Wolf returns home

On 24 February 1918 the German auxiliary cruiser Wolf, commanded by Fregattenkapitän Karl August Nerger, entered Kiel. Since she had sailed from that port on 30 November 1916, 451 days had passed. According to German studies it was the longest cruise by a warship during this war, made without calling at ports and without any outside support. British studies give earlier dates: the official history of the war at sea says the raider reached Germany on 19 February, and the official history of seaborne trade that she entered Kiel as early as 17 February. The date of 24 February, the day she entered her home port, is given consistently by German and more recent studies. On board Wolf had 467 prisoners, seamen and passengers from captured ships, and in her holds rubber, copper, zinc, brass, silk, copra, cocoa and other raw materials that Germany lacked because of the blockade.

The way home

The last months of the cruise were the hardest. After laying mines off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, Wolf captured the Australian steamer Matunga in the summer of 1917, and in September the Japanese passenger ship Hitachi Maru. In the Indian Ocean, near the Cargados Carajos islets, on 10 November she stopped the Spanish collier Igotz Mendi, carrying coal to Colombo. The coal allowed her to return to Europe, and the Spanish ship, with some of the prisoners, including women and children, sailed on with her as a prize with a German crew. In the Atlantic Nerger wanted to transfer coal off the island of Trindade, which he believed to be uninhabited. An intercepted signal from the Brazilian admiralty to the garrison there warned him in time, however, and for five days the two ships laboriously transferred coal on the open ocean, in a heavy swell.

Then they headed far north to go round the British Isles. In the gales, according to the British official history, Wolf came close to sinking. The ships finally parted on the evening of 6 February, and a few days later Igotz Mendi was scraping past icebergs. This time the British did not bar their way: the cruisers that had guarded the waters between Scotland, Iceland and Norway had been withdrawn in December 1917. Wolf reached German waters unhindered. Igotz Mendi was less fortunate. On 24 February itself, at the entrance to the Kattegat, she ran aground south of Skagen, at the northern tip of Denmark. The Danes took the prisoners ashore in lifeboats and they regained their freedom, while the German prize crew was interned. One of those freed, the Briton Frederic George Trayes, later wrote that they had been saved “at the eleventh hour”, because the next day the ship was to have been in Kiel.

The balance of the cruise

Nerger, awarded the Pour le Mérite that same day, became a hero in Germany. In Berlin he marched through the streets at the head of his crew, and the military film unit, the Bild- und Filmamt, shot a film in Kiel about the raider’s return, which also showed the prisoners. According to the most frequently cited tallies, Wolf captured and sank 14 ships totalling about 38,000 gross register tons, and another 13, of about 76,000 tons, were sunk on her mines. The most tragic was the loss of the Spanish mail steamer Carlos de Eizaguirre, which in 1917 struck a mine off Cape Town and sank within minutes. 134 people died, including women and children. A higher figure, about 35 merchant ships and two warships, appears in some studies, but it also includes damaged and smaller vessels.

The British official history judged the German raiders’ cruises soberly. It acknowledged that their captains had shown energy, ingenuity and humane treatment of prisoners, and that the hunt for them had occupied many warships. It pointed out, however, that the longer the raiders stayed at sea, the fewer ships they sank, and that for the enormous British merchant fleet these were insignificant losses. Nor did they cause panic in the ports or interruptions to shipping, and that was supposed to be their main aim. After Wolf the Germans sent no more surface raiders onto the oceans. Wolf herself served in the Baltic until the end of the war, then was allotted to France and sailed as Antinous in the colours of the Messageries Maritimes company.