The scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee

On the evening of 17 December 1939 the German “pocket battleship” Admiral Graf Spee left the harbour of Montevideo, capital of neutral Uruguay, stopped a few miles offshore and was blown up by her own crew. Before the eyes of tens of thousands of spectators gathered on the waterfront, the ship burst into flames and settled on the shallow bottom of the River Plate estuary. More than a thousand of her men were taken to Buenos Aires and interned in Argentina. Three days later, on the night of 19–20 December, her commanding officer, Captain (Kapitän zur See) Hans Langsdorff, shot himself in Buenos Aires.

Chronologies of the war describe these events as three separate entries: on 14 December the damaged ship anchors at Montevideo and invokes international law; on 17 December Uruguay forces her to leave port, and Langsdorff, given a free hand by Berlin, has her scuttled; and on 20 December her captain takes his own life in Argentina. In broad outline this account agrees with the sources. A few details, however, need to be made more precise: Uruguay did not throw the ship out in breach of the law but gave her more time than the rules provided for, and the “free hand” from Berlin had clear limits.

After the battle

On the morning of 13 December, off the River Plate, the Graf Spee ran into the British squadron (Force G) of Commodore Henry Harwood: the heavy cruiser Exeter and the light cruisers Ajax and Achilles. In the Battle of the River Plate the Germans badly damaged the Exeter and hit both light cruisers, but they themselves took some twenty hits. Thirty-six men were killed in the German ship and about sixty wounded, among them, slightly, Langsdorff himself. The shells had not pierced the armour at the most vital points, but they had destroyed the fuel purification plant for the diesel engines, the desalination plant and the galleys, and had torn a gash in the bow with which the ship would not have survived the winter gales of the North Atlantic on the way home. The main guns had used up about two-thirds of their ammunition.

Langsdorff therefore decided to seek refuge in a neutral port. He chose Montevideo rather than Buenos Aires or Mar del Plata in Argentina, a choice historians often regard as a mistake: Uruguay, though neutral, was tied to Britain economically and politically, and its government sympathised with the Allies. The ship dropped anchor in the Montevideo roads a few minutes after midnight, in the first minutes of 14 December. The Ajax and Achilles remained outside to watch the exit from the estuary.

The law of neutrality and 72 hours

The stay of a warship in the port of a neutral state was governed by the Thirteenth Hague Convention of 1907. A belligerent warship could remain in a neutral port for only 24 hours (Article 12), unless that period was extended on account of damage (Article 14). The neutral state could permit the repairs necessary to make the ship seaworthy, but not to restore her fighting strength (Article 17). A ship that overstayed the permitted time could be interned by the neutral state until the end of the war.

On 14 December, in accordance with these rules, the Germans released the British merchant seamen held on board – masters, officers and crew members of the sunk ships, 61 or 62 men according to different tallies. Most of the prisoners taken during the raid, nearly three hundred, were, however, aboard the supply ship Altmark, which was still hiding in the Atlantic. The wounded were taken to hospitals in the city, and on 15 December the dead were buried with military honours in the Northern Cemetery in Montevideo. The cortège was made up of the ship’s sailors and representatives of the local German community. A photograph showing Langsdorff giving the dead a naval salute while the people around him raised their arms in the Hitler salute later went round the world.

Langsdorff and the German minister in Uruguay, Otto Langmann, asked for two weeks for repairs. A Uruguayan technical commission inspected the ship and the government in Montevideo granted 72 hours, considerably longer than the 24 hours laid down in the convention. The deadline expired at 8 p.m. on Sunday 17 December. If the ship had not left port by then, she was to be interned. The Germans saw this as British pressure, and Langsdorff lodged a protest, pointing out that in 1914 the British cruiser Glasgow had been allowed to carry out repairs in a neutral port for much longer. The Uruguayans, who wanted to avoid being accused of partiality, nevertheless stood by their decision.

Playing for time and disinformation

On the British side the affair was handled by the minister in Montevideo, Eugen Millington-Drake, in consultation with the Foreign Office and Winston Churchill’s Admiralty. At first, in keeping with the letter of the convention, he demanded that the Germans leave port after 24 hours. London quickly decided, however, that this was the worst possible outcome: Harwood had at his disposal only two battered light cruisers, of which the Ajax had lost half her main armament, and the heavy cruiser Cumberland, which had arrived from the Falklands on the evening of 14 December after 34 hours’ steaming at full speed. The heavy ships of the hunting groups, led by the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the battlecruiser Renown, were still several thousand kilometres away and could not reach the River Plate before 19 December.

