Post by Dave Homewood on Mar 3, 2023 22:37:15 GMT 12
When War Came To Our Own Front Door
By G.R.C.
LACKING a Lowell Thomas to publicise him, a far greater sea-raider than the boisterous and egotistical Felix Count Luckner seems to have been languishing all these years in comparative obscurity. Yet with the single exception of Count Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien, captain of the famous Moewe, to caused more damage to Allied dipping during the Great War than any other surface raider; was the hero of some of the most incredible feats of those four years that were filled with incredible feats on land and sea and in the air; was one of the finest seamen who ever paced a bridge; was a strict disciplinarian, a man of high courage and indomitable will, humane, considerate of women and children, unwilling to cause suffering, yet ruthless in permitting nothing to jeopardise the successful accomplishment of his mission.
This man, who on a rainy winter's night just over 22 years ago brought the war to New Zealand's very doorstep was Captain Karl August Nerger, of the Imperial German Navy, commander of the raider Wolf — and while Aucklanders slept he was busy laying the mines that 13 months later destroyed the Winmera, between North Cape and the Three Kings, with the loss of some thirty lives. Two nights later he was laying off Cape Farewell, at the western entrance to Cook Strait, the minefield that sent to the bottom cargo steamer Port Kembla, in this case without loss of life.
Could be Done Again
The career of Captain Nerger and his ship — 13 months at sea. 64,000 miles steamed and 135,000 tons of Allied shipping destroyed — makes a story of adventure on the high seas that ranks with the greatest in fact and fiction; but there is more in it than that; at a time when Britain and many are again on the verge of a grim struggle for supremacy, the methods and achievements of Captain Nerger are worthy of close study in high places. What has been done once can be done again, and Germany has given plenty of evidence in her postwar navy that the lessons of 1914-18 have not been lost upon her.
The exploits of the Wolf have been described before, but in a book just published by Messrs. Angus and Robertson of 'Sydney, the story is told "from the inside," as it were, by one who was a prisoner on board for nine months — Mr. Roy Alexander, who was wireless operator of the steamer Wairuna when the Wolf captured her at Sunday Island in the Kermadecs.
The Wolf, a single-screw steamer of 5809 tons gross, was built in Germany in 1913, as the Wachtfels, and she was commissioned as an auxiliary cruiser in 1916, with a crew of about 400 men, an armament of seven 5.9 in. guns, a number of machine-guns and four torpedo tubes. With the exception of the gun on the poop deck, which was disguised as a derrick, all her armament was concealed behind hinged steel sides arranged to drop outboard when she went into action. She also carried when she left Germany 458 mines, as well as a seaplane, which proved invaluable on several occasions.
Secret Well Kept
The secret of the raider's fitting-out was so well kept that when she left Kiel on November 30, 1916, only her officers and a few high officials at the German Admiralty knew what her orders were, and her presence on the high seas was not known to the British Admiralty until over a year later, and then only because a bottle was found washed ashore in the East Indies, containing a message from one of the prisoners.
Nerger had been instructed to lay mine's off the most important of the British colonial ports and to do as much damage as possible to shipping. It was hardly expected that he would succeed in returning to Germany and, indeed, when the months passed without word of the Wolf, the German authorities, gave her up for lost. It was, however, because of her commander's care that no prisoner should escape to carry word of her, and because during the whole cruise she did not transmit a single wireless message, that her existence remained unknown to the enemy for so long.
Favoured with gales and thick weather in the North Sea, the Wolf evaded the British naval patrols, hugging the Norwegian coast, crossing the Arctic Circle and entering the North Atlantic by the strait between Greenland and Iceland. She made straight down the Atlantic without molesting shipping and swung in toward Capetown.
The first of the raider's many narrow escapes came on January 10, 1917, when she was making in toward the coast. A line of ships appeared ahead — a convoy of troopships leaving Capetown, with the British cruiser Berwick leading them. To turn away would have aroused suspicion, so Nerger, with iron nerve and implicit faith in his disguise as an ordinary tramp steamer, steamed straight past the cruiser and the line of transports. That same night he laid a minefield off Capetown and another off Cape Agulhas.
Laying Mines at Night
Colombo was the raider's next minelaying objective — a difficult one, for in order to lay a field successfully off the port, on account of the depth of water, she had to approach very close and well within range of the shore searchlights. Nerger chose a dark, moonless night — February 15 — and steamed in to within about seven miles of the breakwater to begin the work. The field was partly laid, and mines were still going over the stern, when the rays of two searchlights shot out and converged on the minelayer. For a full minute the Wolf was held in the glare, and then the lights moved on — the minelayer had not been sighted.
