Graf Spee sinks her first ship

On 30 September 1939 the German “pocket battleship” Admiral Graf Spee, commanded by Captain Hans Langsdorff, stopped the British freighter Clement in the South Atlantic, a few dozen nautical miles south-east of the Brazilian port of Pernambuco (Recife), and sank her by gunfire. Beforehand she allowed the crew to take to the lifeboats and called for help for the survivors by radio. Clement was the first Allied ship sunk in the war by a German surface warship and the first victim of the Graf Spee’s three-month raid. Four days earlier, on 26 September, Adolf Hitler had permitted the Graf Spee and her sister ship Deutschland, which had been waiting in hiding in the Atlantic since the end of August, to begin their war on Allied trade.

It is often written that on 26 September Hitler ordered the two ships to “run amok” in the Atlantic, the Deutschland in the north and the Graf Spee in the south. The order to begin operations did indeed reach the ships on 26 September. Hitler had agreed to an intensification of the war on shipping as early as 23 September, at a conference with the commander of the Kriegsmarine at Sopot, which is why some accounts give that date, and a few even 20 September. The two ships’ areas of operation, on the other hand, had been assigned before the war: the Deutschland had put to sea with orders to take up position in the North Atlantic, the Graf Spee in the South Atlantic.

The “pocket battleships”

The Admiral Graf Spee was the third and last ship of the Deutschland class, named after Admiral Maximilian von Spee, who in 1914 defeated the British at Coronel and a month later was killed, together with his two sons, in the Battle of the Falkland Islands. She was launched at Wilhelmshaven in June 1934 and commissioned in January 1936. Ships of this type, built while the Weimar Republic was still bound by the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, officially displaced 10,000 tons but in reality considerably more. Armed with six 280 mm and eight 150 mm guns, they were stronger than any cruiser and faster than almost all the battleships that could threaten them. Their diesel engines gave them an enormous range, more than 16,000 nautical miles at cruising speed. The British called them “pocket battleships”. They were ideal raiders for war on trade along distant shipping routes.

Under Plan Z and a memorandum of the autumn of 1938, in the event of war with Britain it was precisely such ships that, operating simultaneously on many oceans, were to disperse the forces of the Royal Navy and destroy British shipping. When in August 1939 Hitler decided to attack Poland, the Kriegsmarine sent them out into the Atlantic in advance, before the British could close the exits from the North Sea. The Graf Spee left Wilhelmshaven on 21 August and the Deutschland on 24 August. Supply ships awaited them at designated positions: the Altmark in the South Atlantic, the Westerwald near Greenland.

Waiting for the order

On 1 September the Graf Spee met the Altmark south-west of the Canary Islands and took on fuel from her. Langsdorff transferred to the tanker surplus equipment, some of his boats, inflammable paint and two light anti-aircraft guns. The orders he had received were clear. He was to wage war on trade strictly in accordance with the prize regulations – that is, to stop ships, inspect their cargoes and sink them only after ensuring the safety of their crews. He was to avoid combat even with weaker warships, since a ship damaged far from home had nowhere to be repaired, and to change his area of operations frequently so as to tie down as many enemy forces as possible.

For the first weeks of the war, however, the ship could not attack. Hitler, who after a swift defeat of Poland was counting on a settlement with Britain and France, did not want to provoke them. After the sinking of the Athenia he forbade attacks on passenger ships and ordered French ships to be spared. The Graf Spee therefore cruised far from the shipping lanes, east of Brazil. On 11 September her Arado Ar 196 reconnaissance seaplane spotted the British heavy cruiser Cumberland approaching. The two German ships, which happened to be transferring supplies, made off at full speed and escaped detection.

At the end of September the situation changed. Poland had been defeated, and Britain and France showed no inclination to negotiate. On 23 September at Sopot Grand Admiral Erich Raeder put it to Hitler that the supplies of the two “pocket battleships” were limited and that the ships could not remain undetected for ever. Hitler agreed to intensify the war on trade. The next day the Seekriegsleitung permitted submarines to attack French ships and to sink ships that called for help by radio, relaxing the restrictions on submarine warfare. On 26 September both raiders received the order to begin operations. In Europe the campaign in Poland was then drawing to a close: on 28 September Warsaw capitulated, and in Moscow Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Boundary and Friendship Treaty.

The sinking of Clement

Clement was a small cargo liner of 5,051 GRT, built in 1934 by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead for the Booth Line of Liverpool. She was sailing from New York to Bahia with general cargo and a consignment of kerosene, with about fifty men on board, under the command of Captain Frederick Harris.

