Word: british
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Only way that the Spee could have overcome the British tactic was to get her two planes in the air for reconnoitering. It must have been early in the battle that a lucky British hit stripped to her fuselage the plane perched on the catapult-blocking the catapult so the other plane was also useless, and thus virtually blinding Spee. Despatches by week's end had not made it clear whether the British used their five available planes...
...went the four, zigzagging, varying speed, roaring steel at each other. The cruisers kept dashing in from all angles like hounds baiting a boar. In Spec's guts, the 62 British seamen-the youngest was 15, the oldest 72, every sort from captain to cabin boy-hollered their happy heads off every time they felt the Spec take...
Marksmanship on both sides must have been keen. Percentage of hits to tries in battle averages 2%. At Jutland, where the firing was tops, the Germans got 1.5%, the British 2.6%. Here the average may well have been 2% in the first phases. Spee suffered two especially bad hits-which must have been 256-pound shells from Exeter, since they both pierced heavy armament. One of them, high on the port quarter detonating a split second after getting inside, ripped gaping holes in side and deck. The other probably decided the battle. It pocked Spee's control tower fair...
Aboard the Exeter as she limped off toward the British base of Port Stanley* in the Falkland Islands, 1,000 miles to the south, were 61 dead men, and 23 wounded. Commodore Harwood was notified by radio that he had been knighted and promoted to Rear Admiral. Ajax and Achilles got off comparatively lightly: between them only eleven dead and eight wounded...
This dramatic curtain was Adolf Hitler's pleasure, communicated by wireless. There was no apparent reason for it. Assuming that the Spee was in no condition to engage even the light British cruisers, Hitler had nothing to lose by allowing her to be interned-unless he expects to lose the war, he could expect to recover the interned ship when war is over. World War I had been lost when the Germans scuttled their fleet at Scapa Flow. If Hitler ordered the Spee scuttled merely that his enemies would never lay hands on her, World War II was already...