Maximilian von Spee

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Maximilian von Spee

Maximilian Graf von Spee (22 June 1861 - 8 December 1914) was a German admiral, born in Copenhagen, Denmark, who joined the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy) in 1878. In 1887–88 he commanded the Cameroon ports, in a German colony in Africa. Before World War I he held a number of senior positions relating to weapons development, before being appointed Chief of Staff of the North Sea Command in 1908, rising to Rear Admiral on 27 January 1910 and being given command of the German East Asia Squadron in 1912 with the rank of Vice-Admiral, based at the Germany colony in Tsingtao, China.

From the outbreak of the First World War his command concentrated on destroying Allied commercial and troop shipping, with considerable success. However Spee was wary of the Allies' strength, especially the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Royal Australian Navy — in fact he described the latter's flagship, the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, as being superior to his entire force by itself. Consequently Spee's squadron moved towards South America. At the Battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1 November 1914, Spee's force engaged and sank two British armored cruisers commanded by Sir Christopher Cradock: HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth were outclassed in both gunnery and seamanship. Admiral Spee's report of action off Coronel, Chile on November 2, 1914, can be found in the World War I document archive maintained by Richard Hacken at Brigham Young University. ^[1]

On 8 December 1914, Spee's force attempted a raid on the coaling station at Stanley in the Falkland Islands, unaware that the previous month the British had sent two modern fast battlecruisers HMS Inflexible and HMS Invincible to protect the islands and avenge the defeat at Coronel, and there were also five cruisers, HMS Carnarvon, HMS Cornwall, HMS Kent, HMS Bristol and HMS Glasgow, at the Stanley naval base. In the ensuing Battle of the Falkland Islands, Spee's flagship, SMS Scharnhorst, together with SMS Gneisenau, SMS Nürnberg and SMS Leipzig were all lost, together with some 2,200 German sailors, including Admiral von Spee and his two sons. Only SMS Dresden managed to escape, though she was eventually hunted down and destroyed.

In 1917 a Mackensen-class battlecruiser was named Graf Spee in his honour, but construction of the ship had not been completed by the time of the Armistice in November 1918, and it was subsequently broken up.

In 1934 Germany named the new "pocket battleship" Admiral Graf Spee after him. Coincidentally, in 1939 the Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled by her crew after the Battle of the River Plate, off the coast of Uruguay, only a few hundred miles from where Admiral von Spee and his squadron had met their end in the same month a quarter century earlier.

Between 1959 and 1967 the Federal German Bundesmarine operated a training frigate named after him.