The Battle of the River Plate

This account of the final voyage of the German "pocket battleship", the Graf Spee, appears in the 60th anniversary year of one of the most famous naval battles of WWII. For the first three months of the war, the Graf Spee eluded all attempts by the Allied navies to track her down and stop her attacks on merchant shipping. Finally she encountered the Royal navy's South Atlantic Squadron, the cruisers Ajax, Exeter and Achilles, off the mouth of the River Plate on 13 December 1939. The first major surface action of the war was also one of the hardest-fought, with the powerfully-armed Graf Spee inflicting heavy damage on the Exeter, but damage to the German ship was sufficient to force her to take shelter in the neutral Uruguayan port of Montevideo, where a British disinformation campaign led her captain to scuttle ths ship on 17 December.