CHAPTER 13

“Very Well, Luce, We’ll Sail Tomorrow”

In London at seven o’clock on the morning of November 4, the Admiralty received the first news of the disaster at Coronel. The First Lord reacted immediately, asking the whereabouts of the battle cruisers Australia and Invincible and the armored cruisers Defence, Carnarvon, Cornwall, and Kent, and how long it would take each of them to reach Abrolhos Rocks, Rio, and Punta Arenas. An urgent signal was sent to Stoddart: “Carnarvon, Cornwall should join Defence off Montevideo. Canopus, Glasgow, Otranto ordered if possible to join you there. Kent will come from Sierra Leone. Enemy will most likely come on to the Rio trade routes. Reinforcements will meet you shortly from England.”

Stoddart, whose flagship was Carnarvon, now commanded all British warships in the South Atlantic. It was another heterogeneous collection: four armored cruisers of different classes and capabilities, two modern light cruisers (one under repair), the armed merchant cruiser Macedonia, and the obsolete battleship Canopus, about to be grounded on the Port Stanley mudflats. Stoddart mustered his squadron at Abrolhos Rocks. All the armored cruisers were present by November 17 and, a few days later, Glasgow, repaired, came in from Rio.

Four armored cruisers was a considerable force and the inclusion of Defence, denied to Cradock, would give Stoddart a fair chance against Admiral von Spee. Stoddart would have two 9.2-inch, fourteen 7.5-inch, twenty-two 6-inch, and ten 4-inch guns against the Germans’ sixteen 8.2-inch, twelve 5.9-inch, and thirty-two 4.1-inch guns. The critical question was the range at which Stoddart should engage. Because Spee’s sixteen 8.2-inch guns had a longer reach than all but the Defence’s two 9.2-inch guns, the British, once again, would have to come closer. There was no doubt that German gunnery would be superior, but the British would have the advantage in speed. The odds, in sum, were roughly even, but after Coronel, the Admiralty did not wish to sponsor a fair fight. From the moment Churchill heard about Cradock’s defeat, he wished to send the battle cruiser Invincible. “But I found Lord Fisher in a bolder mood,” Churchill wrote of the old admiral he had just appointed as First Sea Lord. “He would take two battle cruisers from the Grand Fleet for the South American station.” Within six hours of receiving a first report of Coronel, the First Lord and the First Sea Lord signaled Jellicoe at Scapa Flow: “Order lnvincible and Inflexible to fill up with coal at once and proceed to . . . [Devonport] with all dispatch. They are urgently needed for foreign service.”

Churchill gave Fisher credit for this bold decision. The hunting down and destruction of enemy armored cruisers was the purpose for which Fisher had designed and built battle cruisers. Combining high speed and big guns, they were his beloved “greyhounds” and the dispatch of two of them to the South Atlantic was meant to ensure not merely Spee’s defeat, but his annihilation. “Sir John Jellicoe rose to the occasion and parted with his two battle cruisers without a word,” said Churchill—but, in fact, neither Jellicoe nor Beatty was pleased to be giving up two battle cruisers to hunt down two armored cruisers on the far side of the world. Five days later, when Fisher persuaded Churchill to strip away a third battle cruiser, this time Princess Royal, one of Beatty’s beloved Cats, and send it to the West Indies to guard against Spee coming through the Panama Canal, Jellicoe protested vehemently. It is “important not to weaken the Grand Fleet just now,” the Commander-in-Chief wrote to Fisher. “I will of course do the best I can with the force at my disposal, but much is expected of the Grand Fleet if the opportunity arises, and I hope I shall not be held responsible if the force is unequal to the task devolving upon it.” The Admiralty attempted to mollify Jellicoe by pointing out that the newest British battle cruiser, Tiger, then doing gunnery and torpedo exercises in southern Ireland, was about to join Beatty, and that three new dreadnought battleships, Benbow, Emperor of India, and Queen Elizabeth, were nearly ready. Jellicoe remained unpacified. The four new ships were not yet part of his fleet, he said, and when they arrived they would be raw. He also grumbled that if a third battle cruiser had to go, Fisher should have taken the older, 12-inch-gun New Zealand instead of the 13.5-inch-gun Princess Royal because New Zealand was adequate to deal with Spee and more economical in her consumption of coal.

