Castles of Steel (50 page)

After his victory, Admiral von Spee remained in Valparaíso harbor for less than the twenty-four hours permitted and sailed on November 4. A day and a half later, he was back at Más Afuera, 400 miles out in the Pacific.
Leipzig
was already there, small against the towering cliff, and had brought with her a prize, a French four-masted bark loaded with 3,600 tons of Cardiff coal. The vessel and her cargo were both welcome; the coal was stowed and the bark’s canvas sails were cut up and resewn into 300 useful coal sacks.

For nine days, the East Asia Squadron remained in the shadow of the cliff. There, the German sailors learned that Tsingtao had fallen and that
Emden
’s voyage had come to an end.
Leipzig
and
Dresden
took their turn going into Valparaíso for receiving and sending messages, while aboard the anchored
Scharnhorst,
Spee considered his next move. Oddly, he seemed in no hurry. He must have known that Britain would react aggressively to Cradock’s defeat and that it was to his advantage to reach the South Atlantic before the Admiralty in London could send out reinforcements. Still, he dawdled. Why? Spee’s lethargy had several possible causes. Undoubtedly, he was fatigued; six months of relentless daily responsibility during a 15,000-mile voyage across the Pacific, climaxing in a violent naval battle, were sufficient reason for that. But there was more than weariness in Spee’s procrastination. He was an aggressive, skilled commander in battle, but when he considered the strength of his squadron in opposition to the overwhelming, worldwide power of the British navy, he tended to gloom and fatalism. Imbued since youth with respect for the Royal Navy, he felt that whatever he did, in whatever direction he went, it scarcely mattered; his small squadron inevitably must encounter the avenging power of his enemies. These forebodings explain his advice to his admirer in Valparaíso that she keep her flowers for his grave.

Spee also faced a number of practical difficulties. Cradock had inflicted little material damage on the German ships, but he had significantly weakened their fighting power by depleting their magazines. Another battle in the Southern Ocean would empty the magazines and leave the armored cruisers impotent in any attempt to break through the British North Sea blockade. As always, Spee worried about coal, and this consideration led him to reaffirm at Más Afuera the decision he had made at Pagan Island: he ruled against commerce raiding, which still appealed to the captains of his light cruisers. The squadron, he declared, would remain together.

The East Asia Squadron left Más Afuera on November 15, headed for the tip of South America and the South Atlantic. Four days later, the ships entered the Gulf of Penas on the coast of Chile, 300 miles north of the Straits of Magellan, and anchored in Bahía San Quintín, beneath the peaks of the Cordilleras, crowned in that region by Cerro San Valentín, 13,000 feet high and capped with snow. Not far away, two glaciers, the San Rafael and the San Quintín, reach down to the water. From their decks, the German seamen stared at the sunlight shining on the mountain peaks, the glowing, prismatic colors of the glacier ice, and the luxuriant green virgin forests along the water’s edge. Boats launched in water still as glass made their way back and forth between floating pieces of blue-green ice broken off from the glacier.

Surrounded by the natural silence of this uninhabited place, the German ships coaled again and the admiral conducted a ceremony. The kaiser, exultant, had signaled that he was personally awarding Spee the Iron Cross, First Class and the Iron Cross, Second Class. In addition, the admiral was ordered to select from among his officers and men 300 others to receive the Iron Cross, Second Class. Spee chose his captains, gunnery officers, engineer officers, wireless officers, chief engineers, and his own staff; the rest of the awards were left to the individual ship captains to parcel out. The admiral went from ship to ship, naming and congratulating the recipients (although the medals themselves waited in Germany for the squadron’s return) and outbursts of cheering echoed through the low mists hanging over the water.

In Bahía San Quintín, Spee received a message from Berlin, written before the Battle of Coronel and brought to him from Valparaíso by
Dresden
and
Leipzig.
In most respects, the signal, containing general Naval Staff guidelines, conformed to Spee’s own thinking and decisions:

1. Little result can be expected from war against commerce in the Pacific. In the Atlantic, in view of the strict watch kept by the enemy on the principal trade routes, commerce raiding is possible only with ships operating in groups [large enough to] have nothing to fear from enemy naval forces.

