Battle of the Falkland Islands

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This is about the First World War naval battle. See Falklands War for the war of 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom.

Part of World War I

Date	8 December 1914
Location	South Atlantic, near the Falkland Islands
Result	Decisive British victory

Combatants

Commanders

Strength

2 battlecruisers,
3 armoured cruisers,
2 light cruisers and
1 grounded pre-dreadnought

2 armoured cruisers,
3 light cruisers,
3 transports

Casualties

10 killed,
19 wounded
No ships lost

1,871 killed,
215 captured
2 armoured cruisers, 2 light cruisers sunk, 2 transports captured and subsequently scuttled

The Command of the Oceans 1914-1918
Penang – Coronel – Cocos – Falkland Islands - Königsberg

The Battle of the Falkland Islands was a naval engagement of the First World War, fought between units of the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine on 8 December 1914. The British, reeling from the defeat at the Battle of Coronel sent a large force to destroy the German cruiser squadron. The result was a decisive victory for the British.

1 Background
2 Admiral Spee's intentions
3 The battle
4 Example of wireless intelligence
5 Naval warfare in the southern hemisphere
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Background

Following his success on 1 November 1914 at the Battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, where his German East Asia Squadron sank Admiral Cradock's flagship HMS Good Hope and the cruiser HMS Monmouth, Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee's force put into Valparaíso for orders and intelligence. It is held by historians that his subsequent target was merchant and troop shipping in the South Atlantic after raiding the British radio and coaling station at Stanley in the Falkland Islands.

[edit] Admiral Spee's intentions

There are no documents in the German naval archives of any nature relating to the attack on the Falkland Islands in December 1914. It came as a complete surprise to Berlin. It would therefore appear that Admiral von Spee was acting on his own initiative or on secret undisclosed orders when he drew up his plan.

It is recorded that Lord Fisher had told Churchill: "If I were Spee, I would occupy the Falklands, fortify them, and destroy the maritime traffic of the South Atlantic from there....". If Fisher thought in this way, it is likely that Spee had not only weighed up the possibility, but had decided to proceed accordingly: the "hit-and-run raid" was a euphemism for the full blown invasion, occupation and fortification of the Falkland Islands.

It had been the practice of Admiral von Spee during the first five months of the war to detach a single cruiser for the purpose of neutralizing the harbour installations of enemy-held islands. It was simply not reasonable to arrive with the entire armada, exposing it to risk. By December 1914, increasingly short of coal and lacking intelligence of British naval movements, to advance on Port Stanley with five cruisers, plus three auxiliaries from the south and two supply ships coming down from the north, defies logic if his purpose was simply to demolish the radio station and torch the coal stores. The evasive report submitted to the British Admiralty by Admiral Sturdee adds to the suspicion that von Spee's intention was to convert the Falkland Islands into a German naval base. Admiral Sturdee's report was written on 19 December 1914, eleven days after the battle, by when he had had time to assimilate the various reports and establish the facts of the action. His paper was published as a Supplement to the London Gazette, No 29087 of 3 March 1915.

The pertinent facts are that visibility on 8 December 1914 was at its maximum: the sea was placid, lightly ruffled by a gentle breeze from the north west, the sun bright, the sky clear. The advance cruisers of the German squadron had been detected early on, and by nine o'clock that morning the British battle-cruisers and cruisers were in hot pursuit of the five German vessels, these having taken flight in line abreast to the south east. Sturdee noted that "information was received from the captain of HMS Bristol at 11:27 a.m. that three enemy ships had appeared off Port Pleasant, probably colliers or transports. The captain was therefore directed to take charge also of the Macedonia under his orders and destroy the transports." At the tail of his report, Sturdee returned briefly to the matter of the German transports. "HMS Macedonia reported that only two ships, steamers Baden and Santa Isabel were present: both ships were sunk after removal of the crews."

