The Cruise Of The Raider Wolf

By Roy Alexander

The Cruise of the Raider “Wolf” is not intended as another war book; it is the story of one of the strangest and greatest sea adventures of modern times.

The Wolf has become a legendary figure—a name connected with strange happenings at sea; but to most people it is only a name. The actual cruise was a shadowy, mysterious affair; and for many reasons the history of the cruise has remained equally vague. Briefly, this raider slipped out of Germany in 1916, and for fifteen months roamed the seas of the world depending for fuel and food on the captures she made.
Her very existence depended on these captures not becoming known. Ships encountering the Wolf therefore simply disappeared, their fate unknown. The raider roamed the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific oceans, even touched the Arctic and Antarctic seas. And she capped this unparalleled cruise by running the blockade back to Kiel.

Incidentally, the Wolf was the only enemy warship to enter Australian or New Zealand waters. She mined the coasts of both these countries.

After the raider’s return to Germany there was a world-wide blaze of publicity. The reception of the Wolf’s men in Berlin was one of the outstanding war events in the German capital. Then the Wolf disappeared from public notice as quickly as she became famous. One reason for this was that Captain Nerger, the raider’s commander, was not a publicity seeker and was not in particularly high favour in Germany. It was necessary to receive him with honour after he brought his ship back from such a cruise, but after that he was quietly moved to an obscure post and was heard of no more.

The author was a prisoner aboard the raider for the last nine months of the cruise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786254634

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Text originally published in 1939 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE CRUISE OF THE RAIDER WOLF

BY

ROY ALEXANDER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

PREFACE 5

INTRODUCTION—THE RAIDERS 6

I—THE WAIRUNA’S INTERRUPTED VOYAGE 14

II—THE HAPPENINGS AT SUNDAY ISLAND 20

III—ABOARD A MINELAYER AT WORK 26

IV—THE WOLF IN THE TASMAN SEA 32

V—MINES OFF THE AUSTRALIAN COAST 39

VI—ON THE HUNT OFF SUVA 45

VII—LIFE IN THE PRISON HOLD 51

VIII—THE FLYING DUTCHMAN—MODERN VERSION 57

IX—THE CAPTURE OF THE MATUNGA 63

X—IN DUTCH NEW GUINEA 71

XI—THE SINGAPORE MINEFIELDS 80

XII—BACK TO THE INDIAN OCEAN 91

XII—OFF THE MALDIVE ISLANDS—THE HITACHI MARU 105

XIV—OFF MADAGASCAR 119

XV—ROUND THE CAPE TO THE ATLANTIC 128

XVI—THROUGH THE BLOCKADE TO KIEL 138

APPENDIX I—TRINIDAD ISLAND AND ITS RAIDER VISITORS 152

APPENDIX II—VON LUCKNER AND THE RAIDER SEEADLER 159

APPENDIX III—S.M.S. WOLF AND SHIPS CAPTURED OR MINED BY HER 170

THE RAIDER 170

Wachtfels 170

Wolf, S.M.S. (formerly Wachtfels) 170

Antinous (formerly Wolf) 170

SHIPS CAPTURED 170

Turritella (formerly Gutenfels, later Iltis S.M.S.) 170

Jumna 170

Wordsworth 170

Dee 171

Wairuna 171

Winslow 171

Beluga 171

Encore 171

Matunga 171

Hitachi Maru 172

Igotz Mendi 172

John H. Kirby 172

Maréchal Davout 172

Storo Brore 172

SHIPS MINED 172

Off Capetown and Cape Agulhas 172

Off Colombo 173

Off Bombay 173

Tasman Sea 173

Undola 173

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 174

PREFACE

The Cruise of the Raider Wolf is not intended as another war book; it is the story of one of the strangest and greatest sea adventures of modern times.

The Wolf has become a legendary figure—a name connected with strange happenings at sea; but to most people it is only a name. The actual cruise was a shadowy, mysterious affair; and for many reasons the history of the cruise has remained equally vague. Briefly, this raider slipped out of Germany in 1916, and for fifteen months roamed the seas of the world depending for fuel and food on the captures she made.

Her very existence depended on these captures not becoming known. Ships encountering the Wolf therefore simply disappeared, their fate unknown. The raider roamed the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific oceans, even touched the Arctic and Antarctic seas. And she capped this unparalleled cruise by running the blockade back to Kiel.

Incidentally, the Wolf was the only enemy warship to enter Australian or New Zealand waters. She mined the coasts of both these countries.

