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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday 25 February 2026: ‘Sorry, Your Bird’

In the above depiction, we see, on the left, HM’s Armed Merchant Cruiser Alcantara (M.94), late of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co, fighting what appears to be a Norwegian-flagged steamer Rena but was actually the very well-armed German auxiliary cruiser (Hilfskreuzer) SMS Greif, some 110 years ago this week.

It was a cutthroat affair, one of swirling action, six-inch guns, and, finally, torpedoes.

At the end of the day, both ships were at the bottom of the North Sea.

Meet Alcantara

Built at Harland & Wolff, Govan (Yard number 435G) for the RMSP Company’s Southampton-to-South America run, RMS Alcantara was a beautiful A-series ocean liner of some 570 feet in length with a displacement of 15,831 GRT. Carrying one large single funnel, two four-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines drove her two outward screws while a low-pressure steam turbine drove the centerline shaft, enabling the liner to cruise at 18 knots all day.

She had accommodation for 1,390 passengers (400 first class, 230 second class, and 760 third class passengers, as well as five holds and a refrigerated cargo space for frozen meat.

Launched 30 October 1913 and completed 28 May 1914, she was preceded in service by her sisters, the Belfast-built RMS Arlanza, Andes, and Almanzora.

Alcantara’s only pre-war commercial cruise was a maiden voyage in June 1914 on RMSP’s route from Southampton to Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires.

Once the Great War kicked off in August 1914, she and several of her sisters were subsequently taken up from trade and quickly modified into armed merchant cruisers. They had lots of company as the Admiralty had over 60 commissioned AMCs employed on patrol– and later convoy protection– during the Great War.

In this, the now HMS Alacantara was fitted with eight BL 6″/40 Mark II naval guns repurposed from old battleships, two 6-pounders, and two 3-pounders. By 10 March 1915, she then joined the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, a catch-all outfit for AMCs that at one time had 33 such vessels on its list, tasked with enforcing the blockade along the Northern Patrol.

Her only wartime skipper was a regular, Capt. Thomas Erskine Wardle, RN, who came aboard on 23 March 1915. Shipping out on the training ship HMS Britannia at the ripe old age of 13 in 1890, Wardle had previously commanded the old battlewagon HMS Canopus in 1909, served as Naval Secretary to the Ordnance Board, and been the skipper of the armored cruiser HMS Crescent and then the small AMC HMS Calyx (formerly SS Calypso) in operations around St Kilda earlier in the war.

Wardle was a scrapper.

Her log books for her 11 months with the Northern Patrol detail she was a busy little searcher, challenging at least 57 ships encountered on the sea and boarding another 77 via small boat despite rough sea states, low temperatures, and howling winds common in the region. During that period, she spent no less than 215 days at sea.

Meet Greif

Meanwhile, the planned 432-foot, 4,962 GRT, steel-hulled ship Guben for the German-Australian Line (DADG) was still on the builder’s ways at Neptun Werft AG, Rostock, when the war began. Unfinished, she was subsequently converted for naval service at Kaiserliche Werft, Kiel in 1915 and commissioned as SMS Greif on 23 January 1916.

Slow at just 13 knots on her two-boiler/3,000shp suite, she was armed with four 5.9-inch SK L/40s (two forward abeam, two staggered aft, taken from old battleships) and a single 4-inch SK L/40 hidden aft as well as two 50cm torpedo tubes, one on each side of the bow. and provision to carry as many as 300 mines. Outfitted with an oversized 317-man crew (10 officers, including two doctors; and 307 enlisted– 130 regular navy and 167 reservists), she carried extra manpower to equip prize vessels encountered while on patrol.

Speaking of which, two 2.3-inch landing guns were carried, broken down, for use in arming future raiders of opportunity, ideally in the Indian Ocean.

Her only wartime skipper was Fregattenkapitän Rudolf Tietze, aged 41, previously commander of the old coast defense battleship SMS Wörth, which had been reduced to an accommodations hulk in January 1916.