To appease the angry sea admirals, Fisher, uncharacteristically apologetic, wrote to Beatty, who had supported Jellicoe’s complaint about the taking of Princess Royal. “I admit the force of all your arguments,” Fisher said. “We have nought else . . . [to meet] the eventuality (not yet improbable) of the ‘Scharnhorst and Co.’ coming through the Panama Canal to New York to release the mass of armed German liners ready there to emerge into the Atlantic. Why the Vaterland [the 52,000-ton queen of German transatlantic liners, interned in New York with its German crew on board] has not ‘nipped out’ already is beyond me. . . . As I told Jellicoe, had I known of the New Zealand having more coal endurance, I would have taken her. I’m in the position of a chess player coming into a game after some damned bad moves have been made in the opening of the game by a pedantic ass. . . . It’s very difficult to retrieve a game badly begun.”

The two battle cruisers first assigned, Invincible and Inflexible, belonged to the first generation of Jacky Fisher’s dreadnoughts. Completed in 1908, they weighed 17,250 tons, carried eight 12-inch guns, and could make at least 25 knots. To achieve such heavy armament and high speed within their tonnage, they had sacrificed armor and were no better protected than an armored cruiser. Already, both had participated in the war: Inflexible had pursued Goeben, and Invincible had been with Beatty in the Battle of the Bight. On Thursday morning, November 5, both battle cruisers were moored in Cromarty Firth. That evening, with Invincible leading, they steamed out into the North Sea and, at 17 knots, went north and west through Pentland Firth, then south through the Irish Channel. They were off the Eddystone Light at the western end of the Channel at 5:00 a.m. on November 8. A thick fog covered Plymouth Sound and Invincible grounded briefly on a sandbar; the tide rose and by 2:00 p.m., she was resting in a dry dock. Inflexible followed into a second dry dock. The ships were to have their bottoms cleaned and machinery repaired, and then embark coal, ammunition, and supplies, not only for themselves, but for other ships in the South Atlantic. Nevertheless, as Churchill observed, “Once ships fall into dockyard hands, a hundred needs manifest themselves.” Next morning, Admiral Edgerton, the head of the Devonport dockyard, wired the Admiralty: “The earliest possible date of completion of repairs to Invincible and Inflexible is midnight November 13. Repairs to boilers of Invincible cannot be finished before.” A hurricane blew through the Admiralty. “Friday the thirteenth! What a day to choose!” Fisher exclaimed. “Shall I give him a prog?” Churchill asked. Fisher wanted more than a prog, and the message to Edgerton, drafted by Churchill, was peremptory: “Invincible and Inflexible are needed for War Service and are to sail Wednesday, November 11. Dockyard arrangements must be made to conform. You are held responsible for the speedy dispatch of these ships in a thoroughly efficient condition. If necessary dockyard men should be sent away in the ships, to return as opportunity offers.”

On Monday, November 9, although the ship was still in dry dock, Invincible’s decks were stacked with stores and provisions. That night, the battle cruiser was moved out of dry dock to a coaling jetty. Her crew began coaling just before midnight and continued until 11:30 the next morning with a break for cocoa at 3:00 a.m. and another for breakfast at 7:30. The repairs were never finished; when she sailed, Invincible had several dozen workmen still on board.

