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1939 Battle of the River Plate By Harold Briley The sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of the River Plate, the first Allied victory of the 1939-45 war, was celebrated with re-unions in Britain and Uruguay. The dwindling band of British and New Zealand navy veterans remember with pride a battle which elated all of Britain in 1939. The powerful German pocket battleship Graf Spee had straddled the South American shipping lanes, sinking nine British merchant vessels. In a vast expanse of ocean searched by several British battle groups, the predator was finally found by three smaller cruisers, Exeter, Ajax and the New Zealand ship Achilles, operating from their Falkland Islands base. Battle commenced 150 miles off the River Plate soon after dawn on December 13 as the battleship's mighty, long-range guns pounded Exeter. Though outgunned, the three cruisers kept attacking the heavily armoured Graf Spee from both sides. With all three British ships damaged and short of ammunition, the Graf Spee nevertheless sought refuge in the neutral port of Montevideo for emergency repairs. Amid intense diplomatic activity in Uruguay, which was sympathetic to the Allied cause, the German Commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, consulted Hitler in Berlin, and considered escape across the estuary to Argentina, where there was strong sympathy for the Germans. The British warships waited outside the estuary, reinforced only by the cruiser Cumberland. Exeter, badly damaged, and with many dead, limped back to the Falklands. The day of reckoning came on December 17 when the Graf Spee moved out of Montevideo. Watched by thousands, the ship spectacularly exploded in a ball of fire, lighting the night sky. Langsdorff had scuttled her to avoid interment in Uruguay or further casualties. He and some of his crew were taken to Buenos Aires where he shot himself wrapped in the German ensign. He is buried there. Many of the Graf Spee's crew took up residence in Argentina. German sailors killed in action are buried in Montevideo. So is one British sailor; the rest were buried at sea. Not one merchant seaman died. All were picked up by the gallant Langsdorff from their lifeboats before he sank their ships. They were transferred to a prison ship, Altmark, and free two months later when intercepted off Norway by the Royal Navy. The British commander, Commodore Henry Harwood, was promoted Admiral and awarded a knighthood, and 75 British and New Zealand crew won gallantry medals. Wartime leader Winston Churchill called it a "brilliant action which will long be told in song and story". Echoing that prediction, survivors of the battle in the "HMS Ajax and River Plate Veterans' Association" held a memorial service to their dead comrades, followed by a reunion dinner in Gillingham in Kent. Some also had a reunion in the Canadian town of Ajax, Ontario, named in honour of Harwood's flagship. About 400 of its streets are named after his sailors. A photographic exhibition of the battle was held in Montevideo where a company of divers invited overseas investors to join a project to recover the Graf Spee to turn her into a museum. Exeter was repaired in the Falklands, but was sunk by the Japanese in the Java Sea in 1942. Ajax was scrapped in 1949. Achilles was sold to India in 1948 and renamed Delhi. The action brings to mind the Battle of the Falkland Islands, another British victory, also in December, in the first year of the First World War, 1914, against Vice Admiral Graf Von Spee, after whom the World War Two battleship was named. His crack German Squadron sank two British heavy cruisers in the Battle of Coronel off the Chilean Coast and sailed to attack the Royal Navy's base in the Falkland Islands. But a British squadron commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee reached there one day earlier after a dramatic 8,000 mile dash, surprised the Germans, and sank four of the five German cruisers, including the flagship Scharnhorst, killing Admiral Graf Spee, his two sons and all 700 crew. The cruiser Dresden was sunk later in the Pacific. This
article first appeared in the Falkland Islands Newsletter, Edition 76,
April 2000. The Falkland Islands Association is an independent
organisation which brings together those who support the continuing
freedom of the people of the Falkland Islands. Its Constitution
states that its objectives are to assist the people of the Falkland
Islands to decide their own future for themselves without being subjected
to pressure direct or indirect from any quarter.
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