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the
Magdeburg
was to follow the flagship by halfa mile: if the
Augsburg
struck a mine, the
Magdeburg
could avoid hitting any herself.
    Soon, however, fog—common in those waters in summer—rolled in. By 9 P.M ., it was so thick that even with binoculars an officer on the bridge of the
Magdeburg
could not see the lookout on the stern. At 11 P.M ., the
Augsburg
, intending to run along the supposed Russian minefield before swinging east to enter the Gulf of Finland, turned onto a course south-southeast ½ east—and ordered the
Magdeburg
to do the same. She did so, maintaining the same speed, about 15 knots, that had kept her at the proper distance from the
Augsburg
during the afternoon. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Richard Habenicht, had soundings taken. These showed the depth decreasing: 190 feet, 141 feet, and, at 12:30 A.M ., now of August 26, 112 feet.
    At the same time the radio shack reported that a message was coming in; four minutes later it was decoded and on the bridge. It ordered that course be altered to east-northeast ½ east. The helmsman spun the wheel and, at 12:37, just as he reported that the new course was being steered, still at 15 knots, the luckless vessel hit something. She bumped five or six times and, shuddering, stopped. The cruiser had run aground. As a consequence of her navigation error, which put her a mile south of the
Augsburg
, she had struck shallows 400 yards off the northwestern tip of Odensholm, a low, narrow, sandy island 2½ miles long at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.
    At once, Habenicht sought to free his ship. He reversed engines; he rocked her with various engine speeds; he assembled the entire 337-man crew on the quarterdeck to push the ship’s stern down and her bow up and then went full speed astern; he had the crew carry munitions aft. The ship didn’t budge. Soundings showed that at the bow, where the
Magdeburg
normally drew 16½ feet, the water was only 16 feet deep to port and 9 feet to starboard; at the stern, with normal draft just under 20 feet, the depths were 13 and 17. The vessel needed to rise between 3 and 7 feet. The tides of the Baltic, measured only in inches, would not suffice for this.

    Habenicht let go the anchors and their chains. He had the drinking and washing water pumped out. Ash ejectors flung coal into the sea. All but sixty boxes of munitions were dumped over the side. All movable steel parts—the minelaying rails, bulkhead doors, doors on the forward turrets, steel cables, coaling equipment—were pushed overboard. The Germans’ efforts were spurred by the likelihood that the officials on Odensholm, which was Russian territory with a light-house and a signal station, had alerted superior authorities at the major Russian port of Tallinn, only 50 miles away. Habenicht again ran the engines forward and backward at various speeds. The
Magdeburg
moved not an inch.
    Habenicht worried that the cruiser’s secret documents might fall into the hands of the Russians. In addition to the charts of German minefields and the ship’s war diary, these included the main Imperial German Navy code and the cipher key used to encipher its codewords and thus provide another layer of secrecy. Bender, who was in charge of the destruction of these documents, brought the codebook that was in the steering room, together with its cipher key, to the stokehold and burned it. Sailors did the same for other secret documents. But two other codebooks—one on the bridge and one in the radio shack—as well as a cipher key were retained for communicating with rescuers and higher commands. A fourth lay hidden and apparently forgotten in a locker in Habenicht’s cabin.
    As dawn approached, the seabed and the stones on which the ship was lying became visible. At 8:30, with the fog lifting, the fast and powerful German torpedo boat V-26 appeared, attached a line, and tried to pull the
Magdeburg
off. She failed. Habenicht decided he might as well do some damage and fired some