Talk:Maximilian von Spee

message: ... the Spee Squadron had been lured onto the guns of the British battlecruiser squadron by means of a fake telegram sent in a German naval code that British cryptographers had broken and which "ordered" the German ships to the Falkland Islands to destroy the wireless station there.
Really? I wonder why Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert K. Massie makes no mention whatever of this assertion in his account of WWI at sea, Castles of Steel, which contains a lengthy description of the British destruction of the East Asia Squadron? According to Massie's account, Spee overruled a majority of his captains in deciding to attack the Falklands.
See:  Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (Balantine Books, 2004) by Robert K. Massie, (also J. Cape, 2004, )
Sca (talk) 15:07, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems rather dubious to me - I've never seen the claim repeated elsewhere either. It's been removed from the article. Parsecboy (talk) 16:36, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: "Lured" to the Falklands?

message: "Spee had inflicted the first defeat on a Royal Navy squadron since the Napoleonic Wars a century earlier."  
Certainly this was quite a defeat, and the first surface action defeat of the British, but in September a German sub sank three old armoured cruisers in a single engagement.  A different sort of defeat than Craddock's, of course, but seems like the statement in the article is a bit misleading.  I recommend revising. Busaccsb (talk) 23:24, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That's how the battle is routinely described. We can't make up our own criteria and apply it to the article. Parsecboy (talk) 23:46, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: An engagement requires both sides to know that each other is there in the first place. It was more accurately a massacre. But I agree with Parsecboy on the policy angle. Irondome (talk) 00:02, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Also a fair point ;) Parsecboy (talk) 00:07, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: For info: Action of 22 September 1914. Irondome (talk) 00:19, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

text: The British at this point hadn't lost a squadron engagement on the high seas since the battle of Flamborough Head during the American war of Independence. They'd lost squadron battles on lakes (mostly to Americans) and single-ship actions (mostly to Americans), but losing a cruiser squadron at sea was a shock. 2404:4404:1408:CE00:6D26:DE20:4D5D:6F8A (talk) 11:59, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: First Defeat?

message: * Hello, I just realized that you are the user who greatly improved this article some years ago. I must apologize if I incorrectly added those references, but still, can you kindly find the references for footnotes such as "Strachan, p. 471", " Staff, pp. 29–30", "Bennett, p. 118", "Herwig, p. 158" and "Williamson, p. 39"? Please feel welcome to correct the recent references that I added. --Gabloc (talk) 01:33, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, I hadn't noticed I had never added the full citations to those - this is the main reason I've since started using  templates for citations, since it adds a red error message if the citations and references don't match up. Most of the books you've added are the wrong ones by those authors - I'll take care of them. Parsecboy (talk) 12:08, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footnotes and references 

message: The reasoning for the attack on the islands versus some 'meatier' target seems very meager - why bother with some target at the bottom of the world when Germany's strategic needs were so clear - can the RS's provide more detail here? 50.111.8.86 (talk) 03:31, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Falklands