IN THE weeks before the Battle of the River Plate, Admiral Harwood cunningly moved his ships, Exeter, Achilles and Ajax, like chess pieces across thousands of miles of ocean until on December 13 he achieved a concentration of his one heavy and two light cruisers just where he predicted the German pocket battleship Graf Spee would be.

There, off the estuary of the River Plate, despite being outgunned and outranged, Harwood gave his orders to attack at once, and, although two of his three ships were badly damaged, he drove the German ship into the Uruguayan port of Montevideo where, after being blockaded for several days, Graf Spee was scuttled.