A Small but Mighty Victory
Roger Paine on the Battle of the River Plate
BRITAIN in December 1939 was a time of little Christmas spirit. War with Germany seemed to have reached stalemate, so news of the “Graf Spee victory”, or “The Battle of the River Plate”, as it was known, provided much-needed cheer. The early months of World War II were sometimes referred to as the “phoney war” and it seemed the Royal Navy was the only service fighting.
“It was never ‘phoney’ for us,” Lord Louis Mountbatten commented, commander of an operational flotilla of destroyers. “It was the most strenuous winter I’ve ever known, and the most uncomfortable.”
He might have added “and the most dangerous”. This was illustrated when the battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk by torpedoes fired from a German submarine when in Scapa Flow in the Orkneys on 14 October, resulting in the loss of more than 800 lives. By Christmas, the second war with Germany was a grim reality.
Although it was the U-boats which posed the greatest threat to shipping, attacks on ocean commerce by surface raiders would have been even more formidable. The three German pocket battleships (Panzerschiff) permitted by the Treaty of Versailles in the wake of World War I had been designed with the sole intention of acting as destroyers of commerce. Their six enormous 11-inch guns, a speed of 26 knots and the armour they carried had been compressed with masterly skill. No British cruiser could match them.
Despite their design, they were a grave disappointment to Hitler who had no appreciation of sea warfare. Nevertheless, one battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, was despatched from Wilhelmshaven two weeks before the outbreak of war.
This ship was formidable. Her diesel engines gave a range of 10,000 miles for cruising at 15 knots, and enabled her to attain her maximum speed of 28 knots. She was fitted with a form of radar which only had a range of 19 miles but was a great improvement on British ships, which had yet to be fitted with any. She had a wireless device which combed the air for all wireless communications, experts able to decipher practically any code, and a group of German Merchant Navy officers who were familiar with the trade routes where she would operate.
Commanded by 45-year-old Captain Hans Langsdorff, awarded the Iron Cross at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the ship began operations in the South Atlantic on 26 September. Three days later, the Graf Spee opened its campaign off the coast of Brazil by sinking the Clement, a British merchant ship. Captain Langsdorff altered his areas of operations and over the next three months the ship sank nine British merchant ships totalling over 50,000 tons without any loss of life. Langsdorff gave warning of his intentions, captured the crews and transferred them to his supply ship, the Altmark.
The British response was to form
hunting groups, which included fast battleships, aircraft carriers, plus heavy and light cruisers. Raider hunting at sea was governed by the advantage of surprise and easy concealment over vast stretches of ocean, but hunters were forced to employ many ships spread over thousands of square miles.
One such hunting group comprised three ships: HMS Exeter, a heavy cruiser with six eight-inch guns, the Royal Navy’s HMS Ajax and the New Zealand Navy’s HMNZS Achilles ,two light cruisers each with eight six-inch guns. This squadron was commanded by Commodore Henry Harwood, who anticipated Langsdorff would set course for the mouth of the River
Plate where merchant ships entering and leaving the port of Buenos Aires in Argentina were easy pickings.
After sinking the British merchant ship Streonshalh on 7 December, and taking the crew prisoner, the Graf
Spee approached the entrance to the River Plate. Commodore Harwood made contact with the enemy at 6 am on Wednesday 13 December. The
Graf Spee saw masts on the horizon and detected an adversary at sea.
The Graf Spee opened fire on the largest British ship, HMS Exeter.
Harwood then split his force in two so that the Ajax and Achilles could engage the enemy from divergent angles. The range closed rapidly from 20,000 yards to 12,000 yards with some damage being inflicted on the Graf Spee, although in reply Exeter
lost four of her six guns and most of her bridge personnel.
“We might just as well have been bombarding her with bloody snowballs,” Harwood remarked later.
Exeter retired from the battle, burning fiercely and listing. However, the two smaller cruisers continued hammering away, despite Ajax having two of her turrets disabled. “I therefore decided to break off the day’s action and try to close in again after dark,” Harwood reported. But at the same time, the Graf Spee was heading for the sanctuary of Montevideo in Uruguay.
Captain Langsdorff appeared not to realise he had the British cruisers at his mercy. He received permission from the shore authorities to remain in port for 72 hours, take the wounded ashore and bury crew members who had been killed. Despite protests that Uruguay, as a neutral country, was giving assistance to an aggressor, the pleas were not accepted. Langsdorff’s request for the ship to remain there for longer than three days was refused.
The British authorities also began spreading false intelligence to convince Langsdorff that if he left Montevideo his ship would face certain destruction at the hands of a newly arrived force comprising a battle cruiser and an aircraft carrier.
On Sunday 17 December, as Harwood was preparing his ships for another battle, the Graf Spee, with Captain Langsdorff and a skeleton crew, left harbour at 6.30 pm. The battleship hove to some four miles out and Langsdorff and the crew were transferred to launches and tugs. What happened next is described in a report by the British Naval Attaché.
“Time passed in considerable speculation and suspense but the truth, unlikely though it appeared, was beginning to dawn on some of us. Exactly as the sun set behind her, a great volume of smoke billowed up – and an enormous flash was followed in due course by the boom of a large explosion. So the Graf Spee met her end.” The pride of the German Navy had been scuttled. Photographs of her final ignominious moments were published around the world. Except in Germany.
Langsdorff and his crew crossed the River Plate overnight to Buenos Aires where they stayed in a naval barracks. On Tuesday 19 December, Captain Langsdorff gave his farewell address to his men. Later that night, having completed all formalities for the safe internment of his crew with the Argentine authorities, he went to his room, put a pistol to his head and shot himself. By him was the flag of the old Imperial German Navy.
In February 1940, the captains, officers and crews of Ajax and Exeter,
now back in Britain, were welcomed by the King and Queen on Horse Guards Parade, and marched through the streets of London to the Guildhall. On the same day, the crew of the Achilles was welcomed back to Auckland, New Zealand, with ceremonies and rejoicing.
On 29 October 1956 a film The Battle of the River Plate was given a Royal Command performance. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger it starred Peter Finch as Captain Langsdorff, Anthony Quayle as Commodore Harwood and John Gregson as Captain Bell (captain of the Exeter). American cruiser USS Salem took the role of the Graf Spee.
When I visited Montevideo in 1976, the scuttled wreck of the Graf Spee
was still clearly visible.