ARUBA AND THE GRAF SPEE

BY: BILL MOYER
Dan Jensen recently bought a scrapbook on EBay full of wonderful old photographs of Aruba. From labels on the back of photos he and Stan Norcom put on Dan’s Lago-Colony website, I would guess it was the album of Jean and Arthur Drummond, who lived in Bungalow #278 from roughly 1938 through 1944. There are many pictures of Cameron Highlanders, classic Aruba scenes of divi-divi trees, huge rocks, surf and natives, plus several of ships that bring back special memories for me: three German freighters anchored off Palm Beach (one of them almost certainly the “Antilla”, whose wreck is still there!), HMS Ajax, and the U.S. Vincennes. They recall the years of WW-II on the island.
I was born in Aruba in 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression. Growing up there, I had no clue a Depression existed. All adult families I knew had steady jobs, and I don’t recall my parents ever speaking about economic matters. Every two years, Dad got a three month “home leave” vacation, during which we went by tanker to New York City and drove to Missouri. Things seemed normal there, too, from my small child perspective. However, as the decade went on, I became aware of other problems in the world, especially warfare, which was more and more noticeable in adult conversations, our local newspaper (the Pan Aruban) and, eventually, when I was old enough to go to movies, to “The March of Time” newsreels. I vaguely remember seeing posters in N.Y. about Charlie Chaplin’s parody, “The Great Dictator”.
Later, looking back on the decade, I learned the Depression Years were also years of military struggle. Japan marched its army into Manchuria in 1931, and into China proper in 1937. Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 and began a long campaign to make overseas conquests, attacking Abyssinia in 1935. Hitler came into power in Germany in 1933, and after a few smaller acquisitions, added his native country, Austria, to Germany in 1938. The next year, he marched into Poland with 62 divisions, causing France and Britain to declare war on Germany on 3 September 1939. After taking Poland, Hitler swung west and marched into Holland, Belgium, and France in early 1940. The attack of 22 German divisions into Holland came from 10 to 17 May, 1940. Queen Juliana fled to England. From a practical point of view, ‘Aruba, as a Dutch island, was on the fringe of what became WW-II as of May 10, 1940, and in some respects even earlier when Britain declared war in 1939 (Shell Oil, with its refinery on the western end of the island, was half Dutch, half British.) In September, 1940, Mussolini sent troops from Libya east into Egypt. Britain would have had a vastly increased need for diesel fuel for tanks to defend the Suez Canal, and for aviation gasoline for fighter defense of its homeland, which Aruba could supply.
I’ve read that the German Navy, when given some idea of Hitler’s plans for conquest, told him they could be ready by 1943. Many ships would have to be built, and crews trained. Hitler didn’t wait. He ordered all submarines into action and all surface vessels, though the surface fleet in 1939 was far inferior to those of Great Britain, the United States, Japan, and even France and Italy. In the Versailles Treaty at the end of WW-I, Germany had been restricted in its ability to rearm itself, with limits on the size ships it could build. Battleships were forbidden. (So were fighters and bombers, but the Nazi party trained pilots on gliders in the mid-1930’s and then began to build warplanes in secret factories.) When I worked at U.S. Trust in N.Y., one of our clients was Eddie Rickenbacker, WW-I ace and founder of Eastern Airlines. He told a group of us once that he visited Germany in the 1930’s, was entertained royally by his fellow air ace, gregarious Hermann Goering, who even took “Captain Eddie” on a tour of secret underground factories where warplanes were being built.
The German Navy, however, was much more restricted (until 1939 when Hitler decided to ignore the Versailles Treaty altogether because he was already at war.) After all, you can’t hide a naval yard with hulls of huge warships under construction. Instead of battleships, the best it could do in the 1930’s was build heavy cruisers with moden engines and bigger guns than would have been customary. The German Navy called them “Panzerschiffe”. Britain referred to them as “pocket battleships.” Hitler never had enough large ships to confront the British navy directly, so the Reich marine decided to send them into the open sea individually, as free-ranging raiders. Graf Spee, launched in 1934 and named for a famous German admiral, set out from Wilhelmshaven 21 August 1939 with orders to intercept British shipping in the South Atlantic if Britain were to interfere with Germany’s march into Poland or otherwise commence hostilities (as Britain did in early September.) Graf Spee was to be refueled and re-supplied by an occasional secret rendezvous with a tanker called “Aitmark.”
Tommy Tucker wrote me that crews of the British cruisers Ajax and Achilles were in Aruba for fuel in 1939, and their crews were challenged to a cricket match or other ball game at Lone Palm Stadium by members of the Marine Club. As the game was going on, however, a car sped to the ball field and a messenger got out calling for the crews to return to their ships. They soon pulled out of the harbor and people in Lago Colony later heard that the British ships had been alerted because Graf Spee might be in the area. We now know, from the scrapbook Dan Jensen obtained, that “Ajax” was in Aruba June 17/18 of 1939. If British intelligence had word about Graf Spec’s intentions two months before Graf Spee headed south, the story may be true except that the ball game most likely involved only the crew of Ajax and not Achilles. I was only five years old at the time, but remember my Dad saying something about Graf Spee and being very interested in its whereabouts.
