Adventures of a Sea Hunter (26 page)

A new generation of Germans is preserving the past in an effort to learn from it and to ensure that it is never repeated. I think about that as I sit in Neustadt’s tiny church, surrounded by villagers raising their voices in song. As carols fill the air, I am reminded by those words of peace and love of the duality of the human heart. That gives me hope, even as I continue to be haunted by what I saw in the depths of the mountain.

Kapitan zur See Fritz Emil von Lüdecke listened carefully as Leutnant Arnold Boker, standing rigidly at attention and breathless from his dash to the bridge, reported that he had sighted a British cruiser approaching their position. Turning his binoculars to the horizon, Lüdecke could make out the silhouette of the cruiser, black smoke from its funnels staining the morning sky. The enemy was heading straight for his position. The game was up after 21,000 nautical miles, two major sea battles and seven months of war. The German warship
Dresden
was trapped: her engines and boilers were worn out and her coal nearly gone, and the ship lay at anchor after three months of playing a game of hide-and-seek with the British.

Even as Lüdecke ordered the alarm to call the men to quarters, the smoke of another British ship appeared on the horizon, this one from the opposite direction. Then Lüdecke spotted the smoke of a third ship. Sharp whistle blasts ordered the crew to muster on the deck, but not at their battle stations.
Dresden
was, after all, off the coast of Chile in neutral waters, and was safe. The British could not take any hostile action against them.

Lüdecke watched in shock as a salvo of shells passed over
Dresden
and hit the steep cliffs off the starboard side. Another salvo screamed through the air, and this time the shells ripped into
Dresden’s
stern, mangling steel and men and sending a sheet of fire across the deck.
Dresden’s
gunners fired off three shots before British gunfire smashed the ship’s guns at the stern, but Lüdecke’s men were not at their stations. Most of them were piling into boats and leaping overboard, heading for shore on their captain’s orders. With three British warships closing in, this was a fight Lüdecke knew he could not win.

The British cruisers circled the helpless German ship and kept pumping shells into the burning wreck. One witness later reported that the shells burst inside
Dresden
“with a sound like subterranean thunder.” Flames were licking at two of the magazines, where what was left of the ammunition was stored, and Lüdecke knew he had to act. The enemy must not seize his ship. With what crew he had left, he had to open the ship’s valves, set explosive charges and sink
Dresden.
That meant fighting through the fires and the smashed passageways to go below into the torn and broken hull. He also had to rescue the last men trapped in the burning hulk and take off the dead and wounded from the sinking ship.

To buy time, Lüdecke hoisted a signal calling for a cease-fire and surrender negotiations, and sent Oberleutnant zur See Wilhelm Canaris, in
Dresden’s
pinnace, over to
HMS
Glasgow. Glasgow
ignored the signal, as did the cruiser
HMS
Kent.
Captain Luce of
Glasgow
listened to the German officer’s protests over the violation of Chilean sovereignty and replied that his orders were to sink
Dresden
and leave the rest to the diplomats. As the two men argued,
Glasgow
closed in and continued to pump shells into
Dresden
, raking the hull and sending debris flying.

Then, in a massive roar that shot out of the port side of the bow,
Dresden
shuddered as Lüdecke’s scuttling charge detonated inside the No. 1 magazine. The forward casemate and its heavy guns blew out, and the bow was half torn off, leaving the rest of the hull open to the sea. It was 10:45 a.m.

At 11:15 a.m.,
Dresden’s
bow slipped beneath the surface of Cumberland Bay. Striking the seabed, the bow twisted and tore free as
Dresden
rolled to starboard. The ship was twice as long as the bay was deep, so instead of the stern rising dramatically into the air, the cruiser settled slowly by the stern. The shivering crew huddled on the beach and cheered a final explosion from a second scuttling charge deep within the engine room. Their ship, they felt, had died an honorable death, sunk by its crew rather than falling into enemy hands at the end of a long and eventful voyage. British sailors on
Glasgow
cheered, their ship’s last shots insuring not just that the German cruiser sank but also exacting vengeance for the loss of British ships and sailors the last time their fleet had encountered
Dresden.

Built at the Hamburg yard of Blohm und Voss, which launched the half-completed hull in October 1907 and delivered it to the German Navy a year later, the 4,268-ton, 388-foot
Kleine Kreuzer
(small cruiser)
Dresden
was built to be a fast raider on the high seas rather than a rugged warrior built to slug it out with other warships. Modeled after the successful Confederate commerce raiders of the American Civil War,
Dresden’s
job was to range the oceans, seeking out the enemy’s merchant fleet and sending its commerce to the bottom.
Dresden’s
steam turbines and four propellers drove the cruiser at speeds up to 25.2 knots. The cruiser carried ten 4-inch guns and eight smaller semiautomatic rapid-fire 2-inch guns, and could fire torpedoes from two tubes. If all else failed, or if they needed to save ammunition, the crew could ram and sink a ship with the huge cast-steel ram built into the bow.

