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2 World War I 3 Post War life |
Early Life
At the age of thirteen, von Luckner ran away to sea as an unpaid cabin boy on the Russian sailing ship Niobe travelling between Hamburg, Germany, and Australia. Arriving at Fremantle, Western Australia, he jumped ship and for seven years followed a bewildering array of occupations: seller of the Salvation Army's War Cry, assistant lighthouse keeper (having to abandon the job when discovered with his hotel keeper's daughter by her father!), kangaroo hunter, circus worker, professional boxer, fisherman, seaman, a guard in the Mexican army for President Diaz, railway construction worker, barman, and tavern keeper; he served a short time in a Chilean jail accused of stealing pigs, suffered broken legs twice, and was thrown out of hospital in Jamaica for lack of money. At the age of twenty he entered a German navigation training school where he passed the examinations for his Mate's ticket. By 1908 he had joined the Hamburg-Südamerikanisch Line steamer Petropolis, intending to serve for nine months before volunteering to serve in the Imperial Navy for a year, to obtain a naval commission. He had vowed not to return to his family except in uniform, and was eventually welcomed back by his family who had given him up for lost. He was finally called up by the Navy in February 1912 and served on the gunboat Panzer.
World War I
At the beginning of the First World War Germany converted a considerable number of merchant ships into Armed Merchant Raiders, by equipping passenger liners and other ships with guns and sending them in search of Allied merchant shipping. Most of the armed raiders were not particularly successful, but they tied up considerable Allied forces in hunting them, but by early 1915 most of the armed raiders had either been hunted down and sunk, or had run out of fuel and been interned in neutral ports.
In the early part of the war, Felix von Luckner saw action at the Battle of Heligoland Bight, and during the Battle of Jutland he commanded a gun turret aboard the battleship Kronprinz Wilhelm.
Wishing to revive commerce raiding, the Imperial Navy equipped the impounded three-masted sailing ship Pass of Balmaha (1571 tons) with two 8.8 cm guns hidden behind hinged gunwhales, machine guns, and two carefully hidden 500 HP auxiliary engines. Renamed the Seeadler (Sea Eagle), von Luckner was appointed its commander as virtually the only officer in the German Navy with extensive experience of sailing ships.
The Voyage of the Seeadler
Leaving port
The Seeadler left port on 21 December 1916 and managed to get through the British blockade disguised as the Norwegian ship Irma (many of the crew of 6 officers and 57 men were selected for the ability to speak Norwegian if intercepted by the British). By Christmas Day she was south west of Greenland when she encountered the British Armed Merchant Cruiser Avenger. Avenger put an inspection party aboard "Irma" and all went well.
Raider
On 9 January 1917 Seeadler came upon a single-funneled steamer. She raised a signal requesting a time signal (not an uncommon thing for a sailing ship long out of contact with land to do), and too late for evasive action, she raised the German ensign. Three shots were needed to persuade the 3,268 ton Gladys Royle, carrying coal from Cardiff to Buenos Aires, to stop: her crew was taken off unharmed, and she was scuttled.
On 10 January 1917 Seeadler encountered another steamship which refused to identify itself. The German ensign was raised and a shot fired across the bow of the Lundy Island, carrying sugar from Madagascar. The steamer refused to stop, and four shots were fired directly at her. The steamer hove to and lowered its boats, but its captain ignored an order to come to the Seeadler -- a German boarding party was sent over and discovered that the crew had abandoned ship when the first shots were fired, leaving the captain alone. Later, Captain Bannister told von Luckner that he had previously been captured by a German raider, and had given his parole which he had broken, thus he was not anxious to be a prisoner of war again. Von Luckner continued his voyage southwards, and by 21 January he was in mid-Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa when he found the 2,199 ton French three-masted barque Charles Gounod. loaded with corn. Charles Gounod was quickly despatched, but her log book recorded information about other ships she had met, and their intended route.