After the raider’s return to Germany there was a world-wide blaze of publicity. The reception of the Wolf’s men in Berlin was one of the outstanding war events in the German capital. Then the Wolf disappeared from public notice as quickly as she became famous. One reason for this was that Captain Nerger, the raider’s commander, was not a publicity seeker and was not in particularly high favour in Germany. It was necessary to receive him with honour after he brought his ship back from such a cruise, but after that he was quietly moved to an obscure post and was heard of no more.

The author was a prisoner aboard the raider for the last nine months of the cruise.

The Introduction of the book is a brief account of the raider’s career. The succeeding chapters are written from a personal angle. The author has no anti-German bias; nor is he pro-German: he writes as events appeared to him.

The book includes an appendix on the cruise of the raider Seeadler. The author writes of that ship as it concerned the Wolf.

There is also an appendix on that South Atlantic rendezvous for German raiders and their supply ships, the island of Trinidad, and the use made of it by them.

INTRODUCTION—THE RAIDERS

PEOPLE are weary of hearing and reading of the Great War. Many, particularly those belonging to the generation that has reached manhood since 1918, are naturally unable to understand fully the complete revolution the war brought about in the lives of those who bore the burden and heat of the years 1914-18; a revolution that still, twenty years after, keeps them eternally harking back to the war—always the war.

There is little that is picturesque or romantic in warfare. But one aspect of the war at sea does justify the use of that much misused word romantic; and that is the record of Germany’s sea raiders.

There was romance in their feats; the romance of the old pirate days and of schoolboys’ books of adventure brought suddenly to a living modern reality. Men who had never seen the sea could thrill to the thought of those ships; could find a vicarious joy in their desperate exploits and their hairbreadth escapes—when they did escape.

The raiders were ships manned by men ranking among the world’s finest seamen, and the German sailor is all that. They were ships harried and hunted by most of the navies of the world: lone ships scurrying here and there over the seas; pitting strategy and luck against overwhelming odds; sought by dozens of cruisers as they made swoops on the commerce of their country’s enemies.

The stories of certain of these raiders will be remembered in sea history, and heard whenever the sea and seamen are mentioned.

These sea raiders may be divided roughly into three classes: First were the regular cruisers, such as the Emden Karlsruhe, and Dresden. Far from Germany when war was declared, they raided and sank as much British and Allied shipping as possible before being in turn rounded up and destroyed.

Raiders of the second type were certain merchant vessels which were at sea or in foreign ports on the fateful August 4, 1914; or else, like the liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, slipped away from Germany before the blockade was organized. These ships were fitted hurriedly as auxiliary cruisers, and little or no attempt was made to disguise their armament. All were sunk or interned in the early months of the war.

The third group were those that escaped (or tried to escape) from Germany after the war had been in progress for some time. These auxiliary cruisers were well-armed ships completely disguised as ordinary merchantmen, and depended on this disguise in running blockade or in attacking enemy shipping.

Of all these ships only about ten achieved any success. With the exception of the Dresden (which lasted seven months) all the raiders of the cruiser class were destroyed in the first few months of the war; all the auxiliary cruisers were sunk or interned during the same few months; and the only ships of the third group to escape destruction were the raiders Moewe and Wolf. The latter far surpassed any of the raiders in the duration of her cruise and in the distance steamed.

These facts speak volumes for the superlative efficiency of the British naval patrols. And they must be taken into consideration when reading the outpourings of certain writers (this present one among them), who are inclined to be jaundiced when mentioning certain separate naval incidents.

To take first the raiders of the cruiser group—the Karlsruhe, Emden, Dresden, and Königsberg—here listed in the order in which they did most damage to enemy shipping. The Nürnberg and Leipzig, the other cruisers of this type, did little damage to commerce, being associated more with Admiral von Spee and the Coronel and Falklands battles. These were all cruisers of from twenty-two to twenty-seven knots and carrying from ten to twelve 4, 1-inch guns.

The Karlsruhe was in the West Indies when war was declared. For three months she had a lurid career raiding up and down the South American coast, sinking some seventeen merchant ships approximating seventy thousand tons. Her finish was tragic. Captain Kohler decided to cap his cruise by shelling the important British island of Barbados, in the West Indies. Apart from attacking merchantmen, the object of these raiders was to withdraw British cruisers from European waters by performing some spectacular feat at some distant point. The bombardment of Barbados would have this desired effect. So on November 4, 1914, Karlsruhe was making for Barbados. The crew off duty were on deck, the ship’s band was playing, when a terrific blast tore the cruiser in two—Captain Köhler and 260 of his men being killed or drowned. Spontaneous combustion in the magazines was believed to be the cause of the explosion.

