Coronel and the Falkland Islands – part 3
January 2nd, 2009 From
>Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 23:44:15 EST
>From: EDWARD WITTENBERG
>To: MARHST-L@POST.QUEENSU.CA, WWI-L@RAVEN.CC.UKANS.EDU,
> MAHAN@MICROWRKS.COM, MILHST-L@UKANVM.CC.UKANS.EDU
>CC: wew@papa.uncp.edu
>Subject: Coronel and the Falkland Islands – part 3
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>Reply-To: mahan@microworks.net
>
>Taken from _Sea Battles of the 20th Century_ (London: The Hamlyn
>Publishing Group Limited, 1975) by George Bruce.
>
>Edward Wittenberg
>wew@papa.uncp.edu
>
>
> Admiral Sturdee’s squadron arrived at the Falklands at 10.30am on
> 7 December 1914. Bristol and Glasgow anchored in the inner harbour of
> Port Stanley and the remainder in Port William, the outer harbour. The
> Canopus, already in position, had done much to organize the defence of
> the base. The two light cruisers, Bristol and Glasgow, began coaling
> almost at once and finished in the evening, a wise decision as it turned
> out. Coaling all the remaining ships began at dawn next day, and the
> two battlecruisers had already taken on 400 tons of coal when, at
> 7.35am, came a message from one of the shore look-outs to Canopus: ‘A
> four-funnel and a two-funnel man-of-war in sight from Sapper Hill
> steering northwards.’
>
> Glasgow repeated the message with the signal by flag, ‘Enemy in
> sight’; and to make doubly sure Captain Luce fired a gun. Lieutenant
> Hirst went up to the Glasgow’s masthead and swiftly identified the two
> vessels as Gneisenau and Nurnberg. Surprised while coaling in harbour,
> the British squadron was extremely vulnerable to an immediate attack by
> the German squadron, since most of the ships had colliers alongside.
> Unfortunately, von Spee had thrown away his chances by arriving at
> leisure with only two ships. Not until 8.20am were his other ships seen
> on the horizon.
>
> And not for some time did the German squadron realize that enemy
> cruisers were getting up steam behind the high ridge of Cape Pembroke,
> for they were taken in by the clouds of smoke. ‘Here and there behind
> the dunes’, noted Captain Pochhammer, on the Gneisenau, ‘columns of
> dark yellow smoke began to ascend, and then coalesced and expanded,
> as if stores were being destroyed to prevent them from falling into our
> hands’.
>
> Admiral Sturdee had given his orders at once, the bugles on the
> British ships had sounded ‘Action’, the colliers were cast off, coils of
> smoke poured from the big battlecruisers’ funnels as the stokers fought
> to get up steam in time, and by 8.45 am the cruiser Kent had taken
> position at the mile-wide entrance to the great harbour, with orders not
> to let the enemy out of sight if he chose to move off.
>
> Canopus at last came into her own. Captain Pochhammer had
> already signalled Scharnhorst that he had identified three British
> cruisers (not Inflexible or Invincible) and that he was soon going to
> open fire. Suddenly, at 9.20am, two shells from the 12-inch guns of the
> Canopus dropped a few hundred yards short, seeming to the Germans to
> come from a land battery, for the Canopus was hidden from seaward by the
> spit of land leading to Cape Pembroke, her aim being controlled by
> telephone from a shore observation post. A salvo of three more shells
> followed, one of which hit the Gneisenau by a ricochet.
>
> Von Spee had looked forward to attacking a defenceless base, but
> to find warships there and to see his own ships shelled by an
> apparently powerful concealed land battery was too much. ‘He had no
> desire whatever to engage in a new battle here off the Falkland Islands’,
> declared Pochhammer. Von Spee ordered operations to be suspended and the
> Gneisenau and Nurnberg to rejoin the flagship with all speed. The guns of
> Canopus had saved the ships in harbour and the wireless station from a
> destructive shelling.
>
> Shadowed at 9.45am by the Glasgow and the Kent, the enemy
> squadron made off eastwards at about 21 knots, followed by the rest of
> the squadron at 10am. It was a fine clear morning, with a bright sun
> and almost dead calm. ‘So great was the visibility’, noted
> Lieutenant-Commander Bingham, ‘that on clearing the entrance of the
> harbour we were able at once to take the range of the enemy, the tops
> of whose masts and funnels were just above the horizon. The distance
> was found to be 38,000 yards, i.e., nineteen miles, or nearly twenty-two
> sea miles’.
>
> Probably this was an overestimate, for at 10.48am Glasgow, which
> was three miles ahead, signalled that they were twelve sea miles away.
