Word: spee
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Adolf Hitler change the Admiral Graf Spee from a gallant fighting ship into a miserable scuttleship? Naval men pondered many theories last week, as the Spee's semi-submerged hulk still smoked in the Plata estuary and her 1,039 officers & men were interned at Buenos Aires and Montevideo, four of them under arrest in the latter capital, pending an investigation to see if the Spee's scuttling was criminal...
German defeatism was a blanket answer. Mustard-gas shells aboard the Spee, discovery of which would have created a stench in neutral noses, was the height of British suspicion. Fear that Uruguay or Argentina might become an ally, and turn the interned Spee against Germany, constituted a political answer (see p. 18). None of these answers was approved by non-Nazi naval men, whose code demands that a ship of war shall continue fighting just as long as she can do some damage to the enemy...
...explanation more depressing than any to the German cause was published by El Dia of Montevideo: that Britain's lighter cruisers actually rendered Germany's vaunted sea terror harmless. Said El Dia, which may well have had access to the official Uruguayan commission that examined Spee: "We are authoritatively able to give assurance that the Graf Spee's fighting capacity was almost totally nullified in the battle. Its control tower had been damaged so that its artillery could not be managed. Its ammunition lifter had been paralyzed and heavy shells had to be carried on the shoulders...
What then of the Spee's commander? Was he a coward? El Dia said his Government forced him to protest that Spee was only unfit for sea, not unfit for battle. But sharp tongues in Buenos Aires flung painful taunts at wiry little Captain Hans Langsdorff, 45, after he came ashore so jauntily with his men, to be lionized by the city's German colony...
...Spee's officers were not deprived of their swords and pistols before being quartered at the Immigrants' Hotel (Argentina's Ellis Island), close to the naval arsenal grounds. They relaxed happily while German Ambassador Baron Edmund von Thermann sought to have the Spee's company adjudged survivors of a wrecked ship, not subject to internment...