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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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, March 12, 2025: Spymaster Farm

Above we see the beautiful new kleiner kreuzer SMS Dresden as she transits the Kiel Canal under the Levensau High Bridge in early 1908. Caught at sea in August 1914 in bad repair and already on her way back to Germany, she would end up being the last of the Kaiser’s cruisers at large on the high seas, sent to the bottom some 110 years ago this week.

The Dresden Class

The two Dresden-class light cruisers– our subject and the infamous SMS Emden— were ordered as part of the Kaiserliche Marine’s 1905-06 program to a modification of the earlier Königsberg class design and used the same hull form, armament, and armor plan but carried slightly different machinery. Some 388 feet long, they had a 44-foot beam and drew 18 feet of water under their hull.

Armament consisted of ten 4.1-inch SK L/40 naval guns— the standard weapon of almost all of Germany’s smaller cruisers and large colonial gunboats– in six single shielded pedestal mounts and four casemated, with 1,500 shells for these guns held in the magazine.

The secondary armament consisted of eight 2″/52 SK55 popguns with 4,000 rounds between them, backed up by a pair of submerged bow-mounted 17.7-inch torpedo tubes with space in the magazine for five fish. Landing party equipment included four Maxim machine guns and enough rifles, revolvers, and packs to outfit a company-sized force drawn from the 343-member crew. A light 6cm L/21 boat gun on a carriage along with 241 shells was also part of the ship’s bill.

When it came to armor, they carried a 3.1-inch belt of Krupp nickel steel along with 3.9 inches of protection over their conning towers and engines and about an inch over the deck. Meanwhile, the gun shields on the 4.1″/40s were two inches thick. Damage control was built into the design with 14 watertight compartments and a double-hulled bottom.

When it came to engineering, both used 12 coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft marine boilers with Dresden using four Parson’s steam turbines generating 15,000shp while Emden had two reciprocating VTE engines that produced a less powerful 13,500shp. Likewise, Dresden carried more coal bunkerage (860 tons) while Emden could only stow 790 under normal conditions. Speed was virtually the same (23.5 Emden, 24 Dresden) as was cruising range with Emden having a longer (3,760nm) endurance at 12 knots while Dresden could only steam 3,600 but at 14 knots. Äpfel zu Organen.

Meet Dresden

While sister Emden was constructed at KW in Danzig, Dresden was laid down at the same time as Yard No. 195 (Ersatz Comet as she was originally to be named to replace the 19th-century sloop of that name) at Blohm & Voss, Hamburg. Launched on 5 October 1907 with Lord Mayor of Dresden, Otto Beutler, as a sponsor, she was commissioned on 14 November 1908, beating Emden to the fleet by eight months.

Meeting some early disaster, while on her shakedown on 28 November, Dresden was involved in a collision with the two-masted Swedish sailing ship Cacilie, sinking the Swede and sending the cruiser back to Hamburg for six months of repair, which was followed by a turbine explosion on follow-up trails.

Finally emerging ready to serve, Dresden set sail under Kapitän zur See Eduard Varrentrapp in a three-ship task force along with the 6,500-ton training cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, bound for New York, where they would join the 3,700-ton Ostamerikanischen station cruiser (stationskreuzer) Bremen. Of note on Bremen during this period was a young ensign, one multilingual Wilhelm Canaris, who at the time was planning to spend his career in torpedo boats.

Peacetime ship of intrigue

The four German ships, Dresden included, arrived in New York in late September 1909 to attend the international naval review as part of the 300th Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. The force, under the command of the white-bearded and well-mustached 65-year-old Grossadmiral Hans von Koester– the first German naval officer to hold the rank– would take in the sites and become one of the more celebrated contingents, with thousands of ethnic Teutons and recent emigres from the region in NYC at the time.

Dresden was extensively photographed in the fortnight she spent on the Hudson.

Returning to Germany, Dresden suffered another collision, this time with the light cruiser Konigsberg, and spent some time in the training division in the Baltic.

She was beautiful in all respects, as shown off in period postcards.

