Thread by @NickHewitt4

A little #RiverPlate thread. Some folk who question the significance of the Graf Spee eagle seem to have very little sense of the significance of this strange little action. It took place at a point when Nazi Germany had successfully carved up most of central Europe. 📸Getty

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland and overran it in a brutal blitzkrieg lasting little over a month, while Poland’s Allies, Britain and France, stood by and watched. Then the two sides settled into what has been misnamed “The Phoney War” for six months. 📸IWM COL 149

It was only a “phoney war” for the soldiers. At sea it was never phoney. German U-boats began their campaign on the first day of the war, when U-30 sank the liner Athenia with the loss of 98 passengers and 18 crew. 📸 IWM HU51008

Around the coast, German magnetic mines took a terrible toll of coastal shipping and warships. 114 coasters went down to magnetic mines between September 1939 and May 1940. 📸 Australian War Memorial. PO5468.15

In a dreadful blow to RN pride which cost the lives of 835 sailors, U-47 slipped inside the Royal Navy’s base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship HMS Royal Oak, just a few miles from where I am writing this. 📸 Huskyan.com

Further afield the pocket battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland were sinking merchant ships with impunity. Graf Spee’s Captain Langsdorff has been described as a ‘gentleman’ which if the bar is kept low, he probably was. He did allow crews to abandon ship unmolested. 📸IWM MH2

On the other hand he passed his prisoners over to be incarcerated in truly dreadful conditions aboard the supply ship Altmark, until the ship was stormed by sailors from HMS Cossack whilst skulking in Norway and they were finally liberated in February 1940. AWM OO3626.17

In short when Graf Spee was finally caught off the River Plate by 🇬🇧 cruisers Ajax and Exeter and the 🇳🇿 manned HMS Achilles on 13 December 1939 on 13 December 1939, it came at the end of a pretty torrid period for the British and French navies. 📸IWM ART LD7394

Commodore Henry Harwood’s force managed to drive Langsdorff into Uruguayan waters, where he eventually scuttled his ship in full view of the watching press. It was a cause for huge celebration. The British were outgunned, and Graf Spee should have escaped. 📸IWM A2

It was a victory against the odds, during a very dark time. Harwood out-maneuvered, out-fought and in the end out-bluffed his opponent. Look at the number of the photo in my previous: Admiralty Official Photo A2. This is the moment when the RN starts documenting the war! 📸Alamy

IMO this is why Graf Spee’s eagle matters: not as a symbol of Nazism, but as a symbol of the Nazi war machine getting a resounding kicking at a vital moment. The destruction of Graf Spee shook Hitler’s faith in his navy and he never really recovered it. 📸 Deutschland-class.Dk

Deutschland was renamed Lutzow afterwards because the Fuhrer was so worried about a ship named after Germany being sunk like her sister. This is why I think this eagle should be retained, to tell an important and very poorly understood story of the war against fascism. 📸BBC

Thanks Taff