​Tables were turned on Vice-Admiral Graf von Spee at Battle of Falklands in December 1914

The Royal Navy squadron consisted of two ageing cruisers HMS Good Hope (Cradock's flagship) and HMS Monmouth, four light cruisers, a converted liner, and two other armed merchantmen.

Compared to the German squadron, the British ships were obsolete. Their guns were no match for those of the German ships. Furthermore, they were largely manned by naval reservists.

Within an hour the Germans managed to sink both the Good Hope and the Monmouth. As there were no survivors from either ship, 1,600 British officers and men perished, including Cradock.

Cradock should not have engaged the faster and more heavily gunned German squadron but his orders from the Admiralty were ambiguous. He understood his orders were to fight to the end, despite the odds being heavily against him.

In conversation with both the governor of the Falklands and the governor's aide Cradock had confided that he did not expect to survive an encounter with the German squadron. He also indicated that he did not wish to suffer the fate of Rear-Admiral Troubridge, who had been court-martialled in August for failing to engage the enemy despite the odds being against him, during the pursuit of German warships Goeben and Breslau.

Although Spee had enjoyed an easy victory at Coronel, destroying two enemy armoured cruisers for just three men injured, he was despondent at his prospects: ‘I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbour anywhere in the world.

‘I must fight my way through the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can until my ammunition is exhausted [and he had expended 40% of his ammunition at Coronel], or a foe far superior succeeds in catching me.’

Two days later when Spee arrived at Valparaíso he received a hero’s welcome from the local German population but declined to join in the celebrations. Presented with a bouquet of flowers, he refused them, commenting that ‘these will do nicely for my grave’. So Spee, like Cradock, had a premonition of death.

Shocked at the Royal Navy’s first defeat since the Battle of Lake Champlain in the War of 1812, the Admiralty detached the battlecruisers HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible from the Grand Fleet to form the nucleus of a new British squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee to reverse the defeat at Coronel.

Invincible and Inflexible were vastly more powerful and considerably faster than Spee’s principal ships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

After rounding Cape Horn, despite the objections of three of his ships' captains, Spee planned to raid and destroy the British coaling station and radio facility at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands.

Anticipating this move, the Admiralty sent the new British squadron there so that on arriving there on December 8, Spee unexpectedly found a superior British force in port as his fleet approached.

Realising that he was potentially in deep trouble, Spee and his squadron turned to the open sea at full speed in a bid to escape.

Hotly pursued by the Royal Navy, Spee accepted that escape was impossible and turned back with his two slower big ships while ordering his three faster light cruisers, two colliers, and a hospital ship to flee.

Sturdee sent his five cruisers after the smaller German warships (two were sunk later and one escaped) and faced Spee with his two battle cruisers.

The Scharnhorst took extensive damage with funnels flattened, fires and a list. Eventually she sank, taking von Spee and the entire crew with her. The Gneisenau continued to fire until her ammunition had been exhausted. She sank almost two hours later.

Only 190 of the Gneisenau's crew were rescued from the water. (One of the Gneisenau's officers who was pulled from the water said that he was a first cousin of Admiral Stoddart who was Sturdee’s second-in-command.)

Casualties and damage were extremely disproportionate. The British suffered the loss of one crewman killed and four injured. The Battle of the Falkland Islands was almost a mirror image of Coronel.

Afterwards Sturdee exchanged messages – remarkable for their chivalry – with Hans Pochhammer, second in command of Gneisenau and the senior surviving German officer.

‘The Commander-in-Chief is very gratified that your life has been spared and we all feel that the Gneisenau fought in a most plucky manner to the end.

‘We much admire the good gunnery of both ships. [German gunnery, which prioritised accuracy over rapidity of fire, was outstanding.] We sympathise with you in the loss of your admiral and so many officers and men.

‘Unfortunately the two countries are at war.’

Pochhammer replied: ‘We regret, as you, the course of the fight as we have learned to know during the peacetime the English navy and her officers.’

The Germans were mystified by why Admiral Spee chose to raid the Falkland Islands because he had taken on sufficient coal in Chile and therefore was taking an unnecessary risk.

Perhaps Spee was misled by the German admiralty into attacking the Falklands after receiving defective intelligence from the German wireless station at Valparaiso which reported the port free of Royal Navy warships.

In 1925 Admiral Reginald Hall, director of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division, allegedly told Franz von Rinteln, a German naval intelligence officer, that Spee's squadron had been lured towards the British battlecruisers by means of a fake signal sent in a German naval code broken by British cryptographers and sent on a purloined German telegraph form. It seems highly improbable that Hall would have shared such confidential information to a former German naval intelligence officer.

In 1934 Germany named a new heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee in honour of ‘the hero of Coronel’. In December 1939, she was scuttled by her crew after the Battle of the River Plate off the coast of Uruguay.

The wreck of Graf Spee’s flagship was located off the Falklands on December 5 2019, almost 105 years to the day after her sinking.