She was then along with the cruiser Strassburg, dispatched to join the Mittelmeer-division in the Med between April and September 1913 under the command of FKpt Fritz Ludecke, where she kept tabs on the Balkans as the region descended first into war with the Ottomans and then among themselves, giving birth to the new nation of Albania.

In December 1913, with Ludecke swapped out for FKpt Erich Kohler so that Ludecke could take command of the new light cruiser SMS Karlsruhe, Dresden skipped a much-needed overhaul to hold down the Ostamerikanischen station for six months as Bremen returned home after spending nearly 10 years in the Americas. The plan would be that Karlsruhe, her shakedown finished, would arrive in the summer of 1914 to tap Dresden out and take over the station. Joining Dresden for this deployment, fresh off a year in the Baltic on torpedo boat duties, was a now Lt. Canaris, who had proven very capable when on the old Bremen of making and utilizing local contents across Latin America.

Bremen, fresh from evacuating 1,200 European civilians during the Mexican revolution along with the HAPAG steamers Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Bolivia, was relieved on 21 January 1914 and returned home to Germany, via Port-au-Prince, on 13 February, leaving the station in Dresden’s hands.

With Germany backing Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, Dresden got involved with the local affairs at a ground level. Besides continuing to evacuate nearly 2,000 American and European non-combatants to HAPAG liners alongside British and U.S. warships during the occupation of Veracruz, the cruiser sent a detachment of armed sailors to guard the German embassy in Mexico City and helped the HAPAG steamer SS Ypiranga escape U.S. custody in April 1918, the latter filled with 30 train car loads of German-made Mauser rifles and cartridges bound for Huerta in violation of the American weapons embargo on the dictator. The German-flagged steamer SS Bavaria likewise arrived with another load of guns in May.

Canaris’ contacts and agents in the region, cultivated during his time on Bremen, often proved invaluable. The young officer had a reputation as a “fixer.”

However, no matter how many guns the Germans sent, they arrived too late to help Huerta turn the tide against the Constitutionalists of Carranza, Obregon, and Villa in the north and the Zapatistas in the south. “El Chacal,” with his Federal Army soundly defeated at the Battle of Zacatecas in July 1914, resigned his office. His ride out of the country? Dresden, with Canaris as the general’s interpreter and handler, took him into exile as far as Kingston, Jamaica along with his vice president, Aureliano Blanquet, and their families.

The deposed dictator would later work with German naval spymaster Kapt. Franz von Rintelen during WWI on a series of anti-American and anti-Mexican for that matter initiatives until he passed under sketchy circumstances in Fort Bliss, Texas, with Von Rintelen writing after the war that, perhaps, Huerta was poisoned.

This brings us to…

War!

The fresh and brand-new Karlsruhe, finally complete and deployed to American waters on her maiden cruise, rendezvoused with the well-worn and homebound Dresden at Port-au-Prince, Haiti on 26 July 1914. The ships respective skippers changed places with Kohler, who was intimately aware of the current situation in the theatre, cross-decked from Dresden to Karlsruhe to take command of the new cruiser while Ludecke, who handled the vessel’s commissioning and shakedown, took up residence in his old cabin on Dresden for what he expected to be a ride back home. Likewise, Dresden transferred ordnance, spare parts, and even part of her small arms locker to Karlsruhe as the latter would need them more.

About that.

With the two cruisers departing Haiti on the evening of 26 July, they intercepted a radio message stating that diplomatic relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had been broken off and war in Europe was imminent. Karlsruhe made for Havana to top off her provisions and coal bunkers, then, instead of roaming West into the Caribbean, sortied East towards the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Ludecke in Dresden, heading back to Germany with not enough coal to make it there without stopping to refill her bunkers, was ordered to turn around and engage in independent cruiser warfare (Handelskrieg: commerce raiding) in the event of war– a suicide mission for a ship in Dresden’s condition some 4,800 miles away from home and in waters teaming with British warships.

Topping off at St. Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands on 31 July, Dresden made ready for war and sailed south in radio silence.

