Noble Eighth of December, The

DESCRIPTION: "When our fleet left Abrohlos rocks," they set out to find Graf von Spee. They arrive in the Falklands to avenge the Monmouth and Good Hope. The Germans are surprised when they arrive. The British ships sink most of the Germans
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE:
KEYWORDS: navy battle Germany
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Nov 1, 1914 - Battle of Coronel. Admiral Graf von Spee sinks the HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth
Dec 8, 1914 - Batte of the Falkland Islands. Admiral Sturdee's British fleet sinks all but one of von Spee's ships, effectively ending the German threat in the South Pacific
FOUND IN: Falkland Islands
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy, pp. 78-80, "The Noble Eighth of December" (1 text, with tune on p. 152)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Battle of the Falkland Islands" (subject of the Battle of the Falklands)
cf. "Coal Ship Song (III)" (subject of the ship Kent)
NOTES [4358 words]: Germany, when World War I began, was in an interesting situation. It had almost no overseas colonies -- but it had various ships on overseas stations. The Goeben and Breslau are the subject of "Dardanelles Patrol Song." But they were relatively close to home. The Germans ships based farthest from Europe were those of the East Asia Squadron of Graf Maximilian von Spee -- Germany's one and only foreign Kreuzergeschwander or cruiser squadron, based in what was then known as Tsingtao (Yates, p. 1) -- the modern Qingdao.
Graf Spee, born 1861, was the fifth son of a Catholic family that had been ennobled (granted the "von") in the early 1700s. He had joined the navy at the age of 18, and stayed with it despite contracting a "rheumatic fever" that periodically troubled him for the rest of his life. He married in 1889, having three children. His two sons, Otto and Heinrich, also joined the navy; at the time of this song, Otto was on the Nürnberg and Heinrich on the Gneisenau, both ships in their father's squadron. The elder Spee became a rear admiral in 1910, then was promoted to vice admiral in command of the China station in 1913 (Yates, pp. 28-29). His photos, with his handsome but stern face and short beard, show a man who seems to have been born to play Mephistopheles in a production of "Faust."
Graf Spee had five ships at his command, the armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the lighter Emden, Leipzig, and Nürnberg (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 52), plus some others in the Pacific but not part of his squadron. They were some of the best-trained, most professional ships in the German fleet. They were also, at a time when Britain had the largest fleet in the world by a large margin, little more than sitting ducks, too far from home to survive. At the time the war began, they were training in the Caroline Islands, well away from their base (Marder, p. 104). With no possible reinforcements closer than Germany, and located very close to Japan, which would soon ally with Britain and France (Tsingtao fell to the Japanese and British on November 7; Farquharson-Roberts, p. 54), they would easily be swept up if they returned to their base in China. Graf Spee himself said, "I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbour. I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, until my ammunition is exhausted, or a foe far superior in power succeed in catching me" (Yates, p. 78). So what should his squadron do?
Graf Spee decided on a bold course: he would attack. He sent the Emden off on what proved an incredibly successful raiding expedition (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 53) and took the rest of his ships, plus the Dresden which had been in the South Atlantic (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 55), toward the trade routes off South America. He didn't have much to fear as long as his location did not become known; except for one battlecruiser, HMS Australia, there was nothing in the Pacific as strong as his two biggest ships (Yates, p. 12).
The Germans raided several islands in the next few weeks (Yates, pp. 83-85), and because most of the places he hit did not have wireless, the British did not get word in a timely enough way to catch him. Spee reached the Chilean coast around the end of October (Marder, p. 104).