A moment's carelessness on the part of the watchers ashore had saved the Wolf. She finished her work, laying 39 mines, and two nights later the Bibby liner Worcestershire was blown up there and sank. Within the week the Blue Funnel liner Perseus shared her fate.
From Colombo the raider steamed north up the west coast of India and laid a minefield off Bombay which destroyed three big ships in as many weeks. Then she captured the oil tanker Turritella, fitted her out as an auxiliary minelayer, and sent her with a German prize crew aboard to mine Aden. However, after the mines had been laid the new minelayer — which Nerger had renamed litis — was challenged by a British cruiser and, seeing the game was up, the German officer in command, Kapitan-Leutnant Brandes, gave orders to abandon ship, opened the seacocks and sank her.
Cruisers in Pursuit
From the Chinese crew of the tanker the British naval authorities learned of the presence in the Indian Ocean of a German raider, and although the Chinese were unable to give her name or a good description of her—Brandes and his men naturally kept their mouths shut—all available cruisers were sent out after her. But Captain Nerger, whose wireless operators sat day and night with their earphones glued to their ears, learned at once from an intercepted message that he was a hunted man. Reasoning rightly that the track to Australia would be the last to be searched he made for the Pacific while the British and Japanese cruisers watched the ports of the East Indies and searched the Indian Ocean for months.
Finally, assuming that the unknown raider must have been blown up at sea by an explosion among her mines, or lost through some other cause, they gave it up. The Wolf, capturing and sinking on the way the British tramp steamers Jumua and Wordsworth and the barque Dee, steamed far to the south of Australia and up the east coast of New Zealand to the Kermadecs. where she was anchored off Sunday Island for a much-needed overhaul of her engines. She had been at sea for six months.
The Union Company's cargo steamer Wairuna was steaming past Sunday Island, bound from Auckland to San Francisco with a full general cargo, early in the afternoon of June 2, 1917. Her officers saw the strange steamer lying close by the island, but the Wairuna's master, Captain Saunders, dismissed a suggestion by the second mate, Mr. Rees, that she might be a raider, and held his course.
Bombing Threat
Mr. Anderson gives a vivid description of the situation: "A roar which could only come from a 'plane engine suddenly drowned the steady thumping of the ship's engines; an explosion sounded somewhere near the ship.
"The tea things went flying as I beat the steward by a head along the short alleyway to the deck . . . The 'plane was flying so low that it appeared to be just skimming the ship's masts as it flew over the ship; it was a two-seater biplane, with the lower wings painted with black German crosses, and the observer could be clearly seen dangling a long, pear-shaped bomb over the side.
" 'Don't touch your transmitting key,' said Captain Saunders as I ran up to the bridge. 'Wait here for a moment.' A seaman came running to the bridge with a message attached to a sandbag which the 'plane's observer had dropped on the fore deck.
" 'Do not use your wireless. Stop your engines. Take orders from the cruiser, or you will be bombed,' was the message written in English. The seaplane dived again and planted a bomb just ahead of the ship, to emphasise the order."
By this time the strange ship was within a mile of the Wairuna, and several of her guns were trained upon her, while a boarding party was already on its way. There was barely time to destroy the ship's papers and code books and smash up the wireless gear before a German officer, swinging a revolver, but "quite pleasant and polite," made his appearance. He questioned the ship's officers in the saloon and, the chief steward having made tea, politely drank a cup with his captives.
Tea and Pirates
A big party of armed men had come aboard, and they took full charge of the ship. After the tea-drinking—"tea and pirates seemed a queer combination," says "Mr. Alexander—all the navigating officers and the chief engineer were sent aboard the Wolf, where they were stripped" and searched. In No. 4 hold the Wairuna's men found a crowd of about 100 seamen and officers of many nationalities, taken prisoner from captured ships —among them Captain Meadows, of the Turitella, whose dropping overboard of bottles containing messages ultimately gave the British Admiralty news of the raider.
The Wairuna was a rich prize for the raider, which was short of coal and stores. In addition to 1200 tons of coal in her bunkers and a full list of stores, the Wairuna carried 40 live sheep to provide fresh meat during the voyage across the Pacific, and the Germans spent a happy fortnight transferring to their ship everything likely to be of value. Then she was taken to sea and sunk by shellfire, and the Wolf, after similarly stripping and shelling the American schooner Winslow, which had happened along in much the same way as the Wairuna, steamed away from Sunday Island on June 22.
