German Raiders of the South Seas
Free Download German Raiders of the South Seas by Robin Bromby
English | August 24, 2012 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B009216P4S | 226 pages | EPUB | 4.35 Mb
German Raiders of the South Seas
FAR FROM THE MUD and slaughter of the Western Front, there was another face of the Great War – an oddly stirring and thrilling one, characterised by chivalry and remarkably few casualties. This is the story of how three German naval surface raiders disrupted British shipping across large swathes of the Indian and Pacific oceans between 1914 and 1917. Critical cargoes and much needed reinforcements for the trenches in France and Belgium were hamstrung by German daring on the high seas.
Were it not all real and true, it would make wonderful fiction: the buccaneering crew of the Emden casting a shadow of fear over an ocean; the survivors of the battle with the Sydney sailing a leaking copra schooner from the Cocos Islands to the East Indies, the captain of the Seeadler, von Luckner, sailing a small boat halfway across the Pacific to Fiji, and then later making a dramatic escape from a New Zealand prisoner of war camp.
In the first days of World War I a German light cruiser detached itself from the East Asiatic Squadron with the mission to raid and harass Allied shipping. The ship, SMS Emden, not only became world famous in its two months of raiding, during which it sank sixteen ships and captured others, but demonstrated the vulnerability of Australian, New Zealand and Empire shipping links.
The two Dominions were left with little naval protection as Britain gathered its ships to fight the Germans in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Then in 1916 came another raider, the Wolf, which, undetected and unmolested, laid mines around Australia and New Zealand, and preyed upon merchant ships sailing in the Tasman Sea and South Pacific. The following year the Germans made an abortive attempt to send a sailing ship to raid the South Seas, which ended when the Seeadler was wrecked on a small atoll.
German Raiders of the South Seas is the story of these raiders.
Were it not all real and true, it would make wonderful fiction: the buccaneering crew of the Emden casting a shadow of fear over an ocean; the survivors of the battle with the Sydney sailing a leaking copra schooner from the Cocos Islands to the East Indies, the Wolf sailing undetected in Allied waters for months, the captain of the Seeadler, von Luckner, sailing a small boat halfway across the Pacific to Fiji, and then later making a dramatic escape from a New Zealand prisoner of war camp.
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