The British weren't entirely unprepared; they had a squadron in the area, consisting of the armored cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth, the light cruiser Glasgow, and the armed merchant cruiser Otranto (Marder, p. 104) under the command of Admiral Christopher "Kit" Cradock. The problem was, the squadron was basically junk. Otranto was so weak that Cradock refused even to commit her to battle (Beekman, p. 29). Good Hope was the strongest -- she had two 9.2" guns, and no other British ship had a gun heavier than 6" -- but she was also manned by reservists; Cradock had chosen her has his flagship not because he thought her any good but because she was the fastest of the few armored cruisers available to him, and he had earlier in the war failed to intercept an enemy and wanted to be able to keep up with the Germans in future (Yates, p. 106). But even Good Hope had only the two 9.2" guns; the rest of her weapons were 6" guns, mostly mounted in lower-deck casemates which reduced their range and left them hard to use in heavy seas. Monmouth had a lot of 6" guns, but again mounted low; Jacky Fisher said of this class of ships that "Sir William White designed the 'County' class but forgot the guns" and that "with their wretched pea-shooters, they can neither fight nor run" (Yates, p. 135).
The Admiralty knew that Cradock didn't have enough force to deal with Graf Spee, but rather than combine his tiny squadron with another, or send him a modern ship, they sent the Canopus, a pre-dreadnought battleship. She outgunned Spee -- her main armament was four 12" guns -- but her armor was poor, she was due for scrapping, and she had recently spent much time in dockyard hands and was manned by a bunch of reservists. Yates, p. 123, thinks her guns were so old that Graf Spee's lighter guns actually had greater range (although less punch), and certainly the German weapons were more likely to be accurate. Also, Canopus's speed had fallen off, and even at her best, she had been too slow to keep up with the Germans (Marder, pp. 104-106). Just how slow she had become would prove a crucial question in the coming weeks; the Admiralty thought she could manage 15 knots (faster for short bursts), but Cradock thought she was limited to 12 knots (Marder, p. 107; Yates, p. 130; on p. 134, Yates explains that her Chief Engineer suffered from delusions and did not even know the state of the engines, and so reported 12 knots as her maximum speed until others realized his problems and set him aside). Craddock was told of the 12 knot speed, which made her hopeless if Cradock was to pursue the Germans.
Cradock had at one time ordered the cruiser Defence to join him from another Atlantic squadron, which would have roughly doubled his squadron's effective strength -- enough to at least give him a chance against Spee. The Admiralty ordered her not to go to him (Marder, p. 108). Yet Cradock went out to fight.
It's not clear why Cradock did what he did -- he did not survive, and neither did any of his staff. Some have thought him too aggressive. Others think he felt he could at least do enough damage to the Germans to let other squadrons catch Graf Spee. But the navigating officer of the Glasgow, the one ship to survive the debacle, had another hypothesis, which many think correct: "The Defence was refused to him and he was as good as told he was skulking at [Port] Stanley. What else was there for him to do except go and be sunk? He was a very brave man and they were practically calling him a coward. If we hadn't attacked that night, we might never have seen [the German fleet] again, and then the Admiralty would have blamed him for not fighting." And we know Cradock was worried about how he would be treated, because he wrote another officer, "I will take care I do not suffer the fate of poor Troubridge" (Marder, p. 111; Yates, p. 131. Admiral Troubridge had been court-martialed for refusing to engage the German battlecruiser Goeben with a fleet of ships that were individually weaker but collectively, arguably, stronger, see "Dardanelles Patrol Song").
Whatever Cradock's thinking, he took his under-strength squadron to the waters off Coronel, Chile (about 500 kilometers/300 miles south of Santiago), where they met Graf Spee's force on the first day of November 1914. The result was "what [Winston] Churchill has called 'the saddest naval action of the war,' the Battle of Coronel" (Marder, p. 101).
Neither side expected the battle they got. The Glasgow, Craddock's fastest and newest ship, had been sent north to pick up messages, and heard radio chatter that turned out to be from the Leipzig. The Germans heard that Glasgow was in the area. So the Germans were coming to try to catch Glasgow; the British were coming to try to catch Leipzig. Instead, both fleets found the other (Marder, pp. 112-113; Yates, p. 136).