> The British ships were steaming at 24 knots and gaining steadily, but
> making such dense clouds of black smoke that Admiral Sturdee, on
> board the Invincible, could no longer see the enemy. For this reason,
> and because he was aware that in about two hours he should be able to
> open fire and that Carnarvon, only capable of 20 knots, was dropping
> far behind, Sturdee signalled to Inflexible at 11.26 am that he was
> reducing speed to 20 knots so that his squadron could keep together.
>
> Captain Fanshawe, commanding the Bristol was now ordered to
> proceed with the armed merchant cruiser Macedonia to attack and
> destroy two transports then signalled to be approaching the Falklands.
> They turned out to be the colliers Santa Isabel and Baden.
>
> At 12.20pm, when Sturdee’s officers and men had finished their
> midday meal, the Carnarvon, then steaming at only 18 knots, was still
> far behind. Sturdee, realizing that he could wait no longer, decided to
> press the action and increased speed to 22 knots, and by 12.50 to 25
> knots. He then gave the general signal to engage.
>
> Soon after one o’clock, at 16,000 yards, the Invincible fired its
> first sighting shot at the Leipzig, last in the enemy’s line. It > fell short,
> but the following shots sent great columns of water up all around her,
> and at 1.20pm Admiral von Spee signalled to his three light cruisers,
> ‘Turn off, try to escape’. It was an heroic though desperate attempt to
> save them by drawing on to Scharnhorst and Gneisenau the fire of the
> British heavyweights.
>
> But Sturdee, foreseeing just such an eventuality, had earlier
> instructed his captains that the battlecruisers would fight the enemy
> armoured cruisers, leaving the rest of his squadron to pursue and
> destroy the light cruisers. As the light cruisers Leipzig, Dresden and
> Nurnberg turned away to the southwest, Glasgow, Kent and Cornwall
> immediately swung round to the south and took up the chase without
> Sturdee making any signal.
>
> At the same time, the enemy armoured cruisers turned in
> succession eight points to port, making right-angled left turns to the
> northeast, and increased speed to about 23 knots in line ahead, a move
> which Sturdee followed. Before von Spee had finished his manoeuvre,
> Invincible and Inflexible were racing along on his beam at a distance of
> 16,000 yards.
>
> The battle thus began at 1.20 pm. The Scharnhorst, soon followed
> by Gneisenau, opened fire on the Invincible, Sturdee’s flagship, but
> their shots fell short. Von Spee shortened the range by turning about
> 20 degrees to port, then at 13,000 yards opened fire again and hit
> Invincible. Both British ships replied. Sturdee then turned away to port
> to keep the range beyond the power of the enemy guns, only to obscure
> both his and the Inflexible’s aim by the smoke from his funnels and his
> guns.
>
> But both enemy ships were already hit, the Gneisenau twice, the
> first shell exploding on the upper deck after grazing the third funnel,
> badly wounding an officer and three men, killing a stoker and
> temporarily putting one of her 8-inch guns out of action. The second
> struck her on the waterline, pierced the armour and lodged in a light
> ammunition chamber. Fire threatened, but the chamber was flooded at
> once and the damage limited.
>
> Meanwhile, under cover of the smoke, von Spee turned ten points
> to starboard, thus altering his course right round to southward and
> increasing the range to 19,000 yards. A lull in the battle followed as
> Sturdee followed suit and chased at increased speed, at the same time
> gradually lessening the range, until at 2.47 pm both British ships again
> opened fire at 18,000 yards, and as salvo followed salvo the enemy was
> hit again and again.
>
> Von Spee countered this hail of fire by a sharp turn towards the
> British line, so as to try to bring his twelve 5.9-inch and sixteen
> 8.2-inch guns into action, a move calculated to give him an advantage,
> because the two British battlecruisers mounted only 4-inch guns as
> their secondary armament. Soon, in the face of accurate shooting,
> Sturdee turned away again to stay out of range.
>
> By now the Gneisenau was listing, the Scharnhorst was on fire
> forward and her fast rate of fire was falling off. Certain now that he
> had the enemy mastered, Sturdee swung both his ships in a circle
> outwards and to windward at 3.15pm, to get clear of the curtain of
> smoke obscuring his targets, returning, with the Inflexible leading, on
> the opposite course. According to the British squadron intelligence
> officer, Lieutenant Hirst, ‘the Germans copied this turn, which was
> completed by 3.25pm, leaving both sides steering west by south about
> 12,000 yards apart’.
>
> Frequently now the British 12-inch shells were striking the enemy
> ships. Soon the Gneisenau was in a bad way; Captain Pochhammer noted:
>
> Owing to the great range of the fight, the
> shells fell aslant and consequently hit the thin
> armoured deck more often than the strong side
> plates. Thus they found their way more easily
> into the ship and wrought considerable
> destruction, even in the lower compartments . . .
> The wireless station was destroyed and a deck
> officer had his head blown off there. Another
> shell fell into the after-dressing station, and
> freed some of the wounded from their sufferings.
> The doctor was killed there, and the squadron chaplain
> ended his life of duty.
