Part One
On the afternoon of 24th of July 1915, Kapitan Ernst Graeff of the U-36 was overseeing the confiscation of cargo from a captured Danish steamer off the northwest coast of Scotland. Before this was completed, another steamship loomed on the horizon, a collier bearing a British flag. Graeff and his men had had an immensely profitable spell since leaving Germany a week earlier. The ship on the horizon would be the 15th they’d sunk or captured in the past 72 hours; including nine trawlers of a British fishing fleet. However, Graeff’s war was about come to a sudden end.
The innocuous-looking steamer on the horizon was in fact the Prince Charles, one of the Royal Navy’s newly-deployed Q-ships. Hidden under tarpaulin on her decks were 4-inch and 12-pounder guns. The Prince Charles heaved to and made as if to lower her lifeboats, but as the U-36 drew up to within 600 yards, she hurriedly hoisted the white ensign and revealed her secret weapons. Within minutes the surprised German U-boat was fatally holed. 15 of her 35 crew including the Kapitan made it out of the submarine before she sank. During her two patrols, U-36 had sunk a comparatively meagre 12,000 tons of merchant shipping. Yet Graeff had done more for the German war effort than he could have known at the time.
Earlier on the 24th July, U-36 had stopped a three-masted barque by the name of Pass of Balmaha.[1] This Clyde-built vessel was carrying cotton from New York to Archangel under an American flag. Three days previously, the Balmaha had run into HMS Victorian, an armed passenger liner which formed part of the British blockading squadron operating north of Scotland [1]. Suspicious of her cargo, the commander of the Victorian had ordered the sailing ship to put in at the Orkneys for customs inspection. A six-man guard had been placed aboard and the stars and stripes replaced by the red ensign.
This act had evidently angered the Balmaha’s American commander, Captain Scott, and to avoid having his ship sunk as a belligerent, he reinstated the US flag as soon as it became apparent he would be stopped by the U-boat, locking the Royal Navy men in the hold. Graeff was equally suspicious of the Balmaha’s cargo and put his own man aboard to ensure Scott would follow his new orders to make for Cuxhaven. Fearing a bloody confrontation, Scott chose to leave the British stowaways locked up until they arrived at the German port, where they were arrested, and the ship was interned.
Early German commerce raiding and mine-laying operations using fast passenger liners proved to be of limited success as these ships were highly conspicuous and hard to keep resupplied. By July 1915, the German navy had turned to using armed merchantmen instead. The normal tactic was to disguise these ships as neutral vessels and time their departure with that of a known vessel of the same nationality. The first such ship, Meteor, masked herself as a British freighter, while the SMS Moewe, the most successful German raider of World War One, adopted the disguise of a Swedish merchantman on her first patrol. However, the preferred choice of nationality for such deceptions became Norwegian. Such efforts met with mixed results. In February 1916, the disguised raider Greif, flying the false flag of Norway, had been intercepted and sunk in the North Sea just two days after leaving port.
As a consequence, it was proposed that a sailing vessel would be an even better disguise for a commerce raider. Who would think of arming a barque in the era of steam turbines? Moreover, using a sailing ship would mitigate the problem of resupplying such vessels with coal. The interned Pass of Balmaha was seen as ideal for the role. Constructed by Robert Duncan & Co. in 1888, she was one of a class of swift, steel-hulled so-called ‘wind-jammers’ that had superseded wooden-hulled clippers as competitors to steamships in the long-haul trade. Such vessels were purpose-built for oceanic voyages of the kind commerce-raiding thrived on.
Naturally, the ship required substantial refitting in order to accommodate her armament; a pair of 4.1 inch guns. These were of a similar calibre to those carried on German light cruisers such as the SMS Konigsberg, having a range of more than 13,000 yards. In addition, it was decided equip the Balmaha with a 1,200hp diesel engine. This would enable her to chase down any sailing vessels audacious enough to try to flee, and, with the aid of a stiff breeze, even slower steamers. The ship’s boats were also to be given small motors to facilitate boarding enemy vessels. Finally, the Balmaha was to be fitted with a wireless for two-way communications. For these alterations, she was sent to the J.C. Teklenborg shipyard at Geestemund.[2] Her refitting took until almost the end of 1916 to complete, by which point she had acquired a new name: Seeadler, the Sea Eagle.
To command this unique warship required someone with experience of sailing ships. The man they chose was 34-year-old Felix Graf von Luckner. The early career of Luckner has been the subject of so much embellishment over the years, much of it by the man himself, that it is now difficult to separate fact from fiction. Evidently however, Luckner had gone to sea as a young boy, gaining experience on sailing ships of varying sizes and nationalities; from Russian full-riggers to Canadian schooners [2]. By 1912, when he joined the Imperial German Navy, he’d also acquired experience as an officer on steamships. His first navy posting is believed to have been the Iltis Class colonial gunboat Panther, then based in German West Africa [3].
It seems Luckner had had a busy war even before boarding the Seeadler, reputedly commanding a turret aboard the battleship Kronprinz during the Battle of Jutland. (If this was true, then Luckner was indeed lucky; the Kronprinz had been one of the few German capital ships to entirely escape damage.) For certain, by December 1916, Luckner had assumed command of the Seeadler and a crew of 63 seamen. Among his six officers, his Navigating Officer, Karl Kirscheiss also had a background in sailing ships, while his First Lieutenant, Alfred Kling had taken part in a German Antarctic expedition before the war. Prize Officer Richard Pries had been hand-picked by von Luckner to take command of boarding parties.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 