Word: two
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Ajax dampered her fires and set a smoke screen behind which Formose escaped. Meanwhile the other two-now identified as the light Achilles (7,030 tons) and the heavy Exeter (8,390 tons) -were flanking out to sea. Ajax apparently did the same, astern of Spee. This meant two disadvantages for the German -shoals and shore to starboard, glaring rising sun behind the enemy to port. Captain Langsdorff gave the order to work out to sea, into deeper water...
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...
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...
...Este, where Uruguayans gathered in crowds as if to watch a pelota match, Ajax and Achilles craftily slipped around Spee inshore of her, leaving the enemy silhouetted in the east by the reflected light of the setting sun, themselves under shore's gloom. Just before dark there were two sharp clashes, and it was evidently in one of those that Spee suffered a final disaster: A hit at the forefoot, at bow and waterline, so that as she went through the sea she shipped water. At last night fell, Spee limped away, turned about, ingloriously backed into Montevideo...
Uruguayan officials went aboard, found Spee's seaworthiness impaired, granted a 72-hour stay. Spee took on oxygen welding torches and steel plates and went to work. There was sad work to do, too. Sixty wounded men were treated: two went ashore to hospital. Thirty-six bodies were put into swastika-draped coffins, carried ashore, buried far from home...