouth, Pyramus, and
HMAS Pioneer as guard ships, and presented a conundrum as the British tried to figure out ways to sink her. The collier
Newbridge was expended as a blockship. Aircraft were brought, and almost immediately fell apart in the tropical climate. Cruisers attempted to bombard
Königberg, then the pre-dreadnought battleship
Goliath had a go, but the river was too shallow for most ocean-going warships to get within range. Two river monitors
HMS Severen and
Mersey, brought to the Mediterranean to support the Gallipoli landing, were sent for. After a number of false starts the monitors finally managed to damage
Königsberg badly enough that Loof ordered her to be scuttled on July 11th, 1915, almost a whole year into the war.
Meanwhile, the commander of German Colonial troops in East Africa, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, had defeated numerically superior British troops in four pitched battles, then shifted to a guerilla campaign designed to tie down as many British forces as possible and keep them from reinforcing the Western Front.
Königsberg’s crew joined Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army, and the wreck of the cruiser was stripped to support the campaign. All of the ship’s guns were used as field artillery, coastal artillery, or in one case, to arm a German steamer on Lake Tanganyika. The guerilla campaign achieved its goal of tying British forces down and Von Lettow-Vorbeck did not surrender until the Armistice in 1918, partly made possible by the contributions of
Königsberg.
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau
Admiral Von Spee’s armoured cruisers briefly surpassed the dream of
Großadmiral Tirpitz, father of the Imperial German Navy. From November 1 until December 8, 1914, the German Navy had, locally, defeated the Royal Navy in battle, and achieved the Mahanian goal of seizing control of the sea lines of communication. The Royal Navy squadron exterting control over the west coast of South America and the Horn had been sunk at Coronel, and the surviving ships of the squadron chased from the region until Sturdee arrived to restore the status quo 5 weeks later.
This situation was qualitatively different than that of the other German cruisers that
threatened the sea lanes, and sometimes sank Entente warships, but then had to immediately flee to avoid retribution from local Entente vessels. It can be argued that
Leipzig and
Nürnberg briefly asserted the same control in southern British Columbia for a number of hours on August 21-22, 1914, but Haun and Von Schönberg were at the time solely focused on leaving those waters, since the Japanese declaration of war on the eve of August 22 local time and the arrival of
Izumo would immediately tip the balance back towards the Entente.
It is not clear if Von Spee realized the grand strategic implications of his victory, as he was beset with many tactical concerns. But the British leadership and Royal Navy certainly did, and they assembled a superior scratch force, not only to avenge the blow to British prestige, but to return control of the shipping lanes from the world’s main nitrate producing region, and indeed the southern route from the Pacific to Britain. If one wants to dwell on the strategic implication a bit longer, the Panama Canal only opened in August 1914. Had the canal not yet opened, Von Spee would have placed himself in control of the entirety of east-bound trade from the Pacific. Of course, Von Spee was not in a position to make much use of this advantage. He briefly created a partial blockade of Entente merchant shipping, but he could not maintain this blockade against Royal Navy reinforcements, and had no way to translate this into breaking the Royal Navy blockade on Germany.
Von Spee’s armoured cruisers were not attempting to be commerce raiders themselves, meaning they made no attempt to capture individual merchant ships. However, the two did share credit for a single merchant sinking.
SS Walküre, was a German freighter captured by the French gunboat
Zélée at the start of the war, then both ships were sunk by
Scharnhorst and
Gneisenau in the bombardment of Papeete.
The Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands were both chance meeting engagements, and any number of variables happening differently could have prevented the battles occurring as they did. However, the sheer number of Royal Navy ships looking for Von Spee’s cruisers make the likelihood of a similar battle somewhere quite high. Popular histories often make too much of the advanced age of
Good Hope and
Monmouth (launched 1901).
Scharnhorst and
Gneisenau were launched in 1906, only 5 years later. (Two more
Monmouth class cruisers were in Stoddart’s squadron that took part in The Falklands battle and sank Haun in
Leipzig as well as Von Schönberg in
Niagara, later
.) However, this was an age of rapid technological advance in naval design, and Von Spee’s armoured cruisers were clearly superior in armament and armour, and equal in speed to Cradock’s ACs. Once the Battle of Coronel was joined, the outcome was almost guaranteed to be the same. As was the Battle of the Falklands.
As Von Spee said in a personal journal, “I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbour. I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, until my ammunition is exhausted, or a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me.” Bennet, Geoffrey,
The Pepper Trader.
Geier
Geier was obsolete and in poor shape at the start of the war. Her captain, Korvettenkapitän Curt Graßhoff had been dealt a difficult hand to play. Although
Geier was newer than some of the Royal Navy cruisers in theatre, (
HMS Astraea and
HMCS Rainbow), she was long past being able to make her already inadequate design speed of 15.5 knots and although she was designated as a cruiser, she was an unprotected cruiser, more properly a gunboat. Graßhoff heard of the war warning in Singapore, and attempted to return to Tsingtao, and when that proved impossible, to rendezvous with elements of the East Asiatic squadron. Why Graßhoff would do this is unclear, since
Geier would only slow down the more modern cruisers while offering no combat capability.
Geier meandered through the archipelagos of the south and central Pacific, managing to avoid Entente warship patrols, and briefly met up with
Emden. She captured one British Freighter,
SS Southport, but inexplicably decided to disable the British ship’s engine and leave her adrift rather than scuttling her. The British merchant sailors repaired their engine, and reported Geier’s position. Her engines breaking down, and sometimes being towed by her collier
Bochum in order to conserve coal, Geier finally arrived in Honolulu on October 15, and asked to enter the neutral port on account of unseaworthiness and need to repair the engines.
The Japanese armoured cruiser
HIJMS Asama and pre-dreadnought battleship
Hizen were patrolling around Hawaii, looking for
Geier, and Graßhoff drew out negotiations with the Americans about interning Geier until November 7. This stalling managed to tie down the Japanese ships until Geier was officially interned, then the Japanese left to join
Izumo and Patey’s squadron off the Americas, looking for Von Spee.
Geier accomplished the least of the warships, not surprisingly, but was this situation inevitable? Geier’s liability was her slow speed and the unreliable machinery. Geier was built with an auxiliary sailing rig, and one imagines she could have given up on her broken-down steam engine and operated entirely as a sailing ship as the raider Seeadler did later in the war. However, Geier had her sailing rig reduced in 1905, and her profile clearly presented as a warship, so she would not have been able to hide as an anonymous merchant sailing ship as Seeadler did.
Geier’s assets were her armament and crew. In order to increase her contribution, a much better use of these would have been to transfer them to a fast liner to create a proper auxiliary cruiser, as Von Schönberg did when he abandoned
Nürnberg for
Niagara. Even bringing the armament and crew over to one of the four German colliers that served Geier would have been a dramatic improvement. This idea seems to have only occurred to Graßhoff in mid-September; he had made no preparations for such an eventuality. By that time
Geier was being towed by his collier
Locksun, a steamer only capable of 8 knots herself, and Graßhoff had run out of options and decided to intern in Honolulu.
