The Battle(s) of the River Plate

Methinks I need to do two things because of the above. 1 - paint up a Graf Spee with Ajax and Achilles (yes I have the 1:4800th scale models already) and 2 - try and watch Sink the Bismarck again....

Timing is everything they say and so it was that I noticed that available on BBC IPlayer was the 1956 British Film: The Battle of the River Plate. Needing some timely inspiration before painting the WW2 ships this coming weekend I decided that downloading and watching this would be a good idea - purely for research purposes of course....

I have seen the film but it was many years ago and so some of my memories have dimmed somewhat by the passage of time. I was very glad I did if only for the opportunity to see some actual WW2 era warships going through their paces. The full list looks something like this:

Ships used

• Pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee played by heavy cruiser USS Salem
• The supply ship Altmark played by the fleet oiler RFA Olna.
• HMS Ajax, flagship, played by HMS Sheffield
• HMS Exeter played by HMS Jamaica
• HMNZS Achilles played by herself (at the time in service with the Indian Navy as INS Delhi)
• HMS Cumberland played by herself when she joins the British squadron after the battle, (and by HMS Jamaica in the final scenes off Montevideo).
• German freighter Tacoma, which took the crew off Graf Spee before scuttling, played by RFA Fort Duquesne.
• Gunboat Uruguay, boarding the Tacoma, was played by a British Ton-class minesweeper.
• HMS Birmingham was used for the firing of some of the guns, and to depict the explosions on the foredeck of Exeter, and as Graf Spee during the Replenishment scene with Altmark, as well as the scene on the deck of Graf Spee showing the flag-draped coffins of dead German sailors laid out for burial in Montevideo.
• Destroyers HMS Battleaxe and USS William R. Rush were used as camera ships.

The film is very 'Brtish', complete with stiff upper lipped officers and 'gor blimey' style other ranks, excitable South Americans and brash American radio commentators - all very stereotypical and very much of the times, but overall it was very entertaining in a 'sunday afternoon after a large, torpor-inducing roast lunch' fashion. 

The one thing about the film that I had forgotten about were just how many subsequently well known actors had parts in the films - including Christopher Lee and Patrick Macnee.

Details of the actual battle can be found here.

Initially designed to 'outshoot what it couldn't outfight or outrun what it couldn't outshoot'. In the film Captain Langsdorff (played by Peter Finch) said that he only ships that could successfully catch him to force an engagement were the Hood, Repulse and Renown. In reality Graf Spee was only marginally faster than some the more recently modernised WW1 vintage Queen Elizabeth class battleships.

I must confess to having a soft spot for any naval wargames that is 'raider' related and also for the ships of the Deutschland class. I have fought River Plate on many occasions with a variety of rules and the results are invariably the same - the Graf Spee gets royally battered whilst usually sinking at least one of the Royal Navy warships.  

There is an expansion to the Avalon Hill game Bismarck that extends the search boards into the South Atlantic expressly for the Graf Spee campaign. For completeness sake I shall look into this further.