Though driven entirely from the Pacific during 1914, the Imperial German Navy was to return over two years later in the shape of the commerce raiders SMS Wolf and Seeadler. The former vessel was a converted merchantman, armed with six 150mm guns, one 105mm gun, four torpedo tubes and some 460 mines, that sailed from Kiel on 30 November 1916 under Commander Karl August Nerger. Evading the British blockade, Nerger was able to steam to the South Atlantic and then into the Indian Ocean and the waters off Australia and New Zealand. Wolf carried some 8,000 tonnes of coal giving her a cruising range of over 50,000 kilometres at eight knots – her maximum speed being eleven knots. Also carried aboard the vessel was an FF (Friedrichshafen Flugzeugbau) 33 seaplane, christened Wölfchen, to be used for reconnaissance. SMS Wolf returned to the Austian Adritic port of Pola on 24 February 1918, having completed a voyage of around 100,000 kilometres lasting some 452 days, during which some 30 plus merchantmen of various nation had been accounted for, whether sunk by her mines or taken directly, including the Japanese freighter Hitachi Maru, captured on 26 September and sunk on 7 November 1917. It was an incredible achievement, and Kaiser Wilhelm II decorated Commander Nerger with the Prussian Pour le Mérite.

The second raider to reach the Pacific in 1917, SMS Seeadler was, on the face of it, an anachronism, being a fully rigged three-masted windjammer – a steel-hulled, cargo-carrying, sailing ship.