Möwe returns from her second cruise

On 22 March 1917 the German auxiliary cruiser Möwe entered Kiel. She thus ended her second cruise into the Atlantic, on which she had set out in November 1916. In four months she had sunk or captured 25 ships, according to the most commonly cited lists. The British official history of seaborne trade puts their total tonnage at about 122,000 tons, of which 112,000 tons were British ships. The author of that history, Charles Ernest Fayle, observed that this was a better result than that of the cruisers Emden and Karlsruhe at the beginning of the war. Her commander, Korvettenkapitän Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien, returned home as a hero for the second time.

Escape from the Edinburgh Castle

According to the British official history of the war at sea, in mid-February Möwe was operating on the route used by shipping from the River Plate, several hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. On 14 February she scuttled her auxiliary Geier, converted from one of her prizes, and over the next two days sank three British steamers. On the morning of 16 February she came upon the British auxiliary cruiser Edinburgh Castle, which had just stopped beside two colliers to hand them fresh provisions. Dohna took the sight for a trap and immediately fled at full speed. The Edinburgh Castle, with a fouled hull and worn engines, chased her for several hours but gave up in the afternoon. The British lost sight of the raider and for the next month had no news of her.

The British official history writes that after this encounter Dohna, whose supplies were running out, headed north for home. He kept to the middle of the Atlantic and on the way sank six more British steamers. According to Dohna’s own account, he finally decided to return only in mid-March, when there were already about 800 people on board, including prisoners.

The duel with the Otaki

Möwe fought her hardest action on 10 March, east of the Azores. That day she stopped and sank the British steamer Esmeraldas, and soon afterwards sighted the refrigerated ship Otaki of the New Zealand Shipping Company, sailing from London to New York. The Otaki, like many British merchant ships at that time, carried on her stern a single 120 mm gun for defence against submarines, with a naval crew. Her master, the Scot Archibald Bisset Smith, refused to stop and answered the warning shots with fire. In a duel lasting about 20 minutes the Otaki’s gunners hit the raider several times. According to German and British accounts five men were killed on board Möwe and ten wounded. A fire broke out in the coal bunkers, which according to some accounts took two days to put out, and water poured into the hull through the shell holes.

The raider’s 150 mm guns, however, shot the Otaki to pieces. The ship caught fire, capsized and sank. Six of her crew were killed, including the master, who went down with his ship. The Germans picked up the rest and took them prisoner. Dohna later called the fight a duel as gallant as any that naval history could record. The British learnt its details only after the war. In 1919 Bisset Smith was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, according to British accounts as one of only two merchant seamen to receive it for deeds in this war. Since civilians could not receive it, he was posthumously commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve.

According to Fayle, as many as ten of the ships taken by Möwe on her second cruise were armed for defence. A gun that was often enough to drive off a submarine was, however, of little value against so formidable an opponent. On 14 March the steamer Governor, the raider’s last victim, also tried to defend herself. According to German accounts four British seamen were killed on board before the Germans sank her with a torpedo.

Through the blockade for the fourth time

The British did not know where Möwe was. Admiral Sheppard, who commanded the cruisers in the central Atlantic, set out from Sierra Leone to search for her only on 9 March, and when on 12 March he began sweeping the sea towards Ascension Island, the raider was already off Lisbon. Luck was with her too when she passed through the blockade. The British cruisers that in mid-March had been waiting off the coast of Norway for an expected German raider returned to base on 14 March, and the patrol was not resumed. According to the British official history Möwe passed through those waters on 20 or 21 March. A few days earlier, north of the Shetlands, British warships had sunk the raider Leopard, converted from the freighter Yarrowdale, which Möwe had captured in December and sent back to Germany. Leopard was to have replaced her in the Atlantic.

The raider and her crew were welcomed in Germany with even greater enthusiasm than a year earlier, after her first cruise. Dohna’s book about the second cruise came out in 1917 and, according to German accounts, reached a print run of about 250,000 copies, and a propaganda film about Möwe’s voyages became one of the most popular German war films. Möwe herself never put out to the ocean again. She was considered too valuable a symbol to be risked a third time, and served in the Baltic until the end of the war. On the same day that Möwe returned to Kiel, the British learnt from the crew of a neutral ship that another German raider, the sailing ship Seeadler, was operating on the South American routes.