Three nights later, in cold, thick weather and frequent rain squalls, the Wolf was steaming at full speed between North Cape, Cape Maria van Diemen and the Three Kings, laying her mines in small groups over a wide area.
Valuable Information
Rees, the Wairuna's second officer, kept a careful record of every mine that was laid while he was aboard the Wolf and, as it happened, he was one of the very few prisoners who got away from the raider before she reached Germany many months later. When he reached England, Rees gave the Admiralty the number and approximate positions of the mines laid off New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, but they were not all swept up and destroyed, with the result that the Wimmera was mined, with heavy loss of life, many months after Rees' information was in the hands of the British naval authorities.
After laying another minefield off Cape Farewell, at the western entrance to Cook Strait, on June 27, the Wolf crossed the Tasman, sighting but not molesting a number of ships, and on the night of July 3, between Cape Howe and Gabo Island lighthouse, on the Sydney-Melbourne route, she was again busy at her grim task.
There was an atmosphere of intense strain among both crew and prisoners, for this was a much-frequented shipping track. "Our ears were strained," says Mr. Alexander, "waiting for the rush on deck and the clanging down of the ship's sides — which would mean trouble.
Close to Capture
"It came at last. The mines were going over quickly and about 25 had been dropped in less than an hour, when there was a scurry on deck. The steel sides masking the guns came crashing down against the hull, and we heard the guns and torpedo tubes over our heads being swung out; the ship was clear for action without any attempt at disguise and with her deck still cluttered with mines.
"Nobody in the hold moved. There would be no further sign from the deck before anything occurred. The only sounds were the heavy pounding of the engines and the whimpering of a frightened boy. The ship lurched and heeled over as she changed her course: she was clearing out. Minutes passed. An hour passed. Then somebody ventured to get up and stretch himself.
"There was another movement on deck, and the steel sides were raised back into position—the Wolf had got away again. . . The cruiser Encounter had passed down the coast and had just missed sighting the minelayer at work, Nerger had seen the cruiser first."
Two nights later the Federal liner Cumberland struck one of the mines off Gabo island.
Again running short of coal, the Wolf turned north from the Tasman and patrolled the Sydney-Suva track, with the seaplane taking off each day to search for shipping and keep a watch for possible cruisers. No worth while prizes came along, although the raider destroyed two sailing vessels, whose crews further crowded the already over-populated hold.
The prisoners were allowed on the poop deck all day, and their worst discomforts appear to have been the smelliness of the hold, the heat, and the effects of the poor food.
Message Picked Up
The Wolf was cruising slowly — to save coal — and aimlessly up toward New Guinea, when she picked up a wireless message, sent in plain language, from Sydney to Rabaul, giving full particulars of the departure for the latter port of the Burns, Philp steamer Matunga, with a detailed list of the ship's cargo and coal supplies. Her capture would mean fresh food and full bunkers, and Nerger's drawn and worried expression changed to frosty geniality. Thanks to plenty of wireless messages from the Matunga, giving information of her progress, the Wolf was able to waylay her a day's steaming from Rabaul.
Her captain, under the suddenly-unmasked guns of the raider, sent out no wireless calls, and as far as the outside world knew, the Matunga simply disappeared with all on board. Searches were fruitless, and in the end it was assumed she had been engulfed by a seismic disturbance.
With a prize crew on board, the Matunga steamed in company with the Wolf to a little-known, landlocked harbour in an island off the mainland of Dutch New Guinea. It was characteristic of the forethought that had gone into the equipment of the raider that she had charts of outlandish places all over the world that might conceivably be useful to her. In Offak Bay, Waigeu, she spent nearly a fortnight, transhipping the coal and cargo of the Matunga, having the weed cleaned from her bottom by men in diving suits and her engines overhauled, before she steamed away for the Java Sea and Singapore.
Another Escape
After yet another escape in passing a cruiser at night in Karimata Strait, the Wolf laid her last minefields on the shipping route in the South China Sea and, passing through Lombok Strait, safely regained the Indian Ocean.
The next capture was the Japanese mail steamer Hitachi Mam — an exciting incident, for she attempted to escape after surrendering and to use the gun with which she was armed, and Nerger was compelled to shell her into submission, with the result that there were a number of casualties among her complement — the only such in the course of the raider's career.
