Castles of Steel
To meet this threat, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commander of the British navy’s North American and West Indies Station, had been given four old County-class armored cruisers: Suffolk, Berwick, Essex, and Lancaster, plus the modern light cruiser Bristol. Soon after mobilization, these ships were reinforced by five more cruisers from England. Four were old armored cruisers: Carnarvon, Cornwall, Cumberland, and Monmouth, commissioned from the Reserve Fleet and sent overseas without opportunity to evolve into efficient fighting units. Still another obsolescent cruiser, Good Hope, was detached from the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow and sent to Cradock, who made her his flagship.
In the first month of war, Admiral Cradock reached several conclusions about his assignment. He realized from observation and intelligence that the German liners were not coming out of New York. And he learned that both German light cruisers were operating far to the south of his normal station: Karlsruhe was reported at Curaçao and Dresden off the mouth of the Amazon, where her presence was raising anxiety among shippers and traders down the coast of South America. The Admiralty agreed that the threat in the North Atlantic was diminished; accordingly, on September 3 a new South American Station was created, with Cradock in command. His assignment was to move down the coast of South America to protect merchant shipping in the South Atlantic and to find and sink Dresden. Protection of the West Indies and the upper South Atlantic and responsibility for dealing with the threat of Karlsruhe were transferred to Rear Admiral A. C. Stoddart, who was to have Carnarvon, Cumberland, and Cornwall.
The force with which Cradock was to carry out his South Atlantic mission was thoroughly ragtag. Good Hope, his flagship, was twelve years old and displaced 14,100 tons. When she was new and first put to sea, she had several distinctions. “She was the fastest cruiser afloat, having done over 24 knots on trial,” said her gunnery officer, Lieutenant Ernle Chatfield, later captain of the battle cruiser Lion. And “we were the first new ship to be painted grey all over.” Even so, considering the large size of her hull, Good Hope was laughably undergunned, with two 9.2-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns, half of the latter mounted in broadside batteries so close to the water that they could not be fired in a heavy sea. When Fisher became First Sea Lord, he complained that “the guns . . . on the main deck are practically useless. We know this from experience. Half the time they cannot see the . . . [target] for want of view and the other half they are flooded out by the sea.” Not yet old, Good Hope was, in fact, already obsolete. She had been made so not only by the advent of battle cruisers but by the appearance of more modern armored cruisers only a few years younger, for example, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Good Hope had been consigned to the Third Fleet with other old armored cruisers of her era, then suddenly was recommissioned on mobilization with a crew of whom 90 percent were reservists. When she steamed out of Portsmouth on August 2, a Salvation Army band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” In the three months that followed, her untrained crew carried out only one full-caliber shoot. “It certainly is the limit,” a regular navy gunnery officer wrote later, “taking a ship like that off the dockyard wall, giving her four rounds [per gun] of practice, and then putting her up against a ship like Scharnhorst.”
Good Hope at least carried two heavy 9.2-inch guns, but Cradock’s other armored cruiser, Monmouth, an eleven-year-old, 10,000-ton County-class armored cruiser, carried no heavy guns at all. Here, Fisher’s bitter comment was “Sir William White designed the County class but forgot the guns.” In fact, Monmouth carried fourteen 6-inch guns, but they were old and had no greater range than the 4.1-inch guns of the modern German light cruisers. Worse, many of Monmouth’s guns were sheltered behind gun-port doors only a few feet above the water; in a heavy sea, the doors had to remain shut or the waves would come in. Not infrequently at night, the men on the starboard forward main deck gun would ask permission to shut the gun port, normally kept open for night defense stations, because they were being washed out by the sea. Like many other ships, Monmouth was a victim of haste and improvisation in the Admiralty’s mobilization. About to be scrapped, she was hurriedly recommissioned on August 4, crewed with naval reservists, coast guardsmen, boy seamen, and naval cadets and dispatched to the South Atlantic. When Monmouth met the new light cruiser Glasgow at sea on August 20, Glasgow’s officers were appalled. “Sighted Monmouth at eleven a.m.,” wrote one Glasgow officer. “She had been practically condemned as unfit for further service, but was hauled off the dockyard wall commissioned with a scratch of coast guardsmen and boys. There are also twelve little naval cadets who are keen as mustard. She left England on August 4, she is only half equipped and is not in a condition to come six thousand miles from any dockyard as she is kept going only by super-human efforts.” Still another vessel added to Cradock’s polyglot squadron was the 12,000-ton converted Orient Lines liner Otranto, sent off to war with six 4.7-inch guns. Otranto’s mission was to hunt down converted German merchant ships of her own kind; no one intended that she should fight enemy warships.
