Photos Navies Of All Nations

In March 1915 the German cruiser Dresden steamed into the harbor of Robinson Crusoe Island, in the Juan Fernández archipelago, and cast anchor. The islands, lying in the Pacific some four hundred miles west of the South American mainland, belong to Chile, which was neutral in the world war that had broken out in Europe.

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The Dresden had taken part in two reverberating naval battles. It was on the winning side at Coronel, off the Chilean coast, in November 1914, when Admiral Maximilian von Spee and the German Pacific squadron sank two British cruisers, and on the losing side a month later when a vengeful British fleet caught up with Spee at the Battle of the Falklands and sent him and most of his ships to the bottom of the sea. The Dresden had escaped and was being hunted by the Royal Navy. It was running out of fuel and sending desperate radio appeals for coal when its captain, Fritz von Lüdecke, decided to seek sanctuary in a neutral port, even at the risk of being interned. But the radio signals were picked up by the British. At 8:40 on the morning of March 14, a Royal Navy squadron entered the harbor and opened fire on the ship.

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Von Lüdecke tried to negotiate. He sent over to HMS Glasgow a young lieutenant, Wilhelm Canaris. (Years later Admiral Canaris would become head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence, and finally a leading conspirator against Adolf Hitler, who hanged him in 1945.) Canaris met a British naval officer who merely said that “his orders were to sink Dresden, and leave the rest to the diplomats.” The British squadron resumed fire at point-blank range. Von Lüdecke ordered the crew to abandon ship, and at 10:45 a scuttling charge exploded in the Dresden’s bow. Another went off in the engine room as it sank. From the shore, the surviving German seamen cheered.

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What exactly had happened, however, became a matter of ugly dispute. The British version was that the cruiser “put up a half-hearted fight” for five minutes or so and then ran up a white flag of surrender before being sunk by its crew. But London’s initial accusations that the Dresden was plotting to violate Chilean neutrality by using the island as a base for attacking British shipping soon went rather quiet; on reflection, bursting into the harbor and firing without asking Chile’s permission didn’t show much respect for neutrality either. The British apologized to the Chilean government but said that the action had taken place twelve miles out to sea, not in port. The Times of London professed to believe this. The New York Times, by contrast, reported that the Dresden had been anchored close offshore all through the engagement, with British shells hitting other ships in the anchorage and killing a civilian woman and child. A later, equally unconvincing British version of what happened claimed that the three Royal Navy warships had never entered the harbor but had bombarded the anchorage from the open sea.

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Nearly a century later, in 2002, a Canadian-Chilean team went out to Juan Fernández to research the wreck of the Dresden. With them traveled Delgado. It’s fair to say that—along with Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck—Delgado is one of the most experienced and best-known underwater archaeologists in the world. About the Dresden he writes:

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"What we found, at 70 meters, was that the German accounts seemed right. Indeed, while the victors write the history, in this case they did so to gloss over their violation of the law, and unfairly maligned their opponents."

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Examination of the wreckage on the seafloor showed clearly that the Dresden had been riddled with shells fired at extremely close range; its attackers had even sailed slowly around the cruiser—already abandoned by its crew—firing into it as it burned.

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There was one final discovery. Delgado and his comrades found that part of the stern had been blown off, which no one had recorded at the time. It emerged that a few months before the sinking, Admiral von Spee had gone to the old German treaty port of Tsingtao, in China, and removed a large stock of gold coins held in the banks there. The gold had then been transferred to the Dresden and stored in the captain’s quarters in the stern, with the intention of bringing it back to Germany. Years passed, the war ended, and in Germany Hitler came to power. The new regime made contact with the enthusiastic Nazi element in Chile’s German community, and at some point in the 1930s a discreet Chilean-German team dived down to the Dresden wreck and blew open the captain’s quarters. There the trail apparently breaks off, but it leads plainly toward the Reichsbank in Berlin.

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