“The sea battle that would showcase one of the earliest uses of electronic deception in naval combat.”
By Robert Schreiner
ON THE afternoon of November 1, 1914, a Royal Navy squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock was steaming slowly northward in extremely heavy seas off the Chilean coast, near the port city of Coronel. The four British ships—Cradock’s flagship HMS Good Hope, the armored cruiser HMS Monmouth, the light cruiser HMS Glasgow, and the converted armed merchant liner HMS Otranto—labored along the coast in a wide search formation, several miles abreast. They were hunting for a German light cruiser, SMS Leipzig, which they believed was operating alone, just ahead of their position. What Cradock did not know was that his squadron had been tricked by a relatively new innovation in naval warfare: The Germans were using a form of electronic deception, and the British vessels were steaming into a trap.
SMS Leipzig was attached to the Kaiserliche Marine’s East Asia Squadron, based at the German colony in Tsingtao, China. The East Asia Squadron was an elite naval unit commanded by Vice Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee. Several months earlier, as war was being declared, von Spee had ordered all of his warships and their support vessels to leave the port. They regrouped at a remote German-controlled island in the Pacific, far from the Allied naval assets that had hoped to bottle up von Spee’s forces.
The East Asia Squadron then began an extraordinary months-long odyssey westward across the Pacific, stopping at multiple islands along the way to refuel and resupply. By late October of 1914, von Spee’s forces had reached the western coast of South America, where they were joined by SMS Leipzig—which had recently made a port call in Mexico—and another light cruiser, SMS Dresden, which had been operating in the Atlantic, but had recently sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific.
On that fateful November afternoon, von Spee’s squadron comprised five warships: two powerful modern armored cruisers, SMS Scharnhorst (the admiral’s flagship) and SMS Gneisenau; and three light cruisers, SMS Nürnberg, SMS Leipzig, and SMS Dresden. It was an extremely potent and maneuverable squadron, and it was more than a match for Cradock’s task force moving up the Chilean coastline.
In 1914, electronic communications technology was still in its infancy. All warships of the time were equipped with wireless communications equipment, but direct voice-to-voice transmissions were not yet possible. Instead, orders and queries were communicated from the bridge of one ship, encoded by that ship’s wireless operators in a dedicated wireless room, transmitted via radio antennas to other ships in range, received and decoded by the recipient ships’ wireless operators, then passed along to those vessels’ commanders. It was a time-consuming process. In fact, it was so cumbersome, warships of the time still relied heavily on flag signals for basic orders and maneuvering instructions. But flag signals were useless at night, in inclement weather, or at long ranges.
Just like today, back then, ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore electronic communication offered great tactical advantages but also suffered from vulnerabilities. By 1914, it was already common practice for wireless operators in both the Royal Navy and Kaiserliche Marine, to be trained to “jam” an enemy’s wireless signals by flooding the airwaves with unintelligible noise from the wireless equipment. The hope was that by disrupting an opponent’s electronic communication by jamming, the jammer could gain an advantage. Of course, the downside to such an effort was that while jamming, the jammer’s wireless capabilities were just as useless as the enemy’s.
Deception has always been fundamental to successful warfighting, and in 1914, the use of electronic warfare to achieve it was just beginning to emerge. The sea battle that would take place on November 1, 1914, would showcase one of the earliest uses of electronic deception in naval combat.
Because anyone, friend or foe, could potentially receive a wireless communication if they were in range, most wireless naval communications at the time were encrypted—to minimize the chances that the enemy could effectively “listen in.” However, the transmissions themselves still had identifiable signatures. Wireless operators could often tell if a transmission originated from an enemy or a noncombatant (such as a merchant ship), even if they could not immediately decipher the message. The German Telefunken wireless equipment used by Kaiserliche Marine vessels, for example, had a unique broadcast signature. Additionally, vessels often employed unique “call signs,” to lessen confusion when communicating among several ships.
As Graf von Spee’s contingent gathered off the South America’s Pacific coast, they decided to have all of their warships use the same call sign—that of the light cruiser SMS Leipzig. The Germans hoped that they could cloak the presence of their other newly arrived warships if they all sounded like the one German ship already known to be operating in the area.
Unfortunately for the British, the Germans’ clever ruse worked. Cradock’s squadron intercepted a series of encrypted transmissions they believed were from only one ship: SMS Leipzig. The British vessels converged on that spot in the hope that they could trap and overwhelm a single German ship operating alone. Instead, the British ships blundered into the entire German squadron.
By the time the horrified British officers realized that they had found not just one light cruiser, but von Spee’s entire powerful squadron, it was too late. The Royal Navy vessels were slower than their German counterparts—and they were woefully outgunned. Although Otranto was able to veer off westward to safety, the remaining British warships were unable to elude the Germans before nightfall. The German ships pounded the British line relentlessly, until both Good Hope and Monmouth were lost and the damaged Glasgow had to flee.
The Battle of Coronel was Britain’s first naval defeat since the War of 1812, a century earlier. It was also the first significant naval battle of the First World War, and the overwhelming German naval victory sent shockwaves around world. Interestingly, the battle also saw some of the first uses of electronic warfare in naval combat. Without one of those electronic warfare measures—the Leipzig deception—the battle might not have ever taken place.
ROBERT SCHREINER the author of The Wolves and the Greyhounds: A Novel of the Great War. He is a former CIA Intelligence Officer, a consultant and executive in the global private security industry and an amateur military historian who has traveled the world, routinely sneaking in side-trips to visit ancient fortifications and battlefields. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee with his wife, two spoiled cocker spaniels, and an amusingly musical cockatiel.
