November 14, 1939 0530 South Atlantic 33.87 South, 12.24 West
Slate gray skies greeted the men looking for dawn aboard HMS Sussex. Reveille had been called and all guns and stations were manned. Her sisters flanked her, steaming through mild swells at a steady fourteen knots. They had swept north and westward from the Cape of Good Hope sea lanes to this desolate stretch of nothingness between the great sea lanes. Tristan da Cunha laid several hundred miles to the south, a sparse settlement of whalers and fishermen whose social graces benefited from their profound isolation. Napoleon’s exile laid over a thousand miles to the north. No man had seen anything other than the isolated dolphin pod for days as there was no reason for a merchant ship or their hunters to be here. Yet they swept on, looking for a raider whose trail had grown colder since the last confirmed success weeks ago. They had patrolled south of the Cape to prevent a break into the Indian Ocean. Force G was concentrating near the River Plate while Ark Royal and Renown had moved back north after their failed efforts to conduct aerial sweeps in thirty five foot seas.
“Smoke, 2 points of north” A sudden cry went up from a look-out stationed on the port bridge wing. A darker and slightly thicker patch of gray against gray could be seen against the northern sky. Every man on deck who had an excuse to turn their heads did. Most could see nothing, they were too low and the horizon too fine of a camouflage. But a few men with better eyes or vantage points could squint and see that something looked unnatural at the very edge of their vision.
Signal lamps began to flicker between the three cruisers, two heavy London Counties and the light Leander class ship, HMS Neptune. Men were scurrying below decks preparing for action as stewards brought tea to the officers, and junior sailors were dismissed from their teams to bring tea and bread to their mates. Neptune began to diverge from Sussex and Shropshire as all three ships turned north at twenty four knots to close on the contact.
0558
Captain Langsdorff sipped his coffee as his ship was coming to life. Lookouts had spotted smoke nine minutes ago to the south. At first he had hoped it was a freighter supplying one of the English South Atlantic colonies, but the quantity of smoke and the soon visible three distinct sources of smoke indicated warships. He knew that he was a hunted man and had hoped that two weeks cruising in the desolate South Atlantic would have created an opportunity of escape to the trade routes near South America but that was not to be the case. His armored cruiser had been continually at sea for almost a hundred days with only the repairs that could be performed by his crew. His fuel reserves were sufficient for another two weeks of cruiser warfare before he had to head home.
He had enough fuel to flee but if the English had deployed cruisers, they could nip at his heels like dogs while the heavy ships that he knew were in the region converged on his position. Anyways, his ship was lamed. Her design speed of more than twenty eight knots was a distant memory. He vibrated whenever he approached twenty one knots and the engineers were worried about the shafts staying on above twenty four knots. The diesels were in need of an overhaul. No, the English ships could track him down. His only hope was to cripple or sink these warships with his heavy guns and then escape back into the vast emptiness of the ocean and evade any follow-on search. Anything else would lead to his ship's guaranteed destruction.
He ordered his ship to turn towards the yapping English terriers and for a twenty meter battle flag to be raised to the highest heights.
0611
The radio room crackled with life as the Admiralty acknowledged the sighting report. The great hunt was almost over. Shropshire and Sussex had split from Neptune. The lighter cruiser would fight independently of the heavier, better armed and armored cruisers. She would be a terrier, nipping at the pocket battleship’s heels while the heavy cruisers’ guns attempted to penetrate armor. The range was closing rapidly as the German ship had not turned to flee, instead she edged eastward so that the sun would be behind her. It was a calculated gamble that the darkness would hide the British ships for less time than the sun’s rising glare would blind the directors. As the range closed to 30,000 yards, every man aboard was tense. Thousands of miles steamed, hundreds of neutral and friendly ships checked, three men lost to the sea had all been for this moment, a moment to take on a superior foe to protect the unarmed and vulnerable.
The first 11 inch shell passed five hundred yards long of Shropshire when the German was 19,000 yards away. Within another minute, the two heavy cruisers fired partial ranging salvos. Shropshire's ladders splashed astern and short. Six seconds later, Sussex's ladder salvo threw waterspouts skyward forward and again short of the target. The two heavy cruisers alternated firing, a steady staccato rhythm with enough space between salvos for each gunnery officer to track and correct their misses. Graf Spee focused on the slightly closer Shropshire. Deliberate salvos rang out every forty five seconds, six shells arcing through the air as the heavy cruiser snaked through towering waterspouts, chasing splashes, heeling over and barking out half and full salvos whenever the firing arcs were clear.
Sussex was being harassed by the secondary guns of the German ship. The first hit of the engagement was from a 5.9 gun against her belt, popping rivets and allowing a trickle of water to enter her hull without slowing her down nor impeding her fire. A pair of 256 pound shells slammed into her target. The first bounced off of the thick face armor of the forward turret, temporarily deafening some of the gun crews who could still hear after the firing of the guns. The second shell arced over and penetrated twenty two feet from the bow and two feet above the water line. Water soon began to pour through the hole as his crew struggled to plug the hole and move pumps forward.
Neptune’s eight six inch guns joined the cacophony as Graf Spee’s secondary guns responded to her annoyingly accurate fire. An ugly brick red flash lit the horizon as Shropshire’s Y turret was torn open like a cheap sardine can, men with their limbs shattered and pulverized screamed while their mates died in the milliseconds for a shell to tear through two decks. A desperate, dying, midshipman earned a Victoria Cross as he plunged through the flaming shell room to flood the aft magazine. The flare of flames died down as the local consumables were turned into ash and the thick, sweet and sickeningly entrancing smell of burnt meat permeated the ship.