In these two evasive, deliberately misleading paragraphs are hidden a story, which on no account, was to be made public then, or in the following decades. Port Pleasant is not many miles below Port Stanley on the east coast of the Falklands. How the three German steamers or transports had happened to simply materialize there just before noon is not explained. It can only have been the case that during the night of 7 December no alert naval watch had been kept on the southern and eastern waters of the island, and the German auxiliaries had steamed up during the hours of darkness and anchored close inshore.

Whereas Bristol was the senior ship of the two appointed to destroy the three transports, Sturdee preferred the Macedonia reported that "only two ships were present", these being sunk after removal of the crews. How in perfect visibility the number of German auxiliaries coming about Port Pleasant was counted as three instead of two, and has remained at two ever since, is a puzzle. Was there, or was there not, a third auxiliary?

The German support vessels are reasonably believed to have been five. Two of these, the steamers Mera and Elinore Woermann, sailed from the River Plate on 4 December 1914 for an unspecified destination loaded with cement, rolls of barbed wire, entrenching equipment and provisions. It is thought that they had been headed for the Falklands: they returned to the River Plate on or about 11 December.

The collier Baden, about 7,500 tons, was a HAPAG ship built in 1913. The collier Santa Isabel, about 5,200 tons, was a Hamburg-Sud Amerika ship built in 1914. Both were modern colliers which would have made a useful addition to the British mercantile fleet if taken as prizes, yet they were both sunk within 50 miles of Port Stanley. The two steamers were apparently overhauled by the Bristol and Macedonia at about 1 p.m and the crews "given ten minutes to abandon ship". Since the British boarding parties remained aboard the Santa Isabel for seven hours, and eight and a half hours aboard Baden before the colliers were sunk, one is inclined to suspect that their holds contained something more explosive and delectable than just coal. The Phantom Ship was probably the Norddeutscher Lloyd passenger liner, Seydlitz, built at Schichau in 1903. Able to accommodate 2,000 persons, she was past her best, but could make 14 knots. The day before the outbreak of war, Seydlitz sailed from Sydney and reached Argentina unscathed, laying up at Bahía Blanca at the southern end of Buenos Aires province. Early in November 1914, she made the voyage from there to Valparaiso in Chile, which was the principal mobilisation centre for German reservists and volunteers from all parts of South America.

According to the memoirs (Graf Spees Letzte Fahrt, Leipzig, 1924) of Fregattenkapitän Hans Pochhammer, senior surviving German officer of the Falklands battle, First Officer of the armoured cruiser SMS Gneisenau, the German East Asia Squadron had secreted itself in the Gulf of Penas along the southern coast of Chile during the latter part of November 1914 to load new stores and refit, and was joined there on or about December 21 by Seydlitz, arriving from Valparaiso. Pochhammer was mystified by this liner, for although bearing no outward markings, she was described as "a hospital ship". He could not understand the need for such a vessel, since each of the five warships had adequate medical facilities, sick bays and shared a total of eleven surgeons. Pochhammer was unable to gain access to Seydlitz, and no member of her alleged "medical staff" was ever seen.

Although Pochhammer confirms that the three auxiliaries were present at Picton Island in the Beagle Channel in early December 1914, he avoids mentioning when they sailed: it is clear that they did not leave for the Falklands in company with the five warships on the evening of 7 December, and may have gone on earlier. Pochhammer states that during his captivity at Port Stanley, he was kept aboard HMS Macedonia for part of the time. In conversation with her officers, when he asked them what had become of Seydlitz he was told,

"She came out of Port Pleasant like a bat out of hell. Macedonia and Bristol had to take a steamer apiece allowing Seydlitz to head for the south and west and so escape, we all thought she was an armed merchant cruiser."

Upon her arrival in Argentine waters, Seydlitz put into San Antonio Oeste and declared herself to be "a hospital ship". The Argentine authorities were not deceived and condemned her as a German naval auxiliary. She was interned there for the remainder of the war. The Seydlitz though, was originally a passenger ship with capacity for 2000 passengers, which happened to be about the population of the Falkland Islands at that time. Her most likely purpose for the German force was going to be carrying the captured islanders, probably to be kept out of the way in neutral Argentina.

