The Wolf: How One German Raider Terrorized the Allies in the Most Epic Voyage of WWI

Excellent book about a German WW1 commercial raider (heavily armed merchant ship aiming for oppositions cargo and transportation convoys) SMS Wolf whose role was downplayed by Allies although ship accomplished something that no ship ever did - stay afloat and execute raids for more than 400 days on the open sea without any base of operations.

Ship roamed every world ocean during 400 days, executed harbor mining of key Allied ports and attacked commercial freighters and caused loss of over 110000 tons of shipping to the Allies.

Besides the action of the ship itself, which are quite amazing, main topic of the book are the stories of the crew, captured prisoners of war and relations between them.

It is interesting how some things never change.

Censorship on Allied side that wanted to shut down any story about the German auxiliary cruiser operating in the Far East and around Australia and New Zealand by pushing stories about German spies and saboteurs planting bombs on merchant ships caused terrible issues on multiple fronts. First it caused ship losses because standard precautions like encrypting messages and like weren't used thus enabling Wolf to easily attack its prey.
Second it caused hate against Australians and New Zealanders of German origin that had to migrate back to Germany at the end of the war. Unlike Japanese immigrant internship in America during the WW2 I never heard about the internship of citizens of German origin in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (this one got me truly going what?) and any other British colony/protectorate in the between.

The way Germans were portrayed in Allied media was also a surprise to me. Germans did start the war but level of demonization and representation of Germans as Huns (as in Atilla the Hun's Huns) is truly terrible and awful. Considering this and the way Nazi Germany used the media during WW2 makes me shudder when I think what can demagogues do with modern media in hands (and again it is not like we do not witness the abuse today).

As Wolf captured ship after ship it slowly accumulated large number of prisoners - sailors from almost every part of the world but also passengers, men, women and children. As time passed by this caused issues with food shortages, outbreaks of thousand and one sea-faring disease and general depressing atmosphere on an overcrowded ship in tropical seas with less and less food as time passed by.

It is interesting to see how prisoners made the internal divisions by race (very unflattering view of the Asians that during this pandemic starts to pop up again) and even within the same race (general view that all Scandinavians are German sympathizers). Constant bickering, problems caused by the presence of women among the men living among men for months, captured officers seeking elite prisoner status and better conditions - entire ship was snapshot of the world at the time, with all issues that come with it.

Book goes into detail about those prisoners (like Cameron family) and German officers and crewmen (captain Nerger among them) that wrote about their experiences after the war. We follow prisoners as they try to survive on overcrowded ship in degrading conditions, marvel at the Germans because they behave differently than media represents them and experience constant emotional ups and downs as hopes for being released on any of the many islands get crushed by reality - Germans simply cannot allow their prisoners to inform the Allies of the raider's presence in the area.
On the other hand we follow German officers as they try to control the crew during the highly demanding voyage, crew living in conditions that are little better than the way prisoners live, constantly loading coal from captured ships on a calm and stormy seas, utter despair after year of travel because they do not know if and when will their travel finally end, will they ever see their families, and after hearing rumors about situation in Germany question arises what will they find when they come back home.

Authors write in quite a capturing way. There is not a single surplus page in this book. Story flows very naturally and keeps the reader's attention to the very end.

Final chapters are bitter sweet because at that point reader will be emotionally linked not only to the prisoners but also to the German crew. These chapters describe the fates of all personas in the book, from German crew to the prisoners, and most importantly fate of the SMS Wolf itself. Raider that caused havoc behind enemy lines was downplayed by the Allies because it had to fit the narrative. How can one admit that single ship slipped through so many blockades of Allied forces and made an round-the-globe trip starting from and ending in Kiel, Germany. Raider finally ended its life after a decade of post-war service as a merchant vessel.

Exceptional book for anyone interested in naval history.

Although she was technically SMS Wolf II, the original Wolf was forgotten after she broke her back on a sandbar in the Elbe. She was painted all black, which makes me wonder if she was the inspiration for “the Black Freighter” in Kurt Weill’s Pirate Jenny (well, the English translation; it’s a sailing ship, not a black freighter, in the original German). Four coal-fired boilers, a single screw – and seven 150mm naval cannon, four trainable torpedo tubes, 465 contact mines, and a seaplane. It was just a little odd that Fregattenkapitän Karl Nerger received the assignment – he was something of an outcast in the Imperial Navy, since he came from a middle class background and had formed a liaison with a woman of even lower social class – the daughter of a dockyard worker. Even though they had four children, he was not allowed to marry her.

The Wolf was packed with the latest radio receiving equipment; Nerger intended to use it to track down potential targets. However, he maintained absolute radio silence – there’s no evidence Wolf even had a transmitter on board – so once she left her escort in November 1916, there was no further word from her – at least, as far as the Germans were concerned – until she returned to Kiel in February 1918; in fact, the military had just sent out letters informing all the next of kin of her loss at sea.