When Admiral Cradock’s improvised squadron steamed into the South Atlantic, Glasgow was already there. The only modern British warship on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean, the three-year-old Glasgow was a Town-class light cruiser of 4,800 tons, a sister of Gloucester, which had dogged Goeben. Designed for 25 knots, she had gone faster when her turbine engines burned coal that had been sprayed with oil. Her armament of two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns made her more than a match for any German light cruiser, and her regular navy crew was as well trained and efficient as any in the German fleet. Beyond this, Glasgow had an exceptional captain in John Luce. For two years, he and his ship had been showing the flag and singlehandedly guarding British interests along the east coast of South America, his beat extending from the mouth of the Amazon down to the Straits of Magellan. Under his protection were the vital trade routes supplying Britain with meat and grain from the river Plate, nitrates from Chile, and coffee from Brazil; on any given day in peacetime, hundreds of British and German merchantmen would be moving along these routes. At the end of July 1914, Glasgow was in Rio, expecting shortly to return to England. Believing they would soon be home, members of the crew had bought Brazilian parrots to take back with them; sixty birds were housed in cages on deck in the warm South Atlantic air. When the Admiralty telegram warning of war arrived, the crew began stripping away superfluous woodwork and sending armchairs, books, and other personal possessions ashore. The men could not bear to give up their parrots, however, and Luce agreed that the birds could stay. Officers’ civilian clothing received no exemption; only Lieutenant Hirst, the intelligence officer, was allowed to keep his plain clothes. “Later on,” he said, “when leave could be taken, it was amusing to see my whole range of suits going ashore in the officers’ boat, worn by messmates of varying sizes.”
Luce’s primary concern, once war began, was lack of a coaling base. South America during the Great War was a neutral continent except for the colonies of British Guinea on the northeast coast and the British Falkland Islands, 2,000 miles to the south. In peacetime, Glasgow could buy coal anywhere. But once hostilities commenced, under international rules of war, a warship could coal and provision only once every three months in any given neutral country; admiralties and captains on both sides preferred to reserve this privilege for emergencies. Even in wartime, there was no difficulty obtaining coal; it could be bought from British firms or through British agents in foreign ports. But Glasgow’s operations—and those of other British warships coming south—were certain to be hampered by the lack of a safe harbor where the coal could be transferred from colliers into warships. During the two years Luce had served on the station, he had located two places that, in an emergency, might serve. One was Abrolhos Rocks, a group of rocky islets, surrounded by reefs, fifteen miles off the Brazilian coast, north of Rio and near the main trade route between the Plate and the North Atlantic. The islets, the largest of them three-quarters of a mile long, were uninhabited except for the keeper of a lighthouse,
but they belonged to Brazil. However, three miles out to sea from the lighthouse—and thus outside Brazilian territorial waters—an anchorage of sorts had been formed by reefs above or just below the surface. The site was exposed to the southeast trade winds and the prevailing southeasterly swell caused ships alongside each other for coaling to grind together, denting side plates and starting leaks, but there was no alternative. Luce’s other temporary coaling site, also in international waters, lay in an area in the broad, shallow estuary of the Plate itself, seven miles off the coast of Uruguay, where ships could anchor in forty- or fifty-foot water. Beyond that, the British navy had only the harbor of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands.
