Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [79]
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE LAST GERMAN CRUISER
MAS A TIERRA ISLAND OFF CHILE: MARCH 13, 1914
Kapitan zur See Fritz Emil von Lüdecke listened carefully as Leutnant Arnold Boker, standing rigidly at attention and breathless from his dash to the bridge, reported that he had sighted a British cruiser approaching their position. Turning his binoculars to the horizon, Lüdecke could make out the silhouette of the cruiser, black smoke from its funnels staining the morning sky. The enemy was heading straight for his position. The game was up after 21,000 nautical miles, two major sea battles and seven months of war. The German warship Dresden was trapped: her engines and boilers were worn out and her coal nearly gone, and the ship lay at anchor after three months of playing a game of hide-and-seek with the British.
Even as Lüdecke ordered the alarm to call the men to quarters, the smoke of another British ship appeared on the horizon, this one from the opposite direction. Then Lüdecke spotted the smoke of a third ship. Sharp whistle blasts ordered the crew to muster on the deck, but not at their battle stations. Dresden was, after all, off the coast of Chile in neutral waters, and was safe. The British could not take any hostile action against them.
Lüdecke watched in shock as a salvo of shells passed over Dresden and hit the steep cliffs off the starboard side. Another salvo screamed through the air, and this time the shells ripped into Dresden’s stern, mangling steel and men and sending a sheet of fire across the deck. Dresden’s gunners fired off three shots before British gunfire smashed the ship’s guns at the stern, but Lüdecke’s men were not at their stations. Most of them were piling into boats and leaping overboard, heading for shore on their captain’s orders. With three British warships closing in, this was a fight Lüdecke knew he could not win.
The British cruisers circled the helpless German ship and kept pumping shells into the burning wreck. One witness later reported that the shells burst inside Dresden “with a sound like subterranean thunder.” Flames were licking at two of the magazines, where what was left of the ammunition was stored, and Lüdecke knew he had to act. The enemy must not seize his ship. With what crew he had left, he had to open the ship’s valves, set explosive charges and sink Dresden. That meant fighting through the fires and the smashed passageways to go below into the torn and broken hull. He also had to rescue the last men trapped in the burning hulk and take off the dead and wounded from the sinking ship.
To buy time, Lüdecke hoisted a signal calling for a cease-fire and surrender negotiations, and sent Oberleutnant zur See Wilhelm Canaris, in Dresden’s pinnace, over to HMS Glasgow. Glasgow ignored the signal, as did the cruiser HMS Kent. Captain Luce of Glasgow listened to the German officer’s protests over the violation of Chilean sovereignty and replied that his orders were to sink Dresden and leave the rest to the diplomats. As the two men argued, Glasgow closed in and continued to pump shells into Dresden, raking the hull and sending debris flying.
Then, in a massive roar that shot out of the port side of the bow, Dresden shuddered as Lüdecke’s scuttling charge detonated inside the No. 1 magazine. The forward casemate and its heavy guns blew out, and the bow was half torn off, leaving the rest of the hull open to the sea. It was 10:45 a.m.
At 11:15 a.m., Dresden’s bow slipped beneath the surface of Cumberland Bay. Striking the seabed, the bow twisted and tore free as Dresden rolled to starboard. The ship was twice as long as the bay was deep, so instead of the stern rising dramatically into the air, the cruiser settled slowly by the stern. The shivering crew huddled on the beach and cheered a final explosion from a second scuttling charge deep within the engine room. Their ship, they felt, had died an honorable death, sunk by its crew rather than falling into enemy hands at the end of a long and eventful