>
> Several hits below the waterline had flooded two of Gneisenau’s
> stokeholds, despite all the pumps being in action. Dead, mutilated and
> wounded men lay in heaps where they had fallen, her speed fell rapidly
> and she heeled over to starboard, but her gunners fought on with
> steady and accurate fire.
>
> Meanwhile the Scharnhorst had been hit by a hail of 12-inch
> shells. Pochhammer, 2,000 yards away, observed a large hole forward,
> another gaping hole where her third funnel had been, smoke, flames and
> steam rising from her, and flames visible inside her through shell holes
> in her hull. But still her guns thundered.
>
> At 4 pm, when Admiral Sturdee signalled her to surrender, she
> made no reply, but signalled Gneisenau to try to escape while she
> endeavoured to turn her bows towards the British ships and launch
> torpedoes. It was too late. At 4.04pm she heeled over to port, her bows
> submerged and her propellers still revolving. A few surviving crew
> members scrambled from the decks up on to her side. At 4.17pm she
> went down bows first; fifteen minutes later, when the Carnarvon
> approached the spot, there was not a single survivor.
>
> Gneisenau, stricken as she was, with her speed down to about 15
> knots, now turned towards the two enemy cruisers to try to shorten the
> range and bring her 5.9-inch guns to bear, but Sturdee countered the
> move. For nearly two hours Gneisenau doggedly fought on against the
> three British ships from three different bearings at ranges of from
> 10,000 to 12,000 yards. From time to time dense smoke interrupted their
> fire, but one after another the Gneisenau’s guns were put out of action.
> Captain Pochhammer recorded:
>
> The armour-plate of the 9-inch casemate was
> pierced and when the smoke had cleared away,
> the men were all found dead and the gun out of
> action. Another shell exploded on the upper
> deck just above the bed of the 8-inch fore gun.
> It swept the men away as if they had been
> bundles of clothes . . . Our ship’s resistance
> capacity was slowly diminishing . . . Debris and
> corpses were accumulating, icy water dripped in
> one place and in another gushed in streams
> through shell-holes. Wherever it was possible to
> do so efforts were made to man the guns. The
> after turret had long been jammed, only the
> fore turret remaining intact and continuing to
> fire all alone as long as its ammunition lasted.
>
> The last shot the Gneisenau’s stubborn gunners, fired in answer
> to Sturdee’s call to surrender, buried itself deeply in the Invincible’s
> hull. The British ships re-opened fire at 10,000 yards, struck the
> forward turret with a 12-inch shell which flung it skywards and
> overboard, and for a further fifteen minutes devastated the Gneisenau
> until she was a floating, blazing hulk, her foremast shot away, the
> upper deck a shambles of torn steel and blood, and her shattered guns
> pointing drunkenly in the air.
>
> As she began to go down, survivors among her crew paraded in
> an orderly manner on deck, gave three cheers for the Kaiser and their
> ship, then at the order ‘All men overboard’, jumped into the sea or
> slithered down the hull and swam clear. The British ships, between five
> and six miles away, steamed up at full speed as the Gneisenau slowly
> went down stern first, with her bows high. Boats were lowered and some
> 200 of her crew of 850 were picked up, but many of them died of their
> wounds during the night. They were buried at sea next day with full
> military honours.
>
> Admiral Sturdee’s tactics had been brilliantly successful, for in
> this long-range action, although the Invincible had been hit about 20
> times and Inflexible just once or twice, not a single officer or man had
> been killed and none seriously wounded.
>
> During this ruthless encounter, the three German light cruisers
> had been fleeing south with a ten miles start over the Glasgow, Cornwall
> and Kent. The Dresden, fastest of the enemy ships, apparently built up
> to 27 knots and escaped her pursuers to the southwest in the rain
> squalls that intermittently drove across the sea. Captain Luce,
> commanding Glasgow, therefore joined with Captain Ellerton of Cornwall
> to destroy the Leipzig, last ship in the enemy line, while the Kent
> chased eastward after the Nurnberg.
>
> At about 4.15pm the two British cruisers were both hitting the
> Leipzig from about 9,000 yards; later together on the port side to inflict
> the most damage. The Leipzig’s gunners were firing back with their
> smaller, but accurate and destructive 4.1-inch guns and registering hits.
>
> There were some narrow escapes and some casualties on the
> Glasgow. A dud shell ripped through her foretop and tore off a young
> signalman’s right hand. A minute later, while an officer was applying an
> emergency dressing to this wound, another dud shell crashed through
> the foretop, tearing the officer’s trousers just above his knee, but
> barely grazing him. A third shell struck the mast near the top, exploded
> violently, killed a petty officer standing below and destroyed some
> electrical circuits.
