Description: In this book, the author turns his attention to a double drama which many recognise as the best sea story of the First World War: the lone campaign of the German light cruiser SMS Emden against the British Empire in the Indian Ocean. He has gone back to the German and British Naval records and found information not published before in support of this fresh, strictly factual account of how one raider without a base came to be hunted by seventy-eight British and allied warships. The Emden lived from the wits of her captain, Karl von Muller, and from coal and provisions seized from enemy ships in what, in naval terms, was supposed to be a British lake.

She terrorised the entire region, 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 and destructive hit-and-run raid on Penang. The development of the submarine, of radio and later radar ensured that the Emden was to be the last and most famous practitioner of undisguised, cruiser warfare against commerce – The Last Corsair. Captain Muller became a hero at sea in the same way as the ‘Red Barron’ von Richthofen was to become in the air – not only in Germany and among British and their allies, the quintessence of ‘the gallant enemy’. His ship swiftly became a legend which was enhanced by the courtesy of the crew and their skill in military piracy. When the Emden was finally overwhelmed by the huge odds against her. The Times and other British papers expressed their relief that Muller had survived!