Inspected on commissioning by Großadmiral Prinz Heinrich von Preußen, Greif was detailed to raid the South Atlantic and work her way into the Indian Ocean. Packing enough coal and canned foodstuffs in her holds for an expected 35,000nm sortie, she also shipped aboard 600 6-inch shells, 200 4-inch shells, 12 torpedoes, an extensive small arms locker, and crates of demolition charges. While designed for mines, I am not positive she carried any.

If unable to return home, Greif’s crew was ordered to attempt to land and join colonial warlord Lettow-Vorbeck, holding out in the rump of German East Africa.

Greif set sail from Cuxhaven on 27 February 1916, following behind the submarine U-70, which would see her through the minefields of the Skagerrak.

Our subjects meet

Naval Intelligence advised Jellicoe that an armed German raider was steaming north from the Skagerrak. On this news, he ordered two light cruisers and four destroyers to sail from Rosyth to secure the English east coast against an advance by the expected German auxiliary cruiser. It was probably initially assumed that Greif would lay mines off one of the English naval bases, similar to what SMS Meteor had done at the time.

In addition, three light/scout cruisers, HMS Calliope, Comus, and Blanche, each accompanied by a destroyer, were sent from Scapa Flow to the Norwegian coast to block the northern route for the enemy. They would soon join the alerted Alcantara, low on coal and due to be relieved by her sister Andes. 

The AMCs Columbella and Patia were tasked with searching north of the Shetlands.

Post-war German reports note that Greif encountered two large British auxiliary cruisers working their searchlights and quietly sending short low-power Morse signals back and forth– surely Alcantara and Andes–while poking some 70 miles off Bergen in the pre-dawn of 29 February 1916, but, halting engines and engaging their smoke device, Greif managed to remain unseen.

At 0855 on the same morning, while some 230 miles east of the Faeroes, Alcantara, with Andes not far off, sighted the Norwegian ship Rena, alerted to the prospect that a German raider was trying to break out into the Atlantic. Alcantara fired two blank charges from her 3-pounder, ordered the ship to stop, and prepared a boarding party to check for contraband.

After much hemming and hawing and back-and-forth challenges, Alcantara and “Rena” closed to within 1,100 yards.

FKpt. Tietze ordered his guns to open up at 0940, and Greif’s initial salvo, as noted by Wardle, “put the tellmotor steering gear, engine room telegraph, and all telephones on the bridge out of action, besides killing and wounding men, and disabled Alcantara’s communications equipment.”

Wardle also noted that Greif, most ungentlemanly, dropped the Norwegian ensign and “fought under no flag.” German accounts later note that her Reichskriegsflagge war ensign had been mounted on a corroded line, which broke, then rose later.

The combat was swirling, with the larger and better-armed Alcantara, which had regained steering control, missing two of Greif’s torpedoes but unfortunately catching the third, while the British gunners raked the raider’s decks, hull, and superstructure.

The raider’s ready ammunition for her stern guns was hit, sparking a secondary explosion and blaze that soon spread to her oil tanks.

Greif’s torpedo officer, one Lt. von Bychelberg, remained on the raider’s burning bridge until that final fatal torpedo was fired at 2,800 meters.

By 1015, “Rena” (Greif) was aflame some 3,500 yards off Alcantara, which was listing. With the enemy fire ceased, Wardle ordered his own guns to stop while likewise passing the word to abandon his own stricken ship.

By 1120, Alcantara was under the waves, her survivors attempting to crowd into 15 lifeboats. As the engagement took place “North of 60,” the water temperature was a balmy 44 degrees F.

Meanwhile, her sister Andes, joined by the faster and more proper cruiser Comus and the destroyer Munster, rapidly arrived on the scene.

When a round cooked off on the sinking Greif, Comus followed by Andes, opened up on her from 8,000 yards, then, receiving nothing further, signaled, “Sorry, your bird.”