The state of affairs aboard the Wolf was now serious, for with the coming of the Japanese prisoners, beri-beri, typhus and other diseases had broken out, soon to be followed by the dreaded scurvy. But just when it seemed that the raider's position was hopeless and she must intern or even surrender, fortune smiled again on the German captain. Along came the Spanish collier Igotz Mendi, with 7000 tons of coal. Now it was Germany or the bottom.
At Cargados Reef, Nerger filled his bunkers, repainted and disguised the Igotz Mendi and transferred to her as many of the prisoners as she could accommodate, including the women and their husbands, the children and the old men — his consideration for the women, who were given separate accommodation amidships on board the Wolf, seems to have been a feature of Nerger's character.
Epic of Seamanship
The final stage, of that great cruise was an epic of seamanship and determination. With no ports open to him, Nerger was forced to coal his ship from the Igotz Mendi during the Atlantic passage, in the open sea and with a heavy swell running, and the crashing together of the two ships as they lay alongside damaged the raider severely, so that she leaked dangerously. Her prisoners were suffering severely from scurvy, and gale after gale beset her in the terrible North Atlantic winter of 1917-18.
"Nerger must have kept his crippled ship afloat that night by sheer will power, for there is no natural explanation of her survival," writes Mr. Alexander of one occasion when the pumps were choked and the ship was labouring north at less than five knots and making over 40 tons of water an hour Sheathed in solid ice, she was forced by the ice-pack to pass to the south of Iceland, and in biting squalls of sleat and snow, which must have hidden her at the right moments from the British patrols, she crossed the northern end of the North Sea and reached the Norwegian coast, the Skagerrak and Kiel at last, on February 24, 1918. On the same day the Igotz Menrti went ashore in a fog on the coast of Denmark, bringing freedom for the prisoners on board of her, including Rees of the Wairuna, with his precious information about minefields.
The long-lost Wolf was given a tremendous welcome at Kiel. A huge double line of warships stretched down the bay, with their crews lined up at review stations, and as the Wolf steamed slowly up the lane between them, the band on each ship blared out and the crews cheered wildly as the raider came abeam.
NEW ZEALAND HERALD, 8 JULY 1939
By G.R.C.
LACKING a Lowell Thomas to publicise him, a far greater sea-raider than the boisterous and egotistical Felix Count Luckner seems to have been languishing all these years in comparative obscurity. Yet with the single exception of Count Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien, captain of the famous Moewe, to caused more damage to Allied dipping during the Great War than any other surface raider; was the hero of some of the most incredible feats of those four years that were filled with incredible feats on land and sea and in the air; was one of the finest seamen who ever paced a bridge; was a strict disciplinarian, a man of high courage and indomitable will, humane, considerate of women and children, unwilling to cause suffering, yet ruthless in permitting nothing to jeopardise the successful accomplishment of his mission.
This man, who on a rainy winter's night just over 22 years ago brought the war to New Zealand's very doorstep was Captain Karl August Nerger, of the Imperial German Navy, commander of the raider Wolf — and while Aucklanders slept he was busy laying the mines that 13 months later destroyed the Winmera, between North Cape and the Three Kings, with the loss of some thirty lives. Two nights later he was laying off Cape Farewell, at the western entrance to Cook Strait, the minefield that sent to the bottom cargo steamer Port Kembla, in this case without loss of life.
Could be Done Again
The career of Captain Nerger and his ship — 13 months at sea. 64,000 miles steamed and 135,000 tons of Allied shipping destroyed — makes a story of adventure on the high seas that ranks with the greatest in fact and fiction; but there is more in it than that; at a time when Britain and many are again on the verge of a grim struggle for supremacy, the methods and achievements of Captain Nerger are worthy of close study in high places. What has been done once can be done again, and Germany has given plenty of evidence in her postwar navy that the lessons of 1914-18 have not been lost upon her.
The exploits of the Wolf have been described before, but in a book just published by Messrs. Angus and Robertson of 'Sydney, the story is told "from the inside," as it were, by one who was a prisoner on board for nine months — Mr. Roy Alexander, who was wireless operator of the steamer Wairuna when the Wolf captured her at Sunday Island in the Kermadecs.
