Pocket into Pocket

Dawn: Dark enough to strike without giving too much away, light enough to set the victim up in silhouette. It was to be a simple operation. All the Admiral Graf Spec had to do was warn the plodding French freighter not to send out radio alarms, take off her jittery crew, shell her or set some TNT below, and give her a one-way ticket to Davy Jones. Then get away.

Already there were prisoners in the

Spee's brig from nine such helpless victims. This life of raiding was good. Risks, yes, but mostly just an easy kill every three or four days. Two Limeys in one day off Africa a week ago; now a Frenchman off Uruguay.

In the tower, one of the Admiral Graf Spee's wireless hands ticked out the warning. A couple of 5.95 were cleared--to fire across the Frenchman's bow, or just in case the boys on the Formose were fools.

Suddenly from the lookout came a message : Enemy light cruiser sighted. Convoy. Off the starboard bow.

Alarm gongs clanged violently from lookout to keelson; bugles sounded to-your-stations. On the bridge the young officers put on their earphones and checked with the fire-control room and plotters. Observers focused their binoculars. The T-shaped range finders swung in the sleepy calisthenics of limbering and checking. In the control tower the plotters laid out their instruments--parallel, slide, caliper, is-was.

In the conning tower, Captain Hans Langsdorff talked quickly and confidently with the navigator. This job should be easy. Overwhelming superiority in armament and firepower. The cruiser--identified now as the Ajax, 6,985 tons--would not dare come in close enough to dent the Spee.

Gun crews slid into the two heavy turrets fore and aft and dogged the traps after them. The huge barrels nodded as if eager to belch. Lines of fire hose were dragged out on deck and left sputtering into the waterways. The decks emptied of men.

The Admiral Graf Spee, pocket battleship, 10,000 tons, last word in naval power for its size, was ready. But not for what happened next.

From the lookout came a new alarm: Two more enemy sighted. Light cruiser. Heavy cruiser. Starboard abeam.

Three cruisers to fight. She should be able to wallop them. The two light cruisers carried 6-inchers--too light to pierce the Spee'?, heavy armor, but plenty big enough to do damage far forward and aft, where the skin was thin, and in parts of the superstructure. And they could do six and one-half knots better than the Spee, maybe eight and one-half with all the truck-&-barnacles the German had picked up in the southern seas. The heavy cruiser was something to think about--8-inchers (they could crack most of the Spee's plate, including the control tower, from close range), and the vessel had an edge in speed.

But Spee had two turrets of n-inchers. That is power. A direct hit with 670 pounds of explosive-packed armor-piercer could blow a hole big as a suite at the Hotel Adlon in any of these ships. Then she had the eight 5-9-inchers as well. Roughly, the Spee had a 3-to-1 advantage in armament and fire-power over all three cruisers put together.

Tactics: watch the light cruisers but concentrate on the heavy; cripple her first, then the others would be meat.

The Ajax dampered her fires and set a smoke screen behind which Formose escaped. Meanwhile the other two--now identified as the light Achilles (7,030 tons) and the heavy Exeter (8,390 tons) --were flanking out to sea. Ajax apparently did the same, astern of Spee. This meant two disadvantages for the German --shoals and shore to starboard, glaring rising sun behind the enemy to port. Captain Langsdorff gave the order to work out to sea, into deeper water.

By now Achilles and Exeter were deployed and sheering in. Spee. had to train both big turrets on Exeter, and just keep the others off with 5.93. The engagement settled down to a running dogfight. Tactic of the Britons, directed from the Exeter by Commodore Henry H. Harwood, Commander of the South American Division of the Royal Navy since 1936, was one the Italians have developed: Using curtains of smoke, the cruisers drove through from behind, showed themselves just long enough to get off a salvo, and then plunged back into the screen. This meant that Spee never knew where to look for trouble, and when it came, had to react quickly.

Only way that the Spee could have overcome the British tactic was to get her two planes in the air for reconnoitering. It must have been early in the battle that a lucky British hit stripped to her fuselage the plane perched on the catapult--blocking the catapult so the other plane was also useless, and thus virtually blinding Spee. Despatches by week's end had not made it clear whether the British used their five available planes.

Out to sea went the four, zigzagging, varying speed, roaring steel at each other. The cruisers kept dashing in from all angles like hounds baiting a boar. In Spec's guts, the 62 British seamen--the youngest was 15, the oldest 72, every sort from captain to cabin boy--hollered their happy heads off every time they felt the Spec take a hit.

According to one of the German sailors, the enemy used torpedoes. None of them hit, but they made Spee alter course and lose maneuvering advantages. For a while Captain Langsdorff himself took the wheel.

Marksmanship on both sides must have been keen. Percentage of hits to tries in battle averages 2%. At Jutland, where the firing was tops, the Germans got 1.5%, the British 2.6%. Here the average may well have been 2% in the first phases. Spee suffered two especially bad hits--which must have been 256-pound shells from Exeter, since they both pierced heavy armament. One of them, high on the port quarter detonating a split second after getting inside, ripped gaping holes in side and deck. The other probably decided the battle. It pocked Spee's control tower fair and square. Lights went out. Telephones went dead. The central fire control went out of whack. Some of Spee's best plotters, gunnery officers, observers lay dead or wounded. From then on, orders had to go from less skilled men in secondary control stations. Speaking tubes, portable lights, messages by hand had to be resorted to.