Greif drifted, ablaze, from 1139 to 1212, then sank, carrying 192 of her crew to the bottom, including five of ten officers, her skipper and XO among the lost. With just two of her boats not shot out and generally reserved for use by wounded men, Greif’s survivors grabbed whatever would float that was at hand– ammunition box lids, hatch covers, planking– and took to the water.

Her survivors were picked up by Comus. Post-war German naval tomes report that the remaining officers from Greif were treated well on Comus, fed in the officers’ mess, while the enlisted were “provided for as best as possible.”

Her most senior officer remaining was the navigator, KptLt (Reserve) Jungling, who later compiled a report to the German admiralty in 1919.

Those surviving officers were encamped in Edinburgh Castle, and there found out the extent of British Naval Intelligence’s reach.

Translated from Der Kreuzerkrieg in den ausländischen Gewässern: 

From the interrogation questions posed to the prisoners in Edinburgh Castle by naval officers who spoke fluent German, it emerged that the English knew that the Greif had been moored in the Kiel shipyard next to SMS Lützow and that the Greif crew had been provisioned there initially. Furthermore, it was known that the Greif had been inspected on February 24th by Prince Henry of Prussia and the station commander, Admiral Bachmann. It was also known that the Greif had been anchored in Gelting Bay on February 23rd and 24th.

Her movements out to sea were also apparently known, likely due to decoded signal traffic from U70.

Alcantara lost 72 with two ratings passing of wounds later in March. Her survivors were picked up by Munster and Comus.

Of note, the Kaislerliche Marine once again tried to send a raider out, the Hilfskreuzer Leopard, disguised as the Norwegian Rena, in 1917. That ended with Leopard being sunk with all hands by the intercepting British cruisers HMS Achilles and Dundee.

Not the first odd twist in this tale.

Epilogue

While FKpt. Tietze, Greif’s skipper, was killed by shrapnel during the sea fight, Capt. Wardle of Alacantra was decorated with a DSO for his gallantry in this fight, then, after a stint with the Naval Intelligence Division, was given command of the light cruiser HMS Lowestoft in the Med, followed by the famed battleship Dreadnought, and, post-war, the cruisers Danae and Calliope. In 1924, he was made Rear-Admiral Commanding, Royal Australian Navy Squadron, a position he held for two years before retiring after a 36-year career.

Appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath, he was made a vice admiral on the Retired List in 1931 and passed in 1944, aged 67.

One of Alacantra’s most famed survivors was English stoker and firefighter Arthur John Priest, who had previously survived a collision at age 19 aboard RMS Asturias in 1908, then the collision between RMS Olympic and HMS Hawk in 1911, the sinking of the RMS Titanic (1912) and the loss by mine of HM Hospital Ship Britannic (November 1916), then would go on to be an albatross of sorts on his old ship, HMHS Asturias (torpedoed and beached March 20-21st, 1917), and the SS Donegal (sunk in April 1917). Priest, “The Unsinkable Stoker,” subsequently left sea work and spent the rest of his life on dry land in Southampton, passing in 1937 at the age of 49.

Shifting to more infamous survivors, Greif’s waterlogged ship’s doctor from the raider’s decimated wardroom, Assistant Naval Surgeon (Reserve) Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt, went on to become a fairly well-known psychiatrist and neuroscientist. After spending just three months in a British POW camp, he was part of a prisoner exchange and spent the rest of the war assigned to the German naval mission to Constantinople, where he was discharged in 1919. He went on to discover Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and had a rather “complicated” working relationship with the SS during WWII that is beyond our scope.

In a curious twist of fate, the later Royal Mail Lines steamer RMS Alcantara, built by Harland & Wolff in 1926, was taken up in WWII and used as an AMC for three years. She also encountered a German raider at sea, the Hilfskreuzer Thor, with both ships landing hits on each other in the South Atlantic in 1940, then mutually breaking off the fight and limping away.

Sometimes history is like a carousel. You see the same horses over and over.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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