The Hunters and the Hunted Read online

  Early on 30 October Emden captured the British freighter Newburn, bound for Singapore with a cargo of salt. Müller quickly reached an agreement with the Newburn’s captain and the Frenchmen. The Newburn would take the prisoners to Khota Raja, a port in neutral Dutch Sumatra that was believed to contain a modern hospital in which the wounded would receive better treatment, and French gave their parole not to fight against Germany against during the present war.

  On 31 October Emden met the Buresk at the agreed rendezvous and the two ships sailed along the deserted western coast of Sumatra. Some 500 tons of coal were transferred from the collier. Emden then penetrated the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, in search of prey, but found them deserted and headed south west to the Cocos Island. There, on Direction Island, was a most important objective consisting of a British wireless station and a cable relay station at which the cable from Australia to India crossed that from Australia to Zanzibar. The loss of these facilities would obviously cause problems for the British across a huge area.

  On the morning of 9 November Emden anchored off shore while her First Officer, Lieutenant Commander Helmut von Mücke, led a fifty-strong party ashore and began the work of destruction. Emden’s dummy funnel was now so tattered that it no longer provided a disguise. The cruiser was recognised by the signal station’s staff who began transmitting at once. ‘SOS strange ship in entrance’ was sent several times together with the station’s call sign before it was jammed. It was then changed to ‘SOS Emden here’ and repeated constantly despite the jamming until Mücke burst into the transmitter room and ordered the operators away from their sets at gun point.

  What neither Müller nor Mücke knew was that some of the early transmissions had got through before they could be jammed and had been picked up by receivers just 55 miles north of the island, where an escorted convoy of Australian troopships was passing. The convoy’s escort consisted of two Australian cruisers, Melbourne and Sydney, and the Japanese battle cruiser Ibuki. The instinct of the escort commander, Captain Silver, was to engage the Emden with his own Melbourne, but as she was more powerful than the Sydney and the defence of the convoy was his first priority, he decided that the destruction of the enemy must be the responsibility of Captain John Glossop’s Sydney, which was herself more heavily armed than the Emden, possessing eight 6-inch guns with which to oppose the German’s ten 4.1-inch.

  Ashore, Mücke’s landing party was taking longer than expected to complete its work because it was initially unable to locate the point where the cables entered the sea. At 09.15 Müller ordered the ship’s sirens to blow the recall signal. As they did so he saw that a ship approaching the island was not the collier Buresk, which he had been expecting, but a warship flying the White Ensign. He promptly gave orders for the anchor to be weighed, rang down for full steam to be raised and sent the crew to their action stations. In the circumstances he had no alternative but to abandon Mücke and the landing party. With the anchor secured he immediately steered for the Sydney, opening fire at 5,600 yards range. Three salvos straddled the Australian cruiser and the fourth struck, wrecking her fire control system.

  Emden had been a lucky ship and with that salvo went the last of her luck. Glossop hauled off to a point at which his guns were within range but Emden’s were not. It took his gunners, aiming manually, ten minutes to find the range, and then they began to batter Emden to wreckage. Müller strove desperately to get within range but Sydney was faster, had thicker armour and managed to stay out of trouble without difficulty. In rapid succession Emden sustained hits to her bridge, radio room and mainmast crow’s nest and one of the after guns. By 11.00 all the cruiser’s funnels were down, the gun control turret had been knocked out and fires were raging, the foremast had toppled, the remaining guns had been silenced, the torpedo flat had been holed and was flooding, the ship was being steered from the steering flat, and the decks were littered with dead, dying and wounded. Müller himself had sustained a slight wound while visiting the main deck, having luckily left the bridge only moments before it was hit. As the ship was no longer capable of fighting he decided to run her aground on the reef of North Keeling Island and so save as many of his men as possible. By 11.15 Emden had been run aground with a scream of tortured metal. It was a sad end for the cruiser whose fine appearance had led to her being named The Swan of the East.

  Glossop had sighted the approaching Buresk and with Emden now reduced to a hulk he set off in pursuit of her. The slow collier stood no chance at all and was scuttled by her captain. Sydney then returned to Emden only to find that she was still flying the German ensign. Emden’s signal books had been destroyed and when asked whether she had surrendered she could make not make an intelligible reply with her signal lamp. Sydney opened fire again but stopped when Müller lowered the ensign and sent up a white flag.

