Von Reuter’s head hurt.
Not just from his wounds.
Yesterday had been the great test of his naval career and he had an awful, sinking feeling that he had failed – abjectly – his Kaiser, and the men on his ships.
Von Reuter had half-assumed, and if he was being honest with himself, hoped that the Achilles would use her speed and agility to attempt to escape the trap he had laid for her in the Windward Passage. Had the British cruiser’s first manoeuvre been to reverse course and run north at her best speed – probably at least thirty-two or three knots – and if he had not been able to hit her hard enough to slow her down in the first minutes of the action, after an hour, maybe two, he would have been obliged to call off the stern chase. The danger of coming upon a more powerful Royal Navy Squadron in these waters was far too great. Not least, because the Cuban and the Dominican Air Forces had ignored his increasingly urgent requests, and then pleas, for systematic aerial reconnaissance of their northern waters, particularly the approaches to the Windward Passage south of Great and Little Inagua Islands.
Pertinently, if he had been Admiral Lord Collingwood in Norfolk, Virginia – the closest thing the British had to a master strategist – surveying the map of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean, he too, might have viewed those two sparsely populated, otherwise half-forgotten islands as the keys to the first stages of the coming conflict.
Even the Dominicans had recognised as much!
That was how obvious it was…
However, in the event the Achilles had not run to the north; not even when that bloody scout plane stumbled upon the Karlsruhe task force guarding the southern reaches of the Passage.
Von Reuter had stationed the Karlsruhe – the only ship in his squadron equipped with the latest long-range centimetric air search and gunnery ELDARs – to the south in case Achilles somehow slipped past the Breitenfeld and the Lutzen and their three screening destroyers. However, far from ‘running away’, the Achilles had raced into action at top speed!
Then, when von Reuters heavy cruisers had emerged out of the ELDAR clutter of the mainland, Achilles had poured on the revolutions and brazenly, repeatedly crossed his ‘T’ – as he closed the range with only his ships forward main battery guns able to bear on their target – and for the first twenty minutes of the fight rained murderously accurate ELDAR-directed fire upon the Breitenfeld, the flagship, virtually ignoring the Lutzen in the interests of not confusing Achilles’s fire control, intent on doing the maximum possible damage to at least one of von Reuter’s big ships. A demonstration of such gunnery discipline, of such unwavering single-mindedness from an outnumbered, massively out-gunned adversity which had made no attempt to save herself despite being confronted by impossible odds, was a living testament to the unofficial motto of the Royal Navy.
No Captain can fail in his duty if by laying his ship alongside his foe he engages the enemy more closely…
In those minutes before his cruisers finally turned to the north to cut off the Achilles’s only route of escape, the Breitenfeld had taken nine direct hits and it seemed, been constantly bracketed by salvo after salvo. Although Achilles’s shooting had become erratic soon after both Breitenfeld and Lutzen had finally opened up their ‘A’ arcs to bring all sixteen of their eight-inch guns to bear, she had never at any time shifted her main battery fire from the flagship.
Von Reuter had been briefly knocked unconscious by a direct hit on the unarmoured compass bridge. He hated being cocooned in the conning tower, a Krupp-steel encased ‘sweat box’.
A second hit on the bridge while he was briefly hors de combat had disabled the flagship’s bridge telegraphs and the wheel-to-rudder linkages, so she had had to be conned thereafter from her auxiliary steering position deep beneath her quarterdeck.
Coming around a few minutes later von Reuter had discovered that Gravina had ordered the Lutzen and one of the destroyers, the Z59 type SMS Albrecht von Roon, to close with the by then crippled and burning British cruiser.
This blunder had had two immediate consequences.
Firstly, the Lutzen was no longer able to slave her main battery firing table solutions to those of the flagship, a doubly misguided decision because her fire control ELDAR had been damaged in a storm shortly before the squadron had transferred to the service of New Granada, and therefore had had to continue the engagement with her eight-inch rifles under local, turret control.
Secondly, this had brought the Lutzen, and the destroyer Albrecht von Roon, into range of the Achilles’s three-inch dual-purpose auto-cannons, seemingly undamaged at that stage of the battle.
Even as the range decreased the Lutzen’s gunnery had remained largely ineffective, despite being until then, undamaged. Shortly after she abandoned her station on the Breitenfeld’s port beam the cruiser had found herself steaming through salvoes of shells arriving every two-and-a-half to three seconds. True, her armour had kept the relatively small 3-inch calibre projectiles out of her vitals; but the men manning positions above her armoured main deck had been less fortunate. Like her sister ship, the Breitenfeld, the Lutzen’s hull and superstructure was pocked and here and there, fire-scorched.
Having sustained no casualties until she separated from the flagship, in the final phase of the battle, Lutzen had suffered nineteen dead and forty-four seriously wounded to add to the flagship’s thirty-one dead and sixty-eight badly wounded.
Whereas, Breitenfeld’s damage was par for the course; Lutzen’s injuries had been entirely avoidable. There were areas in both ships – unprotected bow or stern compartments, mess and equipment stores, workshops, boat decks, open anti-aircraft gun mounts above the main (armoured) deck level – which were so comprehensively wrecked that it might, given the capabilities of the facilities available to the fleet in the Caribbean, take up to two to three months in dockyard hands to put right all the damage.
Among the flagship’s catalogue of woe, a direct hit by a six-inch shell had destroyed the Breitenfeld’s seaplane catapult, and a three-inch round had – somehow – penetrated the two-inch armour plate of one of the Lutzen’s secondary battery four-inch twin turrets, killing everybody in it. Worse, early in the action a six-inch round had entered the Breitenfeld’s bow, and although it passed through without detonating, nevertheless caused the starboard anchor chain to run out and have to be explosively jettisoned, setting fire to the fo’c’sle paint store and allowing around three hundred tons of sea water to flood into the surrounding underwater compartments.
Breitenfeld’s clearance divers were still attempting to weld a patch over the hole two metres below the waterline on the starboard plating.
As for the unfortunate Albrecht von Roon…
The Achilles’s had ‘played dead’ until the destroyer was manoeuvring to launch torpedoes, then, at a range of significantly less than fifteen hundred metres, point blank range for the cruiser’s long three-inch rifles, she had opened up a withering fire on the unarmoured destroyer.