2. On the other hand, the coal supply for ships operating in groups will become more difficult because, owing to British pressure, neu-tral states continually extend their prohibitions on exports. Even supplies . . . [from] New York can hardly be counted upon. Coal taken from captured ships will hardly suffice for cruisers operating in groups.

3. [Therefore], it is left to your discretion to break off cruiser warfare against trade as soon as you think it advisable and to attempt to break through to Germany with all the ships you can concentrate.

4. You may succeed if your careful preparations are accompanied by good luck. One of the conditions necessary for success is to take in enough coal in South America to reach the Canaries or at any rate the Cape Verde islands. . . . It may be necessary to secure the cooperation of the High Seas Fleet in breaking through the enemy blockade in the North Sea; therefore, your intentions should be communicated early. . . .

7. Relations with Argentina and Brazil are not friendly. Portugal is hesitating about joining our enemies. . . . Spain is neutral. . . . If Portugal declares war against us, it might be possible to take coal by force from the Portuguese islands of Cape Verde, the Azores, and Madeira.

This memorandum provided no recent intelligence or orders, but it made clear that the Naval Staff agreed that using the cruiser squadron to attack Allied trade would be unwise. Admiral von Tirpitz had strongly advocated that Spee drop everything else and attempt to break through for home. When Spee’s telegram announcing the Coronel victory arrived, Tirpitz had “proposed to put him [von Spee] free . . . to run up the center of the Atlantic. . . . The ammunition left after the heavy expenditure of the engagement seemed to me insufficient for a second battle. I therefore proposed that we should place von Spee, with whom we could communicate via Valparaiso, at liberty to avoid the east coast of South America, making the northward voyage in the middle of the Atlantic or nearer the African coast. . . . [We should] tell Spee that we did not expect any further active operations from him and that . . . his task was now to make his way home . . . through the vast tracts of the Atlantic. . . . The prestige of Coronel would have been established.” Tirpitz, however, did not have operational command of the navy. And Admiral Hugo von Pohl, the Chief of the Naval Staff, was unwilling “to encroach in any way on the freedom of action of the Count [von Spee].” Tirpitz could not overrule Pohl and the order to sail directly home was never sent. A message from Pohl, sent after Coronel, reached Valparaíso on November 16, and also was passed to Spee by
Leipzig:
“What are your intentions? How much ammunition do you have?” Spee replied that the two armored cruisers had about half their ammunition and the light cruisers rather more. As to his intentions, Spee replied: “The cruiser squadron intends to break through for home.”

Coal, as always, remained the determinant. Spee had promises, estimates, and advice, none of which he could burn in his furnaces. Besides, the promises were blurred: the Naval Staff had said that 40,000 tons of coal could be delivered from New York by neutral steamers already chartered; then, in the same message, he was told that these supplies could not be counted upon. Fourteen thousand tons awaited Spee in the Canary Islands—unless Portugal became a belligerent on the Allied side. Before going into Bahía San Quintín, Spee himself had sent messages to Montevideo and New York, asking that steamers—“German if possible”—meet him at Puerto Santa Elena on the South Atlantic coast of Argentina with 10,000 tons of coal. Meanwhile, in Bahía San Quintín, his ships, preparing to sail, were gorging themselves on coal, cramming their bunkers and then piling more on the decks.

Spee had also to consider the deployment of the British navy. He now knew that both
Monmouth
and
Good Hope
had been destroyed and that
Glasgow
had escaped. He had been told that the armored cruisers
Defence, Cornwall,
and
Carnarvon
were in the river Plate; the whereabouts of
Canopus
—the “
Queen
-class battleship”—were unknown. From a collier, joining him from Punta Arenas, he learned that on November 15 a British steamship had arrived in Punta Arenas from Port Stanley and reported that there were no British warships in the Falkland Islands; obviously, the steamer had departed Port Stanley before
Canopus
returned on November 12. Later, German agents at Rio learned that
Canopus
was present at Port Stanley. This information reached Montevideo on November 20, but by then both Montevideo and Valparaíso were out of wireless touch with the German squadron. Spee therefore believed that the Falklands were undefended and that the thousand-mile stretch of ocean from Tierra del Fuego north to the river Plate was empty.