The Wolf, a single-screw steamer of 5809 tons gross, was built in Germany in 1913, as the Wachtfels, and she was commissioned as an auxiliary cruiser in 1916, with a crew of about 400 men, an armament of seven 5.9 in. guns, a number of machine-guns and four torpedo tubes. With the exception of the gun on the poop deck, which was disguised as a derrick, all her armament was concealed behind hinged steel sides arranged to drop outboard when she went into action. She also carried when she left Germany 458 mines, as well as a seaplane, which proved invaluable on several occasions.
Secret Well Kept
The secret of the raider's fitting-out was so well kept that when she left Kiel on November 30, 1916, only her officers and a few high officials at the German Admiralty knew what her orders were, and her presence on the high seas was not known to the British Admiralty until over a year later, and then only because a bottle was found washed ashore in the East Indies, containing a message from one of the prisoners.
Nerger had been instructed to lay mine's off the most important of the British colonial ports and to do as much damage as possible to shipping. It was hardly expected that he would succeed in returning to Germany and, indeed, when the months passed without word of the Wolf, the German authorities, gave her up for lost. It was, however, because of her commander's care that no prisoner should escape to carry word of her, and because during the whole cruise she did not transmit a single wireless message, that her existence remained unknown to the enemy for so long.
Favoured with gales and thick weather in the North Sea, the Wolf evaded the British naval patrols, hugging the Norwegian coast, crossing the Arctic Circle and entering the North Atlantic by the strait between Greenland and Iceland. She made straight down the Atlantic without molesting shipping and swung in toward Capetown.
The first of the raider's many narrow escapes came on January 10, 1917, when she was making in toward the coast. A line of ships appeared ahead — a convoy of troopships leaving Capetown, with the British cruiser Berwick leading them. To turn away would have aroused suspicion, so Nerger, with iron nerve and implicit faith in his disguise as an ordinary tramp steamer, steamed straight past the cruiser and the line of transports. That same night he laid a minefield off Capetown and another off Cape Agulhas.
Laying Mines at Night
Colombo was the raider's next minelaying objective — a difficult one, for in order to lay a field successfully off the port, on account of the depth of water, she had to approach very close and well within range of the shore searchlights. Nerger chose a dark, moonless night — February 15 — and steamed in to within about seven miles of the breakwater to begin the work. The field was partly laid, and mines were still going over the stern, when the rays of two searchlights shot out and converged on the minelayer. For a full minute the Wolf was held in the glare, and then the lights moved on — the minelayer had not been sighted.
A moment's carelessness on the part of the watchers ashore had saved the Wolf. She finished her work, laying 39 mines, and two nights later the Bibby liner Worcestershire was blown up there and sank. Within the week the Blue Funnel liner Perseus shared her fate.
From Colombo the raider steamed north up the west coast of India and laid a minefield off Bombay which destroyed three big ships in as many weeks. Then she captured the oil tanker Turritella, fitted her out as an auxiliary minelayer, and sent her with a German prize crew aboard to mine Aden. However, after the mines had been laid the new minelayer — which Nerger had renamed litis — was challenged by a British cruiser and, seeing the game was up, the German officer in command, Kapitan-Leutnant Brandes, gave orders to abandon ship, opened the seacocks and sank her.
Cruisers in Pursuit
From the Chinese crew of the tanker the British naval authorities learned of the presence in the Indian Ocean of a German raider, and although the Chinese were unable to give her name or a good description of her—Brandes and his men naturally kept their mouths shut—all available cruisers were sent out after her. But Captain Nerger, whose wireless operators sat day and night with their earphones glued to their ears, learned at once from an intercepted message that he was a hunted man. Reasoning rightly that the track to Australia would be the last to be searched he made for the Pacific while the British and Japanese cruisers watched the ports of the East Indies and searched the Indian Ocean for months.
Finally, assuming that the unknown raider must have been blown up at sea by an explosion among her mines, or lost through some other cause, they gave it up. The Wolf, capturing and sinking on the way the British tramp steamers Jumua and Wordsworth and the barque Dee, steamed far to the south of Australia and up the east coast of New Zealand to the Kermadecs. where she was anchored off Sunday Island for a much-needed overhaul of her engines. She had been at sea for six months.
The Union Company's cargo steamer Wairuna was steaming past Sunday Island, bound from Auckland to San Francisco with a full general cargo, early in the afternoon of June 2, 1917. Her officers saw the strange steamer lying close by the island, but the Wairuna's master, Captain Saunders, dismissed a suggestion by the second mate, Mr. Rees, that she might be a raider, and held his course.