Karlsruhe’s sister raider Emden met her fate five days later, on the other side of the world. She had been attached to Von Spee’s China Squadron, but was ordered to raid the East Indies and the Indian Ocean instead of accompanying Von Spee to South America. Captain von Muller sank about ten merchantmen in his dashes along the Indian coast, in addition to shelling and igniting the oil reservoirs at Madras.

Emden was destroyed on November 9, when about to smash the cable station at Cocos Island, in the Indian Ocean, being shelled and driven ashore, a battered wreck, by H.M.A.S. Sydney. A big transport fleet carrying the first Australian troops for the seat of war, and convoyed by the Sydney and a Japanese cruiser, was passing within about fifty miles of Cocos Island when the cable station wirelessed for help. If the raider had managed to come up astern among the transports great loss must have ensued before she was crippled. In the excitement she might well have escaped.

The Sydney-Emden engagement was important in being the first action of a unit of the newly formed Royal Australian Navy. Ninety per cent of the Sydney’s ratings were inexperienced young Australians. They did well—even admitting that the Sydney was slightly the better ship. The Emden’s death roll was 115: the Sydney lost 4 men.

Dresden, the third of these raiders, was with Karlsruhe in the West Indies when war began, and for seven months was a thorn in the side of the British naval authorities. She dodged along the eastern coast of South America, round the Magellan Strait area, and up along the coast of Chile, being finally cornered and sunk on March 15, 1915, at Juan Fernandez, about four hundred miles off the coast from Valparaiso.

The British cruisers Glasgow and Kent, and the auxiliary cruiser Orama, attended the finish of Dresden.

The fourth raider, Königsberg, was notable more for the difficulties encountered in disabling her than for her actual exploits, although she did sink the small British cruiser Pegasus, shelling it while it was under boiler repairs at Zanzibar. Königsberg was finally bottled up in the Rufiji River, German East Africa; a troublesome series of activities (including the use of special monitors) being necessary before the burning raider was abandoned by her crew.

The second group of raiders could not be considered a success; they were too big, too unwieldy, too conspicuous, and used far too much coal to be successful as pirates depending for fuel on the ships they captured.

As already indicated, the total number of raiders operating was much less than is generally supposed. There were only three in this particular group: the liners Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, and the Prinz Eitel Friedrich.

A fourth ship, the 18,000-ton Cap Trafalgar, was sunk by the converted Cunarder Carmania before the German had captured or sunk a single ship.

The liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (14,500 tons) was the historic merchantman that, about 1897, first obtained for Germany the Blue Ribbon of the Atlantic by averaging about twenty-two knots. Her life as a raider was short. She left Germany on August 4 (before war was actually declared), sank the New Zealand trader Kaipara and the small freighter Nyanga, and on August 26 was herself engaged and sunk by H.M.S. Highflyer, off Rio de Oro, Spanish West Africa. Incidentally, the war was, at this stage, being carried on according to conventions: Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse stopped and released the liner Arlanza—allowing the liner to pass because she carried women and children.

Kronprinz Wilhelm (15,000 tons), a liner very similar to the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, slipped out of New York and obtained her guns at sea from the cruiser Karlsruhe. Under Captain Thierfelder, the Kronprinz Wilhelm was the most successful raider of this class. Her tally of sinkings almost equalled that of the Karlsruhe; the Kronprinz spent eight months dodging about the South Atlantic before being compelled to intern in Newport News on April 11, 1915. During that time she sank seventeen vessels, including the French mail steamer Guadeloupe and the Nelson liner Highland Brae.

The third raider, the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, completed a cruise that has been surpassed only by that of the Wolf. Prinz Eitel Friedrich was a 9,000-ton passenger steamer of the N.D.L. line, and had just left China in August, 1914, when she was recalled by wireless and fitted with the guns of the small German gunboat Tiger. Under the command of Captain Thierrichsens the Eitel Friedrich crossed the Pacific, rounded Cape Horn, steamed up the South Atlantic, and finally interned at Newport News on March 11, 1915. As a raider she was not over successful (she sank about eleven ships—most of them sailing vessels) but the cruise was chock-full of adventure. She was hovering about at the battle of Coronel; did special service for her country by steaming into Valparaiso on a mission from Von Spee; and wound up her career just before interning by sinking the French mail steamer Floride.