The East Asia Squadron put to sea from the Gulf of Penas on the afternoon of November 26. Steaming out into the ocean, the ships were caught up in a heavy southwest swell. The wind rose steadily and by late evening the sea was piling up in large rollers with spray driving off the crests. At first, the size and power of the armored cruisers kept them riding over the waves, but the smaller ships, top-heavy with coal on deck, rose, swayed, and plunged. Then, with the wind rising higher, the bows of
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
lifted toward the crests of the waves, breached them, and sent tons of water thundering and foaming down on the decks before running out the scuppers. As the day wore on, the smaller ships were practically submerged in the mountainous seas.

The worst day of the passage was November 29, off the western entrance to the Magellan Straits. Between peaks and valleys of water,
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst
often disappeared from each other’s view. Rope lines were stretched for safety on decks and even in the officers’ wardrooms. Worried about the safety of their ships, the captains of
Leipzig
and
Dresden
ordered their crews to jettison their deck cargos of coal. “The seas were huge,” said a
Leipzig
officer, “at one minute level with the deck, next forty feet below you. . . . We sheered out of line. Heavy seas had shifted the deck cargo . . . [and the] scuppers were stopped with coal, so that with three feet of water on deck and we were in danger of capsizing. We turned up into the wind to have our bows into the sea . . . while all hands turned out to shovel coal overboard. Men were standing waist deep in icy water.”

By the following morning, the wind had dropped, and although rain and hail still pelted the ships, squadron speed was raised to 10 knots. At noon on December 1, the German sailors saw Cape Horn, the southern extremity of the American continent. “Rain clouds hung over the jagged peak rising sheer out of the water, the rock which mounts guard between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,” said a
Gneisenau
officer. The next day, an iceberg, 200 feet high and 650 yards long, pale blue in the sunlight, was sighted. East of the Horn, the squadron encountered and seized a three-masted English sailing ship carrying 2,800 tons of Cardiff coal. The next morning, prize in hand, they reached sheltered waters at the eastern end of the Beagle Channel and anchored off Picton Island. The
Dresden,
short of coal, had informed the admiral that she now had too little to make Santa Elena on the Argentine coast. With prospects for fuel in the South Atlantic uncertain, Spee decided to take the time to parcel out the newly acquired English coal. While the men were coaling, parties of officers landed on the desolate shore beneath the black mountains of Tierra del Fuego to shoot ducks and bring back branches with red berries to decorate their cabins for Christmas. Spee visited
Gneisenau
to see his son Heinrich and to play bridge with Maerker. Another three days went by. And still, Spee displayed no sense of urgency.

On the morning of December 6, the admiral summoned his captains on board
Scharnhorst
and proposed an attack on the Falkland Islands, which he believed were undefended. He wished to destroy the wireless station at Port Stanley, the key to British communications in the South Atlantic, to burn any stocks of coal (his bunkers were full), and to capture the British governor in reprisal for the British seizure of the German governor of Samoa. At this meeting, only two officers—his Chief of Staff and Captain Schönberg of
Nürnberg
—favored this plan; the other captains wished to avoid the Falklands and proceed directly north to attack Allied trade in the estuary of the river Plate. Consultation is one thing, command another, and Spee, finding the image of a defenseless Port Stanley too great a temptation, overruled the majority. As a precaution, he decided that only
Gneisenau
and
Nürnberg
would carry out the attack; the rest of the squadron would wait over the horizon. He instructed Captain Maerker to draw up an operational plan.

Maerker’s plan was this: once detached from the squadron,
Gneisenau
and
Nürnberg
would proceed at 14 knots to a point five miles east of the Cape Pembroke lighthouse, arriving by 8:30 a.m. From this point, they would look into the harbor and, if it was clear of enemy ships,
Gneisenau
would move to the entrance to Port William and lower boats, which would sweep the entrance clear of mines. Then
Nürnberg
would steam all the way into the inner Port Stanley harbor while
Gneisenau
would follow as far as the channel connecting Port William with Port Stanley. There, the big armored cruiser would anchor and send landing parties in armed cutters to the town. Covered by the 4.1-inch guns of
Nürnberg,
they would destroy the wireless station and the coal stocks and try to bring the governor back to the ship. When their work was done, the two ships would leave the harbor and rejoin the squadron not later than 7:30 p.m.