Around noon on Saturday 30 September the Graf Spee’s shipborne aircraft spotted the freighter off the coast of Brazil. The warship closed in and ordered her to stop, forbidding the use of radio. Clement’s wireless operator ignored the ban and transmitted the RRR signal, meaning an attack by a raider, together with the ship’s position. Captain Harris had the secret documents thrown overboard, in accordance with Admiralty instructions. The Arado raked the ship’s superstructure with machine-gun fire. According to British accounts, one of the officers was slightly wounded in the hand. He was the only member of Clement’s crew to be hurt.

A boarding party went aboard. The captain and the chief engineer were taken prisoner aboard the Graf Spee. The rest of the crew took to four lifeboats, and a German officer gave them a course for the Brazilian port of Maceió. Sinking the ship proved harder than expected. Scuttling charges and opening the sea cocks were not enough, and the torpedoes fired missed. In the end the Graf Spee opened fire at close range, first with her 150 mm guns, then with her main armament. According to British records, Clement sank in the afternoon, at about 4.40 p.m. The numbers of shells and torpedoes fired vary between sources.

After the ship had gone down, Langsdorff had a message sent in plain language to the coastal station at Pernambuco, asking it to rescue Clement’s lifeboats at the position given. In doing so he used the call sign of the sister ship Admiral Scheer, in order to mislead the enemy as to the identity of the raider. The survivors reached the coast: some of the lifeboats landed at Maceió, and other men were picked up by Brazilian ships. In the evening the Graf Spee stopped the Greek steamer Papalemos, to which she transferred the two prisoners. The Greek captain promised not to report the encounter by radio until he was well to the east, and he kept his word. The two Britons were put ashore in the Cape Verde Islands on 9 October.

The sinking of Clement took place just off the coast of South America, at the very time when the conference of foreign ministers of the American republics was meeting in Panama; a few days later it declared a security zone around the Americas, closed to hostilities. The Clement affair showed at once that neither Germany nor the Allies intended to respect such a zone.

The Allied response

The RRR signal and the call from the Graf Spee told the Admiralty that a German surface warship was operating in the South Atlantic. Langsdorff’s ruse partly succeeded: the British at first believed they were dealing with the Admiral Scheer. News soon came from the north as well. The Deutschland, operating on the routes between Bermuda and the Azores and on the route from Halifax, sank the British freighter Stonegate on 5 October, seized the American ship City of Flint, with a cargo deemed to be contraband, on 9 October, and sank the Norwegian Lorentz W. Hansen on 14 October. The seizure of an American ship caused a stir in the United States and a diplomatic dispute.

On 5 October the British and French formed eight hunting groups to track down the raiders. They included aircraft carriers, among them Ark Royal, battlecruisers, the fast French battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg, and a dozen or more cruisers. The two German ships, which between them sank a dozen or so merchant ships, tied down forces many times greater, and therein lay their chief success.

Significance

Clement was the first of nine ships that the Admiral Graf Spee sank in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean by December 1939. Together they totalled some 50,000 GRT. Throughout the raid Langsdorff kept to the prize rules: he took the crews of the ships he stopped on board, or transferred them to the Altmark, and he did not kill a single one of the more than three hundred seamen who fell into his hands. The British masters held aboard his ship later remembered him with respect. This conduct set him apart in a war that at sea was very quickly becoming ruthless.

On 13 December 1939, off the mouth of the River Plate, the Graf Spee ran into the British squadron of Commodore Henry Harwood: the heavy cruiser Exeter and two light cruisers, Ajax and Achilles. In the Battle of the River Plate she badly damaged Exeter, but was herself damaged and took refuge in neutral Montevideo. Persuaded by British disinformation that superior forces were waiting for him at sea, Langsdorff had the ship scuttled at the harbour entrance on 17 December, and three days later he took his own life in Buenos Aires. The Deutschland returned to Germany in November and was renamed Lützow, because Hitler did not want to risk a ship bearing the name of the state being sunk. In February 1940 the British destroyer Cossack intercepted the Altmark in Norwegian waters and freed almost three hundred prisoners taken by the Graf Spee. In the years that followed, it was mainly German auxiliary cruisers – converted and armed merchant ships – that operated on the distant oceans, while the sorties of large surface warships into the Atlantic, such as the voyage of the Bismarck in May 1941, ended in ever heavier losses.