Battle of the River Plate (1939): The Hunt for the Graf Spee

The Battle of the River Plate was a naval engagement fought on 13 December 1939 off the coast of Uruguay between the German armoured ship Admiral Graf Spee and three British Commonwealth cruisers. It was the first major naval battle of the Second World War. Although the fight itself was indecisive, it ended with the Graf Spee trapped in Montevideo and scuttled by her own crew, a boost to British morale in the first winter of the war.

Background: a raider in the South Atlantic

The Admiral Graf Spee was one of three Deutschland-class “panzerschiffe” (armoured ships), known in Britain as pocket battleships. Built within treaty limits, she combined six 28-centimetre (11-inch) guns with diesel engines that gave her a long range, making her ideal for raiding merchant shipping. Under Captain Hans Langsdorff she left Germany in August 1939, before the war began, and waited in the South Atlantic.

From late September 1939 she sank nine British merchant ships in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Langsdorff followed the rules of war closely: crews were taken off before their ships were sunk, and no merchant seamen were killed. The Royal Navy and French navy formed several hunting groups to search for her across thousands of kilometres of ocean.

The battle

Commodore Henry Harwood’s Force G guarded the busy shipping routes off the River Plate. He had the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter, armed with 8-inch guns, and two light cruisers with 6-inch guns: his flagship HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles, crewed largely by New Zealanders. Guessing correctly that the raider would come there, he concentrated his ships off the estuary.

At about 6:10 am on 13 December the two sides sighted each other. Harwood split his force so that the Graf Spee would have to divide her fire, with Exeter attacking from one side and the light cruisers from the other. Langsdorff closed in rather than keeping his distance, and his heavy guns soon wrecked Exeter, putting her turrets out of action and starting fires. Exeter withdrew, badly damaged, with 61 of her crew killed.

Ajax and Achilles pressed their attack, and Ajax lost two turrets. The Graf Spee had been hit around 20 times; damage to her fuel-cleaning system, galley and hull meant she could not easily return to Germany through the North Atlantic. After about 80 minutes of action Langsdorff turned for the neutral port of Montevideo, shadowed by the two light cruisers.

Trapped in Montevideo

Under international law a warship could stay in a neutral port only long enough to make essential repairs. The British minister in Montevideo, Eugen Millington-Drake, worked both to have the Graf Spee expelled before British reinforcements could arrive and, later, to keep her there. British agents spread false reports that the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the battlecruiser Renown were close by, when in fact they were still far away; only the heavy cruiser Cumberland had joined Harwood.

The Uruguayan government gave the Graf Spee 72 hours. Believing that a superior force awaited him and unable to get permission for a longer stay, Langsdorff decided with the approval of Berlin not to risk a hopeless battle. On the evening of 17 December the Graf Spee sailed out into the estuary, watched by large crowds, and was scuttled with explosive charges. She burned for days in the shallow water.

Key people

Henry Harwood was a Royal Navy officer who had studied the problem of a raider attacking the River Plate shipping routes long before the war. His decision to split his weaker ships and attack at once was praised as aggressive and well judged. Hans Langsdorff, a respected officer of the German navy, was noted for his humane treatment of captured merchant crews; British prisoners released in Montevideo spoke well of him. Eugen Millington-Drake, the British minister to Uruguay, led the diplomatic struggle over how long the ship could remain in port.

Aftermath

Langsdorff and most of the crew were taken to Buenos Aires. On 20 December 1939 he shot himself in his hotel room; most of his crew remained interned in Argentina for the rest of the war. Harwood was promoted to rear-admiral and knighted. The supply ship Altmark, carrying British prisoners taken from Graf Spee’s victims, was later intercepted in a Norwegian fjord in February 1940, an incident that raised tension before the German invasion of Norway.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1939, 21 August: The Admiral Graf Spee sails from Wilhelmshaven.
• 1939, 30 September: She sinks her first merchant ship, the Clement, off Brazil.
• 1939, 13 December: The Battle of the River Plate is fought.
• 1939, 14 December: The Graf Spee enters Montevideo.
• 1939, 17 December: The ship is scuttled off Montevideo.
• 1939, 20 December: Captain Langsdorff takes his own life in Buenos Aires.

Why it matters

The River Plate was the Royal Navy’s first major success of the war and showed that cruisers acting boldly could defeat a stronger raider. It ended the threat from the Graf Spee, opened the long war against German commerce raiding in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the fate of a single ship captured worldwide attention, later retold in the 1956 film The Battle of the River Plate.