bobbb21's writeup on the battleship Scharnhorst is, of course, definitive, and needs no further elaboration. Very much more obscure these days, however, is the earlier incarnation of the Scharnhorst. A ship which had, if anything, an even more amazing career...
Armored Cruiser Scharnhorst (1906-1914)
Part 1.
It was the tail end of the era and, though no one would explicitly say so, everyone seemed to realize it at some level. There'd been many long decades of relative peace and global maritime empire building, and now even the new German nation had gotten into the act. Every nation worth the name needed overseas colonies, it was just the done thing. And, since all involved had diligently read their Mahan, they also needed strong naval forces to defend their dominions. Or, was it that they needed the dominions to justify the naval forces? It worked either way.
So the Germans, a late entry to the contest, staked out the best of the dwindling number of choice colonies: Some islands in the Pacific, and Tsingtao, China, the home of a thriving expatriate brewing industry, (you can still buy Tsingtao beer), and base of the German Far-East Asia squadron.
As a former naval officer, I look at the grainy, black and white photographs from the era and get a strange sense of familiarity that I know to be false. These men wore uniforms that, though a bit more elaborate, were not unlike the one I wore. They manned gray, steel ships that looked, in some ways, like the ones I served on and around. So I get the sense that I know them. Though actually, I must admit that I can't get my mind around how alien this world must have been from my own. The social attitudes, the rigid, absolute class stratification, and the extreme technological constraints and limitations made the era totally unlike my own experience.
Not that it was all unpleasant - there were soirees ashore with suitable young ladies, appropriately chaperoned, of course. And there were hunting expeditions, and polo, and yearly exchanges of visits with the Royal Navy squadron in Hong Kong. Cocktail parties under awnings stretched over the quarterdeck, toasts to King and Kaiser, and football games ashore for the other ranks...
The German sqaudron's commander, Admiral Maximillian von Spee, went through these motions politely, but hated every moment of them. A gifted naturalist in his own right, he'd have much preferred to be gathering specimens of the local flora.
Or concentrating on the efficiency of his squadron, most especially the gunnery. Through relentless drilling, his men were renowned, crack shots.
August of 1914 put an end to the gunnery drills and social whirlwind. The German squadron, consisting of Scharnhorst, her sister ship Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Emden, Nurnberg, and Leipzig found themselves on the war's actual outbreak not in Tsingtao, but at Ponape, a speck of an island colony 400 miles from the more familiar Truk.
Von Spee had to figure out what to do. He was on the far side of the world from Germany, and, though he could refuel and re-provision at any number of places (or by way of chartered vessels hired by German agents scattered in ports around the globe), he was cut off from Tsingtao, the only base at which he could drydock, or do any significant repairs.
And everyone was hunting him. The Australians, the British, the New Zealanders, even the Japanese, allied with the British in 1914, were all on the lookout. Spies were in every port, so wherever he appeared he could count on his location being reported by wireless telegraph.
Von Spee's options were to either split up his squadron, with each ship proceeding independently in classic commerce raiding warfare, or to keep them together in order to cause mischief as a more powerful, united force. Von Spee knew that, independently, his ships might sink more allied merchant tonnage, but, eventually, each ship would be run down and overwhelmed. Also, his heavy ships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, weren't really suited for commerce raiding, being too slow and more heavily armed than strictly required.
Von Spee decided to keep his force together, and fight his way back, eastward, via South America, all the way home, sowing destruction and confusion against whatever British shipping, naval forces, or shore installations he came upon along the way. The sole consolation von Spee made to the commerce raiding strategy was to accede to a request (made by her captain) to detach Emden for independent raiding operations. (Emden would end up having the most amazing career of any commerce raider, but will be left as a subject for another writeup.)
His captains briefed, Von Spee's force weighed anchor and, after a quick sortie to the German colony of Pagan, where Emden detached and where the ships fueled and provisioned to the maximum extent possible, they sailed for the island of Eniwetok. There, Nurnberg was sent on an errand to Honolulu, Hawaii, to pick up newspapars and mail, and to cable German naval headquarters with von Spee's intentions. The rest of the squadron proceeded to Majuor in the Marshall Islands.
It's difficult, as a former naval officer brought up in an era of nuclear powerplants, satellite surveillance and communication, ever advancing radar, jet aircraft and missiles, to imagine the difficulties and constraints under which the navies of the time operated. Your detection range was the horizon, or the atmospheric visibility, whichever was lower. Navigation was by celestial starshots, or, if the sky was overcast, by ded reckoning. (I had some training once in taking celestial fixes with a sextant...it's not a trivial operation, by any means, and the accuracy, in comparison with, say, GPS, is certainly not impressive.) Ships could communicate, often across thousands of miles, via wireless telegraph, but this was a very uneven exercise, depending on atmospheric conditions as the signals bounced off the ionosphere.