Meanwhile, the Admiralty had appointed an officer to command the force. It was not to be Rear Admiral Stoddart. Command of two battle cruisers and numerous armored cruisers called for a vice admiral and, as it happened, an officer of this rank was immediately available from the inner circle of the Admiralty itself. The appointment, however, was not conceived in thoughtful discussion, but in rancor and compromise. The rancor was Fisher’s; the compromise, Churchill’s. On returning to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, Fisher had brought with him a fierce resentment against the Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee. This feeling stemmed from an old feud. Ten years before, during his first appointment as First Sea Lord, Fisher had assigned Sturdee as Chief of Staff to Lord Charles Beresford, then Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. According to Sturdee, before he took up his post, Fisher asked him “to keep an eye on Charlie as he was inclined to be rather rash and rather wild on Service matters. He asked me to write to him privately about my chief. This request I never complied with. Such a disloyal act was so obvious it did not require a second thought.” Subsequently, during the long, bitter vendetta waged by Beresford against Fisher that resulted in both resigning in 1910, Sturdee sided with Beresford. Fisher, with all the power of his volcanic personality, detested Sturdee. When news of Coronel reached Whitehall, and Fisher persuaded Churchill to send out two battle cruisers, the new First Sea Lord walked into Sturdee’s room to give him this information. Sturdee could not restrain himself from pointing out that he himself had suggested just such a move before Coronel but had been overruled. Fisher, believing that his initiative was being challenged, flushed and left the room. He went straight to Churchill to announce that he would not tolerate “that damned fool at the Admiralty for one day longer.”

Frederick Doveton Sturdee, then fifty-five, was a short, bulldog-shaped man with a Roman nose, a heavy lower jaw, and flourishing eyebrows. He had entered the navy at twelve, specialized in gunnery and torpedoes, and developed a reputation as a tactician. After serving under Beresford in the Mediterranean and Channel Fleets, he was promoted to rear admiral in 1910 and knighted in 1913. Appointed to the Admiralty in May 1914, he quickly made himself disliked. It was said that he was rigid, pedantic, conceited, and surly. Wanting to do everything himself, he refused to listen to advice from subordinates. When his dispositions of the fleet were criticized, he became obstinate; even after the loss of the three Bacchantes, Sturdee continued to press for regular cruiser patrols on the Broad Fourteens. Opinions about him split along old fault lines: Beresford described him as “one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant, officer of my acquaintance”; Fisher called him a “pedantic ass . . . is, has been, and always will be.” Fisher blamed Sturdee for the assignment of ships and squadrons in the weeks preceding Coronel: “Never such utter rot as perpetrated by Sturdee in his world-wide dispersal of weak units! Strong nowhere, weak everywhere!”

Nevertheless, Churchill trusted Sturdee. Fisher’s anger had to be assuaged, but the First Lord refused to make the Chief of Staff the scapegoat for Coronel. Suddenly, a solution presented itself: two battle cruisers were about to leave England on an important mission; a commander for this force was needed; Sturdee could be removed from the Admiralty and Fisher would be pleased. The First Lord summoned Sturdee and told him, “The destruction of the German [Spee’s] Squadron is an object of high and immediate importance. I propose to entrust this duty to you.” Sturdee immediately accepted, turned over his duties as Chief of Staff to Rear Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, and departed by train for Devonport. On Wednesday the eleventh, Sturdee boarded Invincible and hoisted his vice admiral’s flag. By midmorning, the captains of both battle cruisers reported their ships ready for sea. “Very well,” Sturdee said laconically, “we sail at four p.m.” At noon, Lady Sturdee and their daughter came aboard for a farewell meal. Sturdee brought with him the new title of Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic and Pacific. “Your main and most important duty,” his orders read, “is to search for the German armored cruisers . . . and bring them to action. All other considerations are to be subordinate to this end.” All British ships and naval officers, including Stoddart, in all the oceans where von Spee might appear, were placed under Sturdee’s command.

The battle cruisers steamed west and south, through the Bay of Biscay, around the tip of Spain, past Portugal, past Madeira with sunrise lighting its 6,000-foot peak. Daily, the weather grew warmer and the sea shaded to deeper blues. The sea routine of the naval service set in: the officers breakfasted on porridge, fish patties, eggs, and bacon, lunched on bread, butter, jam, and cakes, and for dinner had soup, salt beef, macaroni, cheese, dessert, and coffee. Tea at 4:00 p.m. was followed by officers’ deck hockey. On Sunday mornings, the captains inspected their ships at 10:00 and church services on deck followed at 11:00. Once the weather was warm, a swimming pool was rigged by stretching a canvas between the two forward 12-inch guns; the officers used it between seven and eight a.m.; the men in the evening. On November 17, officers and men changed from their winter blue uniforms into summer white. On deck in bright sunshine, they watched groups of flying fish, like “small flocks of birds,” breaking the surface, flying, plunging, reappearing, soaring.