Troubles in the Caribbean, particularly a civil war in Mexico, where rebels fought to overthrow the despotic government of President Victoriano Huerta, sent
Dresden
there in December 1913. Remaining on station in the region through July, the cruiser spent considerable time in Veracruz protecting German citizens and commercial interests, particularly when the United States invaded it and seized the port and city to protect its interests. On July 20, when rebels toppled Huerta’s government,
Dresden’s
captain took the Mexican president, his family and staffaboard, then carried them to Jamaica, where the British government granted Huerta asylum.

A 3-D MODEL OF THE GERMAN CRUISER
Dresden.
Willi Kramer

Dresden
was due back in Germany for a much-needed refit, and on July 26, rendezvoused with the new cruiser
Karlsruhe
to trade captains.
Dresden’s
new commander, Fritz Emil von Lüdecke, was to take the ship back to Germany, but when war broke out in Europe a few days later, he took
Dresden
to Brazil to attack British merchant ships.
Dresden
engaged several British ships, sinking some but letting others go because they carried cargo from countries not yet at war and, in one case, because the ship was loaded with women and children, and Lüdecke was an officer and gentleman of the old school with “incredible gallantry.”

As British forces in the region mobilized to find and destroy
Dresden
and
Karlsruhe
, Lüdecke headed for the Pacific, steaming through the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America in early September. There, at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas, Lüdecke received new orders to link up with Germany’s East Asia Squadron.

The East Asia Squadron, under the command of Reichsgraf Maximilian von Spec, was Germany’s only fleet in the Pacific. Based in Tsingtao, China, von Spec’s ships included the armored cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, and the light cruisers
Emden, Leipzig
and
Nürnberg.
When the war began, von Spec ordered his squadron out to sea, realizing that the allied forces outnumbered and outgunned his ships, particularly after Japan entered the war on Britain’s side.

Von Spec’s squadron rendezvoused with
Dresden
at Easter Island in early October. Then they all then steamed for Chile and the island of Mas a Tierra. There, von Spec learned that a pursuing British squadron, under the command of Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, had followed
Dresden
into the Pacific. Spec and his captains decided to head to the Chilean mainland port of Coronel, in the hope of finding and destroying
HMS
Glasgow
, which was coaling there. Instead, they ran into most of the British squadron.

The two forces met in battle on the afternoon of November 1, 1914. The fight started with the Germans in a better position—the British were firing into the setting sun and could not see as well. Within a few hours, von Spec’s ships had devastated Cradock’s. Cradock’s own ship,
Good Hope
, on fire and hit many times, exploded and sank with no survivors.
HMS
Monmouth
also sank after a point-blank pounding from the German cruiser
Nürnberg
which fired seventy-five rounds into the burning ship to finish it off; there were no survivors. The Battle of Coronel was the Royal Navy’s first defeat at sea in over a century, and it filled the British with a strong desire for retribution.

After Coronel, von Spec kept his squadron in the Pacific to hunt the enemy, despite orders to return to Germany. When von Spec finally decided to move into the Atlantic, his procrastination had allowed the British enough time to create a new battle force, this one under the
command of Vice-Admiral Frederick Sturdee. When von Spec and his ships arrived at the Falkland Islands to raid them, Sturdee and his fleet were waiting in ambush. The British cruisers could outrun and outgun the German ships, and in an unequal battle, Sturdee chased down and sank all but one of von Spec’s fleet. The first to die was
Scharnhorst
, with von Spec aboard; there were no survivors.
Gneisenau
sank next after a hard fight; the British pulled only 190 of the 765 crew from the water, and many of the badly wounded Germans died after being rescued. The smaller cruisers—
Leipzig, Dresden
and
Nürnberg
—ran for it, but soon
Leipzig
, out of ammunition, her mainmast and two funnels shot away, and sinking, stopped dead in the water. There were only eighteen survivors.
Nürnberg
fought until two of her boilers exploded and British shells sank her, leaving only twelve survivors.

Of all of von Spec’s squadron, only
Dresden
escaped the carnage, outrunning the pursuing British by sailing through bad weather that provided cover. The crew
of Dresden
ran with the bitter knowledge that they could do nothing to help the other German ships and that they had to try to escape to fight another day.

After returning to Punta Arenas for coal,
Dresden
steamed into the narrow channels of Tierra del Fuego, near Cape Horn, to hide from the British. For the next two months, British and other allied ships searched in vain for
Dresden.
But in early March, harassed by bad weather and with his crew restless, Lüdecke decided to return to the Pacific. He felt that they could not safely make it home by running across the Atlantic with so many ships hunting for them. His concerns were underscored on March 2, when the British cruisers
Kent
and
Glasgow
discovered
Dresden
in the channels of the Straits of Magellan and chased her at high speed for hours until Lüdecke outpaced them and escaped.

With only 80 tons of coal left, which was not enough to go anywhere,
Dresden
arrived at Mas a Tierra on March 8 with a rust-streaked hull and worn-out machinery. Lüdecke argued with Chilean authorities for more than the legal limit of twenty-four hours for a combatant to remain in a neutral port, claiming that his coal situation and the ship’s condition required more time. He also radioed passing

Mike Fletcher geared up to dive on the German cruiser
Dresden,
sunk off the coast of Chile. James P. Delgado