The Raider Wolf and the hapless Cumberland by Alan Lucas

During the early part of World War One a degree of old-school honour prevailed in the German navy – enough that enemy merchant ships could be abandoned prior to their sinking by gunfire or torpedo. Considering this, it is surprising that the same country used armed merchant vessels under neutral flags to raid shipping lanes and lay minefields. This unsporting practice smacked not of honour but of outright piracy.
Conflicting morals aside, it must be admitted that it was often a case of piracy with a dash of decency, German raiders continuing their policy of taking prisoners rather than scuttling them with their ship throughout that dreadful, pointless war. It must also be acknowledged that very few raiders survived reprisal when caught, most of them ending in balls of fire as naval ships found their mark and detonated their terrifying cargos of mines and ammunition.
Wolf’s route from Kiel around Australia and return is shown by a solid line outbound and a broken line inbound. Between the 15 ships sunk by her mines and 12 by her guns, she accounted for 112,389 tons of Allied shipping.Arguably the most famous covert raider of all was the Wolf, a 5,890-ton converted cargo steamer whose single screw pushed her flat out at around eleven knots.
Previously she was the Wachtfels owned by the Hansa Line measuring 419 feet long with a beam of 56 feet and three decks including the boat deck. Loaded with hundreds of mines and ammunition for her seven 5.9 inch guns and four torpedo tubes, plus an Arado float plane stowed below decks, she left Kiel, Germany, 30 November, 1916 and returned 15 February 1918 after steaming 64,000 miles in 445 days laying minefields off the Cape of Good Hope, southeast Australia, New Zealand, India and Singapore.
Her minefields accounted for 15 ships totalling 73,998 tons and during her direct confrontations with allied merchant ships she sank 12, totalling 38,391 tons. Importantly for the German war effort, at one stage she had no less than 55 allied warships searching for her.
The only area in Australian waters mined by Wolf was around Gabo Island, one of which sank the British steamer, Cumberland. From here, after a feint to the southeast, she steamed north then west to her next target, Singapore.Remarkably, during her fifteen month voyage, Wolf not once put into port despite her constantly running low on everything from coal to basic food during long periods between fruitful encounters with enemy ships. And considering her need to get alongside her victims to transfer coal and cargo, she became extremely vulnerable waiting for calm seas or when moving herself and a captive vessel, with a prize crew, to a safe anchorage for the transhipment.
Considering her moderate displacement, it is even more remarkable that she managed to accommodate and feed her large complement of officers, crew and ever-increasing number of prisoners.
At times she had as many as 600 people aboard from a dozen different cultures: one of whom was Englishman Roy Alexander who, twenty years after the war, wrote the definitive book The Cruise of the Raider Wolf. Roy spent nine months imprisoned aboard her making him a first-class observer of all that transpired.
Wolf’s mines weighed about half a ton each and held 350lbs of TNT. They were stored in individual wheeled nests that kept them secure at sea while allowing them to be easily moved from the cargo hold to the stern where they were released into the sea, their nests going with them to act as mooring blocks.
Mines were always laid under cover of darkness with their cable lengths pre-set according to prevailing depths minus fifteen feet, this being the depth below the surface where the insidious things would lurk. Fifteen feet matched the draft of vessels being targeted, anything shallower being deemed too small to justify the high cost of mines.
It’s good to know that economic rationalism remained alive and well while we slaughtered each other.
On display at Port Macquarie’s Maritime Museum is this World War Two mine, similar to those used during World War One by the raider Wolf.After laying dozens of mines in Cook Strait, between New Zealand’s north and south islands, she left Cape Farewell on 26 June, 1916, for Gabo Island off the eastern tip of Victoria, taking six days for the Tasman Sea crossing during which time her skipper, Captain Nerger, resisted the temptation to harass passing merchantmen.
His focus was on mining our coast then slinking back to sea to avoid the Japanese and British cruisers that were patrolling the coast (the Japanese were our allies then).
