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he quite simply informed them to disembark then sank it and dropped them off at the nearest neutral port and went on his marry way. the last ship he sank , The dorick star , the crew were still aboard when british destoryers Exeter Achillies and Ajax court up with her.

Langsdorff did manage to get all of the crew off the Spee when Achillies and Ajax lost her in thick fog only the captain of dorrick star stayed onboard

The Spitfire/Hurricane thing needs context.
Hurricanes equipped 34 Squadrons and Spitfires 19 and the percentage kills were 56:44 (this varies slightly from source to source). Whilst the Hurricane did shoot down more Luftwaffe aircraft there were a lot more of them to do the shooting down. Without the Hurricane we would have been well and trully up the proverbial creek!
Cheers
Steve

Think also to be born in mind was that generally but not always the Spitfires took on the Fighters & the Hurricanes had a go at the bombers.

How that effects the facts I do not think one can be cartain. Be interesting to see the figures on Spitfire/Hurricane who shot down fighters/bombers.

All just goes to show that one it is impossible to come to a conclusion & secondly in my mind both aircraft types did a fantastic job. More important those RAF pilots including all the numbers from the Dominions, European occupied countries & the USA who put up the fight of their lives & lost them in Hurricanes & Spitfires.

Perhaps the Captives aboard the Graff Spee were not molested in any way. However memory tells me that Merchant Seamen were injured, if not killed, by shells fired at them by the Graff Spee at their Merchant Ships. Also the Supply ship (cannot remember the name) had a Captain who was not very kind !!! The Graff Spee also killed many Royal Navy & New Zealand officers in the Ajax Achillies & Exeter. This was one of the finest actions of the Royal Navy in its history by 3 courageous Sea Captains.


Laurie

My Great Uncle served as a stoker on HMS Ajax at the River Plate. He went on to serve in submarines, finally being captured by Italians when his submarine, HMS Saracen, was hit by Italian destroyers. He was sent to POW camps, from which he escaped, was caught with Italian partisans and was sentenced to be shot as a spy. He was reprieved by none other than Field Marshall Kesselring (who happened to be visiting at the time) as they were on their way to be dealt with and claimed they were just sailors. Sent to POW camp in Berlin, he was caught as part of an espionage attempt on a railway (they were packing the earth under a bombed railway line they were repairing with ice so it would melt in the spring and buckle the lines, but the ice thawed early). He was 'tried' by the Gestapo for sabotage and sent to a concentration camp for his efforts by the Germans, and after experiencing the horrors of that, was posted to a another POW camp from which he was liberated at the end of the war. A book was written about him by Dennis Holman 'The Man They Couldn't Kill'. He also appeared in a 'This is your life' episode on TV.

Bloody hell Joe,what a remarkable man and an amazing story.

I had a chat with Laurie about the Spitfires going for fighters and Hurricanes for bombers. This was indeed a plan promoted by none other than Keith Park. Some years ago I was trying to reconcile Luftwaffe losses with RAF claims and couldn't really see this in the figures. Like many plans this one may have failed to survive first contact with the enemy (von Moltke.)
RAF squadrons seem most often to have been tasked to intercept raids depending on their geographical position and state of readiness. The radar information came down from Fighter Command HQ via Group HQ to the various Sectors. This obviously wouldn't include the type of aircraft on the raid. Sector commanders did receive reports from the Observer Corps which might. This information was passed the other way up the chain of command (to Fighter Command HQ via Group).

Dowding and Park are both on the record several times emphasising that the real target for ALL British fighters was the bombers. As early as February 1940 Dowding,at a meeting of the Air Fighting Committee,

"wished to emphasise the point that the primary job of fighters was to shoot down bombers,not to fight other fighters."

Cheers

Steve

Steve, there were other escapes my Great Uncle had too. These include: prewar - riots in Jamaica, an enormous earthquake in Chile, and a backfire on HMS Wanderer. Wartime - leaving a pub in London which was bombed a few seconds later, falling between his ship and a dock in Gibraltar (drunk), his first submarine HMS Splendid nearly being rammed near the Isle of Man, a fight with Arabs in Alexandria, a time bomb in Haifa, HMS Maidstone (on which he was a passenger) narrowly escaping hits by torpedoes twice in the Mediterranean, and missing his submarine which was sunk that voyage (I think this may have been HMS Splendid).

With regards to the South Atlantic raids by Graf Spee, it is interesting to note that HMS Ajax sunk the first ship of the Second World War, a German freighter 'Olinda', on 3 September 1939. The next day, 4 September 1939, Ajax sunk another German freighter, the 'Carl Fritzen'. On both occasions the crews were removed and taken prisoner before the ships were sunk. On the way to a rendezvous of Ajax, Achilles and Exeter 200 miles east of Montevideo from the Falklands, on 13 September 1939 Ajax sunk a third merchantman, 'Ussukuma', which was eventually scuttled by the crew. The next day of course, 14 September 1939, the three cruisers intercepted Graf Spee and the famous Battle of the River Plate ensued.

He certainly beat the odds Joe.I don't reckon you could say that he led a mundane life!
I shall keep a weather eye open for the book you mentioned.
Cheers
Steve