On 8th December 1914 the Battle of the Falkland Islands took place. This was a naval engagement fought between elements of the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine on 8 December, 1914 near the Falkland Islands. It came a little over a month after the defeat of the British South Atlantic Squadron at the Battle of Coronel and saw Graf von Spee’s squadron effectively annihilated by a powerful British force under the command of Frederick Charles Doveton Sturdee especially assembled to avenge the loss at Coronel.
The Battle of the Falkland Islands took place on 8 December 1914. There was a radio station at Port Stanley which the German Squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Maximilian von Spee, planned to destroy. The British Squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Doveton Sturdee was caught by surprise as most of the vessels were still coaling. A sea chase then commenced. Von Spee knew that he could not outrun the faster British vessels and turned his two armoured cruisers around to buy time by engaging the battlecruisers and ordered his three light cruisers to disperse.
All the German ships were sunk except the light cruiser Dresden and the hospital ship Seydlitz, which escaped.
Casualties at the Battle of the Falkland Islands:
Royal Navy
- HMS Invincible: no casualties.
- HMS Inflexible: no casualties.
- HMS Kent: 4 killed and 12 wounded.
- HMS Cornwall: no casualties.
- HMS Carnarvon: no casualties.
- HMS Glasgow: 1 killed and 4 wounded.
- HMS Bristol: no casualties.
- HMS Macedonia: no casualties.
- HMS Canopus: no casualties.
German Imperial Navy:
- SMS Scharnhorst: no survivors of her crew of 52 officers and 788 non-commissioned ranks, including Admiral von Spee.
- SMS Gneisenau: around 125 survivors out of her crew of 38 officers and 726 non-commissioned ranks (598 men were lost with the ship, including Spee’s son Heinrich).
- SMS Dresden: no casualties.
- SMS Nürnberg: 7 survivors out of her crew of 14 officers and 308 non-commissioned ranks (Spee’s son Otto was killed).
- SMS Leipzig: 5 officers and 13 seamen survived out of her crew of 14 officers and 280 non-commissioned ranks.
All the survivors from the sunken German ships became prisoners. The crew of the Dresden was interned by the Chilean authorities on 14 March 1915. Battle of the Falklands (britishbattles.com)