The British therefore changed tack. Millington-Drake invoked Article 16 of the convention, under which a warship could not leave a neutral port until 24 hours after the departure of an enemy merchant ship. From then on British and French ships left Montevideo at daily intervals, which, just in case, kept the German ship tied to the harbour. At the same time British intelligence, the naval attaché in Buenos Aires and the Admiralty itself spread rumours that an overwhelming force was gathering off the River Plate. Conversations held over lines known to be tapped, orders in Buenos Aires for fuel for the Ark Royal and Renown, and signals sent on frequencies monitored by the Germans did their work. The press and radio in South America spread the news, and crowds on the shore watched the smoke of British warships cruising just beyond the limit of territorial waters.

The Germans were taken in. The Graf Spee’s gunnery officer reported that he had identified the silhouette of the Renown on the horizon through his rangefinder, although in reality he had most probably seen the Cumberland. On 16 December Langsdorff reported to Berlin that, besides cruisers and destroyers, the Ark Royal and Renown were waiting off the mouth of the estuary; breaking out into the open sea and returning home was hopeless, and the only option was to try to fight through to Buenos Aires with the remaining ammunition. He asked whether, in the event of failure, he should scuttle the ship or allow her to be interned, adding that in the shallow waters of the estuary scuttling might be incomplete.

The head of the Kriegsmarine, Admiral Erich Raeder, put the matter to Hitler. Hitler wanted the ship to fight and at least attempt to break out. Berlin’s reply, sent on 16 December, ordered Langsdorff to try by every means to extend his stay in neutral waters and approved a breakthrough to Argentina, but forbade internment in Uruguay. Should Langsdorff decide to scuttle the ship, he was to ensure that she was effectively destroyed. The choice between fighting and scuttling thus remained in the captain’s hands. Attempts to obtain a further extension from the Uruguayan government failed.

17 December

Langsdorff concluded that a breakthrough to Buenos Aires was impracticable. The narrow channel through the shallow estuary condemned the ship to a long passage on a predictable course under enemy fire, and the muddy waters threatened to clog the cooling-water intakes of her engines. There was not enough ammunition for a battle on the open sea, and the damage could not be repaired in port. The captain did not want to lead more than a thousand men to certain death in a battle that could not be won, nor to leave the ship in a Uruguayan port, where sooner or later the British would get their hands on her. He decided to scuttle her.

Throughout 17 December the crew destroyed documents, codes and the most valuable equipment, and explosive charges and the remaining ammunition were distributed throughout the hull. Most of the sailors transferred to the German merchant ship Tacoma, lying in the harbour. Shortly after 6.15 p.m. the Graf Spee weighed anchor and, with her ensign flying, left harbour, followed by the Tacoma. According to various accounts tens of thousands of people gathered on the waterfront, and American radio broadcast the events live, expecting a battle. The ship headed west, as if bound for Buenos Aires, then stopped a few miles from Montevideo, on the edge of Uruguayan territorial waters. Only about forty men, with their captain, remained on board. They lit the fuses and left in boats.

The explosions came at sunset. Accounts give times ranging from 7.52 p.m. (as some sources do) to 8.55 p.m., the difference most probably arising from the different time zones used in the sources. Columns of fire rose high above the ship, which settled on the bottom only a few metres below the surface and went on burning for two days. Her superstructure and mast stood out of the water. The British, who until the last moment had expected the ship to come out and fight, learned of her end from the Ajax’s aircraft. Harwood, who while the blockade was still in progress had learned of his promotion to rear admiral and his knighthood, could call off the battle that awaited him.

During the night the men from the Tacoma and from the boats transferred to Argentine tugs and a barge waiting in the estuary, and on the morning of 18 December they landed in Buenos Aires. Uruguay detained the Tacoma for her part in the operation. Some of the wounded and the men who had remained in Montevideo were interned in Uruguay.

The death of Langsdorff

Langsdorff had hoped that Argentina would treat his men as shipwrecked sailors and allow them to return to Germany. The Argentine government, though friendlier towards Germany than the Uruguayan, decided, however, that the crew of a warship who had arrived on its territory as an organised body were subject to internment. The sailors were quartered in buildings in Buenos Aires, and their captain in the naval arsenal. According to his officers, Langsdorff was concerned with the fate of his crew to the end, and assembled them to bid them farewell.