  By degrees the wounded were transferred and it became possible to count the cost of the action. Emden’s losses amounted to 141 killed and sixty-five wounded; only 117 remained unhurt. In contrast, Sydney had sustained the loss of only four men killed and seventeen wounded, the majority incurred during the opening minutes of the engagement.

  Emden’s survivors spent the remainder of the war in a prison camp in Singapore, where they encountered a number of old comrades who had been captured aboard the colliers. In February 1919 Indian and Malay troops forming the local garrison mutinied and invited the Germans to join them. The invitation was refused and the mutiny was put down a week later. Müller and some of his officers had meanwhile been transferred to Malta. Subsequently Müller was moved to London where he remained until October 1918 when he was repatriated under a prisoner exchange scheme. Already a recipient of the Iron Cross, he was presented with Imperial Germany’s highest award, the Pour le Mérite. He retired from the Navy because of ill health and died unexpectedly in 1923. All of the cruiser’s officers received the Iron Cross First Class and fifty of her crew received the Iron Cross Second Class. The Iron Cross was conferred on the ship herself and has been carried on the bows of every subsequent Emden.

  Meanwhile, after many adventures, Mücke and his landing party had managed to return to Germany. Mücke was generally regarded as a strict disciplinarian, but that was only to be expected of any warship’s First Lieutenant. He was also a very capable officer who thought through every difficulty he encountered and managed to produce a solution. He had witnessed the one-sided duel between the Sydney and the Emden and was well aware that he and his men were now on their own. He had commandeered the Ayesha, a schooner belonging to the cable company, and had disappeared by the time Sydney turned her attention to Direction Island. He sailed her to Padang in Sumatra where he persuaded the captain of a German merchant ship, the Choising, to convey the party to Hodeida in Yemen, which was then a province of the Turkish Empire, believing that a railway from there connected with the famous Hejaz Railway at Medina. Unfortunately, such a railway, though marked on a map, had never been built and although the party reached Hodeida it was forced to sail northwards by zambuk and then travel many miles overland by camel caravan before the main line was reached, being besieged by hundreds of Bedouin tribesmen for several days until relieved by local Turkish troops. The rail journey took them first to Damascus and then on to Constantinople where they received the warmest of welcomes from Admiral Souchon and the crews of the Goeben and Breslau. From there another train carried them across Europe to Berlin and a tumultuous welcome as heroes. As for Emden, little is left as a reminder that she enjoyed one of the most remarkable careers in naval history. The larger part of her wreck was salvaged for scrap in 1950, but one of her guns can still be seen in Hyde Park, Sydney, another at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and one her shells is on display in the city museum of Madras.

  Prize Log

  Ships Captured By Emden, Other Than Neutral

  Ryasan, 4 August 1914, converted to auxiliary cruiser role at Tsingtao

  Pontoporus, 10 September 1914, 4,049 tons, Greek collier, voluntarily e
ntered German service, sunk by HMS Yarmouth

  Indus, 10 September 1914, 3,393 tons, general cargo, sunk

  Lovat, 11 September 1914, 6,102 tons, ballast, sunk

  Kabinga, 12 September 1914, 4,657 tons, released 14 September

  Killin, 13 September 1914, 3,512 tons, collier, sunk

  Diplomat, 13 September 1914, 4,657 tons, general cargo, sunk

  Trabboch, 14 September 1914, 4,014 tons, ballast, sunk

  Clan Matheson, 14 September, 4,775 tons, general cargo, sunk

  King Lud, 25 September 1914, 3,650 tons, ballast, sunk

  Tymeric, 25 September 1914, 3,314 tons, sugar, sunk

  Gryfevale, 26 September 1914, 4,437 tons, general cargo, released

  Buresk, 27 September 1914, 4,350 tons, collier, scuttled to prevent re-capture by HMAS Sydney