Spee was not without success. She gave Exeter an awful raking--practically demolished her superstructure, and blew one turret to bits. Finally she got at Exeter's vitals, crippled her speed, so that Exeter fell out. It was 10 o'clock. The battle was four hours old. Next for the light pair.

But Ajax and Achilles turned out to be meat by no means. With spectacular coordination they kept each other smoked while driving in for bite after bite. They hurt the Spee, and badly. Some of her guns were silenced--one 5.9 turret tilted. Captain Langsdorff ordered his vessel to the nearest haven, Montevideo.

All the way in they fought, ten and one-half hours more. Within full sight of the headland called Punta del Este, where Uruguayans gathered in crowds as if to watch a pelota match, Ajax and Achilles craftily slipped around Spee inshore of her, leaving the enemy silhouetted in the east by the reflected light of the setting sun, themselves under shore's gloom. Just before dark there were two sharp clashes, and it was evidently in one of those that Spee suffered a final disaster: A hit at the forefoot, at bow and waterline, so that as she went through the sea she shipped water. At last night fell, Spee limped away, turned about, ingloriously backed into Montevideo and wearily dropped her anchor. She was out and all but down.

Captain Langsdorff called up the 62 captives, and as he set them free (under parole not to give away naval secrets), said to them: "The cruisers made a gallant fight. When people fight like that, personal enmity is lost."

Battle shifted from shells and smoke screens to words and laws. How long should Uruguay allow the Spee to stay? Articles 14 and 17 of The Hague Convention of 1907: A belligerent ship may remain in a neutral port only 24 hours, unless to repair damages affecting seaworthiness; under no circumstances may she repair armaments.

Uruguayan officials went aboard, found Spee's seaworthiness impaired, granted a 72-hour stay. Spee took on oxygen welding torches and steel plates and went to work. There was sad work to do, too. Sixty wounded men were treated: two went ashore to hospital. Thirty-six bodies were put into swastika-draped coffins, carried ashore, buried far from home.

Aboard the Exeter as she limped off toward the British base of Port Stanley* in the Falkland Islands, 1,000 miles to the south, were 61 dead men, and 23 wounded. Commodore Harwood was notified by radio that he had been knighted and promoted to Rear Admiral. Ajax and Achilles got off comparatively lightly: between them only eleven dead and eight wounded.

A diplomatic storm raged. Germans furiously charged the use of mustard gas, then dropped the charge. American Governments helplessly talked over what to do about this violation of their 300-mile neutral zone. Germany accused Uruguay of not allowing enough time for repairs.

Outside the mouth of the Rio de la Plata where it spews its yellow silt, the Ajax and Achilles waited exultantly for the deadline. Reinforcements came up fast. The much-disputed aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the battle cruiser Renown put in at

Rio to refuel--evidently on their way to Montevideo. The 31,100-ton battleship Barham, and the French battleship Dunkergue--it and the Renown two of five Allied ships which can both outrun and outgun German pocket battleships--and the 10,000-ton cruiser Cumberland were rumored to be waiting just over the horizon.

The Spec's sister Admiral Scheer and German Submarines were also rumored on their way.

As the zero hour approached, Monte-videans rushed down to the harbor to watch. Correspondents got up on a hotel roof. An NBC radio broadcaster set up his equipment on the dock (see p. 50).

At 6:20, two hours and to spare before the deadline, Spee weighed. Slowly she started moving for the breakwater mouth. The evening was clear--sun at the set, half moon already up, lazy little clouds. The supply ship Tacoma, with all Spee's married men aboard, picked up after her.

What would she do? To try to run that Allied gantlet would be suicide. Spee had had time to make herself seaworthy, but not battleworthy. A rumor got around that Captain Langsdorff would slip her across the Plata's mouth to Buenos Aires, there perhaps to intern.

Outside in the river Spee anchored. Over the sides into barges and launches scrambled the crew. Captain Langsdorff stepped into a launch which, as it drew away from Spee, dragged a long, thin cable.

Just as the rim of the sun dipped into the sea, Captain Langsdorff, surrounded by his officers, saluting, pressed a button on the end of the cable. A dull explosion. In three minutes Spee was on the bottom, her superstructure still showing ablaze. Darkness settled around the hissing remains.

This dramatic curtain was Adolf Hitler's pleasure, communicated by wireless. There was no apparent reason for it. Assuming that the Spee was in no condition to engage even the light British cruisers, Hitler had nothing to lose by allowing her to be interned--unless he expects to lose the war, he could expect to recover the interned ship when war is over. World War I had been lost when the Germans scuttled their fleet at Scapa Flow. If Hitler ordered the Spee scuttled merely that his enemies would never lay hands on her, World War II was already half lost in his own head.

*In a great battle off Port Stanley, 25 years ago this month, Admiral Graf von Spee, namesake of the pocket battleship, lost his ship, his battle, his life.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.