If we look at the likely intentions of the Germans having regard to their tactics on the day, and particularly the attempt by Admiral Sturdee to conceal the circumstances relating to the three auxiliaries under the coast, it is not illogical to draw the conclusion that five cruisers, three auxiliaries and two supply ships converging on a group of enemy-held islands believed to be undefended was the prelude to invasion, occupation and fortification.

Unknown to Admiral Spee as he headed for the Falklands, a British squadron, including two modern battle cruisers, HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible, were at that same time re-coaling at Stanley in the Falklands . They had been sent by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher, to avenge the British defeat at Coronel. The British battlecruisers mounted eight 12-inch guns apiece, whereas Spee's SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau each had 8.2-inch guns. Additionally, the battlecruisers could make 25½ knots over the Spee's ships' 22½ knots. The British battlecruisers were therefore afforded the advantages of being able to both run their opponents down and significantly outgun them. Invincible and Inflexible were accompanied at Stanley by five other cruisers, under the command of Vice Admiral Sturdee. These were the armoured cruisers HMS Carnarvon, HMS Cornwall and HMS Kent; and the two light cruisers, HMS Bristol and HMS Glasgow. An old pre-dreadnought battleship, HMS Canopus, had also been grounded at Stanley to give a stable gunnery platform and act as a make-shift fortress for their defence of this area.

What cannot be known is the extent to which Argentina might have had knowledge of, or been involved in, the enterprise. Admiral Spee had been granted independence to act as he thought fit by the German Admiralty, but surely not to the extent of an invasion which was bound to have major future diplomatic repercussions. The scale of this audacious adventure must be viewed in the light of his own general demeanour of gloom after his conceiving of the plan at Valparaiso in November 1914, and the fact that all the cruiser commanders were opposed to it. A diplomatic origin for the arrangement cannot be discounted. 8 December is an important religious holiday in Argentina, and Pochhammer indicates in his memoir that Spee was working towards a set date for the attack. No document is extant in the Argentine archives relating to the affair, but Argentina would certainly have had just as much interest in the stewardship of the Falklands at that time as she had subsequently.

[edit] The battle

Spee began his attack on 8 December 1914, intending subsequently to refuel north at the estuary of the River Plate (Río de la Plata). While aware of shipping in the area, he mistakenly assumed them to belong to the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Spee's cruisers, the Gneisenau and Nürnberg, approached Stanley first. At the time, the entire British fleet was coaling and they were sitting ducks if Spee had decided to press the attack since the sinking of the first ship would have blocked the harbour.

Fortunately for the British, the Germans were surprised by gunfire from an unknown source, which was the Canopus which had been grounded as a guardship, and was behind a hill. This was enough to check the cruisers' advance and the sight of the tripod masts which were distinctive of the battlecruisers confirmed that they were facing a better equipped enemy. The Kent was already making way out of the harbour and was ordered to follow them.

Already aware of the German ships, Sturdee had ordered the crews to breakfast, knowing that the Canopus had bought them time while steam was raised.

With his crew battle-weary and his ships out-gunned, the outcome was seemingly inevitable. Realising his danger too late — and having missed the golden opportunity to shell Sturdee's fleet while in port — Spee and his squadron dashed for the open sea, the battlecruisers leading left port around 10:00. Spee was ahead by 15 miles but there was a lot of daylight left for the faster battlecruisers to catch him up.

It was nearly one o'clock before the battlecruisers opened fire and it took them half an hour to get the range striking the Leipzig. Realising that he could not hope to outrun the fast British battlecruisers, Spee decided to bring about an engagement with his armoured cruisers alone, to give the light cruisers a chance to escape, just after 13:20. The German armoured cruisers had the advantage of being to windward of a freshening north-west breeze causing the funnel smoke of the battle-cruisers to pour over the area obscuring their target practically throughout the action. Pochhammer indicates that there was a long respite during the early stages of the battle while the battle-cruisers attempted to lure Admiral Spee away from his advantageous position, but failed to do so.