  Ribera, 27 September 1914, 4,147 tons, ballast, sunk

  Foyle, 27 September 1914, 4,147 tons, ballast, sunk

  Clan Grant, 15 October 1914, 3,948 tons, general cargo, sunk

  Ben Mohr, 16 October 1914, 4,806 tons, general cargo, sunk

  Pornrabbel, 16 October 1914, 473 tons, dredger, sunk

  Troilus, 18 October 1914, 7,526 tons, general cargo, sunk

  St Egbert, 18 October 1914, 5,526 tons, general cargo, sunk

  Exford, 19 October 1914, 4,542 tons, collier, recaptured by HM Armed Merchant Cruiser Empress of Asia

  Chilkana, 19 October 1914, 5,146 tons, general cargo, sunk

  Glenturret, 28 October 1914, tonnage not stated, general cargo, released

  Zhemchug, 28 October 1914, Russian light cruiser, sunk by torpedoes and gunfire

  Mousquet, 28 October 1914, French destroyer, sunk by gunfire

  Newburn, 30 October 1914, released with prisoners from Mousquet

  Ayesha, 9 November 1914, schooner, used for landing party’s escape from Direction Island to Padang, Sumatra, then scuttled

  CHAPTER 8

  African Interlude

  Germany was a late starter in what became known as the Scramble for Africa and, despite the Kaiser’s claim for what he considered to be his country’s rightful ‘place in the sun’, only managed to acquire a handful of territories in which other powers, notably the United Kingdom, had little or no interest. These included Togoland, Cameroon, South West Africa and German East Africa (Tanga), the last being subsequently known as Tanganyika and then Tanzania.

  The Germans were harsh colonial masters, demanding serf-like obedience from their native subjects and inflicting horrific punishments on those who chose to offer resistance. In South West Africa the Herero and Namaqua tribesmen were driven to open rebellion. Having defeated them in the field the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, promised them extermination and drove them into the Omaheke desert where most of them died of thirst or from the deliberate poisoning of the few wells. It is estimated that some 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Namaqua were killed in this, the first genocide of the twentieth century.

  A similar uprising, known as the Maji Maji War, took place in Tanga between 1905 and 1907, despite the colony being more highly developed than South West Africa. Reinforcements were requested and promptly despatched from Germany and the German colony of New Guinea but failed to bring the situation under control. The Governor, Count Gustav von Gotzen, distantly related to a wildly optimistic pretender to the Mexican throne, last sat on briefly by the Austrian Archduke Maximilian in the 1860s, offered a pardon to those insurgents who abandoned their leaders and witch doctors and handed in their weapons. According to Gotzen’s own figures between 200,000 and 300,000 rebels and their supporters died in the rising, while only fifteen German and 389 African soldiers lost their lives.

  When war broke out in 1914 Togoland was quickly overrun while the German forces in South West Africa surrendered to South African troops in July 1915. The naval presence of the latter territory had amounted to one small gunboat, the Eber, which had been a frequent visitor to Cape Town in time of peace, no doubt to relieve the utter boredom of her home station. War saw the Eber vanish into the Atlantic where her guns were transferred to the ocean liner Cap Trafalgar, which became a commerce raider while Eber sailed on to neutral Brazil and internment. Cameroon held out until February 1916.

  However, the German forces in East Africa, including the native Schutztruppe, did not surrender until two weeks after the armistice that initiated the process of Germany’s surrender. Given what had gone before this might seem surprising, yet since the rebellion Tanga had become the best administered of Germany’s colonies. A new Governor, Dr Heinrich Schnee, had instituted a series of social and economic reforms that actually benefited the African population, who now felt that they had something worth fighting for. This enabled the German military commander in the colony, Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow Vorbeck, to build up a formidable force of Schutztruppe battalions. Lettow Vorbeck had followed the conventional German path to a commission, having graduated from the famous cadet academies of Kassel and Lichterfeld. He saw active service in China during the Boxer Rebellion and in South West Africa against the Hereros. Thereafter his career took a more individual road. While the ambition of most German officers was to pass through the various stages of regimental life with a view to ultimately securing a staff appointment, he preferred to serve abroad even if this removed him from the mainstream of German military life. At one stage he had commanded a Marine battalion in Wilhelmhaven.