Australian authors Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen have done a great job of documenting the Wolf’s cruise, with three major themes – the performance of the Wolf and her crew; the lives of the prisoners on board (at one point, the Wolf carried several hundred – exact numbers unknown although all the known names are listed in an appendix); and the reaction of Allied authorities on shore.

The Wolf’s principal mission was minelaying. She laid her first minefield Cape Town, then Bombay, then Colombo, then Sydney, then two off New Zealand, then her final mines off Singapore. The mines sank or damaged 16 ships (plus killing a number of people on shore who got excessively curious when they washed up; the last known mine – up to now – from the Wolf came on shore in New Zealand in 2008). The Wolf captured and sunk 12 other ships; one was outfitted with a prize crew and sent to mine the approaches to Aden but was in turn captured before she could do anything, and another – the Igotz Mendi - was sent back to Kiel with a load of prisoners but ran aground in Denmark and was interned by the Danes. The Wolf took extensive advantage her prizes cargoes, victualing and coaling (although by the end large numbers of her crew and prisoners were suffering from scurvy or beriberi or both). By the end of the voyage, Nerger was having severe problems with his crew; word of the Kiel mutinies had leaked out, plus Nerger’s decision to take the Wolf back to Germany was thought to be suicidal – the crew wanted him to put into a neutral port and be interned. (As it happened, Nerger’s luck held; the British were reorganizing the blockade the week the Wolf transited the North Sea and she didn’t even see a British warship).

Many of the prisoners developed the Stockholm Syndrome, identifying more closely with their captors than the other prisoners. This became especially true after the Wolf captured a Japanese passenger liner, the Hitachi Maru; even though the Japanese were nominally Allies, racism was pretty rampant in 1917 and fistfights broke out between the prisoners. Women were also a problem; there were nine female prisoners on board, some of whom took advantage of the attentions of 400+ German crewmen. Mrs. Rose Flood, wife of another prisoner, was denounced as “a beast of the lowest” by Miss Agnes Mackenzie because of her flirtations with German officers; however, the fortyish Miss Mackenzie developed her own coterie of admirers and reportedly did rather more than just flirt. Mary Cameron, taken off the American sailing ship Beluga in 1917, was left alone, possibly because she became seriously ill shortly after her capture and lost all her hair and because her husband Stan (the Beluga’s captain) was constantly in attendance; however the couple’s 6-year-old daughter Juanita quickly became a crew favorite, to the extent that they made toys for her for Christmas (the Wolf’s seaplane pilot explained that he had intercepted Santa Claus in midair and taken delivery as Santa was too busy to land on the Wolf). A further prisoner may also have been involved in romantic situations, although Guilliatt and Hohnen don’t mention it; when Gerald Haxton, notorious lover of novelist Somerset Maugham, was first seen through binoculars on the deck of Hitachi Maru, he was wearing a kimono, pink silk pantaloons with lace trim, silk stockings and patent leather boots with rosettes. Haxton apparently changed into more conventional male attire before actually coming aboard Wolf.

The prisoner’s life on the Wolf was pretty rough; the men were confined in one of the coal holds, which soon became pretty interesting from combination of tropical heat, tobacco smoke, and human effluvia. Nerger was reluctant to allow prisoners much time on deck; since most of them were sailors he was afraid they would figure out Wolf’s characteristics and position and somehow get word to the Allies. In fact, one of them did exactly that – Tom Meadows, captain of the Matunga, captured while taking supplies to the Australia military garrison in Rabaul, – obtained empty bottles, wrote notes with his best estimate of Wolf’s position, and discretely dropped them overboard. One of these was eventually discovered and aided in sweeping the Wolf’s minefields.

Nevertheless, most of the prisoners agreed after the war that their treatment on the Wolf had been the best Nerger could manage under the circumstances, and a few looked up former Wolf crewmen in the 1920s and reminisced.

The reaction of the Allied naval commands is reminiscent of various more recent outbreaks of official imbecility – they absolutely refused to believe there was a German raider on the loose. Mine explosions were attributed to “infernal devices” smuggled onboard the victims by German sympathizers. Even when divers investigated some of the ships sunk in shallow water, and reported the explosions definitely originated outside the ship and were much too large to be caused by any device that could be conceivably smuggled aboard, officials insisted that the mines had been assembled on shore and transported out by small boats. A naturalized Australian fisherman was repeatedly denounced by his neighbors (who also happened to be fishermen); although two investigations concluded that there was nothing in the reports the third concluded that many complaints must mean something and he was interned. The news media, as usual, didn’t help much; newspapers vied for offering rewards for the capture of the “saboteurs”; published as credible reports of uniformed German soldiers marching around the Australian bush and German aircraft flying over Sydney (although the Wolf had a seaplane, it was under repair while she was cruising off Australia); and demanded that all naturalized Germans and “German sympathizers” be rounded up. Ship captures were attributed to anything but a raider; the Matunga’s disappearance, for example, was supposedly caused by a submarine earthquake. Even after the Allied navies concluded that there was really a raider afloat, they withheld this information from the press and public; merchant ships in the area continued to transmit in the clear which assisted Wolf in a couple of captures. The main success of the Wolf was not in the actual captures and minings, but the enormous panic and confusion caused in the Allied war effort.

