This is a new interpretation of the naval Battle of the River Plate that took place in December 1939. This battle was fought between a German “pocket battleship”, the Admiral Graf Spee, and three Royal Navy cruisers. It was the first significant surface naval battle of WWII. The British won, and that victory was important boost for British diplomacy in South America and for British morale during the “phony war” in France.

As told in this book, the battle, the events leading up to it, and the events following it are sharply at variance with the “standard” story. For example, the book contains many facts which disagree with the story of the battle told in “Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War”, 1991, by Correlli Barnett, which I use as my own standard source for general information about the Royal Navy during WWII. The Price of Disobedience should be of a fun read for anyone interested in WWII naval history and post WWI surface naval warfare developments and ship design.

The book starts with the design of the “pocket battleship” class of warships by the German Navy during the late 1920s. Given existing German confusion over possible roles for this class of ships, and the wide range of opinions about the capabilities of potential enemy ships, the reader – or at least this reader - is left feeling sorry for the poor naval architects who had to return to their drawing boards time after time before a design appeared that was acceptable to the Germany Navy and the German government. That design was for a ship that could fight off French naval attacks on German commerce in the Baltic and the North Sea. It was assumed at the time that the British would not be an enemy in the expected “next war”, and commerce raiding was not an original design criteria.

At one extreme, pocket battleships were a great success. By using welding and light metals German naval architects were able to minimize displacement, as required by the Treaty of Versailles, while producing armored warships with very large 11-inch guns on a nominally 10,000 ton ship, with diesel engines that provided great range. Naturally, being German warships they had excellent optical range finders and great gunnery control.

Unfortunately, at least for the German Navy and for the crew of the Graf Spee, pocket battleships over sacrificed armor protection in order to carry large guns on a relatively small hull, their main guns were relatively slow firing, their twin 3-gun main turrets lacked something in reliability, and their secondary armament lacked full armor protection for their crews.

Most unfortunately, it turned out that the Graf Spee could not, as sometimes advertised, outrun any warship that might outgun her, or completely dominate with gunfire any cruiser with smaller guns. She, along with other ships in her class, was particularly hampered because she could not able to divide the fire of her main armament, a potentially serious weakness if she ever encountered multiple enemies in a single battle. Most of these weaknesses were revealed to me for the first time in The Price of Disobedience.

Encountering multiple enemies was exactly what happened to the Graf Spee in the Battle of the River Plate off the coast of South America on the morning of the 13th of December 1939. In the busy shipping lanes from Argentina to Europe, she ran into a waiting British Empire force of three cruisers, the 10,00 ton heavy cruiser HMS Exeter with six 8-inch guns in twin turrets, and the 7,000 ton light cruisers HNZS Ajax and HMS Achilles, each with eight 6-inch guns in twin turrets. (These last two ships were Leander class light cruisers, sister ships to HMAS Sydney, whose last battle I wrote about in a previous e-pinions’ review.)

The very fact that this encounter happened at all is where the full scope of the revisionism of the book is revealed, as is the meaning of the book’s title. The German commander of the Graf Spee, Captain Han Langsdorff, had specific and detailed orders not to seek combat action, “even against inferior naval forces” (page 19). Yet, after almost 3 months at sea, with little success at commerce raiding, and needing to return to Germany for refit and supplies, he decided completely on his own to take on any apparently inferior enemy naval force he might encounter while searching for enemy merchant ships. As the book’s author states, “Langsdorff had fallen for the ‘pocket battleship’ myth by grossly overestimating the capacity of his ship, both to damage opponents quickly and effectively and to take damage without compromising seaworthiness” (page 39).

So, as he approached the South American coast, Langsdorff was ready for a fight. There is no evidence that he thought he had encountered only one British light cruiser in company with two British destroyers, which might well have been an easy enemy to defeat, and is the reason given in previous descriptions of this battle for his decision to engage instead of avoid. (By Barnett, and by Churchill in “The Coming Fury”.) The decision to fight was entirely Langsdorff’s, because Graf Spee sighted the British ships well before they sighted the Graf Spee. According to standing orders he should have run, instead he advanced directly towards the British ships, inviting close combat.

