Wolf sets out on her cruise

On 30 November 1916 the German auxiliary cruiser Wolf sailed from Kiel on her cruise, the second of three raiders that the Kaiserliche Marine sent out onto the distant trade routes that winter. This date is given by German studies and most recent publications. The British official history of the war at sea says only that she sailed at the end of November, about a week after the auxiliary cruiser Möwe, and the British chronology of the war places her departure under 1 December, with the proviso that the date is approximate.

Wolf was the converted freighter Wachtfels, built in 1913 at Flensburg for the Bremen shipowner DDG “Hansa”. She was commanded by Fregattenkapitän Karl August Nerger. From outside the ship looked like an ordinary, slow merchant steamer, making at most about 11 knots. Behind drop-down sides, however, she concealed 150 mm guns, lighter guns and torpedo tubes, and in her holds several hundred naval mines: 500 according to the British official history, more than 450 according to other sources. She also carried a collapsible reconnaissance seaplane, a Friedrichshafen FF.33, which the crew called Wölfchen (Little Wolf). The crew numbered about 350 men. Huge coal bunkers allowed her to stay at sea for months without calling at a port, and the raider was to take the rest of her supplies from captured ships.

Her orders were to “disrupt enemy shipping on the distant seas, especially in the Indian Ocean”. Wolf was not only a raider but also a minelayer: she was to mine the approaches to ports through which troops and goods flowed from India, Australia and South Africa. According to the British official history, Nerger took the ship very far north to avoid the cruiser patrols. According to German studies, she sailed along the coast of Norway and rounded Iceland to the north, through the Denmark Strait. In the critical days gales and snowstorms raged, so violent that, as the British official history writes, it was only around 10 December that the raider reached the open Atlantic, beyond the reach of the British patrols. She then sailed south through mid-ocean, away from the frequented routes, so that no one would see her. For several weeks the British did not know she had put to sea.

Wolf’s cruise proved, according to German studies, the longest voyage by a warship without any outside support during this war. The raider laid mines off South Africa, off Colombo and Bombay, and then off Australia and New Zealand. She sank or captured more than a dozen ships, and according to the most commonly cited tallies a further dozen or more sank on her mines. For more than a year the Allies were unable to find her. She returned to Kiel in February 1918, after 451 days at sea, with several hundred prisoners on board and a cargo of raw materials taken from her victims. Among her sailors was a young stoker, Theodor Plievier, later a writer, who described the cruise in the novel Des Kaisers Kulis (“The Kaiser’s Coolies”).