The Battle of the River Plate: The First Naval Battle of the Second World War

by Gordon Landsborough

A riveting and revelatory history of the first naval battle of the Second World War, when British and German forces clashed off the coast of South America.   At dawn on December 13, 1939, smoke was seen on the horizon in the River Plate, an estuary near the shorelines of Argentina and Uruguay. Ordered to investigate, Britain’s HMS Exeter reported a chilling discovery by lamp I think it is a pocket battleship.   It was. The Deutschland-class heavy cruiser AdmiralGraf Spee, marauder of the South Atlantic, was responsible for sinking several merchant ships without resistance. Now, it had sailed into a trap. British light cruisers HMS Ajax and Achilles joined the Exeter in engaging a German warship which—so Adolph Hitler had boasted—could out-maneuver any vessel powerful enough to damage her, and out-gun any ship able to keep up with her.   So began The Battle of the River Plate. Gordon Landsborough’s true account of this historic conflict details the fateful decisions made by Royal Navy Commodore Henry Harwood and Admiral Graf Spee’s Captain Hans Langsdorff that resulted in a British victory. It was a naval encounter in the finest Horatio Nelson tradition—and true to that tradition—the men with the finest armament of all, courage, emerged triumphant, bringing pride and inspiration into the hearts of a nation unwillingly at war once again.  Features an Appendix containing the official dispatch detailing the Battle of the River Plate.  

227 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

(1913-1984)

Landsborough was a publisher, author and bookseller. Writing tales about the exploits of gun-toting cowboys fighting out on the arid sands of the Wild West, Landsborough was himself a pioneer in the English paperback publishing world of the 1950s.

Reviews

[Terence Blowfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew everything about the circumstances surrounding this battle from reading many books on the subject previously.