On 24 January the small 364 ton Canadian schooner Perce was met and sunk by machine gun fire, after taking off the crew including the captain's new bride. The 3,071 ton French four-masted Antonin, loaded with Chilean saltpetre was overhauled on 3 February and soon scuttled. On 9 February the 1,811 ton Italian Buenos Ayres, also carrying saltpetre, was sunk, while on 19 February a four-masted barque was spotted which immediately piled on sail in an effort to get away; however Seeadlers engines allowed her to overhaul the 2,431 ton British grain carrying Pinmore. By coincidence, von Luckner had worked on the Pinmore in his civilian sailing days, back in 1902. Von Luckner took the Pinmore into Rio de Janeiro in order to get more supplies, before eventually scuttling her.
The next ship to be stopped was the Danish barque Viking but as there was nothing unusual about its cargo the neutral ship was allowed to proceed unmolested.
On the morning of 26 February 1,953 ton British barque British Yeoman carrying a welcome cargo including chickens and pigs was stopped and sunk, while the same evening the French four-master Le Rochfoucauld fell victim to the Seeadler. The boarding party discovered that Le Rochfoucauld had only been recently been stopped by a British cruiser which was looking for the Seeadler.
In the evening of 5 March Seeadler discovered a four-masted barque in the moonlight and signalled "Stop immediately! German Cruiser". Bizarrrely the captain of the 2,206 ton French ship Dupleix rowed across to the Seeadler convinced that another French captain was playing a practical joke on him. He was soon disabused of the idea when his ship was scuttled. Seeadlers next victim on 10 March was asked for the time, but ignored her signal; von Luckner ordered a smoke generator to be lit, so the 3,609 ton Horngarth turned back to render assistance to the 'burning' sailing ship. A single shot put the British ship's radio out of commission, and she was soon scuttled by the Seeadlers now experienced crew.
By this time von Luckner had the problem of feeding and keeping safe nearly 300 prisoners in addition to his crew. Consequently when on the 20 March the French four-masted barque Cambronne was captured, von Luckner arranged for the ships' top gallant mast and additional spars and sails to be removed, before putting his prisoners aboard the Cambronne under the command of Captain Mullen of the Pinmore. The damage to the Cambronne ensured that Seeadler would be able to make good its escape before its location could be reported to the hunting ships.
The Royal Navy was well aware of Seeadlers general location and set a trap consisting of the Armed Merchant Cruiser Otranto and the cruisers Lancaster and Orbita at Cape Horn. However a severe storm blew Seeadler considerably further south before she entered the Pacific Ocean on 18 April. Von Luckner now sailed north along the Chilean coast. By early June, Seeadler was east of Christmas Island and learned that the United States had entered the war. Seeadler turned her attention to American shipping, sinking the 529 ton A B Johnson of San Francisco on 14 June and the 673 ton R C Slade the next day, and the schooner Manila on 8 July. By this time the Seeadler needed to be laid up so that her hull could be scraped clean, so she put into the small island of Mopelia, a coral atoll some 10 km in diameter in the Tahiti group of islands, some 450 km from Tahiti itself.
The Wreck of the Seeadler
Seeadler was too large to enter the sheltered lagoon of Mopelia, and consequently had to anchor outside the reef. On 24 August disaster struck. According to von Luckner the ship was struck by a tsunami which wrecked the Seeadler on the reef, but some American prisoners alleged that the ship ran aground while the prisoners and most of the crew were having a picnic on the island.
The crew and their 46 prisoners were now stranded on Mopelia, but they managed to salvage provisions, firearms, and two of the ships' boats.
Hide and Seek
Von Luckner decided to sail with five of his men in one of the 10 metre long open boats, rigged as a sloop and ironically renamed Kronprinzessin Cecile after a liner. Ever an optimist, he intended to sail to Fiji via the Cook Islands, capture a sailing ship, and return to Mopelia for his crew and prisoners and resume raiding.
