Count (Graf) Maximilian Johannes Maria Hubert von Spee (22 June1861 – 8 December1914) was a German naval officer, born in Copenhagen, Denmark, who joined the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy) in 1878. In 1887–88 he commanded the Cameroon ports, a German colony in Africa. Before World War I he held a number of senior positions relating to weapons development, before being appointed Chief of Staff of the North Sea Command in 1908, rising to Rear Admiral in 1910 and being given command of the German East Asian Cruiser Squadron in 1912, basing in Tsingtao, China.
From the outbreak of the First World War his command concentrated on destroying British commercial and troop shipping, with considerable success. As Japan entered the war, Spee's squadron moved to South America. At the Battle of Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1 November1914, Spee's force engaged and sank Sir Christopher Cradock's force of two cruisers, HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth, when the German force outclassed the British one in both gunnery and seamanship.
On 8 December1914, Spee's force attempted a raid on the coaling station at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, unaware that the previous month the British had sent two modern fast battlecruisers (Inflexible and Invincible) to protect the islands and avenge the defeat at Coronel, and there were also five cruisers, HMS Carnarvon, HMS Cornwall, HMS Kent, HMS Bristol and HMS Glasgow, at the Port Stanley naval base. In the ensuing Battle of the Falkland Islands, Spee's flagship, Scharnhorst, together with Gneisenau, Nürnberg, and Leipzig were all lost, together with some 2,200 German sailors including Admiral von Spee and his two sons. Only Dresden managed to escape.
In 1934 the Germans named the new "pocket battleship" Admiral Graf Spee after him. Coincidentally, Admiral Graf Spee sank in the same area his ship did.
Between 1959 and 1967 the Federal German Bundesmarine operated a training ship named after him.
However Spee was wary of the Allies' strength, especially the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Royal Australian Navy — in fact he described the latter's flagship, the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, as being superior to his entire force by itself.
In the ensuing Battle of the Falkland Islands, Spee's flagship, SMS Scharnhorst, together with SMS Gneisenau, SMS Nürnberg and SMS Leipzig were all lost, together with some 2,200 German sailors, including Admiral vonSpee and his two sons.
Coincidentally, the Admiral GrafSpee was sunk by the Royal Navy in 1939, off the coast of Uruguay only a few hundred miles from where vonSpee and his squadron had met their end on the same month a quater century earlier.
In the ensuing Battle of the Falkland Islands, Spee's flagship, Scharnhorst, together with Gneisenau, Nürnberg, and Leipzig were all lost, together with some 2,200 German sailors including Admiral vonSpee and his two sons.
In 1917 a Mackensen-class battlecruiser was named GrafSpee in his honour, but construction of the ship had not been completed by the time of the Armistice in November1918, and it was subsequently broken up.
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