HMS Invincible
Last week, marine archeologists announced finding the wreckage of the German battlecruiser SMS Scharnhorst, off the Falkland Islands. The Scharnhorst, along with most of the German East Asia Squadron, was sunk by the Royal Navy 105 years ago on this day, December 8, 1914, in the Battle of the Falklands. How and why the Battle of the Falklands came to be fought remains something of a mystery.
Toward the end of 1914, the Imperial German Navy’s East Asia Squadron, under the command of Vice-Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee, was fighting its way home. On November 1, the German squadron has easily defeated two obsolete British cruisers killing 1,600 British seamen, off the coast of central Chile near the city of Coronel. Spee then refueled his ships and rounded Cape Horn. Before setting a course for Europe, however, Spee decided to attack the British supply base at Stanley in the Falkland Islands. He believed the base was undefended. He was wrong. It would prove to be a fatal mistake.
The East Asia Squadron was made up of two armored cruisers, SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the light cruisers SMS Nürnberg, Dresden and Leipzig, and three auxiliaries. When Spee steamed into Stanley, he discovered a larger Royal Navy squadron waiting for him. The British squadron, under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee, consisted of the battlecruisers HMS Invincible and Inflexible, the armored cruisers HMS Carnarvon, Cornwall and Kent, the armed merchant cruiser HMS Macedonia and the light cruisers HMS Bristol and Glasgow.
Spee and the East Asia Squadron were outnumbered and outgunned. When the Germans turned to flee, they were also outrun by the faster Royal Navy ships. The battle was a rout. The Germans lost both armored cruisers, and two of the three light cruisers. Two d the auxiliaries were also captured and scuttled. Where the British had 10 killed with 19 wounded, the Germans lost 1,871 including Admiral Spee and his two sons. An additional 215 German sailors were captured.
How and why the Battle of the Falklands was fought is something of a mystery. Why did Spee choose to attack Stanley? Why did he think that it was undefended? How did the British know when and where Spee would arrive?
After the battle, German naval experts were baffled at why Admiral Spee attacked the base and how the two squadrons could have met so coincidentally in so many thousands of miles of open waters. Kaiser William II’s handwritten note on the official report of the battle reads: “It remains a mystery what made Spee attack the Falkland Islands.
It was generally concluded that the German admiralty passed inaccurate information to Spee from the German wireless station at Valparaiso which reported the port free of Royal Navy warships.
In 1925, a German naval officer and spy, Franz von Rintelen, interviewed Admiral William Reginald Hall, Director of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, and was informed that Spee’s squadron had been lured towards the British battlecruisers by means of a fake signal sent in a German naval code broken by British cryptographers.
If that was the case it foreshadowed the breaking of the Japanese naval code in 1942, which contributed significantly to the American victory.
There are many skeptics of von Rintelen’s account, however. BritishBattles.com notes: The problems with [von Rintelen’s] claim are numerous: Why did the Admiralty not inform Sturdee of this ruse as it could only work if his ships were in the Falklands when von Spee arrived? There was very limited direct radio communication, if any, between London and its own ships let alone with von Spee. There is no indication from the conduct of operations in the Pacific and Atlantic that the British Admiralty had access to German naval codes. It seems inconceivable that a British admiral would discuss secret naval matters with anyone, let alone a notorious German saboteur like von Rintelen, whom the British would have shot if they could have laid their hands on him.
We may never know whether Spee was lured to the Falklands by a fake coded message, inaccurate information or just poor judgment and supremely back luck.
In 1936, the German Kriegsmarine commissioned a heavy pocket battleship, Admiral Graf Spee, named in honor of the admiral lost in the Battle of the Falklands. In the first naval battle of World War II, the Admiral Graf Spee was trapped in the River Plate by a superior British naval force and was scuttled.
In his essay at the Wavell Room, Reflections on the Battle of Jutland, https://wavellroom.com/2019/11/28/reflections-battle-jutland-broad-questions-from-a-narrow-selection-of-the-secondary-literature/, Ralph Hitchens wrote recently that, “by the spring of 1916 the Royal Navy was reading the verbatim text of German naval wireless traffic.” He does not offer to prove this, but it seems to be widely agreed. That the Admiralty withheld Hipper’s escape route from Jellicoe for reasons of OPSEC suggests a plausible explanation for why the Admiralty kept in the dark about Von Spee’s approach to the Falklands.
Correction. The last line of my previous comment ought to name Sturdee as kept in the dark by the Admiralty.
In background for his book, Bodyguard of Lies, Anthony Cave Brown goes through a whole litany of reasons British intel didn’t share what they knew mostly to avoid leaks that they had broken the Germans naval code. While he does not mention the Falklands specifically, he does consider the WWI code breaking a key to the later successes in WWII. Morison calls it the second biggest mistake in naval history because Admiral Spee had no reason to go near the Falklands on his way home. Not really sure what Morison considered the first biggest mistake?
Trying to read the tea leaves of history can be fascinating. A good argument can be made for believing that Spee was tricked into attacking the Falklands. On the other hand, Spee appeared to be acting opportunistically and had just won battles at Papeete and Coronel. He could have simply blundered into an attack on the Falklands wanting to add another victory on his way home.
In his book, Castles of Steel, Massie claims that the Royal Navy had a pretty good handle on the WW 1 German Navy code. He claimed it was a failure to pass on to Jellicoe and Beatty critical German ship movement information that led to the Royal Navy’s failure to meet the German as a combined force.