German Raiders of the South Seas

"The band had played Watch on the Rhine, the sailors left behind cheered, other men waved their hats, and women cried, as the Emden pulled out of Germany's China colony of Tsingtao for the last time" Thus begins a World War I epic that was, both literally and in spirit, a world away from the trenches and slaughter of France and Belgium. Were it not all real and true, it would make wonderful fiction: the Emden survivors from the battle with the Australian cruiser Sydney sailing a leaking copra schooner from the Cocos Islands to the East Indies, the Wolf sailing undetected in Allied waters for months, the captain of the Seeadler, von Luckner, sailing a small boat halfway across the Pacific to Fiji, and then later making a dramatic escape from a New Zealand prisoner of war camp.