CHAPTER TWELVE
THE LAST GERMAN CRUISER
MAS A TIERRA ISLAND OFF CHILE: MARCH 13, 1914 Kapitan zur See Fritz Emil von Ludecke 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, Ludecke 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 Ludecke 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 Ludecke 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.
Ludecke 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 Ludecke’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 Ludecke 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 Ludecke 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, Ludecke 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 Ludecke’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.
THE LONG ODYSSEY OF 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 Ludecke, 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 Ludecke 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, Ludecke 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, Ludecke 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 Nurnberg. 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.
