Blurbs

Gentlemen of War: The Amazing Story of Captain Karl von Müller and the SMS Emden - Dan van der Vat

Gentlemen of War is a dramatic but strictly factual rendering of what is perhaps the most exciting naval adventure of World War I: the lone campaign of the German light cruiser SMS Emden against the British Empire in the Indian Ocean. For his research, author Dan van der Vat went back to British and German naval records to uncover totally fresh information to support this account of how one raider without a base came to be hunted by seventy- eight British and Allied warships.
The amazing feats of the Emden were accomplished in major part because of the genius of her captain, Karl von Müller, who became a hero at sea in the same way the "Red Baron" von Richthofen did in the air. Müller's valor was recognized not only in Germany and among neutral nations but also by the British themselves, who regarded him as the quintessence of "the gallant enemy." His ship swiftly turned into a legend whose aura was enhanced by the courtesy of its crew to those they captured and by their skill in military piracy. When the Emden was finally over-whelmed by the huge odds against her, The Times and other British papers expressed relief that Müller had survived!
But before her capture, the Emden wreaked havoc throughout the Indian Ocean, which, in naval terms, was supposed to be a British lake. Surviving on coal and provisions seized from enemy ships, the Emden delayed troop movements, sank two warships, held up twenty-one British merchantmen, sending sixteen to the bottom, abducted four colliers, shelled Madras, causing a huge oil fire, and made a daring hit-and-run raid on Penang.
Nor does the story end with the Emden's surrender. When the ship went to fight her last battle, fifty men under First Officer Hellmuth von Macke were accidentally marooned on a remote island. Stealing a leaky little schooner, the castaways got home to Germany in the most remarkable evasion of the war. And almost equally startling is the exploit of Lieutenant Julius Lauterbach, who escaped across the East Indies, the Pacific, a still neutral United States and the Atlantic to receive a hero's welcome back in Germany.

Dan van der Vat, a former foreign correspondent for The Times, is now foreign-leader writer of The Guardian. lie makes his home on Eel Pie Island, Middlesex, England.

Jacket photograph of Von Muller by Australian War Memorial
Jacket photograph of ship by the Imperial War Museum

At a time when chivalry, courage and patriotism are too frequently derided, it is a
pleasure to find a book in which they are applauded and described without any trimmings of sentiment. . . . This is all a series of epic tales told in a straightforward, businesslike way. It all adds up to a first-class and most readable addition to naval literature which benefits from the very considerable amount of detailed research by the author."
CAPTAIN JOHN MOORE, RN (Ret.) Editor of Jane's fighting Ships, The Guardian

The Emden was the greatest surface raider in the history of modern sea warfare—and was
recognized as such by her opponent, the Royal Navy, as by the Germans themselves. [Her ex- ploits are) carefully and vividly set out by Mr. Dan van der Vat. So, too, is what is a much less well- known part of the story: the extraordinary adventures of those men on the Emden who evaded captivity and finally found their way home to Germany via Arabia and Turkey. Mr. van der Vat spins a rattling good yarn, in the old-fashioned sense of that phrase, of the days when men were still old-fashioned enough to stick to an honourable code of behaviour in fighting their wars. That code did not survive long after the Emden lay wrecked and rusting on a coral reef."
—The Economist

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