Admiral Grad Spee, the third of Germany's 'Deutschland' class cruisers [the so-called "pocket battleships"], was laid down in 1932, launched in 1934 and completed in 1936. Displacing 11,700 tons, she could make 28 knots with ease and her design, a a fast heavily-armoured long-range merchant raider, proved a triumph. Sent to stand off the South American coast when War was imminentt, she was soon preying on Allied merchantmen and in less than three months sank over 50,000 tons of shipping, much of vital raw materials for the war effort. By December, the Admiralty had mounted an operation to hunt and destroy Graf Spee and Commodore Henry Harwood, senior Royal Navy Officier in the South Atlantic, was given comand of a flotilla -- designated Force 'G' -- comprising the heavy cruiser H.M.S. Exeter (built 1929) and the light cruisers Achilies (1932) and Ajax (1934). Harwood believed Graf Spee would be attracted to the busy shipping lanes off the estury of the River Plate and his intuition proved uncannily accurate when he sighted her on 13 December. Splitting his force to sail abreast of Graf Spee, Harwood went into action immediately . Within half-an-hour, all three of his cruisers had been damaged, with Exeter and Ajax so badly mauled that Harwood was forced to retire. Surprisingly, instead of pursuing his quarry when he was in a position either to defeat them or to escape himself , Captain Langsdorff took Graf Spee into the neutral port of Montevideo where he was allowed to remain for a few days. Believing that he was boxed in by a superior force which was growing by the day, Langsdorff took his ship out into the Plate etury on 17 December and scuttled her in sight of Harwood's squadron. Although a somewhat hollow victory for the Royal Navy, the three cruisers had nevertheless fought valiantly against a much more powerful enemy whose sinking provided a sorely-needed boost to British morale as the War gathered momentum.