We now know that Graf Spee had a successful run in late 1939 into the South Atlantic and, briefly, around the tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean, sinking a total of nine British merchant ships. Captain Langsdorf, a naval officer from the Old School, fired warning shots to stop each vessel and ordered their crews to abandon ship before he sank each one. Incredibly, in nine sinkings, there was no loss of life. Langsdorf either kept the British crews as prisoners on Graf Spee, or, when possible, he transferred them to Altmark. Then came what has been called “The Battle of the River Plate”, somewhat miss-named because it actually occurred far out at sea until Graf Spee retreated into the neutral waters of the Rio de Ia Plata estuary which separates Uruguay from Argentina. Graf Spee, with six - 11 inch guns (maximum range 3 0,000 yards) and a top speed of 26 knots, encountered three British cruisers: Exeter, a heavy cruiser with six - 8” guns (maximum range 27,000 yards) and 31 knots top speed, and the light cruisers Ajax and Achilles, each carrying eight - 6” guns (maximum range 25,000 yards) and with top speeds of 32.5 knots.
Langsdorfs orders were to avoid combat with major British naval units, but he supposed at first the warships must be escorting merchant vessels, forged ahead, and opened fire. He allowed the British ships to get too close, however. His gunnery smashed Exeter, but not before Exeter was able to land an 8” shell in the forward part of Graf Spee which opened a huge hole in the deck and knocked Captain Langsdorf unconscious. Altogether, the British ships scored 17 hits on Graf Spee, killing 37 men and wounding 57 others (out of a crew of 1,100.) Langsdorf gained consciousness and turned his ship around, managing to dodge a span of three torpedoes, then headed west at Full Speed Ahead. He couldn’t match the British cruisers’ speed, and could only keep them at bay by lobbing an occasional salvo back at them, scoring a few more hits. Exeter was in bad shape but kept in formation to divert fire from the smaller cruisers. Word came on the radio that another cruiser, the Devonshire, was coming to help. Devonshire was larger than Exeter, with eight - 8” guns, but just as fast.
Langsdorf thought his ship needed repairs, that even if it managed somehow to elude or outfight the pursuing British ships (which seemed unlikely) it would not be able to travel north of Britain in winter seas to get back to Germany. He headed for the Rio de la Plata estuary, and got as close to Montevideo, Uruguay, as its authorities would allow him to come. He was able to get his wounded men ashore for medical treatment, and his British prisoners to safety. At least he was in “neutral” waters where he might refuel and get repairs done. British diplomats ashore, however, were far too clever to allow this to happen. They distracted the Uruguay authorities with legal arguments while at the same time circulating rumors to newspaper reporters that more British ships were on the way. Finally, Langsdorf and a skeleton crew took Graf Spee out to the three mile limit, scuttled the ship, and returned to shore by launches. Then Langsdorf shot himself with his service pistol, in his hotel room.
So, in a way, the story of Graf Spec is also a story about Aruba’s first exposure to WW-II. At least one of the three British cruisers involved in the pursuit and defeat of Graf Spee was refueled with Lago oil. Remember, this all took place late in 1939, even before Holland was overrun by Germany in May of 1940 and long before the U.S. became “officially” at war after Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Operation “Paukenschlag” (“Kettledrumbeat”), an assault by U-boats along the U. S. east coast, occurred in January, 1942, and the U-I56’s attack on Aruba (part of “Operation Neuland”) came February 16, 1942. Wake Island and Guam fell to the Japanese in Dec. 1941, as did Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands in mid-1942. The Battle of Midway, usually considered the turning point of the War in the Pacific because it cost the Japanese four aircraft carriers and hundreds of their best trained pilots, was in May, 1942.
You may be interested to know that Aitmark managed to get back to Europe, to neutral Norwegian waters, where it was captured by the British “the old-fashioned way”, by assault by a boarding party! The 299 prisoners that had been kept aboard Aitmark after their ships were sunk by Graf Spec, were then released.
by: Bill Moyer, Dallas, 2006
An aside by Dan Jensen
In the summer of 1959 I went to Brazil as an exchange student.  I was in Rio for a month and the company that organized the exchange program put me up in a medium class hotel while I was in Rio.
The maitre d' in the hotel's restaurant was German and one day when there was not much business in the restaurant, I got to talking to him.  I asked how he got to brazil.
He told me he had been the purser on the Graf Spee and when she was scuttled he was ashore in Uruguay.  He made his way to brazil and had been working at the hotel ever since.