Battle of the Falkland Islands, 1914: Coronel avenged

Five weeks after its worst defeat in more than a century, the Royal Navy struck back. At Coronel, off Chile, on 1 November 1914, Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron had sunk two British cruisers with all hands. On 8 December the same squadron steamed toward the Falkland Islands expecting to destroy a coaling station. It found two battlecruisers waiting, and by nightfall four of its five warships were at the bottom of the South Atlantic.²

Background: the answer to Coronel

Von Spee's squadron had been based before the war at Tsingtao, Germany's colony on the Chinese coast. When war came he took his two armored cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, across the Pacific, away from the Japanese fleet and the stronger British ships in Asian waters, gathering three light cruisers on the way. At Coronel on 1 November his 8.2-inch guns outranged almost everything Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock had, and Cradock's flagship Good Hope and the Monmouth went down with all hands; Britannica puts the dead at some 1,800, Cradock among them.³ › Battle of Coronel, 1914

The defeat caused outrage in Britain, and the Admiralty moved fast. The new First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, reinforced British squadrons across the Atlantic, while British and Japanese ships gathered in the Pacific to bar any return that way. Above all, Fisher took two battlecruisers from the Grand Fleet. On 5 November a telegram to Admiral Jellicoe said the First Sea Lord required Invincible and Inflexible to recover control, and that Vice Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee would command in the South Atlantic and Pacific.⁴

Armies and commanders: two squadrons

The battlecruisers were exactly the right tool. Faster than von Spee's armored cruisers and carrying eight 12-inch guns each against his 8.2-inch ones, they could choose the range and fight outside his reach. Sturdee's force also had the armored cruisers Carnarvon, Cornwall and Kent, the light cruisers Bristol and Glasgow, a survivor of Coronel, and the old battleship Canopus. It reached Port Stanley on 7 December and began to coal, with no idea where the Germans were.⁵

Von Spee had five warships: Scharnhorst, his flagship, and Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Leipzig, Nürnberg and Dresden, followed by colliers. After Coronel he had rounded Cape Horn into the Atlantic and decided to attack the coaling station and wireless station on the Falklands on his way. John Rickard calls it a serious error of judgment. Corbett, the British official historian, notes that no word of the battlecruisers' arrival had reached the German admiral.⁶

The battle in phases

A morning surprise

On the morning of 8 December the observation post on Sapper Hill reported two warships approaching. They were Gneisenau and Nürnberg, sent ahead to destroy the wireless station. Sturdee's ships were caught coaling in a cramped harbor where they could not use their range; the colliers were cast off, steam was raised and the squadron prepared to sail. The danger passed at about 9:20, when the old battleship Canopus, grounded in the harbor as a fort and directed by an observer ashore, fired two salvos of 12-inch shells. The shots fell short, but the Germans had not expected a battleship. When they then made out the tripod masts of battlecruisers above the smoke in the harbor, they turned away at full speed.⁷

Sturdee put to sea at 10 a.m. The bad weather of the past days had cleared; the sea was calm and the visibility unusually good, and only bad weather to the south could have saved von Spee. The battlecruisers had the speed, and in less than three hours they were within range.⁸

Von Spee turns to fight

Just before 1 p.m. the battlecruisers opened fire at about 16,000 yards on the rearmost German ship, the Leipzig. At about 1:20 von Spee made his decision: he turned his two armored cruisers to fight and ordered his light cruisers to scatter for the South American coast, buying them time to escape. Sturdee had provided for this; his own cruisers broke away after the German light cruisers while Invincible and Inflexible turned on Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.⁹

The first exchange was inconclusive. Invincible was hit at about 1:45 as she came within the extreme range of the German guns, and Sturdee turned away; by 2 p.m. the range had opened to over 16,000 yards and both sides ceased fire. Von Spee made off south toward the weather, and a second chase began. From about 2:45 the battlecruisers closed again and the main action was fought at ranges of 16,000 down to 12,000 yards, with the funnel smoke of the British ships drifting across their own line of fire and making accurate shooting almost impossible for both sides.¹⁰