The table on p. 109 of Marder shows just how much of a mismatch the battle was. The German ships had a total weight of broadside almost 50% greater than Cradock's -- and that was counting all the British guns, many of which could not be fired in the rough waters of the South Pacific. Plus, the Germans had twelve 8" guns; other than the two 9.2" guns in Good Hope, Cradock had nothing better than a 6", so the Germans had him outranged (Marder, p. 113). And even if you ignore that, the Gneisenau had won prizes for her gunnery, and the Scharnhorst was almost as good, and the British ships weren't even manned by regulars and hadn't had any chances for gunnery practice! (Marder, pp. 109-110). And the German ships had better armor, which was probably strong enough to keep out 6" shells.
Cradock should have known better than to underestimate Graf Spee, too; the two had met each other at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, and were even said to be friends (Yates, p. 137. After the battle, when Spee visited Chile, he was at a banquet where a man cursed the British navy. Spee stood, lifted his glass, declared, "I drink to the memory of a gallant and honorable foe," drank the toast, and stormed out; Yates, p. 181).
When the two forces met about fifty miles to the west of the town of Coronel, Chile, Graf Spee's battle management was exemplary. Using his superior speed, he held off battle until even the light favored his ships (Beekman, p. 27). And his ships served him well. Scharnhorst's first salvo at Good Hope was short, the second long; the third hit -- and is thought to have destroyed one of Good Hope's two 9.2" guns (Yates, p. 139). Craddock's supply of useful weapons had been cut in half before he even opened fire. Gneisenau hit Monmouth at about the same time, before Monmouth even got close enough to fire. Within minutes, the two biggest British ships had suffered dozens of hits and were clearly ruined. After about fifty minutes, Good Hope apparently suffered a magazine explosion (Yates, p. 141).
The Otranto, a big slow target with few useful weapons, had already fled by then. The Glasgow had suffered several hits, one of which created a large hole above the waterline but did not slow her down. Cradock was gone. Captain Brandt of the Monmouth had stopped answering signals. Captain Luce of the Glasgow, although the junior captain, was on his own. He knew he had no chance of surviving if he stayed, and little chance of hurting the Germans, and someone needed to report the outcome. He fled at top speed (Yates, pp. 142-143). The battle of Coronel was over.
Graf Spee's ships suffered only trivial damage; their only casualties were two or three men on Gneisenau with minor injuries (Marder, p. 114). There were no survivors from either Good Hope or Monmouth (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 58). It is not even known where Good Hope went down, although the Monmouth was seen after the battle, in dreadful condition and unable to fire her guns but still afloat; the Nürnberg found her with her flag still flying, and since no one took the flag down, the Nürnberg sank her with all hands (Yates, p. 143).
It was not really a bad defeat; the British had lost two cruisers they would be better off without, and about 1600 men -- the latter harder to replace, but they were not well-trained, and this was World War I; if the British didn't want casualties, they would have done something about bloody-minded generals like Douglas Haig. The real problem with Coronel was that it was such a one-sided defeat: the British had lost two ships and had barely scratched the German vessels' paint. The psychological harm was much worse than the effect on the fleet. (And, similarly, the psychological boost to the Germans was out of all proportion; the Kaiser gave Spee the Iron Cross, first class, and told him to hand out 300 second class crosses to the men of his command; Yates, p. 186.)
Despite his victory, Graf Spee was starting to run out of resources; he had only about 900 8" shells left for his two big cruisers (Marder, p. 118), less than half of a full supply, and had sent away most of the colliers which had supplied him with coal so far. He needed to get home to resupply, particularly since the Admiralty was determined to deal with him. The problem for the British was, Graf Spee could go anywhere -- through the Panama Canal (perhaps to attack trade in the West Indies), or around Cape Horn (to patrol either the Latin American or African coasts), or back across the Pacific to haunt the Indian Ocean. Graf Spee would be overwhelmed -- if he could be found.
