1914 - European War in the Americas
June 28, Sarajevo, Bosnia - Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated by Gavrilo Princip. The Archduke had been positioned to become heir to the Hapsburg throne by an 1867 execution in Mexico, followed by fateful instances of tuberculosis, madness, and suspicious suicide. The chain of events began with the execution of Franz Ferdinand's uncle, the short-lived Mexican Emperor Maximilian, in Querétaro, Mexico the morning of June 19, 1867. Seven bullets from a firing squad ripped into Ferdinand Maximilian, and as the dying Emperor twitched in the dust, a 19 year-old named Aureliano Blanquet stepped over him to deliver the coup de grâce. In June 1913, Blanquet would be named Mexico’s minister of war as a reward for his role in killing yet another head of state, President Francisco Madero. Thus, Maximilian’s death and executioner touched both the Great War and the Mexican Revolution.
July 20, Puerto Mexico - Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, General Aureliano Blanquet and associates board German cruiser SMS Dresden to new lives as plotting exiles, first in Jamaica, then in Spain, and eventually in the United States. Huerta's forces surrendered to the Constitutionalist revolutionaries during the next three weeks. The First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army, a towering (6-foot 4-inch tall), ambitious politician named Venustiano Carranza, made a triumphal entry into Mexico City on August 20, and became the country's de facto president for the next six years. But he had not heard the last from Huerta...
July, Western Hemisphere - German naval intelligence activates its secret logistics and spy network, the Etappendienst.
August, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Lima, et al. - European embassies, legations and consuls instruct male citizens of military age to register. Tens of thousands of European expatriate reservists abandon their lives in the New World to defend their homelands in the Old World, quitting jobs, terminating contracts, breaking leases and leaving families. Many expect to return by Christmas.
August, New York, Philadelphia, Newport News, etc. - Freighters depart US ports with secret provisions for German warships and auxiliaries. The German Naval Attache in Washington, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, orchestrates the complex Etappendienst logistics operations. For example, SS Berwind, a 21 year old merchantman which typically hauled sugar for the New York & Porto Rico Steamship Company, departed New York harbor August 5. Her captain took orders from a supercargo assigned by Boy-Ed's assistants in New York. About August 20, Berwind reportedly radioed the German Legation in Buenos Aires for instructions, presumably related to the conversion of the Cap Trafalgar from luxury liner to armed auxiliary. Ironically the Berwind would eventually be sunk August 7, 1918 by German submarine UB-88 off the French coast.
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August 17-18, San Francisco, California - Around midnight, the German cruiser SMS Leipzig slid under the Golden Gate Bridge and docked in San Francisco. At dawn the warship’s presence startled the city and sparked frenetic activity among diplomats, lawyers, covert German Etappendienst operatives and British intelligence agents. Leipzig took on 575 tons of coal, and replenished her galleys and storerooms while her officers gathered all the information they could about movements of enemy freighters and warships. The cruiser departed San Francisco well before the 24-hour limit of neutrality law. In Los Angeles, Etappendienst Lieutenant Karl zur Helle scrambled to gather gunsights and other specialized equipment for Leipzig, which he would deliver at Bahia Bellenas in Baja California 10 days later. During the next 4 months, Zur Helle would shadow the ship down the Pacific Coast, all the way to Punta Arenas, Chile, arranging fuel and food, providing intelligence and communications links.
September, Eastern Pacific and South Atlantic - The German Navy's East Asiatic Squadron evades British and Japanese warships to disappear into the Pacific Ocean. Sightings of German warships are reported off the coasts of California and Mexico. Meanwhile, in Atlantic waters of the Western Hemisphere, German cruisers are joined by passenger liners that have been hastily converted to marauding corsairs. Allied warships from Great Britain, France, Japan and Australia scour the oceans for German vessels.
September 14, Departement de l'Aisne, France - Mexico’s most prominent tycoon, British investor Weetman Dickinson Pearson, lost his youngest son, 23-year-old Geoffrey, in battle, confirming the war’s cold indifference to class or wealth. The remains of British Army Staff Sergeant Francis Geoffrey Pearson are buried in Montreuil-aux-Lions Cemetery in Picardie, France. (Photo: Find a Grave / Laurin Espie).
