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Von Spee must have felt the strain of his predicament. Ammunition and coal supplies were low; the journey across the Pacific had been long and lonely. Would those dusty orders issued by the Kaiser have started to haunt him?He must never show one moment of weakness. How, in the knowing approach to doom, would that have been possible? Even for a man known for unwavering confidence, for unflinching calm?
Now that the squadron was off the coast of South America, cables and telegrams once again reached him on the ship’s radio. Despite the clear impossibility of the fleet reaching Germany, Berlin advised: “Break through for home.” At the same time, von Spee learned that Japan, France, and Britain were concentrating their entire naval efforts on his squadron. (“Thus,” Churchill would later write of the hunt for von Spee, “to compass the destruction of five warships, only two of which were armoured, it was necessary to employ nearly thirty, including twenty-one armoured ships, for the most part of superior metal, and this took no account of the powerful Japanese squadrons, and of French ships or of armed merchant cruisers.”) But information as to the enemy’s position reached von Spee only weeks after dispatch, when it was no longer useful. As he was rounding the coast of South America, the enemy, larger, more powerful, and invisible to von Spee, was closing in.
Von Spee knew he could not lead the squadron’s two thousand men safely home. Is it not likely this plunged him into despair? Despair so great it caused him to miscalculate at the Falkland Islands, an error, in the end, that would cost him the fleet?
Shortly before leaving for the Falklands, at Valparaíso, von Spee sent this message to his Kaiser: “I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbor. I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, until my ammunition is exhausted or a foe far superior succeeds in catching me.”
When a visitor aboard the ship handed him a bouquet of purple irises, von Spee is reported to have said: “Thank you, thank you, indeed. They will do very nicely for my grave.”
—Fleet of Misfortune: Graf von Spee and the Impossible Journey Home