  In 1913 Dr Schnee had requested Berlin to replace his modest naval presence – an old gunboat whose engine was still assisted by sails – with something a little more prestigious. The Admiralty agreed and the light cruiser Konigsberg, under Commander Max Looff, was despatched from Kiel. Her route took her through the Mediterranean, along the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea to Aden, where, the world still being at peace, Looff paid a courtesy call on the British governor who entertained him to dinner. The cruiser reached Dar es Salaam, the capital of the German colony, on 6 June 1914. She was much admired for her smart turnout and particularly for her three funnels, which were taken by the local population as symbolic of her fighting capacity.

  On 29 June the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand initiated the international slide down the slippery slope to total war. Looff carried out gunnery and torpedo exercises, saw to it that his ship was fully provisioned, landed his wooden furniture and fittings, and detailed the steamer Somali as his supply ship in the event of war being declared. It quickly became apparent that the British, fully aware of his presence, were intent on eliminating the Konigsberg as quickly as possible, for on 1 July it was reported that on 1 August three British cruisers, Hyacinth, Pegasus and Astrea, were to call at the island of Zanzibar for coaling. Together, they formed the Royal Navy’s Cape Squadron, commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Herbert King-Hall. Individually, they were not impressive, having once formed part of Queen Victoria’s navy, added to which they were far slower than the Konigsberg and armed with less powerful guns. Nevertheless, working together under a capable commander, they had the capacity to destroy or at least neutralise Konigsberg. Looff therefore put to sea on 31 July.

  Ten miles out, his masthead lookout reported the presence of three ships. They were clearly King-Hall’s cruisers, for as soon as Konigsberg came into view they quickly deployed to intercept her as if war had been declared – one remaining ahead, one deploying to port and the third to starboard. Looff reversed course and rang down for maximum speed. Soon the stokehold was filled with the sound of scraping shovels and slamming fire doors as the sweating stokers re-doubled their efforts in the equatorial heat. Anxious engineer officers tapped the brass-cased pressure gauges as the needles crept ever higher towards the danger zone. At length Konigsberg reached her maximum speed in excess of 24 knots and the British ships began to fade from view.

  Then, luck came to Looff’s aid in the form of heavy, driving rain. Unseen by his opponents, he reversed course, sliding past Astraea, King-Hall’s flagship, without attracting attention and sped away to th
e south. All that dawn revealed to the British lookouts was a completely empty sea. Such was the Admiral’s rage that it remained firmly fixed in the memories of those within earshot.

  Looff’s escape, however, had been bought at the price of most of his precious coal and he was forced to arrange a rendezvous with the Somali. On 4 August Konigsberg’s radio operator received a coded transmission consisting of the warship’s call sign and a single apparently meaningless word which he entered on a message form – egima. He handed the form to the officer of the watch who, because of its high security classification, took it straight to Looff. It was clearly something the captain had been expecting. After glancing briefly at the codeword he remarked that Germany was now at war with Great Britain and the ship’s company should be assembled so that he could inform them of the fact.

  Shortly after, a Japanese liner was intercepted and boarded. For the moment, Japan was neutral and would not enter the war on the side of the Entente powers until 23 August. As the liner’s officers believed the cruiser to be British, polite bewilderment was the order of the day. The boarding party was welcomed with smiles and bows, to which its commander replied with clicked heels and a correct salute. After a comparison of the manifest with the cargo and a search of the ship the Japanese were permitted to go on their way, both sides doubtless wondering what it had all been about. Next, two German freighters, the Zeithen and the Hansa, ignorant of the outbreak of war, were prevented from entering the Red Sea and making their way to the Suez Canal, where they would certainly have been interned. A third German cargo ship, the Goldenfels, made a pointless attempt to avoid what her captain believed to be a British cruiser, and joined the convoy. At length, on 6 August, Konigsberg finally halted a British merchantman, the City of Winchester. Her holds were filled with general cargo, including the first crop of the Indian tea harvest, but while Looff was hoping to take her coal aboard it was found to be of such poor quality as to be not worth the trouble of handling. After some 400 tons of cargo were transferred to the German freighters they were told to head for East Africa while the British ship was scuttled after providing Looff’s gunners with some target practice.