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As the zero hour approached, Monte-videans rushed down to the harbor to watch. Correspondents got up on a hotel roof. An NBC radio broadcaster set up his equipment on the dock (see p. 50).
At 6:20, two hours and to spare before the deadline, Spee weighed. Slowly she started moving for the breakwater mouth. The evening was clear—sun at the set, half moon already up, lazy little clouds. The supply ship Tacoma, with all Spee's married men aboard, picked up after her.
What would she do? To try to run that Allied gantlet would be suicide. Spee had had time to make herself seaworthy, but not battleworthy. A rumor got around that Captain Langsdorff would slip her across the Plata's mouth to Buenos Aires, there perhaps to intern.
Outside in the river Spee anchored. Over the sides into barges and launches scrambled the crew. Captain Langsdorff stepped into a launch which, as it drew away from Spee, dragged a long, thin cable.
Just as the rim of the sun dipped into the sea, Captain Langsdorff, surrounded by his officers, saluting, pressed a button on the end of the cable. A dull explosion. In three minutes Spee was on the bottom, her superstructure still showing ablaze. Darkness settled around the hissing remains.
This dramatic curtain was Adolf Hitler's pleasure, communicated by wireless. There was no apparent reason for it. Assuming that the Spee was in no condition to engage even the light British cruisers, Hitler had nothing to lose by allowing her to be interned—unless he expects to lose the war, he could expect to recover the interned ship when war is over. World War I had been lost when the Germans scuttled their fleet at Scapa Flow. If Hitler ordered the Spee scuttled merely that his enemies would never lay hands on her, World War II was already half lost in his own head.
*In a great battle off Port Stanley, 25 years ago this month, Admiral Graf von Spee, namesake of the pocket battleship, lost his ship, his battle, his life.