Great Britain and Germany: Order of Battle, Coronel, November 1, 1914
v.1.0 September 11, 2002
[The first time I saw the name Coronel was as a school student, in Winston Churchill’s history of the Great War. Several decades passed before I remembered to look up this battle, and was surprised to learn how small it was. We sometimes forget that famous battles are not necessarily about large number of people or ships or aircraft engaged in giant life-or-death struggles to make history. Of course, for the men engaged off Coronel on that November 1st nearly a century ago, it was very much a life-or-death affair. To those who lived, and to the families of those who died, Coronel would have had as much import as any of the titanic Pacific naval battles in the latter part of the Second World War would have had for their participants four decades later.]
Sources
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Marina/8163/Coronel.htm
http://www.donbarrett.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/war/coronel.htm
http://www.warships1.com/W-OOB/OOB_WWI/OOB_WWI_Coronel.htm
Coronel, as Don Barrett explains, was the first defeat suffered by the Royal Navy in a hundred years, since the time of Napoleon. Much of the reason was that the Good Hope and Monmouth [County class cruisers] were manned mostly by reservists, while the German armored cruisers and their crews were the “pride of the German fleet.” Whereas the Royal Navy lost 1600 killed, the German Navy suffered three wounded.
The Royal Navy avenged its losses on December 2, 1914, when it caught the German squadron off the Faklands and sank the entire squadron except for the Leipzig. The Gneisenau was lost with all hands, only 200 survived the loss of the Scharnhorst. Before they abandoned ship, however, those men lined up on deck and praised the Kaiser. Different times, different men – its impossible to imagine something similar could happen today.
Great Britain
West Indies Squadron, Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher CradockGermany
East Asiatic Squadron, Vice-Admiral Graf von Spee
