7
From the outset, it was a question of provisions.
The two thousand officers and men who had turned to von Spee for instructions required food and fresh water. The ships’ guns needed ammunition. And above all, the five armored cruisers could not move an inch without coal.
Coal: That simple fuel of ancient plant fossils would write von Spee’s fate. TheScharnhorst alone, von Spee’s flagship, burned almost twenty-five percent of its two-thousand-ton coal capacity in one day. After less than a week at sea the ship needed to anchor and refill its bunkers. But the German Empire had only one fortified coaling base in the entire Pacific: Tsingtao—the port the squadron was fleeing. Across the Pacific were a fewEtappen, neutral countries with German supply contacts, and also the islands Apia, Yap, Rabaul—German colonies. But it was only a matter of time before the Allies seized these, silenced the cable and radio stations, and cut off von Spee from any potential supplies.
It was August 6, 1914, when the German East Asiatic Squadron, theKreuzergeschwader, put to sea, beginning their long and arduous journey across the Pacific, toward the base at Wilhelmshaven, toward Germany, toward home. Allied against them now were Russia, Great Britain, and France, whose ships were quickly closing the oceans of the world to German merchantmen and men-of-war. Only the Baltic Sea, thousands of miles away, remained safe.
“From now on,” von Spee wrote in his journal, “I am on my own.”
In leaving Tsingtao, von Spee also left behind any hope for communication with home. The range of the ship’s wireless was only several hundred miles, and cable stations were few and far between. Alone, unadvised, von Spee would have to follow the orders, now strangely prophetic, that the Kaiser had issued long ago to commanders in foreign waters in case of a war:
From that moment on he must make his own decisions. . . . The constant strain will exhaust the energy of his crew; the heavy responsibility of the officer in command will be increased by the isolated position of his ship; rumors of all kinds and the advice of apparently well-meaning persons will sometimes make the situation appear hopeless. But he must never show one moment of weakness. He must constantly bear in mind that the efficiency of the crew and their capacity to endure privations and dangers depend chiefly on his personality, his energy, and on the manner in which he does his duty. . . .
So von Spee did his duty. He decided to cross the Pacific, to round the coast of South America, and then break for Europe.
The squadron’s first stop on this long journey was Pagan, a small German-owned island in the Marianas. Here they found live cattle and pigs, fresh vegetables, flour, whiskey, wine, and tobacco. The men went ashore, listened into the night to the songs of the islanders, watched the moon rise above them. It was almost, for those few days, as if the war had not yet started.
But when the four supply ships they were awaiting failed to arrive, captured by the Allies, everyone, especially von Spee, understood that the search was now on.
—Fleet of Misfortune: Graf von Spee and the Impossible Journey Home