>
> Captain Ellerton shortened the range so as to inflict more damage
> with the Cornwall’s old 6-inch guns, receiving for his pains ten
> successive hits, mostly harmlessly on his ship’s armour. But the Leipzig
> was hit again and again for more than an hour. Her foremast was shot
> away and by 6.30pm she was on fire fore and aft, yet her gunners still
> fought back, until at 7pm, when she fired her last shell, she was hardly
> moving.
>
> Captain Luce signalled her to surrender, circled round and waited,
> but the surviving Germans, surrounded by fires on board, had no
> effective means of replying. Unaware of this, and anticipating that her
> captain might be hoping to sink the Glasgow at the last moment by
> torpedo, the two British ships moved nearer and ruthlessly shelled her
> until her mainmast and both her funnels were gone and she was a
> blazing wreck.
>
> Two green signal lights then rose from her, which were accepted
> as a token of surrender. Luce moved in to within 500 yards of her, then
> both ships lowered two boats each into the choppy sea to take off
> survivors. ‘Night had closed in rather misty’, noted one of the Glasgow’s
> officers.
>
> Two hundred yards ahead was the blazing
> ship, James high up on her quarter-deck and
> shooting out of ports and jagged shell-holes in
> the side, showing the white-hot furnace within .
> . . Small explosions would occasionally scatter
> sparks like a firework-the white steam escaping
> seemed to complete her national flag-black
> smoke, white steam and red flames-our
> searchlights poked hither and thither to assist
> the cutters in their search for survivors-our
> guns’ crews
> leaning silently against their guns . . .
>
> The Leipzig turned on to her beam ends and went down at 9.23pm
> while the flames and red hot metal hissed furiously in the water. Of her
> complement of over 400, only five officers and thirteen men were lifted
> from the sea alive. About 230 were alive when she fired her last shot; of
> these all but 50 were slaughtered in the final shelling and 32 of them
> either drowned or failed to survive the icy water. The British ships’
> crews were lucky this time, reversing Coronel. Cornwall was hit eighteen
> times, but not one man was wounded, while two hits on the Glasgow had
> killed one man and wounded four.
>
> Meantime, the cruiser Kent, commanded by Captain Allen, had a
> long chase after the Nurnberg. It ended 150 miles south of the
> Falklands. Burning even every scrap of wood on board to supplement
> her coal and build up steam, Kent came within 11,000 yards of the
> enemy just after 5 pm. The first two of Nurnberg’s salvoes missed, as
> did the Kent’s first; then the Nurnberg hit Kent’s upper deck and a
> 6-inch shell from Kent penetrated the after steering-flat below the
> waterline, killing several men.
>
> But it still appeared that the Nurnberg might escape before
> nightfall. Suddenly two of her over-worked boilers exploded, her speed
> fell to barely 19 knots and she turned to port at 5.45pm to fight at
> short range. The Kent followed suit, and at 6pm range was down to
> 3,000 yards. A shooting match began in which Kent’s fourteen 6-inch
> guns struck heavier blows than Nurnberg’s 4.1-inch guns.
>
> Soon fires blazed on the Nurnberg and her topmast was toppling
> over, but one of her shells penetrated one of Kent’s 6-inch gun
> casemates, scattering red hot splinters which killed one and wounded
> nine of the gun crew. The Nurnberg was, by comparison, ‘riddled like a
> watchman’s bucket’, with only two guns firing on her port side.
>
> She turned as if to try to bring her starboard guns to bear, only
> to receive two 6-inch shells simultaneously from Kent, which knocked
> out her two forward guns. Captain Allen had the fight all his own way
> from then on, and by 6.25pm the Nurnberg was down by the stern,
> blazing fiercely and scarcely moving, although still firing an occasional
> shot up to 6.35pm, to which Kent replied. Nurnberg then fell silent. Kent
> also ceased fire and waited for the enemy to haul down her colours.
>
> Either the enemy would not, or could not, owing to the fires
> blazing everywhere, so the Kent opened fire again for another five
> minutes; then at last she surrendered and the only two boats on board
> Kent that would float after the 37 shells that had hit her were lowered
> to take off survivors. At that very moment, 7.27pm, the Nurnberg turned
> over on to her starboard side and slipped beneath the waves. While
> albatrosses circled above, attacking anyone in the water, Kent’s boats
> found only twelve men alive out of her crew of 400, five of whom later
> died. Kent had lost four killed and twelve wounded.
>
> Although the fast Dresden had for the time being escaped-a
> matter for which Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee incurred the First Sea
> Lord’s wrath-Admiral von Spee and his squadron had been eliminated
> and Allied control of seaborne commerce was now almost complete, for
> the time being. British sea power was playing a decisive part in the
> war, but already, as the Battle of the Falkland Isles showed, the
> destructive power of British shells appeared to be decidedly inferior to
> that of the enemy’s. It was an inferiority that was to show up clearly in
> the Battle of Jutland.