The Demise of a Pocket Battleship
When the German heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee came to her end in December 1939, one of the main factors that led to her demise could be blamed on part of her shipboard equipment. The British knew all about their enemy’s woeful blundering, and with their own superior design ensured that it wasn’t going to happen to them. Indeed, that weakness in the German ship’s equipment was the design of her Arado spotting aircraft that they used on their warships.
On the German warships the Arado seaplanes were used as spotter planes, but like the RN ships they could only be launched from their mother ship when the weather permitted. They’d be launched at first light each day from a steam catapult to see what other ships were in their 50-60 mile range. But on that fateful day for the Kriegsmarine in December 1939, the Admiral Graf Spee which had two seaplanes didn’t fly either of them off to make their early morning reconnaissance sweep. If they had, Kapitan Langsdorf of the German ship would have known that from fifty or sixty miles away three British cruisers were looking for him, but due to the policy of the Kriegsmarine, and even though the German pocket battleship was more than a match for the three British cruisers, Kapitan Langsdorf would have turned tail and fled at speed.
Indeed, it was the policy of the Kriegsmarine that they should not engage with any enemy warships, unless they were much smaller. But both of Graf Spee’s seaplanes were disabled and out of service and no such early warning reconnaissance system could be used. The reason for the Arado seaplanes disability was they both had cracked cylinder heads in their engines. But it was nothing new, because since the Graf Spee’s departure from Germany some three months previously, with spare cylinder heads in the storeroom, they’d all been used up with the familiar head cracking. More cylinder heads were on the way via their supply ship Altmark, but she was late on arrival.
The cause of the cracked cylinder heads on the Arado seaplanes is quite simple to explain, and such a thing occurred after the Arado had completed its reconnaissance and landed in the water close to its mother ship to be hoisted aboard. However, it is when the Arado hits the water in a choppy sea, whilst landing at as slow a speed as possible, that if the relatively cold seawater hits the hot engine of the seaplane its cylinder head is liable to crack, and it would only have taken one or two buckets of seawater over a hot engine to do such damage. The Arado seaplane’s engine was placed at the same level and in front of the pilot, whereas on the British Walrus seaplanes their engines were situated much higher and behind the pilot. Therefore, whereas the Walrus could land in a choppy sea quite safely the Arado could not. The Walrus was designed by RJ Mitchell and first used in 1933, they were strong and reliable and carried on British cruisers and battleships. The Arado which was relatively light and flimsy had been replaced by another Arado in 1940. Just why the Germans were not fully aware of the fault in their spotter planes is unknown. They must have known that the British Walrus had a high engine, because after all the Walrus had been in use for six years before WW2 began.
As the photograph of the Arado on the Graf Spee shows, the engine is level with the pilot, whereas the engine of a Walrus is eight feet higher up. How and why the Germans never realised their monumental error and rectified it will never be known but the fact remains that they did, and such led to the historical Battle of the River Plate. Other of the accompanying photos depict a Walrus seaplane on the steam catapult of HMS Achilles.