Despite initial success by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in striking Invincible (commanded by Edward Bingham), the British capital ships suffered little damage due to their armour. Spee then resumed the hasty escape, but the battlecruisers were within extreme firing range some forty minutes later.

Invincible and Inflexible engaged Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Sturdee detached the cruisers to chase the Leipzig and Nürnberg.

Inflexible and Invincible turned to fire broadsides at the armoured cruisers and Spee responded by trying to close the range. His flagship Scharnhorst took extensive damage with funnels flattened, fires and a list. The list became worse at 16:04 and she had gone under by 16:17. All hands were lost. Gneisenau continued to fire and evade until 17:15 by which point her ammunition had gone and her crew let her sink, going down at 18:02. During her death throes, Admiral Sturdee had made the error of continuing to engage Gneisenau with his two battle-cruisers and the cruiser Carnarvon, a quite unnecessary tactic when one of the battle-cruisers could have been detached at that time to hunt down the escaping Dresden. Admiral Sturdee avoids mentioning this event, 190 of Gneisenau's crew were pulled from the water. The battlecruisers had received about 40 hits and lost one man with four more injured.

The Nürnberg and Leipzig meanwhile had run from the British cruisers. The Nürnberg was running at full speed but in need of maintenance while the crew of Kent were pushing her boilers and engines to the limit. Nurnberg finally turned to battle at 17:30. Kent had the advantage in shell weight and armour and that started to tell against the Nurnberg. The latter suffred two boiler explosions around 18:30 giving away the advantage in speed and manoeuvre to Kent. She then rolled over at 19:27 after a long chase. The cruisers Glasgow and Cornwall had chased down Leipzig. Glasgow closed to finish Leipzig which had run out of ammunition but was still flying her battle ensign. She fired two flares so Glasgow halted fire. At 21:23 she rolled over leaving only 18 survivors more than 80 miles southeast of the Falklands.

Ten British sailors were killed during the battle and 19 wounded, whilst none of the British ships was badly damaged. In contrast, 1,871 German sailors were killed in the encounter, including Admiral Spee and his two sons, plus 215 survivors were rescued and ended up prisoners on the British ships. Most of them from the Gneisenau, as well as five from the Nürnberg and 18 from the Leipzig. None of the 765 officers and men from the Scharnhorst survived.

Of the known German force of eight ships, two escaped: the auxiliary Seydlitz and the light cruiser Dresden, which roamed at large for a further three months before her captain surrendered off the Juan Fernández Islands on 14 March 1915. Evacuating his ship, he then scuttled her by detonating its main ammunition magazine.

As a consequence of the battle, German commerce raiding on the high seas by regular warships of the Kaiserliche Marine was brought to an end. However, Germany put several armed merchant vessels into service as commerce raiders until the end of the war (see Felix von Luckner, for example). These lone raiders would not utilize the fleet in being principle of von Spee.

[edit] Example of wireless intelligence

Military historian John Keegan has written about the battle in his book Intelligence in War and let the battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands illustrate the effect that wireless intelligence has on the outcome. The whereabouts of the ships could be sent round the world such that ships no longer need rely on visual search. Von Spee's decision to head to Stanley was in part to capture its communication centre.

[edit] Naval warfare in the southern hemisphere

There are a variety of anecdotes, some of them even found online, which say things such as:

"The British naval vessels fired large guns which were aimed by mechanical sights. The shipbuilders and engineers designed this system to account for the Coriolis Effect. Due to the size of the guns, their projectile speeds, and their long range, it was necessary to account for Earth's rotational motion over the shell's many-thousand-yard trajectories. However, the system was designed to be fired in the northern hemisphere, since the guns were manufactured in Britain. Due to an idiosyncrasy of the gun sights, each precisely aimed shot landed several hundred yards to the side of the target due to this phenomenon. The gun trajectories at the Battle of the Falkland Islands is a common problem in advanced classical physics courses, involving gravitation, rotation, and many other significant physical considerations."