As Cradock’s squadron steamed down the east coast of South America, the admiral spread his net for Dresden. The net came up empty in respect to the fugitive light cruiser but did produce another result. At the end of August, the 19,000-ton Cunard armed merchant liner Carmania arrived in the South Atlantic from England, bringing Cradock’s ships a cargo of coal, provisions, and a large quantity of frozen meat. These supplies delivered, Carmania, which had been equipped with eight 4.7-inch guns, remained with Cradock. It was in this capacity that the ship was detached from the main force and ordered to reconnoiter Trinidad Island, which the Admiralty suspected was being used as a secret German coaling base. This island, not to be confused with the British island colony of Trinidad in the West Indies, lies about 600 miles east of South America on the same latitude as Rio, and belonged to Brazil. Far from any trade route, it was no more than a mid-ocean group of sharp coral rocks inhabited by seabirds and scuttling land crabs.
Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on September 14, as the ocean was ruffled by a moderate breeze, Carmania, coming down from the northeast, sighted three German steamships at anchor in a bay at the western end of the island. One was a large liner, and the others were colliers, their derricks busy transferring coal to the bigger vessel. On seeing Carmania, the three ships immediately separated and made off in different directions. The large ship was the new Hamburg–South America Line liner Cap Trafalgar, 18,710 tons and 590 feet long, whose wartime assignment was to prey on British trade in the South Atlantic. At the outbreak of war, Cap Trafalgar had been at Buenos Aires, where she installed heavy lumber to buttress her decks for gun mountings and painted two funnels to resemble the markings of a British Union Castle liner. On September 2, Cap Trafalgar had rendezvoused at Trinidad Island with the German gunboat Eber, where she mounted two 4.1-inch guns and eight machine guns, and took aboard most of Eber’s navy crew of 392 officers and men. Lieutenant Wirth of the Imperial Navy became the liner’s new captain. Thereafter, Cap Trafalgar had cruised for ten days looking for British merchantmen, but the air was so filled with British naval wireless signals that Wirth became more concerned about the safety of his ship than with attacking enemy vessels. Now he was back at Trinidad Island to coal.
When Carmania appeared, Cap Trafalgar decided to run for it and soon was making 18 knots. Carmania, designed for 18 knots, could make only 16. Then, for unknown reasons, Wirth changed his mind and decided to fight, and turned Cap Trafalgar onto a converging course. At noon, when the distance between the two ships was down to 8,000 yards, Carmania opened fire. Cap Trafalgar fired back, and the world’s first battle between ocean liners began. Carmania had overwhelming superiority in guns, but battle between ships of this size and design was awkward. Neither ship had any kind of coordinated fire control; each gun crew simply fired whenever a target appeared in its sights. On both big liners, the upper deck where the guns were mounted was seventy feet above the hold where the ammunition was stored. As there were no ammunition hoists, the shells had to be carried to the guns by hand.
The range continued to fall. At 4,500 yards, Carmania began firing salvos from her port guns and two of these broadsides struck Cap Trafalgar on the starboard waterline. The German ship replied as well as she could, but most of her shells went high and Carmania was hit mostly in her masts, funnels, derricks, and ventilators. When the range came down to 3,000 yards, the German machine-gunners opened fire and the bullets hammered noisily but harmlessly against the steel sides of Carmania. When the barrels of Carmania’s port-side 4.7-inch guns—all of them over twenty years old—became red-hot, her captain, Noel Grant, solved the problem by turning his ship around to bring her starboard guns into action.
Within half an hour, Cap Trafalgar was on fire forward and was listing to starboard. Carmania was also in trouble. A German shell had passed through the captain’s cabin under the forebridge and started a fire; the fire main was cut, so no water was available. With the flames out of control, Carmania’s foredeck was abandoned and, in order to steer the ship, orders were relayed through megaphones to a rudder station at the stern. Meanwhile, flames and smoke sucked down the ventilators set the engine-room crews to gasping and choking. Nevertheless, Carmania had begun to prevail when Wirth decided to attempt a second escape. Cap Trafalgar still had the higher speed and Carmania, in pursuit, continued firing until, beyond her maximum range of 9,000 yards, her adversary was out of reach. By 1:30 p.m., the British believed that Cap Trafalgar had escaped. The reality was different: Captain Wirth had been killed, the fires burning fore and aft had made the German decks untenable, the ship’s list was increasing. Then, suddenly, the great vessel heeled over, resting her funnels on the surface of the water. At 1:50 p.m., Cap Trafalgar sank, first lifting her stern high in the air. Five boatloads of men pulled away.
