The East Asia Squadron abandons local defense

The squadron's nominal task was to defend Germany's Far Eastern possessions, but remaining near those colonies offered little prospect beyond a glorious defeat. Von Spee instead concentrated ships dispersed across a vast theater and prepared to move toward South America. Dresden illustrates the scale of that concentration: the modern light cruiser began the war in the Caribbean and crossed into the South Atlantic to join the force. She might have had a better independent chance of reaching Germany, which makes her redeployment a concrete example of the choices created by an overseas squadron with no secure wartime base.