GRAF SPEE PARADOX.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 95, 20 March 1940, Page 11

GRAF SPEE PARADOX.

“Perhaps the most unorthodox battle in British annals,’’ is how the action with the German _ ‘pocket’ battleship Graf Spec is described by Commander Edward Ellsbcrg, D.S.M., of the United States Naval lteserve, in an article in an American quarterly marine journal. “There in the mud lies the Graf Spee, her flame-twisted superstructure gaunt against the eastern horizon, a paradox when she was built, even more a paradox in her unbelievable end—that 'pocket’ battleship designed by Germany to outshoot anything she could not outrun, to outrun anything she could not outshoot,” wrote Commander Ellsbcrg. “But when the day of battle finally came for her sho could do neither. Under the light guns of three faster but weaker British cruisers, whose officers refused to realise that they were supposed to run before the Graf Spec’s superior gunpower, lest they be swiftly annihilated, and hung on to fight instead, she herself chose to flee into a neutral port for safety, a sadly-crippled ship whose fighting days were over.”