A number of other German merchantmen, in foreign waters at the beginning of the war, had varying careers, mostly as supply ships to the raiders mentioned. Of these, the N.D.L. liner Seydlitz had about the most exciting cruise. She left her berth at Circular Quay, Sydney, just in time to escape being seized as a war prize; made her way to South America and served as a supply ship to Von Spee; succeeded in getting away from the Falklands, and finally interned in Bahia Blanca.

Other than the three ships mentioned, none of these vessels was armed or acted as raider. There were no means of supplying them with guns. Contrary to all rumours, there is no record of German merchantmen carrying unmounted guns in pre-war days in readiness for a possible declaration of war.

The third group of raiders, and the most spectacular of the lot, were those disguised auxiliary cruisers that escaped, or attempted to escape, from Germany after the war was well in progress and the Allied blockade lines had been coordinated and strengthened.

Submarines were of course the first line of attack in the war on British commerce—an attack which, at one period, threatened the very existence of Britain. But the range of the submarines was limited; their activities were confined to the North Atlantic and to European waters.

There were several reasons for getting surface raiders away from Germany to the South Atlantic or the Indian Ocean. Such raiders would divert cruisers from the submarine area; there was the prospect of doing enormous damage on the less strongly patrolled colonial trade routes before the raider was sunk or captured; there was the further prospect of impressing the native races if the raiders reached Eastern waters.

Highly desirable though this program was, the strength of the North Sea blockade proved to be too steep an obstacle. During all the war years only three ran the blockade—the Moewe, Wolf, and Seeadler—and of these only Wolf and Moewe succeeded in returning to Germany. Two ships to return in four years! Germany paid dearly in men and money for her raiders.

It is not known definitely how many of these raiders were lost. They had an unpleasant habit of disappearing with all hands when an accident occurred. Many of them carried a large number of mines, and, as can be read in this story of the Wolf, a slight mishap among those mines would result in the complete disappearance of the unfortunate ship carrying them. Such secrecy was observed in fitting out these ships that official German records are vague as to their number. Some sources of information say ten; others say more. In addition to the successful three, the fate of only two is known: the Greif and the Leopard.

Greif (Griffin, in English) was intended, as was the Wolf, to reach the Indian Ocean before beginning her raiding. She was a type similar to the Wolf, being listed as a fifteen-knotter. It is improbable that she carried mines, since she went through a hard-fought action under heavy shellfire for about four hours. This gunfire finally sent her to the bottom.

The German Emperor himself paid a secret visit to bid farewell to the crew of the Greif before she slipped away from Kiel on February 27, 1916. The raider then made up to the Norwegian coast and out into the North Sea, as a fake Norwegian merchantman. On February 29 she was there challenged by the British auxiliary cruiser Alcantara (formerly a liner on the South American service). Greif had not the ghost of a chance. She torpedoed and sank Alcantara after a hot engagement, but was then herself sinking. Two additional British cruisers arrived to finish off the sinking raider, which took down with her over two hundred men.

On March 16, 1917—just over a year later—a raider similar to the Greif was sunk in the same locality in much the same manner.

The raider Leopard was the converted British steamer Yarrowdale, which had been captured by the Moewe and sent to Germany with prisoners a few months earlier. Leopard was torpedoed and smashed with shellfire from the auxiliary Dundee and the cruiser Achilles; the blazing raider going down with every man of her crew, in addition to the British boarding party that had gone across to her when she was still trying to pass as a Norwegian.

Now to come to the very few successful raiders of this group.

Moewe (Gull, in English) was originally the German steamer Pugno, a 4,500-ton vessel, built in 1914 for the fruit trade between West Africa and Hamburg. Seen in Kiel later, she was a smart-looking ship. More raked than Wolf, she appeared to be fairly speedy, but was quite an unimpressive single-funnelled vessel of moderate size. Her speed was given as fourteen knots. And she was fitted with torpedo tubes, one 4.1-and four 5.9-inch guns, and minelaying equipment. Collapsible sides hid her armament. She dodged out to the Atlantic at the end of 1915.

This raider, under the command of Count Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien, beat any of her sister raiders in the tonnage she sank—her two cruises accounting for about fifty ships. She also succeeded in mining Pentland Firth, at the north of Scotland, an exploit that caused the loss of the battleship King Edward VII.

Moewe was the only ship to run the blockade twice; she got away from Germany in the winter of 1915-16 and again in 1916-17. Both of these cruises were entirely different from that of the Wolf. The commander of the speedier Moewe believed in quick dashes, quick results, and a quick return to Germany. Extraordinary luck helped him.

