The Last Cruise of the Emden: The Amazing True WWI Story of a German-Light Cruiser and Her Courageous Crew
The true story of the most extraordinary and little-known escapades of a German light cruiser called into the thick of battle during World War I.
Customer Review: Story of a great sea adventure
Light cruiser Emden undoubdtedly most successful German commerce raider during Great War at sea. The ship named after a small town in northern Germany straddling along the banks of river Weser which flowed into the North Sea.The ship formed the part of German East Asia squadron based at Tsingtao on the Kiachow bay located almost near the tip of China’s Shantung peninsula.
3500-ton fast,modern Emden was commanded by a man who was very daring,skillful and chivalrous. Captain Karl Von Muller was forty-one- year old ,tall, blond Prussian.
With the outbreak of World War 1,Emden broke away form parent squadron and steamed into Bay of Bengal ,Indian Ocean through Sunda straits which then were British lakes.
The area teemed with allied shipping .For three months from August 14 to November 9 Emden ravaged ,devastated allied shipping along the east coast of India.On the night of September 22,1914 ,using darkness as a cover ,the ship approached to 3000 yards to Indian port city of Madras.Suddenly switching its search lights Emden raked the area the area with gunfire pumping 125 shells within half an hour. Oil storage tanks of Burmah Company went up in flames destroying half a million gallons of kerosene.
Emden virtually paralysed British trade along the Bengal coast .This single ship brought forced Admiralty to retain ships at ports and made troop-carrying vessels sail in convoys protected by escorts.Emden’s maraudings threaten to throw into disarray Britain’s plans to fight Kaiser’s Germany.Within a span of four days [September 10-14] Muller sank 8 steamers on the approaches to kolkata. So Emden had to be stopped at all costs.In London Admiralty despaired.It pooled the resources of Commonwealth to form hunter-killer groups to comb ocean wastes to track and hunt down this elusive foe.
Fame of Muller’s ship rests on its ability to evade Royal Navy for so long. Besides ship is used to pop up at unexpected places which bestowed upon it the status of a ghost ship.This was so because Germans masked ship’ movements by resorting to a simple trick.This was done by installing an dummy funnel which gave it an appearance of 4-funnel British cruiser.
End came on November 9 when Emden while approaching Cocos island on the India Ocean was sighted and alarm sounded.A large Austalian troop convoy bound for Red Sea and Egypt picked up the signal.Soon Australian light cruiser [3knots faster carrying long-range guns] was dispatched. And in an unequal battle that ensued the German raider was sunk.Muller and his fellow officer surrendered and sat out rest of the war in prison in Malta.
However on the whole effect of Emden’s raider warfare was minimal when we relate it to the maritime resources of British empire. But British public became restless ,indignant and wanted to kow why despite Royal navy’s supremacy this happened. Answer is provided by American naval historian Arthur Marder. Sea is vast and huge ,dotted with myriad islands which gave ample scope to play a game of hide and seek.
But days of commerce raider, I wish to say, is confined only to the pages of History.Science since then has advanced leaps and bounds .This has inevitably affected the nature of war at sea.We have today overhead satellites and potential raider holds no chance of vanishing into the vastness of the sea. Raider can be neutralised within minutes by anti ship cruise missile fired either from a ship or an aircraft with target inputs gleaned from satellite data fed into the missile’s on board computer.But before the advent of submarine raider gave small naval powers the only means for assailing enemy’s sea line of communication.
Customer Review: An amazing story…a serviceable book
I stumbled across the story of the Emden in another book and really didn’t quite believe it, so I tracked down this book to read more. It really is an amazing story — a lone German cruiser roaming the Indian Ocean in the early days of World War I, harrassing shipping and confiscating the cargoes of merchant ships it encounters. Many ships are sent out to find and destroy the Emden, and finally one does. But the story doesn’t end there — part of the crew escapes in a sailing ship, determined to make it back to Germany. They survive numerous threats to make it to the Arabian peninsula, where they travel by camel caravan and survive an attack by Beduouin tribesman before reaching safe haven in Istanbul.
One thing the book makes clear is that the captain and his officers did not expect to survive their adventures. Their goal was to create as much havoc as they could…as they continued their cruise without stopping for routine maintenance, their boat grew battered and slower as its systems were pushed to their limit, week after week. (They employed numerous ruises to escape their pursuers, including a false canvas funnel that they used on occasion to try to make their three-funnel German ship look like a four-funnel British steamer of the time.) The book also explains that the captain had to constantly be on the lookout for shiploads of coal it could confiscate, as the Emden would burn through hundreds of tons of coal per week. But through it all, the captain pretty much expected that the ship was doomed, and his goal was merely to keep running as long as he could.
If the book is to be believed — and it is part of the legend of this ship and her crew — the ship became famous for its chivalrous treatment of captured prisoners. The book also takes some time explaining the various “rules” of war that the captain paid attention to: when it could confiscate an enemy ship vs. when it could only take the cargo.
The book does a serviceable job of telling the story in a very straightforward way. There is a just enough detail to explain what’s happening without the mind-numbing jargo that sometimes spoils books on naval history (at least for me). However, it seems to me the story could have been told with a fair amount more drama — it seems as if the book has been drawn mainly from other books of the early 20’s and 30’s about this shop…surely in the years between then and the 60’s, when this book was written, more personal diaries and journals about the Emden might have surfaced that could have added more color. Likewise, the book could have used more follow-up on the main characters — we trace their movements back to Germany but never really hear what became of them.
Cruise Vacations For Dummies 2006 (Dummies Travel) Nearly 23 million people have cruised in the past 3 years, according to a 2004 study by CLIA (Cruise Line International Association) and it is projected that the number of cruisers will rise to 30 million over the next 3 years. 
