I think that Doveton Sturdee has been badly treated by history and when I watched this doc (it showed here in Canada earlier this year), it did nothing to address that. Many of the perceptions and initial source material for Coronel and the Falklands comes from Churchill and he was in full CYA damage control mode to disguise how his micromanagement of Admiralty operations (as during the hunt for Goeben) contributed to the disaster. He then took full credit for the Falklands victory though and his antipathy to Sturdee is solidly in the public record.
One could argue that Sir Doveton gave the RN one of it's finest victories ever, destroying 80% of von Spee's force and his supply tail with trifling losses. He expended ammunition rather than lives, fought the battle exactly the way that Jacky Fisher envisioned Battlecruisers to be most effective and left his subordinates unrestricted by excessive signalling. Considering the adoration of David Beatty for the Dogger Bank and the opening phases of Jutland, Sturdee's victory is a model of machine age surface combat, one that he gets very little credit for in my opinion.
Good Hunting
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