Two of the outstanding incidents of these cruises of the Moewe were the fights put up by British merchant vessels. Clan Mac Tavish, a cargo steamer bound from Australia to England, put up a great struggle when she encountered the raider in January, 1916; the merchantman fought on with her single antisubmarine gun till she had lost seventeen men in the unequal encounter.

A similar encounter during the second cruise a year later had more serious results for Moewe; the cargo steamer Otaki, with her one 4.7 gun, fired nine rounds at the raider, killing five of the German crew and holing the Moewe in several places. Otaki lost four men, including the master, and was abandoned sinking.

A hideous episode was the sinking of the 10,000-ton Georgic with 1,200 horses aboard. Less gruesome but an odd coincidence was that a sailing vessel captured was named the Duchess of Cornwall, while the next vessel captured was the steamer King George. Duchess of Cornwall was, of course, an earlier title of Her Majesty Queen Mary.

Such were the cruises of the Moewe; and, deservedly, Count zu Dohna-Schlodien became a national hero.

The career of the raider Seeadler is described in the last chapter.

We come now to the cruise of probably the greatest raider of them all—the Wolf. Official figures credit her with sinking 135,000 tons of shipping, ranging from mail steamers to old windbags. Colonial and naval reactions to that record made the cruise of the Wolf far more significant than that of any other raider. She caused many cruisers to be diverted to protect the colonial troopship and merchant routes; she caused a commercial and insurance stampede when she appeared in seas thought to be free from enemy action; and she was of historical interest in being the first enemy vessel ever to enter Australian or New Zealand waters or to cause the loss of lives and ships in those waters.

The Wolf left Germany on November 30, 1916, and returned to Kiel on February 24, 1918. She was fifteen months at sea, and had steamed 64,000 miles.

Considered only as a cruise this voyage was unique in modern history; at the same time it was one of the most highly coloured affairs in naval records. From the time she slipped out into the Atlantic, she never entered a port till she returned to the Baltic (over a year later), leaking, battered, and with her emptied mine compartments crammed with prisoners. She had got along in the manner of the pirates of other days, depending for fuel and food on the vessels she captured and sank. She cruised in all the oceans of the world; inside the Arctic Circle in winter and for months in the tropics. She laid minefields off Capetown, Colombo, Bombay, Singapore, and the Australian and New Zealand coasts.

And the ship that did all this was a converted cargo steamer; a plain single-screw steamer named the Wachtfels built in 1913 for the Hansa Line of Bremen. Her tonnage was 5,809 tons, and her best speed eleven knots.

Picture the Wachtfels plodding around the seas with her peacetime cargoes. Nothing afloat could then have been imagined as less likely to become a famous cruiser—a notable ship in sea history. This unpromising tub was secretly docked toward the end of 1916. The work that followed transformed her into one of the most heavily armed auxiliary cruisers afloat. Outwardly she was still a plodding freight carrier, one of thousands of other inconspicuous cargo steamers; actually she was S.M.S. Wolf, armed with seven 5.9 guns, four torpedo tubes, and smaller armament galore.

All of this armament was well hidden or disguised; the gun mounted on the poop appeared to be an ordinary cargo derrick, even when seen at very close quarters, while the deck guns and tubes were hidden behind hinged steel sides arranged to drop outboard in a few seconds when the guns were needed.

Wolf owed much of her success to this perfect disguise. Seen at sea she appeared a most ordinary type of merchant ship. It was almost uncanny for those aboard the ships she captured to see what was apparently an ordinary steamer suddenly change into a cruiser swarming with men. The ship also was fitted with minelaying equipment, and over four hundred mines were placed aboard, together with a dismantled seaplane which could be put together when the raider had passed the blockade lines.

About four hundred men were drafted aboard the ship and notified that they were on special service. Of course no information was given concerning the ship or her proposed activities till they were actually on board.

Captain Karl August Nerger was placed in command; his chief officer was Kapitän-Leutnant Schmehl. Captain Nerger was a naval officer then holding the rank of Korvettenkapitän; and Leutnant Schmehl was a mercantile marine officer then holding naval reserve rank.

The big crew placed under Nerger’s command included skilled ratings of all branches of the service. As one example of the efficiency of the men and material carried, there was an occasion in the Pacific when the seaplane crashed and a complete new wing was made aboard the raider.

There were no ceremonious farewells for the Wolf as there had been in the case of the ill-fated Greif. The utmost secrecy was observed when the Wolf slipped away from Kiel. On this first attempt to get away one of the ship’s bunkers was found to be afire before the vessel was clear of German waters. It was necessary to return to port and flood the bunker before the fire could be extinguished. The raider put to sea again on