War in the Pacific: World War I, that is

Mention World War I, and most people will likely think of trench warfare in Europe. They likely will not think of the Pacific Ocean.

But the conflict triggered by the assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was indeed a global conflict, fought on sea as well as land.

Drexel University history professor Eric Dorn Brose thinks historians have missed the boat by not paying enough attention to what went on in the Pacific during World War I. The conventional view, he says, is that "this was a kind of sideshow, not a particularly important aspect of the war. I think it was more important to the outcome of the war than has been realized."

For evidence, Brose points to the story of Vice-Admiral Maximilian von Spee, commander of Imperial Germany's East Asiatic Squadron during World War I, the man for whom the famous World War II German pocket battleship Graf Spee would later be named.

Spee is the central figure in Brose's most recent book, Death at Sea: Graf Spee and the Flight of the German East Asiatic Naval Squadron in 1914 (Amazon/CreateSpace, $12.99 paperback).

The book is self-published, a bit of a departure for Brose, three of whose books - A History of the Great War, A History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, and The Kaiser's Army - were all published by Oxford University Press.

But Death at Sea isn't the same kind of book as the other three. The description on the title page reads: "A Novelistic History and Senecan Tragedy."

"It's not a historical novel, and it's not a standard history," Brose explains.

Oxford "didn't think it was appropriate for a university press," he adds. "They suggested I try some of the trade presses and recommended Thomas Dunne. So I went to them and found myself falling between two stools. Oxford thought it was more a trade book and Dunne thought it wasn't enough of one."

In the end, Brose said, "I decided to [publish] it myself because I wanted to get it out there."

The fictional approach allows Brose to emphasize that strategies and tactics are not impersonal processes but the result of decisions, and that those decisions owe as much to the character of the person making the decision as to anything else. So Spee's peculiarly fatalistic Catholicism figures as much as his outstanding seamanship.

"I tried to get the reader to sympathize with two sets of characters," Allied and German, Brose says. "There's no good side or bad side."

When World War I began in August 1914, a good bit of Germany's East Asiatic Squadron was scattered about the Pacific and Indian Oceans. One of its light cruisers, the Leipzig, was patrolling off the coast of California. Another, the Königsberg, was off the coast of East Africa. A third, the Emden, "cruised the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan [and] captured a Russian merchantman," after which it rendezvoused with other ships in the fleet off Pagan Island in the Marianas, then a German colony.

In Brose's "novelistic presentation," Spee calls a meeting on board his flagship, the Scharnhorst, and the alternatives are laid out by Spee himself and Lt. Commander Karl von Müller, captain of the Emden.

"Perhaps we should consider splitting up the squadron," Müller suggests, "slipping into the Indian Ocean and operating independently . . . as corsairs. Using the Dutch East Indies as a haven and supply of coal . . . we can operate indefinitely and strike a lethal economic blow against the enemy." He also thinks they can stir up political unrest in India.

Brose has Spee thinking to himself that he is neither a pirate nor a revolutionary. "If the East Asiatic can break successfully for South America," he tells Müller, "and if Admiralty detaches a few capital ships for overseas operations, we could unite with them, defeat whatever the English send against us, sail for home, and then crash through their naval cordon."

Finally, on Aug. 14, Spee took most of his fleet east, but he detached the Emden to raid the Indian Ocean. As Brose puts it, "two of the greatest adventures in the history of World War I had begun."

At first, things went surprisingly well. Over the next three months, the Emden sank 28 Allied merchant vessels and two warships. It also bombarded the harbor of Madras, setting afire the tanks of the Burma Oil Company. This did, in fact, cause some considerable unrest in India. Meanwhile, Spee zigged and zagged his away across the Pacific and on Nov. 1, off Coronel, Chile, dealt Britain its first naval defeat since the Battle of Lake Champlain during the War of 1812.

Like all winning streaks, however, this one did not last. Just eight days after the battle of Coronel, the Emden surrendered to the Royal Australian Navy off the Cocos islands, after a horrendous exchange that even included its wounded sailors' being savagely attacked on deck by albatrosses. Müller would spend most of the war interned in England.

As for Spee, a little more than a month after his victory at Coronel, he met his match off the Falkland Islands. All but two of his ships were sunk and Spee himself, along with his two sons, perished. In fact, of the 765 men and officers aboard the Scharnhorst, only seven survived.

For some people, Brose has discovered, these battles are not mere academic matters. At a website called World Naval Ships Forums (http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/) they continue to be fought, and Brose has had some brusque exchanges over his book with some of the participants, notably one who goes by the name Patroclus.

This emotional response makes sense because Brose's book, by virtue of its fictional style, has considerable emotional resonance. This is because Brose seems to have sympathized especially with Müller, and gives him the last word, in a fictional letter to his parents:

My dear parents, I fear for our times. The Great War has cut down the Russian monarchy, and it will fell both our allied empires too, Later they may be reestablished and united, but it will surely happen under the evil banner of nationalistic fanatics who will trigger another great war. . . . And when that second great war comes to an end, the terrible weapons it will surely spawn . . . will certainly grip the entire world in fear.

Is there any evidence Müller felt this way?

"I was extrapolating from his experience of what war was like," Brose says. "He was a gentleman playing by the rules of war and what World War I turned into just had to be huge disappointment for him."

In other words, Brose was employing what he calls "informed imagination."

It seems to work.