By 3 August war was at hand and Dresden turned wolf. Pairing up with the HAPAG steamer Corrientes out of Pernambuco which was placed at her disposal, the cruiser began stopping passing merchant ships off the coast of Brazil to inspect their papers. Encountering four British vessels, she let two go (SS Drumcliffe and SS Hostilius) on parole after deeming their cargo to be neutral and sank two whose cargo was considered contraband: SS Hyades (3,352 tons) on 14 August and SS Holmwood (4,223 tons) on 26 August.

Headed further into the South Atlantic, Dresden was joined by the HAPAG steamers Prussia, Baden, Persia, and Santa Isabel. The Admiralty then dispatched orders for her to proceed into the Pacific with her train to link up with the Bremen-class light cruiser SMS Leipzig which, after an eight-year tour in Chinese waters as part of VADM Maximilian von Spee’s East Asian Squadron (Ostasiengeschwaders zusammentreffen), had been dispatched to relieve the light cruiser SMS Nürnberg on the west coast of Mexico, where the latter had been protecting German residents during the revolution. Picking up coal and provisions at San Francisco in August just after the outbreak of the war, Leipzig melted into the Southeast Pacific, lurking between Baja and the Galapagos Islands, where she, like Dresden, soon picked up a train of coal-carrying German steamers (Anubis, Abyssinia, Amasis, and Karnak of the DDG Kosmos line).

After a stopover to effect repairs before rounding Cape Horn, Dresden transitioned to the Pacific.

Panic ripped through the Western seaboard of Canada as Dresden and Leipzig were believed in the area (they never got within 1,000 miles), with the Canadian government rushing the newly-formed Cobourg Heavy Battery from Quebec and its two new 60-pounder 5-inch BL guns for a transcontinental rail trip to establish an emergency coastal battery (at Point Grey– now the University of British Columbia) to protect Vancouver. Likewise, the Condor-class sloop HMCS Shearwater landed two QF 4-inch naval guns for positioning in Stanley Park, named for Lord Frederick Stanley, Governor General of Canada in 1888. The RCN’s largest warship, the old Apollo-class protected cruiser HMCS Rainbow, missed Leipzig by only a day at San Francisco in mid-August.

Following an invitation from the British Ambassador in Tokyo, the 9,500-ton Japanese armored cruiser Izumo was dispatched to Esquimalt as reinforcement. The Japanese cruiser Asama, battlecruisers Kurama and Tsukuba, and the patchwork battlewagon Hizen (former Russian Retvizan) later joined her in what the IJN referred to as the American Expeditionary Force (Amerika ensei-gun) under RADM Keizaburo Moriyama. A separate Japanese task force built around the battleship Satsuma and cruisers Hirado and Yahagi sailed as the Special Southern Expeditionary Force (Tokubetsu nanken shitai) to search the Philippines, Palau Islands, and East Indies area and after Coronel moved towards the South-Central Pacific with the battlecruiser Ibuki. Had Spee crashed into either of these forces, it would have no doubt been one of the most interesting naval clashes in history.

Linking up with Leipzig off the west coast of Chile on 3 October, the two cruisers and their train of makeshift supply tenders on 12 October joined Von Spee’s primary force– the big, armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the light cruiser Nürnberg— at Easter Island. The admiral’s squadron had been on the run from their homeport at Japanese-besieged Tsingtao since August and had stopped along the way to plaster French Tahiti (wasting 80 irreplaceable shells to level Papeete) and sweep the Marquesas Islands on the ever-present search for coal.

Besides her guns, Dresden’s very handy fixer, Canaris, was able to provide the admiral with intel, garnered via his carefully cultivated contacts around the continent. He was one of the first to pass the reports of a British cruiser force approaching from the Horn.

From 26–28 October the squadron coaled in Cumberland Bay of the volcanic and sparsely populated Isla Más a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe Island)– it’s as remote as it sounds, situated some 350 west of Chile– and made ready. There, the auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which had been raiding in Australian waters with little luck, arrived and took over reasonability for the collier train.