On the night of 19–20 December he wrote letters to his wife, to his parents and to the German ambassador in Argentina, and then shot himself with a pistol, lying on an ensign. According to some accounts it was the Graf Spee’s ensign, according to others the old ensign of the Imperial Navy. His body was found on the morning of 20 December. In his letter, dated 19 December, Langsdorff wrote that he had decided to scuttle the ship so as not to expose his men to a pointless death, that he took full responsibility for this, and that by his death he wished to prove that the armed forces of the Reich were ready to die for the honour of the flag. He was buried with military honours in the German section of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires. His sailors walked in the cortège and, according to contemporary accounts, so did the masters of British merchant ships who had been his prisoners.

Reactions

In Berlin the scuttling of the ship without a fight was regarded as a disgrace. Hitler was furious, and the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels, which only a few days earlier had been proclaiming victory over three cruisers, had to explain the ship’s end by the coercion of “neutral” Uruguay and alleged British superiority. On 22 December Raeder issued an order that a German warship was to fight with the full commitment of her crew to the last shell, until she was victorious or went down with her flag flying. On the same day the German minister in Montevideo, Langmann, objected in a telegram to Berlin to false reports in the German press that the British had desecrated the graves of the Graf Spee’s sailors.

For Britain, after the loss of the Royal Oak, the Courageous and the Rawalpindi, it was the first great success at sea in this war. Churchill exploited it lavishly for propaganda, and the return of the Exeter and Ajax in February 1940 was celebrated with a march of their sailors through London. The victory was also acclaimed in New Zealand, whose ship Achilles had fought off the River Plate.

The American republics, which in October had proclaimed a security zone around the continent in the Declaration of Panama, sent a joint protest to Britain, France and Germany on 23 December against fighting in their waters. Nothing came of it. The episode did show, however, that the war in Europe had reached the shores of South America, and that the neutral states of the region faced a choice as to which of the belligerents to favour.

Place in the war

The scuttling of the Graf Spee closed the first chapter of the German war on trade on the oceans. Since the first ship sunk on 30 September she had sent to the bottom nine ships totalling some 50,000 gross register tons without killing any of their crews, and for two and a half months she had tied down hunting groups made up of the most valuable British and French warships. Her end also exposed the weakness of Raeder’s concept: a lone raider, cut off from bases and docks, could be neutralised even by a weaker opponent if she suffered damage far from home. The Kriegsmarine did not, however, give up raiding: in the autumn of 1940 her sister ship Admiral Scheer went out onto the oceans, followed by auxiliary cruisers. In the Battle of the Atlantic, however, the burden of the war on trade passed to the U-boats.

Raeder’s order to fight to the last shell had lasting consequences. In accordance with it the battleship Bismarck fought to the end in May 1941, and the Scharnhorst in December 1943, and thousands of sailors died in each. Another consequence of the December events was the Altmark incident. On 16 February 1940 the British destroyer Cossack forced her way into the Norwegian Jøssingfjord and freed about three hundred prisoners from the raid held aboard the supply ship. This violation of Norwegian neutrality strengthened Hitler in his decision to invade Norway in April 1940.

The wreck, which stood out of the water for the first few months, became a source of valuable intelligence. The rights to it were bought for £14,000 by a Montevideo firm that was a front for the British. Their specialists found on it the aerial of a Seetakt radar and established that, contrary to earlier assumptions, the Germans had radar on their warships. The Graf Spee’s sailors spent the war in Argentina and Uruguay. Many officers escaped and made their way back to Germany by various routes – from several dozen to about two hundred men, according to different estimates. The rest were dispersed to smaller towns after 1940 and repatriated after the war, although many of them later returned to South America and settled there for good. From the wreck, which in time sank into the mud, the rangefinder was raised in 2004, and in 2006 the great bronze eagle with a swastika from the ship’s stern, which has been the subject of a long-running dispute in Uruguay. The legend of Langsdorff as a chivalrous opponent, cemented by a British film of 1956, survives to this day, although historians point out that he was a loyal officer of the Reich and took the decision to scuttle his ship in agreement with Berlin. As twenty years earlier, when the Germans scuttled their fleet at Scapa Flow, self-destruction proved to be for the German navy both a way of avoiding surrender of a ship to the enemy and a deeply felt humiliation.