Battle of the Falkland Islands, 1914: Coronel avenged

Five weeks after its first defeat in a century, the Royal Navy struck back. At Coronel, off Chile, on 1 November 1914, Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron had sunk two British cruisers with all hands. On 8 December the same squadron steamed toward the Falkland Islands expecting to destroy a coaling station. It found two battlecruisers waiting, and by nightfall four of its five warships were at the bottom of the South Atlantic.²

The answer to Coronel

The defeat at Coronel caused outrage in Britain. The new First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, reinforced British squadrons across the Atlantic, and the Japanese navy moved ships to bar von Spee's way back into the Pacific. Above all, Fisher took two battlecruisers from the Grand Fleet. On 5 November a telegram to Admiral Jellicoe said the First Sea Lord required Invincible and Inflexible to recover control, and that Vice Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee would command in the South Atlantic and Pacific.³ › Battle of Coronel, 1914

The battlecruisers were exactly the right tool. Faster than von Spee's armored cruisers, and armed with 12-inch guns against his 8.2-inch ones, they could choose the range and fight outside his reach. Sturdee's force also had the armored cruisers Carnarvon, Cornwall and Kent and the light cruisers Bristol and Glasgow, a survivor of Coronel. It reached Port Stanley on 7 December and began to coal, with no idea where the Germans were.⁴

Von Spee had rounded Cape Horn and decided to attack the coaling station on the Falklands. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org calls it a serious error of judgment.⁵

A morning surprise

On the morning of 8 December an observation post on Sapper Hill reported two warships approaching. They were the vanguard of von Spee's squadron, come to attack the coaling station. Sturdee's ships were caught coaling, in a cramped harbor where they could not use their range. The danger passed at 9:19, when the old battleship Canopus, grounded in the harbor as a fort and directed by an observer ashore, fired two salvoes of 12-inch shells. The Germans had not expected battleships. They turned away, and the chase began.⁶

Sturdee put to sea at 10 a.m. The day was unusually fine, with a calm sea, and only bad weather to the south could have saved von Spee. The battlecruisers had the speed, and it took them less than three hours to come within range.⁷

The sacrifice of the armored cruisers

Just before 1 p.m. the battlecruisers opened fire at about 16,000 yards on the nearest German ships. At about 1:20 von Spee turned his two armored cruisers to fight and ordered his light cruisers to scatter, buying them time to escape; Sturdee sent his own cruisers after them. For the next three hours Invincible and Inflexible pounded Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at ranges between 16,000 and 10,000 yards, keeping outside the range where the German guns would tell.⁸

Soon after 4 p.m. Scharnhorst, burning and listing heavily, went down with all her crew, Admiral von Spee among them. The battlecruisers shifted their fire to Gneisenau, which took hit after hit until she heeled over and sank at about 6 p.m.; her crew, HistoryOfWar.org adds, scuttled her. HistoryOfWar.org says 190 of her 764 men were picked up; the Western Front Association quotes the captain of Invincible, who recorded 108 rescued by his ship, fourteen of whom died. On the two battlecruisers just one man was killed, a member of a 4-inch gun crew on Inflexible, struck when a shell from Scharnhorst hit the main derrick.⁹

The chase of the light cruisers

Glasgow and Cornwall ran down the Leipzig. Each time she turned to fire a broadside she lost a little of her lead, and Cornwall closed in. The Leipzig fought on fire until the evening and sank at 9:23 p.m.; eighteen of her men were saved. Kent, with no fast light cruiser to help her, chased the Nürnberg, helped by her engine-room staff, who raised her speed to 25 knots, and by two of the German cruiser's boilers bursting. The Nürnberg hit Kent thirty-eight times, and one shell set fire to charges in a gun casemate before a sergeant threw them clear. She sank at 7:25 p.m., and Kent's boats picked up eleven men, four of whom died of exposure. Bristol and an armed merchant cruiser sank the German supply ships without loss of life.¹⁰

Only the Dresden, faster than her consorts, escaped into the weather building in the south. She stayed at large until March 1915.¹¹

What the Falklands decided

Kent's casualties were the heaviest in the British squadron, eight men killed or dead of wounds. For Germany the battle ended its surface war on the world's oceans: Rickard writes that after the Falklands and the end of the Dresden the main German threat outside the North Sea came from the U-boats. The paymaster of Glasgow, who had watched Cradock's ships go down at Coronel, wrote that Coronel was avenged.¹²