The end of the armored cruisers

The British 12-inch shells told in the end. Scharnhorst, burning and listing heavily, kept firing almost to the last; soon after 4 p.m. she rolled over and sank with all her crew, von Spee among them. Britannica and the Royal Navy both record that two of his sons also died in the battle. The battlecruisers shifted their fire to Gneisenau, and the slow Carnarvon at last came up to join in.¹¹

Gneisenau took hit after hit until she lay stopped with a heavy list; at about 6 p.m. she heeled over and sank, her sea cocks opened by her own crew. The British ships closed to pick up survivors from the icy water. The counts differ: Corbett gives some 200 saved out of a crew of 850, Rickard 190 out of 764, and the captain of Invincible recorded 108 picked up by his own ship, fourteen of whom died.¹²

The battlecruisers had suffered little. Invincible was hit about a score of times without serious damage. Corbett states that there was not a single casualty in their crews; the Western Front Association, working from Inflexible's log and her surgeon's notes, names one man killed, Able Seaman Neil Livingstone of a 4-inch gun crew, struck when an 8.2-inch shell from Scharnhorst hit the main derrick.¹³

The chase of the light cruisers

Glasgow and Cornwall ran down the Leipzig. Glasgow opened fire at about 3 p.m. and drew her round; each time the Leipzig turned to fire a broadside she lost ground, and Cornwall came up to join from about 4:15. The German cruiser fought on, burning fore and aft, until her guns fell silent after 7 p.m. She sank at 9:23 p.m., and only eighteen of her men were saved. Glasgow lost one man killed; Cornwall had no casualties.¹⁴

Kent, with no fast light cruiser to help her, chased the Nürnberg. Her engine-room staff drove her to some 25 knots, and two of the Nürnberg's worn boilers burst, cutting her speed. In the fight that followed the Nürnberg hit Kent nearly forty times, and one shell set fire to cartridges in a 6-inch casemate. The German cruiser sank at about 7:25 p.m.; Kent's boats found only seven men alive in the freezing sea. Corbett counts four killed and twelve wounded in Kent; the ship's surgeon's records, quoted by the Western Front Association, name eight men who were killed or later died of wounds, most of them in the casemate fire.¹⁵

Bristol and the armed merchant cruiser Macedonia caught and sank two of the German colliers, with no loss of life. Only the Dresden, the fastest German ship, escaped into the weather building in the south.¹⁶

Turning point

The battle was decided before a shot was fired, when the Admiralty sent two battlecruisers to the South Atlantic and they arrived a day before von Spee. Once the Germans had turned away from Port Stanley, nothing could save them but bad weather, and the day stayed fine. The moment that shaped the rest was von Spee's turn to fight at 1:20: he gave up any hope for his two big ships in order to give his light cruisers a chance, a decision Corbett, the enemy's historian, said did him and his service the highest honour.¹⁷

Aftermath

The German East Asia Squadron was gone. Britannica gives the British loss as 10 dead and 19 wounded, with no ship lost, and the German as some 1,900 killed and 215 captured, with six ships sunk; the Royal Navy's figure for German dead is 1,871. The Dresden hid among the channels of southern Chile until March 1915, when she was caught and destroyed in Chilean waters.¹⁸

For Germany the battle ended its surface war on the world's oceans. Rickard writes that after the Falklands and the end of the Dresden the main German naval threat outside the North Sea came from the U-boats. For Britain it restored the navy's prestige at a dark moment of the war: Britannica notes that the battle has been called the most important naval battle of the war for the boost it gave to Allied morale.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

In the Falklands the battle has never been forgotten. Its anniversary, 8 December, is Battle Day, a public holiday in the islands, marked each year with a service at the memorial in Stanley. The memorial, unveiled in 1927, carries a figure of Victory holding a palm branch and an orb and looking out to sea toward the scene of the battle; it is believed to be the most southerly memorial of World War I anywhere.²⁰

Visiting the battlefield today

The battle was fought at sea, but its starting point can still be seen. The 1914 memorial stands on Ross Road in Stanley, west of Government House, looking east over the water toward where von Spee's squadron was sighted, and it is the focus of the Battle Day service each December.²¹