Although Nerger returned to a hero’s welcome – Germany being a little short of heroes in 1918 – it didn’t last. He was finally allowed to marry to the mother of his children, by the Kaiser’s personal intervention, but he remained a captain while other raider captains with considerably less success were promoted to admiral. He did receive command of the Baltic minesweeping squadron – not exactly a plum job. After the war he got a job with Siemens as a security manager; his politics are uncertain or at least glossed over by Guilliatt and Hohnen, but he may have been involved in some of Siemen’s slave labor camps. He was captured and imprisoned by Soviets, and eventually beaten to death at age 77 for refusing to surrender his shoes to another camp inmate.

A fine, well-narrated and interesting book, thoroughly researched. The authors provide a map of Wolf’s cruise, a detailed map of her activities off Australia, New Zealand, and the Solomons, a detailed ship diagram, what must be the few surviving photographs, appendices listing the Wolf’s specifications, all her successes, every crew member (there was a Rabe on board), and every identified prisoner. Minor annoyance – Australia’s been metric for years, but presumably in deference to the American market Wolf’s dimensions are given in feet, her voyages in miles, and her guns are 5.9 inches.

One of the best books I have read. A great yarn and great history.

Excellent book, really enjoyed it, I don't come across many books with a 1st war theme, made a nice change from the pile of 2nd world war books that I see in the library at work. The flow of the book was fine, and easy to follow, I was interested right up to the end of the book. Well worth a read, will certainty look for more work from this author.

By turns this book is charming, educational, cute, horrifying, riveting, and funny. Though it is a historical account, it has a more coherent story and cast of characters than many novels I've read.

Strangely, I spent much of this book about a warship hoping that nobody would be shot (and in most cases my hopes were justified). Most of the times, my hopes were fulfilled.

The WWI German raider "Wolf" was a coal-fired merchant ship camouflaged in black paint that terrorized the world's oceans for over a year late in the war. Never landing at port the Wolf fed off the carcases of its victims, provisioning on the run like a high seas Bonnie and Clyde, leaving behind only minefields. Hundreds of civilians from all over the world were captured from allied vessels and held in the Wolf's festering holds. The ship became a microcosm of the world circa 1917, a coal-black metaphor for understanding the times. Two Australian authors have restored the Wolf's lost story with a modern-style narrative based on archival research and interviews with surviving family members.

The book does an excellent job showing the nuanced relationships that developed between the Germans and their prisoners. There was a war on, but the impeccable propriety maintained between classes sometimes lead to hilarious and bizarre wartime situations. German Navy sailors acted as waiters serving white table-cloth meals to upper-class British prisoners as on a 5-star cruise, suffering their charges abuses about the quality of service, while keeping the lower class citizens below in the sweltering hold barely supplied. It was a microcosm of the social failings that allowed the Great War to happen, where generals like Haig never saw the horrors of the front lines.

This non-fiction book by Richard Gulliatt and Peter Hohnen is just amazing. It is about a German merchant ship converted over to a disguised warship during World War I. It left Germany loaded with heavy guns, torpedos, and mines in order to prey upon merchant ships and mine harbors.

It was wildly successful. It sunk either by direct action or its mines almost 30 ships. It would come upon ships at sea and force them to surrender, transfer the crew and passengers and anything worth taking off the captured vessel and then sink it. Since it was a merchant ship it lots of room for prisoners. The ship never released any prisoners because they were afraid the prisoners would spill the beans about the ship.

One reason the ship was so successful was because its very existence embarrassed the allies so they kept it a secret. So no merchant ships were ever warned about its presence nor were they warned that many of the harbors of the world were mined by the ship.

The ship was at sea for over a year and made a triumphant return to Germany with over 700 prisoners in its hold.

A side story is just how gentlemanly naval war was back then. When a ship was captured the Wolf's captain would come over and introduce himself to the captain of the captured ship. A big meal was ordered up for everybody and afterward the prisoners were transferred over to the Wolf and it would take several days to transfer the coal, cargo, food and such and then everybody would gather up on deck to watch the captured ship be blown up.

The captured officers would be provided an orderly and would be given the run of the ship. After the war many of the former prisoners went to Germany to look up the old buddies, the crewmen of the Wolf.

Contrast that with World War II where Germany again had Commerce Raiders as these ships were called but their captains would open fire on unarmed passenger ships and leave everybody, men, women, and children, in the sea as the raider steamed off.

This is a great read. I give it four stars out of four.