At von Spee's chosen cruising speed, his force needed to refuel about every 8 days.
For a coal-fired warship, this evolution was an ordeal. All hands pitched in, and it still took all day for the coal to be carried, in sacks, from the coaler and dumped down the scuttles into the bunkers of the ship being refueld. The ship's band would set up some place out of the way, often atop a gun turret, and play marches to keep the crew energized. It was back-breaking, exhausting work, made worse by the temperatures under the Pacific sun. By the end, the entire ship, and all the crew were filthy, caked in coal dust on every square inch of deck, equipment, skin, or uniform.
Provisions also would be loaded. Of course, they had no refrigeration, so these were in the form of live animals for slaughter on the voyage.
Von Spee proceeded across an ocean more vast than any aboard had ever seen. Day after day eastward, at 10 knots.
At Christmas Island they were rejoined by Nurnberg, who had learned in the neutral American colony that the Japanese had indeed declared war on Germany, and that their navy had joined in the global hunt to run von Spee down.
From Christmas, the German squadron sailed for Samoa, where the Germans had had another colony before New Zealand had snapped it up at the outbreak of war. Von Spee intended to sink any ships he surprised in the harbor there, but there were none. As he sailed away, his radiomen heard the wireless station on the island broadcast his position.
Von Spee then resorted to a ruse that Nelson might have used a century earlier: he allowed himself to be seen steaming away to the northwest. This was duly reported as his course when he was last seen...
Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, the British were frantically trying to cover all their bases, and account for every known German unit still at large. Von Spee's force was the most powerful of these, but far from the only one. Admiral Chrisopher Craddock found himself in the Falkland Islands, assembling a force with which to deal with any commerce raider that should appear in the South Atlantic. He'd been given the old armored cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth, a scattering of light cruisers, the armed liner Otranto, and had been promised the more modern cruiser Defence. His crews were a very ad-hoc mixture of raw recruits and rusty reservists, activated in the panic at the start of the war. This force was adequate to deal with the typical, lightly armed commerce raider, but would be no match for von Spee should he appear. This was not a worry, though, as von Spee's position was last fixed in the middle of the vast Pacific, and he had been steaming away...
von Spee, however, had resumed his generally southeast course after steaming beyond the horizon from Samoa. His ships proceeded, across the baking tropics, to Suvarov Island, then Bora-Bora, a French colony, where the German force pulled another ruse. The local French authorities took the German ships, which were flying no flag, for British, and sent out an officer in a boat to offer assistance. The French officer was met by German Officers speaking English and French. Soon other local authorities appeared, welcoming them with bouquets of flowers, and loads of coal,and provisions, for which the Germans paid with gold. As the German force sailed away, the French raised thier flag on the shore in salute. The Germans duly replied by raising the German naval ensign.
On they steamed. From Bora-Bora to Papeete, where the Germans fired their first shots in anger, sinking a gunboat and destroying some shore artillery. From there to the Marquesas. From there to Easter Island. Finally, after 12,000 miles and almost four months, Mas Afuera, on the Chilean coast, in a spectacular harbor dominated by a 3,000 foot sheer rock cliff. Von Spee paused once more to refuel from chartered colliers, then weighed anchor to proceed southwards along the coast of Chili...
Meanwhile Cradock, grasping desperately for solid information among the rumors and fragments of wireless messages, had a hunch where von Spee might be heading. And he didn't intend to shirk the challenge. Since the Goeben incident, earlier in the war, when a Mediterranean squadron of British cruisers had avoided combat with the powerful battlecruiser Goeben, allowing it to slip into Istanbul and precipitating Turkey's entry into the war on the side of Germany, all British officers were extremely anxious that they not be seen avoiding a fight. Cradock knew he was tremendously outclassed by von Spee's force, but anticipated that things would be more even once the modern cruiser Defence joined his force. So he was crestfallen to learn that the Admiralty had substituted Canopus instead. Canopus was an ancient battleship launched in 1892, and, though it had four 12 inch guns, it's top speed was no more than 15 knots. For Cradock, this was worse than useless. Leaving Canopus in his wake, he advanced from his assigned station in the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, and up the west coast of South America. He'd be damned if anyone would accuse him of avoiding a scrap...
And so the two forces blundered into their destiny, off the little Chilean town of Coronel. The conditions couldn't have been more unfavorable for Cradock; heavy seas made many of the guns on the British ships, placed low along their sides, unusable. As the sun went down, Cradock's force found itself silhoetted against the twilight to the west, while the German ships were lost to the British gunners in the gloom and haze towards the shore to the east. Cradock's untrained gunners did their best, but were no match for von Spee's relentlessly trained experts....
In a little over an hour's shooting, both Monmouth and Good Hope went down, without a single survivor from either ship. The armed liner Otranto and light cruiser Glasgow fled in the gathering darkness. No German ship had so much as a scratch in its paint.
(...to be continued...)