Aug 18, 1330 hours.
SMS Princess Charlotte, Ocean Falls
Von Spee waved, and
Princess Charlotte’s crew uncovered her guns. Nürnberg rounded the promontory and sat, ominously blocking the entrance to the bay. Von Spee had taken the opportunity, when stopping the
Penang Maru, to temporarily take on an extra 40 men from
Nürnberg and make a more powerful landing party. Now these men poured out of the
Charlotte’s side cargo door, and jumped from her lower promenade deck at the stern. Twenty armed men headed for the SS Kintuck. Fifty men headed the short distance to the sawmill, many with bayonets fixed on their rifles. They advanced swiftly, but tactically, leaving rifle teams at points that commanded the wharf-top. Teams in both parties carried their wooden crates.
As the landing party entered the sawmill, McNulty shepherded a half dozen men out the far side of the building, and led them across the bridge to the townsite. The armed sailors swept the expansive building and then passed through, leaving the demolition teams to rig their charges. The incessant clanging of the fire alarm was, although appropriate, irritating and distracting.
The bewildered crew of the SS Kintuck appeared on the dock. They made their way to the harbour bridge, and over to the town.
The main force of the landing party needed to cross an empty expanse of nearly 300 meters before they arrived at the pulp mill. Apparently the Crown Williamette company had big plans to fill the intervening space with more industry. The landing party moved in two groups, one providing overwatch behind what cover they could find while the other advanced. These groups leapfrogged several times before arriving at the pulp mill building. No workers were inside, only machinery, vats and pressure vessels, and storage rooms stacked with rolls of rough cellulose sheets. The bigger pieces of equipment were rigged with Dynamite charges, but the cellulose storage seemed to offer the best potential. The sailors poured lubricating oil from maintenance stores onto the rolls, and rigged fuses to bundles of distress flares.
The parties retraced their steps to
Princess Charlotte, lighting fuses as they went, and crossing the wide open spaces with the same discipline. Von Spee held his breath as he watched from the bridge wing, his mind reliving the scene of his men being pinned by rifle fire just a few hours before. But the rifle shots he anticipated never came, and his men returned to the
Charlotte intact.
Von Spee was unclear about what wood pulp actually was. But he figured since it was some intermediate stage between trees and paper, both of which burned quite well, that it would exhibit the same properties. Smoke appeared from the hatches of the
SS Kintuck, even before the boarding party returned to the wharf. The commander of the party had to hurry his men off, as the flames quickly reached to the mastheads.
The pulp mill suffered a series of internal explosions, as the fuses burned down to the demolition charges. Black smoke appeared in the storage wing of the mill. Then an unexpected white hissing, roaring cloud obscured the building, as the SO3 tanks ruptured and the undiluted contents reacted violently with anything made of wood. The tiny figures of the evacuated workers on the forested shore fled from the path of the chemical cloud, as it drifted east over the lake. When the cloud dissipated, the pulp mill was fully engulfed in flames.
Having recovered all of her landing party, the
Princess Charlotte pulled away from the wharf. The windows of the sawmill blew out in a rapid series of explosions, and flames immediately appeared inside. The fire on the
Kintuck reached from stem to stern.
“No casualties among our men,” marveled Von Spee to Radl, as he looked back at the mill town shrinking astern. “I can’t see any among the Canadians either, unless someone was very unlucky. Did we do a better job this time? Or was it just a roll of the dice?”
“Only God knows these things,” answered Radl.
When the
Princess Charlotte was halfway across the bay, the flames reached two tons of miner’s blasting powder in the
Kintuck’s after hold. A tremendous explosion rent the ship behind the mid-castle superstructure, and debris flew high in the air. Burning pieces of cellulose sheet trailed smoke as they drifted through the air above the east end of the bay. Then a moment later myriad splashes appeared in the water all across the inlet as countless shiny projectiles plunged from the sky. The
Charlotte’s crew ducked for cover. Objects struck the deck, with a stucatto of
thunk sounds. When the sounds stopped, Von Spee stuck his head back out the bridge door. On the deck by the bridge steps was a ruptured tin can. He smelled burned salmon. Half a dozen more dented steaming tins lay on the deck within his field of vision. The sound of the explosion returned in echoes off distant mountains.
Back across the bay, the blazing
Kintuck settled by the stern, and the adjacent wharf had caught fire, while the two mills burned fiercely. The pipeline from the dam burst where it entered the pulp mill, and a cascade of water poured into the conflagration, creating a cloud of steam, and extinguishing some of the flames. At the waterfront on the town side of the bay, crowds stood and silently watched the Germans’ departure.
Nürnberg led the way back down Cousins Inlet at 18 knots. A British White Ensign flew from
Nürnberg’s mainmast. “Rule Brittania,” said Radl dryly.
Astern, black smoke rose above the forested hillsides before being blown away to the east. Eagles circled on thermals overhead. The breezy sunny afternoon was beautiful, thought Von Spee, and for a moment it was possible to forget the death and destruction that lay in their wake the last few days. A half hour’s steaming brought the convoy back to the detained
Penang Maru, anchored behind Stokes Island. No one was happier to see the German ships than the Japanese captain. The
Nürnberg and
Princess Charlotte held station in the current as the German boarding party rowed across from the Japanese freighter in their yawls. Von Schönberg took this opportunity to reclaim from the
Princess Charlotte the
Nürnberg’s crewmen who had topped up the landing party.
As the Germans pulled away, the
Penang Maru’s apprentice wireless operator was already methodically re-assembling the equipment, as his master quietly watched.
“Very good,” said the master, rubbing his chin. “You chose precision over speed. Precision is its own kind of speed.”
The apprentice completed his task, but found he was one part short. “They stole the tuning coil,” sulked the apprentice, indignant at the German’s perfidy.
“We have spare,” said the master brightly.
http://www.clydeships.co.uk/view.php?ref=16613
https://web.archive.org/web/20080401012309/http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/bluefunnel.html
https://www.bevs.org/diving/wkkintuck.htm