On the night of July 3, around twenty five mines had been laid off Gabo Island when the cruiser Encounter was sighted, obliging Wolf to stop laying and drop her steel side-plates to bring her guns and torpedo tubes to bear – all manned and ready for action. But there was no action that night, Encounter failing to see her. Wolf escaped to sea and headed for Singapore to lay her next minefield after going north of New Guinea then through the Indonesian chain of islands.
A rather tedious but sensible ploy of Captain Nerger was to never depart a new minefield in a logical direction. From Gabo Island, for example, he steamed southeast before turning north for New Guinea and Singapore. After mining Singapore, he similarly steamed back on his course rather than take the short cut out to the west. With these manoeuvres he managed to out-fox the Allies every time.
The raider Wolf went on to distinguish herself with many more enemy ships sunk – including a few sailing ships, before running the Atlantic blockade back to Germany where she became one of only two raiders to actually return from active duty, all others being destroyed by enemy fire.
Meanwhile, back at Gabo Island, her mines claimed their first victim: she was the new twin-screw British steamer Cumberland that radioed an SOS to say she was sinking.
First to respond was a Japanese cruiser that rushed to stand by whilst Cumberland was hastily beached on Gabo Island. Whether through political guile or genuine belief that mines could not be laid that close to home, the government announced that she had suffered an internal explosion, despite the glaringly obvious fact that her plates were buckled inwards, not outwards. Perhaps the Pollies of the day did not want to alarm their citizens; but whatever their motive – or level of ignorance – the stricken ship was temporarily repaired and then hauled off the beach to be towed to Sydney.
Sadly, Cumberland didn’t get far, foundering soon after in 300 feet of water off Green Cape, twenty miles northeast of Gabo Island.
Cumberland lay on the bottom until 1952 when her cargo of copper, lead and zinc, with an estimated value of 300,000 pounds, became too attractive to resist. A British salvage company sent the Foremost 17 with 30 men aboard to find the wreck, which they did with commendable speed and efficiency.
Working out of Eden, the salvage team blew a hole in the wreck then used a grab with a ten-foot mouth guided by divers in a bell to remove the cargo over a period of weeks. Interestingly, the hull had been conveniently weakened for the salvage operation by depth charges dropped during the Second World War, making her the victim of mines in not one but two world wars.
As for minefields: there is a very strong argument for their international banning when it is remembered that, like land mines, they can go on killing for years after armed conflict ceases. Mine clearing after hostilities does not stop breakaways floating off to remain a threat for many years after. Soon after World War II, for example, there were numerous cases of accidental encounters with mines close to shore where currents and onshore wind drove them.
A nail-biting time was spent by yours truly sixteen years after WW II ended when anchored behind Acheron Island, north of Townsville. A mine was lolling around not 30 metres away, its chain apparently (and hopefully) snagged on the bottom. I got underway and reported it to the management of Palm Island but have no idea if any action was taken.
Off Cairns, a mine snagged its dangling mooring chain on a coral head and became a favourite rounding mark for the local fleet of mackerel dories. The story goes that one of the dories cut it too close one day, hit one of the horns and detonated the mine, blowing dory and fisherman sky-high.
A professional fisherman who worked his nets in Princess Charlotte Bay told me that in the late 1940s, “You never lost sight of a stranded mine when working around the bay’s perimeter.”
He was a great raconteur, but even if I cut his yarns in half, a worrying truth remains: those mines are still there – hopefully all duds by now.
Then there was the confirmed story of a mine fetching up on Low Islet during the 1950s and being reported to the Navy by the lighthouse keepers. This one was still alive, the combination of the Navy explosives and the mine’s contents blowing a huge crater in the intertidal flat. Interestingly, according to one of the light keepers, sharks became ultra-active and very aggressive after the explosion, suggesting that the percussion may have affected them in some way.
As late as 1972, twenty-seven years after the war, a documentary film group led by Peter Marjason on Lizard Island found a mine on the seabed whilst skin-diving off its eastern coast. The Navy was called and it was destroyed, the mine’s contents proving to be well and truly dead.
Humans apparently learn nothing from history, dooming us to repeating its horrors ad infinitum. But surely, can’t we at least ban weapons that insidiously lie in wait for innocent victims after the wars are over?