Unluckily for Langsdorff, the British ships, three of the four that made up raider hunting group G, were under the command of Commodore Henry Harwood, one of the leading pre-war British naval theorist on tactics to deal with pocket battleships! Quoting from the book, “Had he but known, by taking on Exeter, Hans Langsdorff was facing the Royal Navy’s leading expert on the precise tactical doctrine to deal with his ship; and on the regional political circumstances which were later to arise” (page 55). Harwood had given so much thought to defeating German surface raiders and the circumstances of his own command that he had predicted the Graf Spee’s arrival off the River Plate estuary based on reports transmitted by British ships she had sunk, and had deliberately concentrated three of his four available cruisers in just the right location to intercept her on the morning of the 13th.

The account of the naval battle itself is very well written and adds important new information to the story of the Graf Spee. Three things I had not realized were that Harwood’s ships were close to evenly matched against Graf Spee in terms of total firepower and the armor protection for their ammunition spaces; Graf Spee’s fore turret suffered several malfunctions during the action; and the fire of the relatively small 6-inch guns of the Ajax and Achilles had great impact due to the exposed positions of the gun crews of Graf Spee’s secondary armament and the ability of those 6-inch shells to damage critical equipment outside the pocket battleship’s main armor belt. In fact, it was the fire from Ajax and Achilles that inflicted the most damage on the Graf Spee during the battle.

What story of happened after the battle is possibly the most interesting part of The Price of Disobedience. The Graf Spee finally turned away from her enemies, unable to finish off the seriously damaged Exeter, low on ammunition, and in need of serious repair work, shadowed by Ajax and Achilles. Langsdorff found her temporary refuge in the harbor of Montedevio, in neutral Uruguay. Unfortunately, Harwood had been there before him! From 1936 on Harwood had been Commodore commanding the South American Division of the Royal Navy. During that tour, he made lasting friendships with military officers and government officials from Uruguay and Argentina which were to prove very helpful in the negotiations that took place after the Graf Spee arrived in Montevideo.

I will not bother to go deeply into the tangled web of negotiations including appeals to Hague Convention of 1907 by both the British and the Germans, the spreading of disinformation by both sides, and outright spying that went on between the Graf Spee’s arrival at Montevideo and her final destruction. However, this section takes up a major part of the book and is fun reading for those not particularly interested in the weight of an 11-inch armor piercing shell. At one point the Uruguayan Foreign minister had to usher the British ambassador out a side door so that he would not have to meet face-to-face with the German ambassador who was waiting outside the front door for the next scheduled meeting! (Page 106.)

Meanwhile, so many small boats, either rented by German or British diplomats or owned by German or British controlled businesses, were continually sailing back and forth across Montevideo harbor trying to bring secret aid to the Graf Spee or to spy on her, that is surprising that they didn’t run into each other.

Two final points. First, the final outcome for both the Admiral Graf Spee and her captain Langsdorff were not good. Read the book if you don’t already know exactly what happened to the Graf Spee. As for Langsdorff, he committed suicide in Argentina shortly after the loss of his ship. In a final bit of revisionism, the author of The Price of Disobedience reveals that contrary to the standard story, he died a good Nazi, and his body was definitely not found lying next to the flag of the German Imperial Navy.

Second, I was left with one nagging question at the end of the book: What would have happened militarily and diplomatically if the British had sailed into Montevideo harbor to finish off the Graf Spee and prevent the remote possibility of her escaping? Given that such an action would have, at least in the short term, royally angered Americans, both south and north, this option apparently was never considered. And this book isn’t a book in counterfactual history. Still, given the aggressive tendencies of the Royal Navy during World War II, and the aggressive nature of the First Lord of the Admiralty of the time, Sir Winston Churchill, it’s a might-have-been I find myself pondering.


Recommended: Yes