September 14, Atlantic Ocean (600 miles east of Rio de Janeiro) - Ships of the Hamburg American and Cunard lines battled to the death. The arming of the luxurious 600-foot Cap Trafalgar had been the first project of German naval intelligence in Buenos Aires in the first days of August 1914.
No sooner had workmen begun the frantic conversion, the Argentine Maritime Ministry prohibited the arming of foreign vessels in Argentine waters. Undaunted, German naval attaches arranged for the elegant Cap Trafalgar to undergo her makeover to warrior at Trindade Island, a desolate moonscape far off the Brazilian coast. A gunboat from the German West Africa patrol, SMS Eber, brought two 4.1-inch cannons and six heavy machine guns to Cap Trafalgar at Trinidade. Ammunition and provisions were piled in her opulent salons, canvas was lashed over her Winter Garden solarium, and Eber's naval crew manned the guns. |
The high seas duel with Cunard's HMS Carmania was a bitter brawl between two floating hotels armed with deadly weapons, yet scantily armored. Carmania was better outfitted for war, mounting eight 4.7-inch guns. Under the blazing tropical sun, sailors who would have risked their lives to save one another weeks earlier endured an intense hellstorm of shells, large caliber bullets and shrapnel trying to kill one another. Carmania’s larger shells prevailed, Cap Trafalgar sank. The battle of the shipping lines presaged the merciless, all-out warfare to come, engaging not just military and naval forces, but all of each belligerent’s society.
October, Washington, DC - Lawyer Rafael Zubarán Capmany arrived in Washington in October under orders from Mexico's de facto head of state, First Chief Venustiano Carranza, to serve as Confidential Agent of the revolutionary Constitutionalist Army. During his three-month stay in the US, he began building and organizing an efficient Mexican intelligence network. Two years later, Carranza would appoint Zubarán to be Mexico’s ambassador to Germany.
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November 1, Pacific Ocean near Coronel, Chile - The Battle of Coronel is a German victory. Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee, aboard cruiser Scharnhorst, leads Germany's East Asiatic Squadron into an unexpected duel with Admiral Christopher Cradock's South Atlantic squadron and sinks the HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth in about one hour. In meetings with the Kaiser's representatives in Mexico City just four months before, Cradock had negotiated Huerta's exile and offered protection to German property. He perished with 1,600 British sailors at Coronel. German losses amounted to only 3 men wounded.
November 3, Valparaiso, Chile - Two days after the Battle of Coronel, German cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Nürnberg sailed into Valparaiso at mid-morning to the rousing cheers of Germans in the streets and aboard interned merchantmen.
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Von Spee's flagship boomed a salute to the Chilean flag, and dozens of lucky sailors strolled into town for a brief, celebratory shore leave. The German Minister and Consul-General hosted a banquet at the German Club. Admiral von Spee raised his glass “to the memory of a gallant and honorable foe,” then departed abruptly. His men returned to their ships laden with gifts, flowers and fruit showered upon them by an adoring German-Chilean community. German reservists from Chile joined them. The Gneisenau took on an additional 50 men, their proud kinfolk on the docks unaware that they were saying goodbye forever. Von Spee was anxious to load provisions, gather information and depart. Jubilation, horns and whistles heralded the fleet’s departure from Valparaiso November 4.
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December 8, Falkland Islands - Admiral von Spee's German Fleet is devastated by the British Navy at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. 2,200 of Germany's finest sailors perish in the frigid South Atlantic waters. The battle heralds the waning months of Germany's cruiser war in the Pacific and South Atlantic. The naval balance of power tips to the Entente, but the Germans stay in the game with corsairs, secret supply lines and, soon, submarines.
December 27, Washington - German ambassador Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff received coded instructions from Berlin to render support to Indian nationalists in the United States: “You should, in conjunction with [Heramba Lal] Gupta, but without attracting attention, take steps to have such Indians as are suitable for this purpose instructed in the use of explosives by some reliable person.” It was a synergistic partnership in the Americas: the Ghadar nationalist movement provided recruits, and German intelligence provided weapons training, money, and logistics expertise in the fight against their mutual British enemy. Operations began immediately on the West Coast of the United States and Mexico.
Copyright 2019, Jamie Bisher.