German Raiders of the South Seas - The Naval Threat to Australia/New Zealand 1914-17

Doubleday 1985

In the first days of WW1, a German cruiser detached itself from the East Asiatic Squadron with the mission to raid and harass Allied shipping. The ship, SMS Emden, not only became world famous in its two monhs of raiding, during which it sank 16 ships and captured others, but demonstrated to a cunning enemy the vulnerability of Australian, New Zealand and Empire vital shipping links. The two dominions were left with little naval protection as Britain gathered its ships to fight the Germans in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Then in 1916 came another raider, the Wolf, which, undetected and unmolested, laid mines around Australia and New Zealand, and preyed upon merchant ships sailing in the Tasman Sea and South Pacific. The following year the Germans made an abortive attampt to send a sailing ship to raid the South Seas, which ended when the Seeadler was wrecked on a small atoll. This is the story of these raiders, the buccaneering crew of the Emden casting a shadow of fear over an ocean; the survivors of the battle with the Sydney sailing a leaking copra schooner from the Cocos Islands to the East Indies; the captain of the Seeadler, von Luckner, sailing a small boat halfway across the Pacific to Fiji, and then later making a dramatic escape from a NZ prisoner of war camp. With over 80 black and white photographs, many of them previously unpublished, and detailed maps of the routes of the major ships, German Raiders makes fascinating reading and is an important addition to the naval history of Australia and New Zealand...