Bombing Threat
Mr. Anderson gives a vivid description of the situation: "A roar which could only come from a 'plane engine suddenly drowned the steady thumping of the ship's engines; an explosion sounded somewhere near the ship.
"The tea things went flying as I beat the steward by a head along the short alleyway to the deck . . . The 'plane was flying so low that it appeared to be just skimming the ship's masts as it flew over the ship; it was a two-seater biplane, with the lower wings painted with black German crosses, and the observer could be clearly seen dangling a long, pear-shaped bomb over the side.
" 'Don't touch your transmitting key,' said Captain Saunders as I ran up to the bridge. 'Wait here for a moment.' A seaman came running to the bridge with a message attached to a sandbag which the 'plane's observer had dropped on the fore deck.
" 'Do not use your wireless. Stop your engines. Take orders from the cruiser, or you will be bombed,' was the message written in English. The seaplane dived again and planted a bomb just ahead of the ship, to emphasise the order."
By this time the strange ship was within a mile of the Wairuna, and several of her guns were trained upon her, while a boarding party was already on its way. There was barely time to destroy the ship's papers and code books and smash up the wireless gear before a German officer, swinging a revolver, but "quite pleasant and polite," made his appearance. He questioned the ship's officers in the saloon and, the chief steward having made tea, politely drank a cup with his captives.
Tea and Pirates
A big party of armed men had come aboard, and they took full charge of the ship. After the tea-drinking—"tea and pirates seemed a queer combination," says "Mr. Alexander—all the navigating officers and the chief engineer were sent aboard the Wolf, where they were stripped" and searched. In No. 4 hold the Wairuna's men found a crowd of about 100 seamen and officers of many nationalities, taken prisoner from captured ships —among them Captain Meadows, of the Turitella, whose dropping overboard of bottles containing messages ultimately gave the British Admiralty news of the raider.
The Wairuna was a rich prize for the raider, which was short of coal and stores. In addition to 1200 tons of coal in her bunkers and a full list of stores, the Wairuna carried 40 live sheep to provide fresh meat during the voyage across the Pacific, and the Germans spent a happy fortnight transferring to their ship everything likely to be of value. Then she was taken to sea and sunk by shellfire, and the Wolf, after similarly stripping and shelling the American schooner Winslow, which had happened along in much the same way as the Wairuna, steamed away from Sunday Island on June 22.
Three nights later, in cold, thick weather and frequent rain squalls, the Wolf was steaming at full speed between North Cape, Cape Maria van Diemen and the Three Kings, laying her mines in small groups over a wide area.
Valuable Information
Rees, the Wairuna's second officer, kept a careful record of every mine that was laid while he was aboard the Wolf and, as it happened, he was one of the very few prisoners who got away from the raider before she reached Germany many months later. When he reached England, Rees gave the Admiralty the number and approximate positions of the mines laid off New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, but they were not all swept up and destroyed, with the result that the Wimmera was mined, with heavy loss of life, many months after Rees' information was in the hands of the British naval authorities.
After laying another minefield off Cape Farewell, at the western entrance to Cook Strait, on June 27, the Wolf crossed the Tasman, sighting but not molesting a number of ships, and on the night of July 3, between Cape Howe and Gabo Island lighthouse, on the Sydney-Melbourne route, she was again busy at her grim task.
There was an atmosphere of intense strain among both crew and prisoners, for this was a much-frequented shipping track. "Our ears were strained," says Mr. Alexander, "waiting for the rush on deck and the clanging down of the ship's sides — which would mean trouble.
Close to Capture
"It came at last. The mines were going over quickly and about 25 had been dropped in less than an hour, when there was a scurry on deck. The steel sides masking the guns came crashing down against the hull, and we heard the guns and torpedo tubes over our heads being swung out; the ship was clear for action without any attempt at disguise and with her deck still cluttered with mines.
"Nobody in the hold moved. There would be no further sign from the deck before anything occurred. The only sounds were the heavy pounding of the engines and the whimpering of a frightened boy. The ship lurched and heeled over as she changed her course: she was clearing out. Minutes passed. An hour passed. Then somebody ventured to get up and stretch himself.
"There was another movement on deck, and the steel sides were raised back into position—the Wolf had got away again. . . The cruiser Encounter had passed down the coast and had just missed sighting the minelayer at work, Nerger had seen the cruiser first."
Two nights later the Federal liner Cumberland struck one of the mines off Gabo island.
