CHAPTER X
Capture of H.I.G.M.S. “Emden”
On November 11, 1914, the Secretary of the Admiralty issued a statement which, after referring to the self-internment of Koenigsberg in the Rufigi River, and the measures taken to keep her there, proceeded as follows:
“Another large combined operation by fast cruisers, against the Emden, has been for some time in progress. In this search, which covered an immense area, the British cruisers have been aided by French, Russian, and Japanese vessels working in harmony. His Majesty’s Australian ships Melbourne and Sydney were also included in these movements.
“On Monday morning news was received that the Emden, which had been completely lost after her action with the Jemchug, had arrived at Keeling, Cocos Island, and had landed an armed party to destroy the wireless station and cut the cable.
“Here she was caught and forced to fight by His Majesty’s Australian ship Sydney (Captain John C. T. Glossop, R.N.). A sharp action took place, in which the Sydney suffered the loss of three killed and fifteen wounded.
“The Emden was driven ashore and burnt. Her losses in personnel are reported as very heavy. All possible assistance is being given the survivors by various ships which have been despatched to the scene.
“With the exception of the German squadron now off the coast of Chile, the whole of the Pacific and Indian oceans are now clear of the enemy’s warships.”
The material news was that Emden had been caught and sunk. She was one of Germany’s small fast cruisers, armed like the rest with 4.2 guns, and therefore no very formidable match for the ship that met and encountered her. The work of her destruction, we afterwards learned, had been done by Captain Glossop of Sydney, with a rapidity and neatness unsurpassed in any naval engagement of the war before or, indeed, since. But at the moment when the news came, the method of the thing was of far less importance than the thing itself, for it is no exaggeration to say that at the end of the first week of November the spirits of the nation were at an exceedingly low ebb. There was a marked uneasiness as to the naval position. The successes of the Fleet had been achieved without fighting, and it looked as if, in the naval war, we were not only watching, almost abjectly, for the initiative of the enemy, but that we were unable to defeat that initiative when it was taken. The public therefore forgot that 98 per cent. of our trade was carrying on as before, that our sea communications with our armies were under no threat, that the enemy’s battle force was keeping completely within the security of its harbours. There had been but one active demonstration of British naval strength—the affair of the Bight of Heligoland. But a dropping fire of bad news had made our nerves acutely sensitive. It was submarines people feared most. Writing at the time, I summarized the general attitude of the public as it appeared to me:
“Long before the war began the public had been prepared by an active agitation to believe that the submarine had superseded all other forms of naval force, so that when one cruiser after another was sent to the bottom, almost within hail of the English coast, people really began to believe that no ship could be safe, and that (under a form of attack that was equally impossible to foresee, evade, or resist) our vaunted strength in Dreadnoughts must in time dwindle altogether away. Then there were not wanting circumstances that, superficially at least, looked as if the Admiralty’s war plans and distribution of the Fleet were not adequate to their purpose. In at least one conspicuous instance, the resources of our enemy had been too great either for the means or the measures of our admirals. War had not been declared more than a day or two before the Goeben and Breslau made their way through the Mediterranean and escaped unengaged to the Dardanelles. The public knew that we had two powerful squadrons of ships in these waters, one overwhelmingly stronger than the German force; the other, on almost every conceivable train of reasoning, at least a match for it.[B] It seemed utterly humiliating that, with the French Fleet as our allies, and with Germany having none, so important a unit as the Goeben should have got away scot-free. Then it was not long before we heard of the depredations of the Emden, and of British ships being chased and threatened in the North and South Atlantic by other German cruisers.
[B] I should not say this now.