The above text is clearly erroneous in at least one point: The calculated deflection for the Coriolis force at the ranges and velocities of the battle of the Falklands would be on the order of 50 yards (so failing to correct, assuming a correction was included in the sights, would result in a total miss of 100 yards - 50 yards compensated out by the sights being wrong, and 50 yards in the opposite direction by being in the wrong hemisphere - not "several hundred yards"). However battle ranges in this engagement varied from nearly 17,000 yards to under 8,000, so the effect would not be uniform; and secondly, the amount of deflection by the Coriolis force would in fact be small compared to other aiming errors, and the general long range gunfire spotting procedures would insert a compensation factor in the aim simply by the spotters noting the degree of miss, and reporting this. Second, there is no indication in surviving British gun direction equipment manuals that any Coriolis correction was included in their design, which calls into question the first part of the assertion about shipbuilders and engineers. Finally, as a Navy with global commitments, with the possibility to engage in battle practically anywhere on the world's oceans, it appears unlikely that the Royal Navy would include gunnery control equipment designs that did not reflect the possibility of the Coriolis influence, if it was a significant factor that could not be easily compensated. Later US gun fire control systems, designed to shoot US battleship projectiles nearly over the horizon, with the aid of aircraft spotting did include a Coriolis compensation that could be set using ship's navigation data. But it appears that the ranges and velocities of guns in the Falklands would make the compensation unnecessary, since it would be easier to include an arbitrary spotting correction, rather than complicate the mechanical computers with additional gearing.

Another reason to argue against this is that the German mechanical computers for fire control were actually less sophisticated than the British. German ships shot accurately at the battle, and the Germans were far more likely to have designed their ships for combat in the North Sea or Baltic only, than the Royal Navy ships. On the other hand, the German large cruisers were known to have recently won the German Navy shooting competition, and further, they had recent battle experience, in the Coronel action.

One of the criticisms of the Falklands action, reported later in the press and presumably after Jutland in Royal Navy circles, however, was that the British shooting by the battlecruisers was generally poor, and the poor shooting was supposedly repeated later at Jutland; charges were made that because the Falklands battle was a victory, the poor shooting was never investigated. The claim of the Coriolis effect not being included in the design may have arisen as a clever diversion intended to fool the non-technical public (and non-technical seagoing officers) into blaming the Royal Navy hierarchy and shore-based design establishment, rather than the crew of the ships. It is unclear when the first claims of Coriolis effect causing poor shooting was made. It is also worth noting that the two British battlecruisers at the Falklands were among the best-shooting British ships at Jutland, but they had just participated in a battle practice in the prior weeks, whereas they had never seen action before and had not recently undergone gunnery training at the time of the Falklands action. In addition, the British battlecruisers, especially the second in line, were seriously hampered by the heavy coal smoke they were putting out, due to their high speed in a chase, and this smoke hung low and heavy, blocking the sights of the after turrets on both ships. Further, the gunnery officer in the trailing battlecruiser realized at one point that he had been trying to spot on the basis of splashes caused by shells from the lead battlecruiser, and thus firing rather wildly - a factor far more likely to cause a several hundred yard error than the comparatively small error of the Coriolis effect.

In the end, therefore, it appears that the reports of the Coriolis effect being a significant cause of poor British gunnery accuracy in the Falklands, may fall into the category of a physics and military legend or myth. It should nevertheless have been possible for two battle-cruisers to finish off two armoured cruisers in less time than the four hours taken. The First Officer of Gneisenau, Fregattenkapitän Pochhammer, stated in his memoir that his ship was hit seventy times by heavy calibre munition, and the hit rate of over 4.5 was not bad shooting given the circumstances involving the smoke. As at Coronel, when his ship had received three hits, he noted that the British shells tended to disintegrate after the first contact. This points the finger at the quality of the British munitions, not the gunnery.

[edit] References

Keegan, John: Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, Knopf, 2003 ISBN 0-375-40053-2
Pochhammer, Hans: Graf Spees letzte Fahrt, Hase & Koehler, 1924