Again running short of coal, the Wolf turned north from the Tasman and patrolled the Sydney-Suva track, with the seaplane taking off each day to search for shipping and keep a watch for possible cruisers. No worth while prizes came along, although the raider destroyed two sailing vessels, whose crews further crowded the already over-populated hold.
The prisoners were allowed on the poop deck all day, and their worst discomforts appear to have been the smelliness of the hold, the heat, and the effects of the poor food.
Message Picked Up
The Wolf was cruising slowly — to save coal — and aimlessly up toward New Guinea, when she picked up a wireless message, sent in plain language, from Sydney to Rabaul, giving full particulars of the departure for the latter port of the Burns, Philp steamer Matunga, with a detailed list of the ship's cargo and coal supplies. Her capture would mean fresh food and full bunkers, and Nerger's drawn and worried expression changed to frosty geniality. Thanks to plenty of wireless messages from the Matunga, giving information of her progress, the Wolf was able to waylay her a day's steaming from Rabaul.
Her captain, under the suddenly-unmasked guns of the raider, sent out no wireless calls, and as far as the outside world knew, the Matunga simply disappeared with all on board. Searches were fruitless, and in the end it was assumed she had been engulfed by a seismic disturbance.
With a prize crew on board, the Matunga steamed in company with the Wolf to a little-known, landlocked harbour in an island off the mainland of Dutch New Guinea. It was characteristic of the forethought that had gone into the equipment of the raider that she had charts of outlandish places all over the world that might conceivably be useful to her. In Offak Bay, Waigeu, she spent nearly a fortnight, transhipping the coal and cargo of the Matunga, having the weed cleaned from her bottom by men in diving suits and her engines overhauled, before she steamed away for the Java Sea and Singapore.
Another Escape
After yet another escape in passing a cruiser at night in Karimata Strait, the Wolf laid her last minefields on the shipping route in the South China Sea and, passing through Lombok Strait, safely regained the Indian Ocean.
The next capture was the Japanese mail steamer Hitachi Mam — an exciting incident, for she attempted to escape after surrendering and to use the gun with which she was armed, and Nerger was compelled to shell her into submission, with the result that there were a number of casualties among her complement — the only such in the course of the raider's career.
The state of affairs aboard the Wolf was now serious, for with the coming of the Japanese prisoners, beri-beri, typhus and other diseases had broken out, soon to be followed by the dreaded scurvy. But just when it seemed that the raider's position was hopeless and she must intern or even surrender, fortune smiled again on the German captain. Along came the Spanish collier Igotz Mendi, with 7000 tons of coal. Now it was Germany or the bottom.
At Cargados Reef, Nerger filled his bunkers, repainted and disguised the Igotz Mendi and transferred to her as many of the prisoners as she could accommodate, including the women and their husbands, the children and the old men — his consideration for the women, who were given separate accommodation amidships on board the Wolf, seems to have been a feature of Nerger's character.
Epic of Seamanship
The final stage, of that great cruise was an epic of seamanship and determination. With no ports open to him, Nerger was forced to coal his ship from the Igotz Mendi during the Atlantic passage, in the open sea and with a heavy swell running, and the crashing together of the two ships as they lay alongside damaged the raider severely, so that she leaked dangerously. Her prisoners were suffering severely from scurvy, and gale after gale beset her in the terrible North Atlantic winter of 1917-18.
"Nerger must have kept his crippled ship afloat that night by sheer will power, for there is no natural explanation of her survival," writes Mr. Alexander of one occasion when the pumps were choked and the ship was labouring north at less than five knots and making over 40 tons of water an hour Sheathed in solid ice, she was forced by the ice-pack to pass to the south of Iceland, and in biting squalls of sleat and snow, which must have hidden her at the right moments from the British patrols, she crossed the northern end of the North Sea and reached the Norwegian coast, the Skagerrak and Kiel at last, on February 24, 1918. On the same day the Igotz Menrti went ashore in a fog on the coast of Denmark, bringing freedom for the prisoners on board of her, including Rees of the Wairuna, with his precious information about minefields.
The long-lost Wolf was given a tremendous welcome at Kiel. A huge double line of warships stretched down the bay, with their crews lined up at review stations, and as the Wolf steamed slowly up the lane between them, the band on each ship blared out and the crews cheered wildly as the raider came abeam.
NEW ZEALAND HERALD, 8 JULY 1939