Spee made it surprisingly easy to find him. He decided to head for the Falklands, presumably to head into the mid-Atlantic. It was the main British base in the South Atlantic, but it was not very big or elaborate and was thought to be poorly defended; he could do some damage there even as he started for home.
The defenses were better than he thought. After he learned of Coronel, Captain Grant of the Canopus retreated to the Falklands; the ship eventually grounded itself, with the crew preparing defenses for the port. (Yates, p. 196). They probably wouldn't have been enough to prevent an invasion if left un-reinforced, but they could potentially give the Germans a nasty surprise. And the Admiralty's response was rapid and dramatic. Having refused to take Graf Spee seriously enough before the battle, they now took him perhaps too seriously and sent an overwhelming force. The battlecruiser Princess Royal was sent to the West Indies, and the battlecruisers Inflexible and Invincible were pulled out of the Home Fleet to the South Atlantic to catch Spee -- even though Invincible was in bad enough shape that the dockyards insisted she wasn't ready to sail (Wragg, pp. 64-65). The force was also allocated five cruisers, most of which had been in the area -- Coronel survivor Glasgow, plus Carnarvon, Kent, Bristol, and Cornwall (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 60). That was enough that they might be able to beat Graf Spee even without the big ships. Forces of cruisers were sent to the northern and southern coasts of Africa, to cover other points Graf Spee might attack (Marder, pp. 118-119).
To command the armada chasing Graf Spee, First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher chose Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee. This wasn't because Fisher liked Sturdee; indeed, despised him, and held him to blame for the mis-allocation of forces that had led to Coronel (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 60; Massie, p. 525, explains that Sturdee had been chief of staff to Fisher's enemy Charles Beresford). Fisher's verdict on the earlier dispositions in the southern hemisphere was "Strong nowhere, weak everywhere!" (Marder, p. 120), which is absolutely correct and led to Cradock being so heavily overmatched, but how much of that is Sturdee's fault is a different question. I think Sturdee does bear some of the blame, but Winston Churchill, who was in charge of the Admiralty, deserves plenty of blame also.
Curiously, the Admiralty did not order Sturdee to hurry, or even to assure that his mission was secret; Sturdee almost went out of his way to advertise his voyage, even stopping to inspect merchantmen along the way south, and stopping at ports where there were German ships and ships of neutrals friendly to Germany (Yates, pp. 184-185).
Sturdee was very lucky, though. Graf Spee didn't hear of Sturdee's voyage, even though there were many wireless reports about it. Sturdee dawdled somewhat on his way south (which makes me think Fisher's charges about his competence at least partially true), finally arriving at the Abrolhos Rocks off Brazil for a supply stop on November 26 (Yates, p. 190), He still seemed inclined to dawdle -- he wanted to spend three days there -- but was convinced by Captain Luce of the Glasgow (Yates, p. 191) to accelerate his voyage; he arrived at the Falkland Islands on December 7. He immediately set about coaling his ships (Marder, p. 120).
It was lucky Sturdee had hurried on the last leg -- and lucky that bad weather around Cape Horn had caused the Germans to delay to rest (Yates, p. 191). By an incredible coincidence, Graf Spee arrived in the Falklands the morning after Sturdee.
Spee, who had performed so brilliantly to this point, had started making mistakes after Coronel -- Yates, p. 182, suggests that he was psychologically worn out after the long campaign. Around the time of Coronel, the German authorities had officially granted him the permission to come home. Yet he waited ten days before deciding on his next move, only then deciding to head home by way of the Falklands. It was the only British base in the south Atlantic (Yates, p. 193), and he wanted to destroy it even though the majority of his captains, including the exceptional Captain Maerker of Gneisenau, wanted to bypass it (Yates, p. 193).
