The Battle of the River Plate was fought in the South Atlantic on 13 December 1939 as the first naval battle of the Second World War. The Kriegsmarine heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee, commanded by Captain Hans Langsdorff, engaged a Royal Navy squadron, commanded by Commodore Henry Harwood, comprising the light cruisers HMS Ajax, HMS Achilles and the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter.
The history of Uruguay comprises different periods: the pre-Columbian time or early history, the Colonial Period (1516–1811), the Period of Nation-Building (1811–1830), and the history of Uruguay as an independent country (1830).
HMNZS Achilles was a Leander-class light cruiser, the second of five in the class. She served in the Royal New Zealand Navy in the Second World War. She was launched in 1931 for the Royal Navy, loaned to New Zealand in 1936 and transferred to the new Royal New Zealand Navy in 1941. She became famous for her part in the Battle of the River Plate, alongside HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter and notable for being the first Royal Navy cruiser to have fire control radar, with the installation of the New Zealand-made SS1 fire-control radar in June 1940.
The Battle of the River Plate is a 1956 British war film in Technicolor and VistaVision by the writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film stars John Gregson, Anthony Quayle, Bernard Lee and Peter Finch. It was distributed worldwide by Rank Film Distributors Ltd.
Hans Wilhelm Langsdorff was a German naval officer, most famous for his command of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee before and during the Battle of the River Plate off the coast of Uruguay in 1939. After the Panzerschiff was unable to escape a pursuing squadron of Royal Navy ships, Langsdorff scuttled his ship. Three days later he died by suicide in his hotel room in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Admiral Sir Henry Harwood Harwood, KCB, OBE, was a British naval officer who won fame in the Battle of the River Plate during WWII.
Altmark was a German oil tanker and supply vessel, one of five of a class built between 1937 and 1939. She is best known for her support of the German commerce raider, the "pocket battleship" Admiral Graf Spee and her subsequent involvement in the "Altmark Incident". In 1940 she was renamed Uckermark and used as supply tanker for the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during Operation Berlin before sailing to Japan on September 1942 as a blockade breaker.
Alberto Guani Carrara was a Uruguayan jurist, diplomat and the Vice President and President of the Senate from 1943 to 1947.
The Deutschland class was a series of three Panzerschiffe, a form of heavily armed cruiser, built by the Reichsmarine officially in accordance with restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. The ships of the class, Deutschland, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee, were all stated to displace 10,000 long tons (10,160 t) in accordance with the Treaty, though they actually displaced 10,600 to 12,340 long tons at standard displacement. The design for the ships incorporated several radical innovations, including the first major use of welding in a warship and all-diesel propulsion. Due to their heavy armament of six 28 cm (11 in) guns and lighter weight, the British began referring to the vessels as "pocket battleships". The Deutschland-class ships were initially classified as Panzerschiffe, but the Kriegsmarine reclassified them as heavy cruisers in February 1940.
Force K was the name given to three British Royal Navy groups of ships during the Second World War. The first Force K operated from West Africa in 1939, to intercept commerce raiders. The second Force K was formed in October 1941 at Malta, to operate against convoys sailing from Italy to Libya. Axis air attacks on Malta led to Force K being reduced and on 8 April 1942, the last ship of the force was withdrawn. After a convoy was run to Malta in Operation Stoneage Force K was re-established against Axis convoys.
Sir John Henry Eugen Vanderstegen Millington-Drake, KCMG was a British diplomat.
Mensun Bound is a British maritime archaeologist born in Stanley, Falkland Islands. He is best known as director of exploration for two expeditions to the Weddell Sea which led to the rediscovery of the Endurance, in which Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men sailed for the Antarctic on the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The ship sank after being crushed by the ice on 21 November 1915. It was rediscovered by the Endurance22 expedition on 5 March 2022.
This is a timeline of events of World War II in 1939, from the start of the war on 1 September 1939. For events preceding September 1, 1939, see the timeline of events preceding World War II.
Germany–Uruguay relations are foreign relations between Germany and Uruguay. Germany has an embassy in Montevideo. Uruguay has an embassy in Berlin, a consulate-general in Hamburg and 6 honorary consulates. Germany is Uruguay's principal trading partner in the European Union.
Jürgen Wattenberg was a German naval officer and U-boat commander during the Second World War. In a successful career spanning just under a year, he sank 14 ships, a total of 82,027 gross register tons (GRT).
Ussukuma was a German passenger ship named after a location in the central highlands of German East Africa . On 6 December 1939, only a few months into the Second World War, she was scuttled off the coast of Argentina. In January 2008 her wreck was identified by the Argentine Navy in 70 metres (230 ft) of water, 62 miles (100 km) off Necochea.
Admiral Graf Spee was a Deutschland-class "Panzerschiff", nicknamed a "pocket battleship" by the British, which served with the Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany during World War II. The vessel was named after World War I Admiral Maximilian von Spee, commander of the East Asia Squadron who fought the battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands, where he was killed in action. She was laid down at the Reichsmarinewerft shipyard in Wilhelmshaven in October 1932 and completed by January 1936. The ship was nominally under the 10,000 long tons (10,160 t) limitation on warship size imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, though with a full load displacement of 16,020 long tons (16,280 t), she significantly exceeded it. Armed with six 28 cm (11 in) guns in two triple gun turrets, Admiral Graf Spee and her sisters were designed to outgun any cruiser fast enough to catch them. Their top speed of 28 knots left only a few capital ships in the Anglo-French navies fast enough and powerful enough to sink them.
MV Carnarvon Castle was an ocean liner of the Union-Castle Line. She was requisitioned for service as an auxiliary cruiser by the Royal Navy during the Second World War.
The following events occurred in December 1939:
MS Africa Shell, was a British coastal oil tanker operated by the Shell Company of East Africa Ltd. The ship's life was short, lasting only a matter of months from her introduction into service in 1939, until she was intercepted and sunk by the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in the Mozambique Channel, off the coast of Portuguese East Africa, becoming the sixth victim of Graf Spee's commerce raiding sortie.
