Battle of The Falkland Islands - Secret Service Trap

Secret Service Trap

After the disaster, German naval experts were baffled at why Admiral Spee attacked the base and how the two squadrons could have met so coincidentally in so many thousands of miles of open waters. Kaiser William II's handwritten note on the official report of the battle reads: "It remains a mystery what made Spee attack the Falkland Islands." See Mahan's Naval Strategy."

It is generally believed that Spee was misled by the German admiralty into attacking the Falklands. He called a meeting of his officers and announced that he would attack the base which acted as a coaling station and wireless relay station for the British, as his intelligence, received from the German wireless station at Valparaíso, reported the port to be free of Royal Navy warships. Despite objections by the captains of three of his ships, the attack proceeded.

However, in 1925 the German naval officer, Franz von Rintelen, interviewed Admiral William Reginald Hall, Director of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division (NID), who said that the Spee Squadron had been lured towards the British battlecruiser squadron by means of a fake signal sent in a German naval code broken by British cryptographers.

Broadcast of a false order in a broken naval code would have been against the British Naval Staff's policy as noted by Rear-Admiral Herbert Hope "In a very few months we obtained a very good working knowledge of the organisation, operations, and internal economy of the German Fleet. Had we been called upon by the Staff to do so, we could have furnished valuable information as to the movements of submarines, minefields, mine-sweeping, etc. But the Staff was obsessed by the idea of secrecy; they realised that they held the trump card and they worked on the principle that every effort must be made to keep our knowledge up our sleeves for a really great occasion such as the German Fleet coming out in all their strength to throw down the gauge of battle. In other words the Staff determined to make use of our information defensively and not offensively" No less than Winston Churchill replied most sharply to Admiral Jellicoe even mentioning the subject by telegraph specifically, so sharp was the concern that the breaking of the German Naval codes might be uncovered.