Carmania’s precarious condition after the battle made it impossible for her to stop and pick up the German seamen. The fire raging in the fore part of his ship forced the British captain to steer Carmania before the wind so that the flames would be blown out over her bow rather than down his decks. In this situation, he could not steer in the direction of the German lifeboats. In addition, Carmania had five holes at the waterline, and the forebridge with all its steering and navigational instruments and its communications to the engine rooms had been destroyed. Beyond that, smoke had been seen on the northern horizon and Captain Grant feared the possible arrival of a German warship, which he believed that Cap Trafalgar had been continually signaling during the action. In fact, the smoke rose from one of the German colliers, now flying an American flag in hope of misleading Carmania and being allowed to collect the survivors. Carmania did not interfere; the collier took its surviving compatriots into Buenos Aires.
The wounded British liner limped away to the Abrolhos Rocks and eventually to Gibraltar for repairs. The ship had been hit seventy-nine times; five men had been killed, four died of wounds, and twenty-two were injured. Most of the casualties occurred among the men on deck, for the most part among the gun crews and ammunition-supply parties. No one below was harmed except by smoke inhalation.
By September 18, when Cradock and his squadron reached the river Plate, Dresden already was around Cape Horn and in the Pacific. From the moment this light cruiser had sailed from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, her captain, Fritz Lüdecke, had displayed little interest in trade warfare. He had stopped and sunk one British freighter in the South Atlantic and let others go, destroying only their wireless equipment. Otherwise, his objective was to reach Cape Horn; he stopped only to coal. On September 5, he arrived at Orange Bay in Tierra del Fuego, on an uninhabited stretch of coastline just east of Cape Horn. Here, hidden against the desolate shore and a backdrop of the snow-topped mountains of Hoste Island, Dresden met a collier and remained for eleven days to rest and adjust her engines. While she was there, she received, by way of Punta Arenas, a message from Berlin: “It is advisable to operate with Leipzig.” On September 16, Lüdecke departed Orange Bay and, accompanied by a pair of supply vessels, passed slowly around the Horn. Believing himself now out of danger, he eased down to a speed of 8 knots to help his collier manage the heavy sea. He continued north up the Chilean coast, coaling in Bahia San Quintin in the Gulf of Penas, then cruising off the small port of Coronel. On September 30, Lüdecke left the South American coast for remote M
ás Afuera and from there his wireless room established contact with Scharnhorst. On October 4, he sailed for the rendezvous at Easter Island, arriving on the afternoon of October 12.
Cradock, steaming south and already looking beyond his own area of responsibility, wondered aloud whether Spee might be coming across the Pacific. “Gniesenau and Scharnhorst reported Caroline Islands . . . 8 August,” he signaled the Admiralty on September 5. “Is there any later information as to movements? Several German colliers said to be in vicinity of Magellan Straits.” The Admiralty could tell him only, “No certain information of these ships since 8 August. . . . Magellan Straits and its vicinity quite possible. Falkland Island anchorages might be used by them.” On September 14—the same day that Carmania sank Cap Trafalgar, and while Cradock was in the river Plate—the Admiralty took a stronger position. Whitehall still had no definite news of Spee’s whereabouts, but the repeated warnings of Patey and Jerram had created concern, and a telegram to Cradock, forwarded by the British minister in Rio, contained a multitude of new orders: “There is a strong probability of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau arriving in the Magellan Straits or on the west coast of South America [where] the Germans have begun to carry on trade. . . . Leave sufficient force [in the Atlantic] to deal with Dresden and Karlsruhe. Concentrate a squadron strong enough to meet Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, making Falkland Islands your coaling base. Canopus is now en route to Abrolhos; Defence is joining you from Mediterranean. Until Defence joins, keep at least Canopus and one ‘County’ class cruiser with your flagship. As soon as you have superior force, search Ma-gellan Straits with squadron, being ready to return and cover the River Plate, or, according to information, search north as far as Valaparaiso. Break up the German trade and destroy the German cruisers.”