By 1 November, Von Spee’s force would mix it up in the lopsided sea battle of Coronel against British RADM Craddock’s 4th Cruiser Squadron. While recounting the whole engagement is beyond the scope of this blog post, suffice it to say that Dresden, unscathed, accounted well for herself, landing a reported five hits on the Town-class light cruiser HMS Glasgow and one on the armed merchant cruiser Otranto. However, she expended 102 shells she could not recover from magazines that were already depleted.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, on the evening of 4 November in deep water east of Trinidad, Karlsruhe mysteriously met her end at the hands of an explosion that has yet to be explained. She sank in just 27 minutes, taking two-thirds of her crew to the bottom with her. Until then, she had a successful raiding career, taking 17 prizes.

The same week, in the Indian Ocean, on 9 November, Dresden’s sister, SMS Emden, was defeated in a battle with the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney near the Cocos Islands, having collected 23 prizes. The number of German cruisers on the high seas was shrinking rapidly.

Back in the Pacific, Von Spee’s squadron sailed triumphantly into Valparaiso to coal and replenish, unafraid of the Royal Navy for a change.

After replenishing at Valparaiso with the rest of the victorious squadron, Dresden was released to patrol the area and sank the British steamer North Wales (3,691 tons) on 16 November.

Crossing back into the Pacific, Von Spee anchored his force at remote Picton Island on 6 December and called a council of his skippers. Leaving Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the collier train hidden along the south coast of Argentina, he wanted to take his cruisers and raid the British coaling station at Port Stanley in the Falklands. His captains for the most part disagreed with only Capt. Schonberg of the Nürnberg sided with Von Spee and urged to break up the squadron to proceed on independent raiding sorties ending in either internment or a trip back home. The loss of Emden was sobering.

Von Spee, being the boss, went his way and on 8 December crashed headlong into British VADM Doveton Sturdee’s waiting force of two hulking battlecruisers (HMS Invincible and Inflexible along with the cruisers HMS Cornwall, Kent, Carnarvon, Glasgow, and Bristol; and the old battlewagon HMS Canopus.

It was over by late afternoon, with Strudee’s flotilla of bruisers chasing down Von Spee’s smaller cruisers and pounding them one by one beneath the sub-polar waves of the South Atlantic.

Of Von Spee’s cruisers off the Falklands that day, only the turbine-powered Dresden, with Ludecke pushing his stokers and boilers to the point of breaking– somehow hitting a record 26 knots on cranky engines– managed to gain a few miles on her pursuers and, with darkness falling, slip into the nameless fjords and inlets of Tierra del Fuego

Von Spee and four of his cruisers found themselves in the embrace of Poseidon that day along with 2,200 German sailors– including both of the admiral’s sons.

Endgame

For a time, the world thought Dresden was dead, lost with the rest of Von Spee’s squadron.

However, she was still very much alive. She had suffered no damage in the clash. With the help of one of Canaris’ contacts, the German-Chilean mariner and harbor pilot Albert Pagels, Dresden was able to hide in the Punta Arena region, with Pagels guiding the cruiser into scarcely charted Quintupeu Fjord for safekeeping.

Eventually, the word got out and the British, along with the rest of the world that could do basic cruiser math, knew Dresden was still at large, a fleet in being if nothing else. Canaris provided constant reports on British fleet movements, and she was able to relocate a few times during this period, keeping one step ahead of the Royal Navy.

On 18 January 1915, Dresden was able to take on 1,600 tons of coal– twice her normal load– from the NDL freighter Sierra Cordoba. Ludecke nursed a plan to strike out across the remote Southern Pacific, skirting Antarctica until rising north to raid the Solomon Islands and, coaling at the Dutch East Indies, head into the Indian Ocean.

On 27 February, she sank the British barque Conway Castle (1,694 tons), her last prize, bringing her total to 12,927 tons of Allied merchant shipping.