Three days after leaving Mopelia, they reached Aitu Island in the Cook Islands group, where they pretended to be Dutch-American seamen crossing the Pacific for a bet. The New Zealand Resident, the administrator of the island, gave them enough supplies to reach another island in the group, Aitutaki, where they posed as Norwegians. The New Zealand Resident in Aitutaki was suspicious of the group but had no means of detaining the group, and von Luckner quickly took the party on to the island of Rarotonga. Approaching Rarotonga in the dark, von Luckner saw a dark ship which he thought was an Auxiliary Cruiser but in fact was a beached ship, Von Luckner pressed on directly to the Fijian island of Wakaya, arriving after a voyage of 3,700 km in an open boat. Most people on Wakaya accepted their story of being shipwrecked Norwegians, but one sceptic called a party of police from the old Fijian capital of Levuka. On 21 September the police bluffed that the non-existent gun on the inter-island ferry Amra would blow von Luckner out of the water. Not wishing to cause bloodshed, von Luckner and his party surrendered and were confined in a Prisoner of War camp on Motuihe Island, off Auckland, New Zealand.
Meanwhile, back on Mopelia, a small French trading ship Lutece anchored outside the reef. Leutnant Kling of the Seeadler, having heard of his captains' capture on the radio, sailed out to the Lutece and captured it at gunpoint. The French crew was put ashore with the other prisoners, and all the Germans embarked on the ship, now renamed Fortuna, and set course for South America. The master of the A B Johnson, Captain Smith, then took the remaining open boat from Mopelia with three other American seamen, and sailed 1,600 km to Pago Pago, arriving on 4 October where they were finally able to inform the authorities of the activities of the Seeadler and arrange for the rescue of the other 44 sailors still stranded on Mopelia.
The Fortuna, meanwhile, came to grief when it struck uncharted rocks off Easter Island. The crew scambled ashore, where they were interned by the Chileans for the remainder of the war.
Escape!
Von Luckner still did not accept that the war was over for him. The commander of the PoW camp at Motuihe had a fast motor boat, Pearl, at his disposal, and on 13 December 1917 von Luckner and a number of other prisoners seized the Pearl and made for the Coromandel peninsula. Using a dummy machine gun, he then seized the 90 ton scow Moa and made for the Kermadec Islands, but the pursuing armed cable laying ship Iris had guessed his destination and caught up with him on 21 December. A year after his mission began, the war really was over for Felix von Luckner. He spent the remainder of the war in various PoW camps in New Zealand before being repatriated to Germany in 1919.
For his exploits, Felix von Luckner was awarded the Pour le Mérite, the famous Blue Max, Imperial Germany's highest decoration.
Post War life
At the age of 40, von Luckner became a Freemason. He wrote a book of his adventures which became a best-seller in Germany, and an American book about him spread his fame widely. An entertaining speaker, he was widely admired for his seamanship and for having fought his war without killing anyone, and many cities in the United States made him an honorary citizen. In 1937 and 1938 he and his wife undertook a round-the-world voyage in his yacht Seeteufel, being welcomed in New Zealand and Australia, though some viewed him as an apologist for the Nazi regime. During the Second World War Hitler tried to use him for propaganda purposes, though as a Mason he was not in one of the Nazi's favoured groups of people. Von Luckner refused to renounce his membership of the Masons, or the various honorary citizenships granted in the US, and consequently he suffered by having his bank account frozen. In 1943 he saved the life of a Jewish woman whom he provided with a passport he found on a bombsite, and who subsequently managed to escape to the US via a neutral country. At the end of the war, the mayor of Halle where he was living asked him to negotiate the towns' surrender to the approaching American forces, which he did, though he did not return to the town after hearing that the Nazis had condemned him to death.
After the Second World War, von Luckner moved to Sweden, where he lived in Malmo until his death at the age of 84 in 1966.