At Coronel, Spee had done everything right. At the Falklands, he blew it. Having reached the islands, he sent two ships, the Gneisenau and the Nürnberg, to reconnoiter. Sturdee's own ships didn't spot them, but the other lookouts who had been set up by the Canopus did (including one near Sapper's Hill, as mentioned in the song; Yates, p. 198). The Canopus, with some difficulty, passed along to raise the alarm (the battlecruisers, wrapped around by the dust of their coaling, didn't see ordinary signals (Yates, p. 196). This alerted Sturdee, who was shaving at the time (Yates, p. 197); it also alerted the Germans (Marder, p. 121). Most commentators think that if Graf Spee had taken all his ships straight in and blockaded the narrow entrance to the harbor, he could have beaten the British ships in detail, despite the immense edge in gun weight of the British battlecruisers -- after all, the two big ships were not ready to fight; they would need two hours or so to get up steam (Yates, p. 198). But the observant German lookouts had seen tripod masts, which at this time were found only on heavy British ships, so they told Spee that there were battlecruisers in Stanley Harbor. Spee (who probably didn't believe it) ordered his scouts back and started to flee. He thought he would find Canopus-class ships, which he could not outfight but could outrun -- and so he decided to run (Yates, p. 199). But Sturdee's ships were faster than he thought. And, because the Germans were fleeing, the British could set out in an orderly way to follow the Germans.
Once his fleet as at sea, Sturdee arguably made another error that didn't cost him, ordering a "General Chase" rather than giving specific orders for a pursuit (Marder, p. 122). That order could have led to chaos. But, because his ships had such an edge in firepower, plus the battlecruisers were several knots faster than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Sturdee was able to catch up. When Sturdee's big ships finally got close enough to threaten the Leipzig, Spee made the odd decision to turn his two big ships around and fight in hopes the smaller ships would escape (Yates, p. 204). It was a strange battle, with Spee trying to get closer to the British so he could use all his weaponry, while the British tried to stand off (Marder, pp. 122-123). This spared the big British ships from damage, but the long range meant that relatively few of the British shells hit (the lesser British ships were stunned by the big ships' crummy shooting; Yates, p. 203); it took a very long time to sink Spee's ships. Sturdee's maneuvers didn't help, because he kept obscuring his gunsights in his own funnel smoke (Marder, p. 126); in the end, he used up so much ammunition that he might have been in trouble had he met a significant German force on the way home.
Ironically, when Spee became sure there was no hope for Scharnhorst, he apparently tried the same maneuver used by Cradock at Coronel: he charged his attackers as if to ram, while ordering Gneisenau to try to escape (Yates, p. 209). But it was too late. As for Gneisenau, she apparently fired until she had used up every 8" shell in her magazines (Yates, p. 210). When there was no further hope, Captain Maerker opened her seacocks and ordered her abandoned (Yates, p. 211).
When Spee had turned around to make his last stand, the smaller British cruisers went after the German small fry. That took longer, but Glasgow and Cornwall sank the Leipzig around 8:30 p.m. Two British ships that sailed later, Bristol and Macedonia, took care of several colliers (Marder, p. 122; see also the map on p. 205 of Yates). Most amazingly, the Kent managed to catch and sink the Nürnberg at 7:30 despite being slower and weaker (she, like the Cornwall, was a sister ship of Cradock's Monmouth). Kent's crew had gone all-out to catch up, even chopping up wooden furniture to try to raise more steam (Yates, p. 216). Only the Dresden the fastest German ship, got away, to be tracked down the next year; the others, after so long without dockyard maintenance, probably could not reach their design speeds (Yates, p. 213).
The Scharnhorst went down around 4:15 with all hands, including Graf Spee; 176 men were rescued from Gneisenau, which lasted until around 6:00 p.m. (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 60), meaning that the British, with no enemies left in the vicinity were able to pick up survivors after she sank. Both ships had had the chance to surrender (Marder, p. 123); neither did, even though their ships were obviously past saving and there was no point in continuing the fight. There were just eighteen survivors from Leipzig (Yates, p. 215). Only seven men from Nürnberg survived; she had done Kent enough damage that the British ship had only two boats left to lower, making rescue operations difficult (Yates, p. 218).