Nearly bumping into the cruiser HMS Kent at 11,000 yards on 8 March, Dresden lit all boilers and cranked almost 25 knots against Kent’s 22 to keep over the horizon successfully. However, this five-hour chase drained her bunkers dry– down to her last 80 tons– and a promised replenishment shipment on the NDL steamer Gotha, coming out of Montevideo with 3,000 tons of coal and spare parts for Dresden’s turbines, was likely not coming. It was clear the time came to end the race.

Ludecke ordered his ship to the closest neutral port, Robinson Crusoe Island, and made ready to intern Dresden under the safety of Chilean supervision, anchoring 500 yards offshore. Informing the Admiralty by coded wireless message of his status, he received “Seine Majestät der Kaiser stellt Ihnen frei, aufzulegen” (“His Majesty the Emperor gives you the freedom to hang up”) in reply.

On 9 March, Ludecke reported to the local governor at Robinson Crusoe of his intentions, who simply shrugged– he had no police or soldiers to take the cruiser into custody on an island with 45 inhabitants– and said he would send a letter by sail coaster to the mainland for orders how to proceed. In the meantime, Ludecke ordered Dresden’s guns elevated and pointed harmlessly at the island’s dormant volcano, with her steam punt tied to her stern ready to pull her around to face an incoming threat in extremis. With coal so low, shore parties were landed to retrieve wood to burn in the boilers for heat and auxiliary power.

While the Chilean navy three days later dispatched the protected cruisers Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno to accept Dresden’s passage into internment, it was the British who found her first.

On the foggy morning of 14 March 1915, with many of the German cruiser’s complement ashore, a squadron made up of the cruisers HMS Kent and Glasgow along with the auxiliary cruiser Orama, appeared on the horizon– bird-dogged there by a decrypted wireless signal. Any question of the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The three British man-o-wars carried a total of 34 6- and 4-inch guns against Dresden’s 10. Nonetheless, as her pinnacle turned Dresden’s scarcely manned battery seaward, her fate was sealed.

Capt. John Luce, Glasgow’s skipper, opened fire on Dresden at 3,000 yards despite the fact both ships were inside Chilean territorial waters. He had orders to destroy the German and, having faced off with her unsuccessfully at Coronel and the Falklands, took them seriously. Four minutes into the battle, with Dresden firing all of three rounds, she raised the white flag and struck her colors. Canaris motored out in the pinnacle for parley while Ludecke ordered her scuttled via a mix of open sea valves and torpedo warheads in her magazine.

Within a half hour of Glasgow’s first shot, Dresden capsized to port at 1115 and sank in 230 feet of water. Seven members of her crew were killed, three outright and four from wounds. Another 14 were seriously injured. The British suffered no casualties.

Epilogue

Strongly worded notes of protest flew between London, Santiago, and Berlin over the sinking and violation of neutrality.

Most of Dresden’s crew survived the ship’s final battle.

As they were on Chilean territory, they were not picked up by the British as PWs and instead were, awkwardly, interned. After waiting five days on Robinson Caruso Island as guests of the local governor, existing on a cargo of 1,000 lobsters, they were picked up by the tardy Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno then were deposited on Quinquirina Island, adjacent to Coronel.

Settling into an easy life, funded by the German embassy in Santiago, the men kept chickens and cows, and tended neat gardens. The city of Dresden took up a public subscription for gifts sent to the crew for the Christmas of 1915. Two men died while in exile, one in 1916, and the other in 1917.

Allowed flexible leave periods, many men simply released themselves from their gilded cage, aided by the German naval attaché, KKpt August Moller. Kplts Kurt Nieden and Friedrich Burchardi, along with ObltzS Kurt Hartwig were among the first to leave, the latter arriving in Germany just three months after Dresden’s sinking and, switching to submarine duty, earned a Blue Max as the skipper of SM U-32, sending 44 enemy ships to the bottom including the battleship HMS Cornwallis.

Canaris followed suit. Traveling under a Chilean passport arranged by Moller, “Senior Reed Rosas” arrived in Europe on a Dutch steamer in October 1915, including a stopover at Plymouth. Within a few months, Canaris would be reassigned from the surface fleet to Directorate N, naval intelligence, and, still traveling as Rosas, would proceed to Spain to set up a spy network before joining the U-boat arm himself.

