“Although Canopus had once been a formidable warship for her era, by 1914 she was woefully obsolete.”
By Robert Schreiner
ON THE morning of December 8, 1914, a crisp dawn revealed unusually clear skies and calm seas around the remote British outpost of the Falkland Islands.
As the residents of Port Stanley began to stir, a German naval squadron crested the southern horizon and steamed swiftly northward toward the islands. A month earlier, those same warships – the Kaiserliche Marine’s elite East Asia Squadron – had destroyed a Royal Navy squadron at the Battle of Coronel, and now they threatened Britain’s primary naval base in the South Atlantic.
German intelligence had indicated that the port was probably lightly defended. The squadron’s commander, Vice Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee, intended to shell the port into submission, send armed landing parties ashore, and take possession of the colony in the name of the Kaiser. It was an audacious plan intended to shock the world even more than the recent German victory at Coronel. What von Spee did not know was that Port Stanley was far from defenseless.
Since the Royal Navy’s devastating defeat at Coronel in November, the British Admiralty had been working furiously to counter the threat posed by Germany’s rogue squadron. Additional naval assets from the Caribbean were redeployed southward, and – in an unprecedented move – the Admiralty sent two capital ships from the home fleet, the battlecruisers HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible, under the command of Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee, to find and destroy the German squadron.
Among the British ships already assigned to South American waters was HMS Canopus, a relic from the pre-dreadnought era of shipbuilding. The first ship of her class, the battleship Canopus was launched near the end of the previous century, in 1897. Her operational roles had diminished over the years, and she had lain idle in the reserve fleet since 1912, destined for dismantlement, until war was declared in 1914. Canopus had been hastily remobilized and added to Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock’s command as he searched for von Spee’s squadron.
Although Canopus had once been a formidable warship for her era, by 1914 she was woefully obsolete. In her prime, she could have steamed as fast as 18 knots, but by 1914, she struggled to reach 16 knots under ideal conditions. Additionally, persistent engine problems dogged her from the moment she was assigned to Cradock’s command, limiting her top speed to a plodding 12 knots. Her biggest assets were her four massive 12-inch guns, paired in two large armored turrets, fore and aft.
Unfortunately, her lack of speed and maneuverability rendered her nearly useless, and Admiral Cradock had assigned Canopus to the lowly task of collier escort duty. In fact, when Cradock engaged the German squadron at Coronel, he had done so without Canopus, which was more than 250 miles away and unable to join the rest of the British task force. Cradock’s flagship HMS Good Hope and the armored cruiser HMS Monmouth went down with all hands during the battle. The damaged HMS Glasgow escaped, rejoined Canopus in the Strait of Magellan, and the two ships limped back to Port Stanley in defeat.
Pending a significant overhaul of her engines, Canopus was considered unseaworthy, and the decision was made to beach her immense bulk on the mud flats of Port Stanley’s inner harbor. Once beached, her crew set to converting the battleship into a temporary fixed gun platform to protect the port. Her masts were taken down, so that she was effectively hidden from the sea behind the low spit of land to the southeast. With the masts down, an alternate spotters’ station was set up on a hill above the town, equipped with a telephone line that ran down to Canopus’ bridge.
By the time Admiral Sturdee’s powerful fleet arrived at the Falklands on December 7, the typically quiet Port Stanley had been transformed into a well-protected and armed naval base. Sturdee ordered all of his ships to begin coaling, with the expectation that they would set off in search of von Spee’s squadron two days later. Captain Grant of Canopus had arranged for a demonstration of his old battleship’s capabilities as a fixed gun platform the following morning. However, at dawn that following day, the Germans appeared on the southern horizon.
As von Spee’s force approached the Falklands, he ordered two of his ships to steam ahead to conduct the first phase of the assault – destroying the port’s wireless station. The armored cruiser SMS Gneisenau and the light cruiser SMS Nürnberg broke from the main German formation and accelerated toward their objective. As they drew near, the German crews saw multiple trails of smoke drifting skyward from within the port. Because they could not immediately see the ships of the British fleet laying at anchor, they mistakenly assumed the residents of Port Stanley were burning their coal stocks as a panicked deterrent to a potential attack.
The British spotters in the hilltop platform saw the approaching German warships and telephoned their alarm to the beached battleship below. Canopus passed along the alarm to the rest of the fleet, and her gun crews elevated their barrels seaward toward the oncoming enemy. As Sturdee’s fleet frantically got up to steam and prepared to leave the port, the spotters on the hill above sent targeting information to Canopus’ gun crews below.
Still believing they were approaching an unprotected port, the two lead German warships slowed to bring their port side gun batteries to bear on the colony’s wireless station. Before they could fire, however, two massive explosions rose from the sea, almost a thousand yards off their port beam. Moments later, a second pair of plumes erupted from the sea, this time, only a few hundred yards away. The Germans were shocked at the apparent size of the shore batteries firing upon them – and dismayed that they could not see where the shots were coming from. They had no idea that the hidden guns of the old battleship Canopus had fired the first shots of the battle.
This surprise development, and the sudden realization that the columns of smoke were coming from the funnels of multiple British warships in the port, caused von Spee to abandon his planned attack. He ordered all of the ships of his squadron to come about and flee southward.
The British fleet poured out of the port, got up to full steam, and quickly overtook the fleeing Germans. Unlike the previous Battle of Coronel, this time the British forces had overwhelming speed and superiority.
Admiral von Spee split his squadron in a vain attempt to throw off his pursuers. In the ensuing day-long fight, the swift battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible pummeled and sank Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; while Glasgow, Cornwall, and Kent engaged and sank Leipzig and Nürnberg. Only the light cruiser Dresden managed to escape.
The Battle of the Falklands was an overwhelming British victory that ended Admiral von Spee’s rogue voyage and helped atone for the Royal Navy’s losses at Coronel. It was also a moment of pride and vindication for the officers and men of the old battleship HMS Canopus, which – although beached on a muddy shore – had managed to drive away the initial German attack and buy enough time for the rest of Sturdee’s fleet to weigh anchor and steam out to meet the enemy.
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.
