Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [80]
THE LONG ODYSSEY OF DRESDEN
Built at the Hamburg yard of Blohm und Voss, which launched the half-completed hull in October 1907 and delivered it to the German Navy a year later, the 4,268-ton, 388-foot Kleine Kreuzer (small cruiser) Dresden was built to be a fast raider on the high seas rather than a rugged warrior built to slug it out with other warships. Modeled after the successful Confederate commerce raiders of the American Civil War, Dresden’s job was to range the oceans, seeking out the enemy’s merchant fleet and sending its commerce to the bottom. Dresden’s steam turbines and four propellers drove the cruiser at speeds up to 25.2 knots. The cruiser carried ten 4-inch guns and eight smaller semiautomatic rapid-fire 2-inch guns, and could fire torpedoes from two tubes. If all else failed, or if they needed to save ammunition, the crew could ram and sink a ship with the huge cast-steel ram built into the bow.
Troubles in the Caribbean, particularly a civil war in Mexico, where rebels fought to overthrow the despotic government of President Victoriano Huerta, sent Dresden there in December 1913. Remaining on station in the region through July, the cruiser spent considerable time in Veracruz protecting German citizens and commercial interests, particularly when the United States invaded it and seized the port and city to protect its interests. On July 20, when rebels toppled Huerta’s government, Dresden’s captain took the Mexican president, his family and staffaboard, then carried them to Jamaica, where the British government granted Huerta asylum.
A 3-D MODEL OF THE GERMAN CRUISER Dresden. Willi Kramer
Dresden was due back in Germany for a much-needed refit, and on July 26, rendezvoused with the new cruiser Karlsruhe to trade captains. Dresden’s new commander, Fritz Emil von Lüdecke, was to take the ship back to Germany, but when war broke out in Europe a few days later, he took Dresden to Brazil to attack British merchant ships. Dresden engaged several British ships, sinking some but letting others go because they carried cargo from countries not yet at war and, in one case, because the ship was loaded with women and children, and Lüdecke was an officer and gentleman of the old school with “incredible gallantry.”
As British forces in the region mobilized to find and destroy Dresden and Karlsruhe, Lüdecke headed for the Pacific, steaming through the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America in early September. There, at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas, Lüdecke received new orders to link up with Germany’s East Asia Squadron.
The East Asia Squadron, under the command of Reichsgraf Maximilian von Spec, was Germany’s only fleet in the Pacific. Based in Tsingtao, China, von Spec’s ships included the armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Emden, Leipzig and Nürnberg. When the war began, von Spec ordered his squadron out to sea, realizing that the allied forces outnumbered and outgunned his ships, particularly after Japan entered the war on Britain’s side.
Von Spec’s squadron rendezvoused with Dresden at Easter Island in early October. Then they all then steamed for Chile and the island of Mas a Tierra. There, von Spec learned that a pursuing British squadron, under the command of Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, had followed Dresden into the Pacific. Spec and his captains decided to head to the Chilean mainland port of Coronel, in the hope of finding and destroying HMS Glasgow, which was coaling there. Instead, they ran into most of the British squadron.
The two forces met in battle on the afternoon of November 1, 1914. The fight started with the Germans in a better position—the British were firing into the setting sun and could not see as well. Within a few hours, von Spec’s ships had devastated Cradock’s. Cradock’s own ship, Good Hope, on