British casualties were light. Invincible took 22 hits but no casualties; Inflexible had taken three hits and had one man dead and two wounded (Yates, p. 212). Cornwall had suffered eighteen hits but no killed or wounded. Glasgow had suffered two hits, one to a boiler, and had one killed and four wounded (Yates, pp. 215-216). Kent, which had taken 38 hits, had sixteen total casualties, not all of them fatal (Yates, p. 218) -- although it took some time for her to report; her wireless had been knocked out and she had used so much coal that she had to steam back to Port Stanley at very low speed (Yates, pp. 219-220).
The British finally caught up with the Dresden in 1915; she was out of ammunition and coal. When she was found by Glasgow and Kent in the Juan Fernández islands, Captain Lüdecke raised the white flag after being hit by a few shells and sent Wilhelm Canaris, the future German intelligence admiral, to play for time while Lüdecke scuttled her (Farquharson-Roberts, p. 61; Yates, p. 234). She had seven killed and sixteen wounded; the British took the latter to hospital while the rest were interned (Yates, p. 235). Glasgow, which had been the only cruiser to survive Coronel, was thus present to see all five of Graf Spee's ships go to the bottom, and Captain Luce, who had done so well to escape Coronel and had convinced Sturdee to hurry to the Falklands, had the honour of being in charge of the squadron that finally tracked her down. The Chileans did protest Luce's actions as a violation of their neutrality, but accepted the British apologies (Yates, pp. 235-236).
Sturdee was given a baronetcy in the 1916 honours (Marder, p. 124), plus a grant of £10,000, making him financially secure for the rest of his life (Yates, p. 297). As Sturdee himself told his flag captain, "Well, Beamish, we were sacked from the Admiralty, but we've done pretty well" (Yates, p. 222). But there were many who thought it undeserved -- how much skill does it take to beat an enemy you have outgunned who kindly shows up on your doorstep all but begging to be destroyed? The doubts were such that he never again held another independent fleet command. He was made Admiral of the Fleet in 1921 (Yates, p. 297), but there was no German navy to fight by then!
As Marder, p. 126, observes, "The Falklands will never be cited in naval literature as an example of a tactical masterpiece. Strategically, however, the consequences were profound." It raised British spirits, and it all but eliminated German commerce raiders; British merchant ships were safe -- until the U-boats got into the act.
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy's two songs about this, this one and "Battle of the Falkland Islands," are both accurate enough as to sound as if they came from newspapers. "Falkland Islands" says that a lookout at Port Stanley saw ships and wondered if it was Spee, sent a message to flagship Invincible, states that the admiral (Sturdee) was shaving, lists the ships lost at Coronel as Good Hope and Monmouth, and hints that Spee will die -- all of which are true.
This song states that the fleet set out from Abroholos rocks (and who but a staff planner would even know that name?), was led by Invincible and Inflexible, dates the battle to the eighth of December, lists Sturdee as the commander, says he was in a battle cruiser, lists his cruisers as Bristol, Carnarvon, Cornwall Glasgow, and Kent, says they went to Port Stanley, states that the ships lost earlier were Monmouth and Good Hope, says that the Germans were seen from Sapper's Hill in the Falklands, correctly lists the five German ships (although the informant mispronounced Gneisenau), and lists exactly which British ships sank which Germans . It does get the distance from Portsmouth to the Falklands wrong (it's about 8000 miles, not 3000), but the 3000 figure might be the distance from someplace in the south Atlantic. It's an astonishingly detailed report; if Tawney didn't cite a recording of the song, I'd be inclined to suspect he wrote it.
Although it doesn't mention this battle specifically, see also "Coaling Song III" for the Kent. - RBW
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