His compatriots in Germany called him Der Seeteuel (the Sea Devil), and this wily, handsome German naval officer, Count Felix von Luckner, lived up to the name by sinking fourteen allied ships during World War I. His ship, the Seeadler (Sea Eagle), was the only sailing ship used by the German navy as an armed merchant ship raider. Officers under his command on the ship, as well as von Luckner and much of the crew, spoke Norwegian as well, so the three-masted sailing ship’s original name, Path of Balmaha, was changed to Seeadler, but posed as a Norwegian sailing ship with the name of Irma on its bow. With the Norwegian look and language of the ship, the vessel could easily approach a merchant ship without raising an alarm, this is until von Luckner raised the German flag and requested permission to board the merchant ship. If the request was refused, von Luckner would order a shot over the bow of the rival ship. Invariably the canon shot was enough to convince the captain of the merchant vessel to allow the German boarding crew to come aboard. All of the merchant ship’s crew was ordered off the ship and onto the Seeadler. Then von Luckner ordered his gun crews to sink the abandoned ship and its cargo. Fourteen merchant ships, plying the waters of both the Atlantic and Pacific, and carrying over 500,000 tons of cargo, were sunk by von Luckner in this manner throughout the war. Amazingly, but because of von Luckner’s method of seizing a rival ship, there was only one fatality in the sinking of the fourteen ships. A young sailor on the British merchant ship Horngarth, Douglas Page, was among five men burned when an errant German shell hit a steam pipe. Von Luckner’s men treated the scalded men, but were unable to save young Douglas. There was not one fatality among the German sailors of the Seeadler. It should be of no surprise that the sailors of the British and allied merchant ships sunk by von Luckner appreciated his humanity during the antagonistic throes of the war. So it is not hard to believe, that during World War I war, one of America’s heroes was Count Felix von Luckner, born near Dresden on his nobleman father’s estate. Luckner was a man that my father, Cecil Russell, who fought the Germans in France in 1918, admired very much. In the late 1920s, in either 1927 or 1928, Count von Luckner came to Menomonie, during one of his two tours of America, to speak at Stout Institute. I was going on four years old; too young to know anything about the Count, but it wasn’t long before I kept hearing the stories about the German sea captain. As I grew older my dad told me the story about this man Luckner who he admired so much, He even had a photograph of the old sea captain hanging in his office. In 1928, writer, newscaster Lowell Thomas’s book, Count Luckner, the Sea Devil, Was published by Doubleday, Doran and Co., but it would be another seven years before I could find myself reading the book about the man. I became totally impressed by the man to this day. There is no question that von Luckner was an unabashed self-promoter. His ship, the Seeadler, was not the most effective of the German merchant raiders. Others surpassed the number of ships his crews sank, but he had the advantage of a sailing vessel that was not dependant on alternate fuels. With enough provisions he could sail the seas without stopping for coal or oil to power the Seeadler. However, in an emergency, he had a pair of hidden 500 HP diesel engines he could use to get out of trouble. Von Lucker’s story, not just his life during World War I, but all of his outstanding achievements are more than can be tuck into this column. Lowell Thomas’ Count Luckner, the Sea Devil, Doubleday, Doran 7 Co. New York, 1928, gives a colorful look at this remarkable man’s life. Hitler tried to use sixty-year-old Count Felix von Luckner “for propaganda purposes”, and the old sailor who was a Mason, refused to renounce his membership and the honorary U. S. citizenship awards, his bank accounts were frozen. In 1943 he save the life of a Jewish woman with passport he found that allowed her to leave the country. As the World War II was winding down and U. S. troops were approaching his adopted city of Halle, he met with the American officers to negotiate surrender to prevent further damage to the city. Count von Luckner moved to Malmo, Sweden, with his wife after World War II. He died there at the age 84 in 1966. However he lives on in the hearts and minds of many who have met him, read his life’s story, and those who believe in his version of what war should be like. .