Six days out from England, the battle cruisers anchored in the wide, semicircular bay of Porto Grande on St. Vincent, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa. As they approached, the British sailors saw an 8,000-foot volcanic mountain, its peak wreathed in clouds, rising straight from the sea. The harbor itself was crowded with ships, including eight German steamers sheltering in the neutral port. As soon as their anchors splashed, the battle cruisers were surrounded by brightly colored boats with green oranges, bananas, and coral necklaces for sale. Colliers came alongside, and coaling continued through the night. A tragedy marred this procedure. In the middle of the night, a sixteen-year-old boy attending a cable motor on board Invincible dropped off to sleep. His hand, resting on the rolling cable, was caught and the boy was dragged completely around the cable drum. He died instantly. The following day, Invincible, under way, halted in mid-ocean and the boy was buried at sea.

Sturdee proceeded south at a constant, economical 10 knots, his speed, like Spee’s in the Pacific, dictated by coal. His ships’ appetites were huge and the distances immense: 2,500 miles from Devonport to the Cape Verde Islands; 2,300 miles from Cape Verde to the Abrolhos Rocks; 2,200 from the Abrolhos Rocks to the Falklands. The admiral wanted his approach unknown. His ships maintained radio silence and although it took Sturdee twenty-six days to travel from Devonport to the Falklands, the information that he was coming never reached Spee. This was less a success of British security than a failure of German intelligence. At Devonport, it was widely known that the two battle cruisers were off to deal with Spee. News of the voyage also became known in Rio and Montevideo, thanks to talkative radio operators, German and British, at Cape Verde. On November 17 at a club in Rio, Lieutenant Hirst of Glasgow overheard two Englishmen discussing the imminent arrival of the two battle cruisers. The Germans had a good cable connection with Chile, but when they did learn about Sturdee’s coming, either it was too late to reach Spee by wireless at sea or they simply did not realize the urgent nature of the news.

At dawn on November 26, Sturdee reached Abrolhos to find Stoddart’s cruiser squadron and nine colliers riding at anchor. Soon, the sea was filled with small boats going from ship to ship. Invincible had brought fifty-four bags of mail from England and Inflexible distributed a month’s provisions—including beer, which Stoddart’s men had not tasted for weeks. Then, under a merciless sun, in temperatures of 100 degrees, the battle cruisers coaled. The armored cruiser Defence, no longer needed to confront Spee, was dispatched to bolster the squadron at Capetown. At a conference of captains on the morning of November 27, Sturdee declared that Spee could not reach the river Plate before he did and that even if the Germans came into the South Atlantic, they probably would steam slowly up the middle of the ocean. He admitted that Spee might attack the Falklands, and arrangements were made for Port Stanley to send a daily wireless signal so that silence could be interpreted as the loss of that colony. Sturdee’s plan was that if he arrived at the Falklands before Spee came around the Horn, he would use the islands as a coaling base and then set his fast light cruisers, Glasgow and Bristol, to ferreting the harbors in Tierra del Fuego and the fjords of the Chilean archipelago. Once the prey was located, the battle cruisers were to come at high speed. The squadron, he announced, would sail from Abrolhos on the twenty-ninth. Captain Luce of Glasgow was surprised to hear that Sturdee intended to remain at Abrolhos for another two days. Luce, who had been at the Falklands and was aware of the deep anxiety of the inhabitants, felt that this was unjustifiable; in addition, the tactical urgency of Sturdee reaching the Falklands before Spee seemed obvious. “In some trepidation,” he wrote later, he went back to the flagship after the conference. “I hope you don’t mind me coming over, sir,” he said to Sturdee, “and please don’t imagine I am questioning your orders, but thinking it over, I do feel we should sail as soon as possible.”

