“There are lots of redeeming points in the whole show. Best of all was to see the gun’s crew fighting their guns quite unconcerned. When we were last in Sydney we took on board three boys from the training ship Tingira, who had volunteered. The captain said, ‘I don’t really want them, but as they are keen I’ll take them.’ Now the action was only a week or two afterwards, but the two out of the three who were directly under my notice were perfectly splendid. One little slip of a boy did not turn a hair, and worked splendidly. The other boy, a very sturdy youngster, carried projectiles from the hoist to his gun throughout the action without so much as thinking of cover. I do think for two boys absolutely new to their work they were splendid.”[D]
[D] The (slightly modified) plan of this action is reproduced by the kind permission of the Editor of the Times.
CHAPTER XI
The Career of Von Spee
At the beginning of hostilities the strategic position in the Pacific and Indian oceans should have been one that could have caused no possible naval anxiety to the Allies. Japan had at once thrown in her lot with us, and as we had squadrons in the China Seas, in the Indian Ocean, and in Australasia there was, when the forces of our eastern allies are added to them, a total naval strength incalculably greater than that at the disposal of the enemy. But this fact notwithstanding, there was for some months extraordinary uncertainty, and the arrangements adopted by the Admiralty permitted a serious attack to be made on our shipping and involved a tragic disaster to a British squadron. The facts of the case are far from being completely known, but the main features of the original situation and its development make it possible to draw certain broad inferences, which are probably correct.
In the summer of 1914 the German sea forces at Tsing-Tau consisted of two armoured cruisers, two light cruisers, certain destroyers and gun-boats. Leaving the destroyers and gun-boats behind, Von Spee in the month of June abandoned his base at Tsing-Tau, and, after calling at Nagasaki, made for the German possessions in the Caroline Islands. His flag flew in Scharnhorst, and this ship with her sister vessel Gneisenau constituted his main strength. He had the two light cruisers, Leipzig and Emden, in his company, and on July 20, when the situation was becoming acute, he ordered Nürnberg, which was at San Francisco, and Dresden, which was at Vera Cruz, at the other side of the American continent, to join him. Nürnberg reached him in a couple of weeks; Dresden not till the end of October. By mid-August, then, his force consisted of two armoured cruisers, each with a broadside of six 8-inch and three 6-inch guns, and three light cruisers armed only with 4-inch. Of the light cruisers Emden and Nürnberg had a speed of between 25 and 26 knots; Leipzig of about 23 or 24. The fighting value of the armoured cruisers was approximately equal to that of Minotaur and Defence and probably superior to that of the Warrior class. The German 8-inch guns fired a projectile only slightly lighter than the British 9.2, so that, gun for gun, there should have been little to choose between them; while from the point of view of the control of fire, the broadside of six homogeneous guns could probably be used quite as effectively as a mixed armament of four 9.2’s and five 7.5’s, and more so than one of four 9.2’s and two 7.5’s. To engage such a squadron with the certainty of success, therefore, at least three British armoured cruisers of the latest type would have been required.
Neither of the British squadrons in eastern waters possessed the combination of speed and power that would have made them superior to Von Spee’s force. Vice-Admiral Jerram, in the China station, had under his command Triumph, Minotaur, Hampshire, Newcastle, and Yarmouth. But Triumph was not in commission at the outbreak of war, and, though armed with 10-inch guns, she was three knots slower than the German cruisers. Sir Richard Peirse’s command in the East Indies consisted of Swiftsure, a sister ship of Triumph; Dartmouth, a cruiser of the same class as Newcastle; and Fox, a cruiser of old and slow type. Neither squadron, then, could have sought for Von Spee with any hope of bringing him to action, if he choose to avoid it, or with any certainty of defeating him, if he accepted battle. Australia possessed a navy of her own of vastly greater force than either of these outpost forces of the mother-country. Of ships finished, commissioned, and ready for sea, it consisted of Australia, a battle-cruiser of the Indefatigable class; two protected cruisers of the Dartmouth type, Sydney and Melbourne; and Encounter, a sister ship of Challenger, with destroyers and submarines. A fast light cruiser, Brisbane, and some destroyers were building. In the Japanese Navy the Allies had, of course, resources out of all proportion to the enemy’s strength.
When war became imminent Admiral von Spee, as we have seen, left his base for the Polynesian islands. He did this because it was obvious that he could not keep Tsing-Tau open in face of the strength that the combined Japanese and British forces could bring to bear against it, and to have been trapped would have been fatal. The same reasons that made him abandon Tsing-Tau forbade his trying to keep possession of Rabaud in the Bismarck Archipelago. He faced his future, then, without a base—just as Suffren did in 1781. There were several elements peculiar to the situation that made this possible. In the coast towns of Chile and Peru the Germans had a very large number of commercial houses and agents, and there were German ships in every South American port. Their trade with the islands was considerable and, no doubt long before war, it had been arranged that, on receiving the right warning, a great deal of shipping should be equipped and mobilized to supply the German squadron. The widely scattered German outposts afforded also a service hardly less valuable than coal and food. They constituted an intelligence organization that was indispensable. Having no base, and no source of supply other than these German houses in South America and the islands, it was inevitable that Von Spee should look to the east, and not to the west, in any operations that he undertook, if those operations were to be extended and made by a squadron, and not by detached ships. In discussing, then, the strategy which the German Admiralty pursued, these facts must not be lost sight of.
Of warlike policies he had a choice of two. He might either keep his ships together and embark on a war of squadrons, or he could scatter his ships and devote himself to commerce destruction. In the first case, as we have seen, he could only look for objectives in the east. In the alternative the greatest fields of his operations were either north of the Carolines, where the Chinese trade could be attacked; or northwest, where the Asiatic and Australian trades converge to Colombo; or still farther to the west, where the whole eastern trade runs into the mouth of the Red Sea. To the eastward there was no focal point of trade where great results could have been achieved—unless indeed he took his ships round the Horn to attack the River Plate trade or, better still, the main route that passes Pernambuco. It was an obvious truth of the situation that, according as the attack on trade promised great results, so would that attack encounter the greatest dangers, for it seemed to be a certainty that the focal points would be the best protected. The most frequented of these, the approaches to the Red Sea, were also the furthest from his source of supply, and had he in fact resolved upon commerce destruction, his ships would have had to maintain themselves, as did Emden, by coaling and re-victualling out of the prizes that they took. The advantage of scattering and going for the trade ruthlessly would have been the virtual certainty of inflicting very formidable damage indeed of an economic kind. The advantage of keeping his squadron together was the chance of some coup that would turn the scale—even if only for a time—in his country’s favour. The disadvantages of the first policy were that there was the certainty that each ship would ultimately be run down and destroyed by superior force, and grave risk that one or more ships would be paralyzed by want of supplies, before a sufficient destruction of trade could justify the sacrifice. The weakness of the second was that, as a squadron, his ships might accomplish nothing at all.