It was almost Homeric in scope. An odyssey full of adventure and danger, and it was happening
exactly 100 years ago. You may never have heard of it, but it’s a story worth telling,
so here you go: the legend of the German raider, the Moewe!
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the first voyage of the Moewe.
Well, I say first, but that’s not entirely correct. The Moewe was actually launched as
a freighter; a banana boat called Pungo- true story- in 1914, but was requisitioned by the
German navy and refitted for future use as a minelayer, renamed, and was ready for service
in November 1915. Early in the war German light cruisers had been in service in the
Atlantic, but the Allies had hunted them down. They still had the U-boats, of course, but
there was a theory that a freighter with extra coal room for extra range, decent guns, torpedo
tubes, and mines might make a good raider.
Enter the Moewe. At 5 AM on December 30th, the Moewe weighed anchors and headed off into
the North Sea, where she calmly made her way through the British navy’s net, while spending
the New Year laying mines. And then she cruised down the English Channel. Seriously, through
the heart of the British navy. Several British cruisers signaled her, and she occasionally
answered them, and was even saluted at least once. See, the Moewe carried a very powerful
wireless radio set, and her captain, Nikolaus Graf zu Dohna-Schlodien, was able to follow
the movements of the British patrol ships. Funnily enough, several of the British transmissions
spoke of a strange liner that didn’t answer questions. This was the Moewe. But the Moewe
had encountered, like, a dozen British warships, and she didn’t answer the far off ones,
correctly thinking she could outrun them, and she showed every courtesy to the closer
ones, and so the Moewe ran the gauntlet from Germany to the Atlantic.
The Moewe, with about 300 men aboard, headed for the steamship lanes off the Spanish and
Portuguese coast. Once there, she was relatively safe from pursuit, and indeed, it took weeks
before anybody actually realized there was a German raider out there. But one by one,
Allied ships failed to reach their destinations, and several ships arrived in England that
claimed to have been chased by a mystery ship off the African coast, so a flotilla of British
cruisers was sent out. They returned empty-handed.
Okay, at dawn, on February 9, 1916, a steamship pulled in to Hampton Roads, off the coast
of Virginia. When the sun was up, the German naval flag was flying from the prow. This
was not, however, the Moewe. This was the British ship Appam, a victim of the Moewe,
which had now sailed across the Atlantic for 33 days guided and guarded by a German crew
of 22 men and one officer from the Moewe. The Appam now also carried as prisoners, 156
Appam officers and crew, 116 of its passengers, 138 survivors of ships destroyed by the Moewe,
and 20 Germans who had been en route to a prison camp in Britain on the Appam when rescued
by the Moewe. The ship was interned. Now... what status did this ship have? Germany claimed
the right of asylum for a prize ship because of an old Prussian treaty with the US; Britain
demanded the ship be released. The US allowed the Appam to remain in German hands with the
same privileges as other interned ships. The Appam was worth a million dollars stripped,
and its cargo sold for $700,000 dollars. There had also been a quarter of a million dollars
in gold bars that went straight into the Moewe’s strongbox for a total haul of nearly 2 million dollars.
But now at least everybody knew there was a raider out there eluding the Allies, right?
And it had sunk and captured a whole bunch of ships.
Well, the search that followed was more thorough and on a broader scale than any such search
of the war so far, but to no avail. Then on February 20th, the British ship Westburn pulled
into Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a Spanish port. One German officer and six men from the Moewe
had brought it in with 206 prisoners from one Belgian and six British ships. After putting
his human cargo ashore, the German lieutenant asked for the port’s permission to re-anchor,
and when it was granted, he went beyond the 3-mile limit and blew up the Westburn.
Again, the command came, the Moewe must be found. The British public actually took the
Moewe to heart, though, even though she was the enemy. It was reminiscent of the glory
days of British privateers going forth to wreck French commerce. But the Moewe was never
caught, and amazingly, on March 5th, 1916, she pulled into Wilhelmshaven with 199 enemies
as prisoners. And the quarter million dollars in gold bars, of course.
The Moewe had sunk 15 Allied vessels- 13 British, one Belgian, and one French- with an aggregate
of 60,000 tons of shipping. This had been accomplished in the face of combined Allied
sea power. The Moewe even came home the long way around; going around Iceland to journey
through the Arctic Sea at the worst time of the year.
Count zu Dohna-Schlodien received a message from the Kaiser himself, summoning him to
Berlin for a meeting in person. The crew of the ship were all awarded the Iron Cross Second
Class, but the skipper was given the Blue Max, Germany’s highest award.
Thing is, was it the Moewe that sank all of those ships? There had been a concerted German
effort for interned ships at different ports to break out on the same day and rendezvous.
The Bahrenfeld and the Turpin had escaped from South American ports that day and were
never seen again, apparently. Perhaps they had also assumed the title of Moewe and carried
out some of the raids. We’ll likely never know. But it’s a good story, and think about
it, in under three months the Moewe sunk 15 merchant ships, captured the Appam, and returned
home with nearly 200 prisoners and a whole lot of gold, and finally, was most probably
also responsible for the loss of the British battleship King Edward VII, which struck a
mine in the North Sea on January 6th.
This was only the first raiding voyage of the Moewe, and the rest of her legendary exploits
lie in the future, but I thought you guys might enjoy a ripping yarn from the high seas.
You can look up details of all of the victims of the Moewe for yourself, it’s really interesting.
If you are still hungry for another great story about a German ship and its crew, then
click here for our special episode about the last voyage of the SMS Emden.
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See you next week.