“But, dammit, Luce,” Sturdee replied, “we’re sailing the day after tomorrow. Isn’t that good enough for you?” Luce persisted and Sturdee relented: “Very well, Luce, we’ll sail tomorrow.”

At 10:00 on the morning of November 28, Sturdee led his force to sea. Sweeping south in bright sunshine, the ships spread in a fanlike search pattern, each ship at the maximum distance—twelve miles in good weather—that permitted visual communication by signal light. Two days later, with the sea still calm and visibility excellent, Sturdee ordered firing practice. Carnarvon towed a target for Kent, which fired 144 rounds of 6-inch ammunition; then Kent towed for Carnarvon. The battle cruisers fired their 12-inch guns at 12,000 yards, the range at which Sturdee intended to engage. Invincible fired thirty-two shells, four from each gun, at a target towed by Inflexible. Only one hit was obtained, but the near misses were declared satisfactory. Inflexible then fired thirty-two rounds at an Invincible target and scored three hits. While Invincible was hauling in her target, the wire cable wrapped itself around the starboard outboard propeller. Sturdee halted the entire squadron for twelve hours in mid-ocean while divers went down and attempted to clear the fouled propeller. They failed, but to avoid wasting more time, the squadron got under way with Invincible steaming on only three propellers.

As the ships steamed farther south, the air grew colder, the sea changed from deep blue to green and gray, and the swells were flecked with whitecaps. Spouting whales and an albatross were seen and the crews changed from summer white uniforms back into winter blue. The Falkland Islands first appeared through rain squalls at around 9:00 on Monday morning, December 7. Twenty-seven days and 7,000 miles after leaving England, the battle cruisers passed the Cape Pembroke lighthouse, marking the entrance to Port Stanley harbor, and carefully made their way through the string of improvised mines strung across the harbor mouth. Along the shore on each side as they glided into the anchorage, the crews saw seals and penguin rookeries. Port Stanley harbor is divided by a narrow channel into two bays: Port William, the outer, deeper anchorage, and Port Stanley, the inner harbor and site of the small settlement. In Port William, the two battle cruisers and the armored cruisers dropped anchor. Bristol and Glasgow, being of shallower draft, proceeded through the narrow channel into the inner harbor, where the little settlement spread itself along the shore. Five minutes after anchoring, divers went down to clear the tightly wound cable from lnvincible’s propeller. Before morning, the propeller was free. The squadron needed coal, but because only two colliers were available, the warships had to take turns. Cornwall was given permission to put out fires in order to clean her boilers and Bristol was allowed to dismantle an engine for repair. The armed merchant cruiser Macedonia was assigned to patrol the harbor entrance and the armored cruiser Kent, keeping steam up inside the anchorage, was instructed to relieve Macedonia at 8:00 the following morning.

Then Sturdee summoned his captains on board lnvincible. There were reports of German colliers at Dawson Island in Tierra del Fuego, which suggested that Spee might soon be coming around Cape Horn. Sturdee, wishing to get around the Horn before the Germans, declared that the British squadron would remain at the Falklands for only forty-eight hours; they would sail, he said, on Wednesday, the ninth. Meanwhile that day, the officers of Invincible and Inflexible were to have five hours’ shore leave; the officers of the armored and light cruisers would have their turn the following day. Proceeding ashore in their ships’ boats, the battle cruiser officers saw Canopus dressed in her strange colors, sitting on her mudbank. They were welcomed at the small town pier by the rector of Christ Church, who invited them to afternoon tea. Returning to their ships at six o’clock, they looked at the barren hills to the west and bundled their coats tighter against the cold wind coming up from Antarctica.

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.

The meeting ended at noon and the captains returned to their ships. That afternoon in clear weather, the East Asia Squadron steamed eastward along the south coast of Tierra del Fuego. The next day, Monday, December 7, Admiral von Spee and his ships turned northeast toward the Falkland Islands.