Another officer, Lt. Lothar Witzke, his leg broken in the sinking of Dresden, escaped Chilean confinement in early 1916 and, proceeding to California, joined German intelligence and was named as part of the munitions explosions at Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in 1916 and Mare Island in 1917. Subsequently arrested by U.S Army counterintelligence, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not conducted due to the Armistice, and ordered released by President Coolidge in 1923. He was welcomed with an Iron Cross when he returned home. He later, without a shock here, worked for the Abwehr.

The largest group of Dresden sailors to leave Chile, six officers and 45 men led by Lt. Karl Richarz, escaped an old three-master barque, Tinto (137 feet, launched in 1852). They arrived some four months and 12,000 miles later in Germany via Iceland and Norway. This feat was accomplished despite inadequate charts and condemned sails, with a stop (and release) by the British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur as a cherry on top. One of the officers aboard, a young ensign Friedrich Wilhelm Fleischer, would go on to become a vice admiral during WWII only to end that war in a British PW camp. Jack Higgins would borrow the story for the basis of “Storm Warning” albeit changing the date to 1944.

As for Ludecke, Dresden’s final skipper, he remained in exile, reportedly untethered after the loss of his proud ship. He did not return to Germany until the end of 1919. Retained by the Reichsmarine briefly until March 1920, he was the operations officer for the fleet’s sole remaining cruiser squadron’ until he retired at the rank of rear admiral. He passed in 1931, aged 58, having only written briefly of his wartime experience, a chapter in a forgotten 1920s German text.

Of Dresden’s other skippers, her Hudson-Fulton commander, Varrentrapp, went on to command the battleships SMS Schleswig Holstein and Konig Albert during WWI, ending the conflict as a rear admiral in charge of the defenses of Wilhelmshaven. He was discharged in 1919 and passed in 1928, aged 60. Erich Köhler, who Lüdecke relieved in July 1914, perished at age 41 aboard Karlsruhe when the ship went down.

One other Dresden crewmember deserves mention. Immediately after the sinking. A rating on Glasgow noticed a pig swimming in the water and succeeded in rescuing him. The crew named said swine “Able Seapig Tirpitz” and he served as their mascot for a year before being transferred for shoreside duty at the Whale Island Gunnery School at Portsmouth.

Late in the war, he was auctioned off for charity but his “trotters” were turned into a carving set delivered to Glasgow while the head was mounted.

It seemed that almost all of the German cruisers that Dresden sailed with died in battle, the ship something of an albatross for the Kaiserliche Marine.

Besides Karlsruhe, Dresden’s own sister Emden, and the other four cruisers of Von Spee’s squadron, Konigsberg, who she literally bumped into in 1910, would scuttle up the Rufiji River in Africa in July 1915, her crew eventually captured by the British in 1917. Likewise, the old Bremen was sunk in the Baltic by a mine in December 1915. Strassburg, who she patrolled the Balkans with back in 1913, would be sunk at least twice in WWII.

The Japanese only disbanded the Amerika ensei-gun patrol force in May 1915, after Asama was recovered from being grounded off Baja in shallow water. The secondary Tokubetsu nanken shitai had been ordered back to Japan in January 1915 following Von Spee’s death off the Falklands. It was the beginning of the Combined Fleet’s experimentation with squadron operations outside of home waters. It would not be the last.

As for Dresden herself, as Robinson Crusoe gets little traffic, her hull is still there, as are 6-inch shells from Glasgow— the latter embedded in the cliffs behind her final anchorage. Dresden was illegally salvaged several times, likely by “treasure” hunters. Legal expeditions in 1965 and 2006 recovered numerous relics including her binnacle, flags, and her 340-pound ship’s bell. After display in Chile, the latter was sent “home” to a place of honor at the Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr (MHM) in Dresden, unveiled in 2008 on the ship’s 100th birthday.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

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