A curious tragedy. Hitler commissioned a pocket battleship, the Graf Spee, light on armor but fast and heavily armed, for the purpose of raiding British merchant ships early in the war. I called it a "tragedy," because although all wars are tragedies, this particular engagement pitted two good captains against one another and both did what they had to do. One departed the field victorious and went home to a hero's welcome. The other lost his standing in the navy, his ship, and ultimately his life. The hero was the British commander of the cruiser Achilles, Henry Harwood, who, accompanied by two other dashingly white British light cruisers, inflicted sufficient damage on the Graf Spee to force her into a neutral port and bluffed Captain Hans Langsdorff into scuttling his ship and committing suicide.
The greatest irony is that while both men were "good" -- disregarding the causes for which they fought -- Langsdorff was the more humanitarian of the two. He came from a family of Lutheran pastors and intended to join the church himself before deciding on the navy. He sank several British merchant ships, warning them first not to send any radio signals, then taking the crews prisoner before sinking the ship. He sank three without loss of life. If a merchant ship began sending a message anyway, Langsdorf fired across their bow and later congratulated the British captain for his bravery. He was easy with his men, well liked, and gentlemanly with his peers. His opponent, Harwood, can't be criticized but he was a demanding skipper, repeatedly calling drills at odd hours of the night.
Harwood intuited that the Graf Spee would show up at the mouth of the River Plate, in Uruguay, and met him there. Langsdorff was a willing combatant, though in engaging the Brits he was disobeying orders. He could have gotten away easily because of his superior speed but had felt insulted at having had to sink only unarmed merchant vessels. However, he believed the three enemy ships to be destroyers when in fact they were a heavy cruiser and two light cruisers. It was a mistake by Langsdorff. The Exeter received a dozen direct hits, rendered unfit, and was allowed to withdraw under a smoke screen. But Graf Spee had been damaged too, with 36 killed and more than 50 seriously wounded. Langsdorff decided she was in urgent need of repairs and pulled into the River Plate for Montevideo. The morning after docking, Langsdorf released 61 Brits who had been taken captive after their ships were sunk.
The first half of the story is about battle. The second half is about guile. Langsdorff estimated the repairs would take two weeks. Uruguay, a neutral country, gave him four days. Outside the port there were only two British cruisers, Achilles and Ajax. They might not be able to stop Graf Spee if she made a run for it, and they wanted time for reenforcements to join them. The Brits pulled every footnote out of international law to stall the Germans. The Brits knew their phones were tapped so they deliberately made a call to their ambassador indicating that two more British warships would soon be arriving. Rumors and hints convinced the Germans that a far superior naval force lay waiting for them outside the harbor -- aircraft carrier included.
Langsdorff was under great pressure. Berlin's only instructions were not to let the ship fall into enemy hands. Uruguay had not given him only 24 hours to leave. But if he left, it would be impossible for him to win a battle against all the capital ships he believed to be arrayed against him. And it wasn't just the loss of the ship that concerned him. In his last letter home, to his wife, he couldn't sentence his crew to death. He disembarked his crew and scuttled the Graf Spee at the mouth of the harbor. Then he saw his crew safely to Buenos Aires and shot himself.
He was buried with military honors in Buenos Aires, a funeral attended by representatives of Germany, Argentina, and Great Britain. It was a great media event, of course, the first major British sea victory of the war. The British were jubilant and some considered Langsdorff a coward for not going down with guns blazing. But more than a hundred men had already died. Many are buried in Buenos Aires and on the 60th anniversary of the battle, both Germans and British gathered for a commemoration.