Half of her firepower gone, Shropshire heeled over in a hard turn to port to open the range and escape further punishment. Smoke, both from her wounds and from a hasty smoke screen, shielded her. In her rush to safety, her forward guns flung seven more salvos scoring two hits, none critical while a pair of 11 inch shells penetrated. One shell passed through an unarmored area cleanly, leaving a short passageway between the main deck and the hull while the other shell tipped over and punched through to a boiler room before detonating. Shell fragments opened men up while super-heated steam escaped to boil the crew alive. Men who entered that room after the action were never able to forget what they had seen despite their strongest desire and need to do so. She limped away at seventeen knots.
While Shropshire was being pounded by her superior opponent, Sussex scored a regular procession of hits. Three, four, five, six and finally seven shells landed on Graf Spee. Most caused little damage but each shell killed some men, and flayed others, each shell opened up pipes, cut wires, rattled precision machinery and each shell slowly degraded her opponent’s capability to fight.
Even as the heavy cruiser began to receive heavy return fire from Graf Spee, Neptune’s lighter guns scored what would turn out to be the critical hit. A salvo of eight six inch shells produced three hits. The first failed to penetrate the main belt. The second detonated as it passed seven feet underneath the forward range finder, eliminating his accuracy. That shell would have been important but the last shell of that critical salvo landed four yards short. It entered the water and rapidly sank seven feet at a sharp but not quite vertical angle until the shell head touched the rapidly rotating propeller shaft. It exploded. A blade broke, and another was peppered with fragments. The rapidly spinning blades that had been so precisely balanced only moments ago were drunkenly lurching. The highly trained German sailors reacted without orders, cutting power to the shaft but their reactions were limited by their humanity. The damage had been done. The starboard shaft would not be able to provide power. Graf Spee was crippled, thousands of miles from a neutral port and now months from a friendly shipyard that could repair the damage.
This was not immediately obvious to the British sailors and commanders. They knew that they were laming the great bull for the matador in the guise of Renown to kill but in their duty as picadors, they were suffering heavily as the bull still had horns to swing widely and powerfully. Sussex slowed slightly and began to turn to cut across the stern of Graf Spee while Neptune maneuvered for a torpedo attack from the front quarter. The secondary guns of the pocket battleship had been suppressed, which is an amazingly clinical word for the deaths and wounds of dozens of men amidst twisted metal and toxic conflagrations fueled by wood, oil and rubber tubing. Only the aft main turret was still fighting with anything approaching the efficiency it had at the start of the battle. It rumbled every twenty or thirty seconds at Sussex, scoring a hit and slowing his antagonist even as the yappy hound continued to nip at his heels and broaden the wounds with effective slashes of her more numerous but light claws.
Neptune had plunged through the calm seas to a range of 4,500 yards, opposed by a single forward 11 inch gun firing in local control and a pair of anti-aircraft guns. The torpedo crews had checked their weapons and their directors twice in the past four minutes as this would be the best chance to kill the raider instead of merely crippling her. Captain Morse pressed his ship closer, the forward two turrets firing at almost point blank into the much larger cruiser. At forty two hundred yards, the ship turned to present her starboard broadside. One minute later, the light cruiser stable and running with the sea, four torpedoes entered the water. All were running towards their target as Neptune crashed hard to reverse course and fire a second salvo from her other battery.
Before those torpedoes could be fired, the first salvo arrived with devastating effect. The first and third torpedoes of the salvo missed. The second torpedo exploded forward of Anton turret while the last torpedo exploded underneath the bridge.
Fire ceased.
Sussex slowed.
Her three operating turrets tracked the gravely wounded bull and her torpedoes were made ready as well for a killing blow but nothing happened for a moment that extended into a minute and then two. Finally, the great battle flag that had hung over Graf Spee for the entire morning dropped to the deck. British tars who were on deck of the three cruisers strained their eyes. Those with binoculars or more often those manning the directors’ powerful optics could see ant like men scurry around the deck of Graf Spee. Floats, boats, and nets were lowered into the water. Within two minutes of the ceasefire, the first sailors had entered the water. Neptune closed to within five hundred yards of the burning and listing silent enemy hull. Ropes were extended along the hull as the main turrets continued to track in silence. Seven minutes later, the first German sailors had grabbed the ropes and were hauled aboard and the light cruiser had her only two undamaged boats in the water assisting in rescue operations. She could have sent over a prize crew but the German ship’s list had grown from only six degrees to eighteen degrees since she had been torpedoed.
Twenty three minutes after the first torpedo exploded, Graf Spee turtled and took to the bottom of the sea over eight hundred German sailors and seventy Allied prisoners. The two working British cruisers pulled three hundred men from the water.
By mid afternoon, critical repairs were made to Shropshire. As the cruisers steamed south at twelve knots, scores of burials were conducted, bodies returned to the sea, and the fragments of remains sent overboard with as much reverence as possible by chaplains who blessed and consecrated as they sanctified and consoled. The three ships limped to Tristan da Cunha where slightly less expedient but still temporary repairs for all three ships were made. At the end of the week, both heavy cruisers departed for Durban. Sussex would then proceed to Singapore for a comprehensive rebuild while Shropshire’s deeper wounds would be healed at the South African dockyard. The light cruiser slowly worked her way home, stopping first at Cape Town, and then Freetown where Ajax, Exeter, Renown and Ark Royal as well as a bodyguard of destroyers joined her as an escort and an honor guard. She arrived at Portsmouth for two months of repairs in the great complex, her crew released for a week at a time after they received the King's thanks. Men were home to kiss their wives and see their children open the presents under the first wartime Christmas tree.