Australia will not occupy the islands north of the equator

The British chronology of the war records under 3 December 1914 that the British government had acceded to Japan’s request that Australia should not occupy the German islands north of the equator. According to Colonial Office documents, by that day the Colonial Secretary, Lewis Harcourt, had decided that the Marshall Islands, the Carolines, the Marianas and Palau would remain “for strategic reasons” in Japanese hands, and that their fate would be settled after the war. The Australian expedition, which had been waiting for weeks to put to sea, did not sail north.

Islands “temporarily” occupied

In October Japanese squadrons occupied without a fight the German possessions in Micronesia, from Jaluit to Saipan. At first Tokyo presented this as a purely military step. According to a telegram that reached the Colonial Office on 14 October, the Japanese had landed on Yap to investigate the German wireless and cable station, had occupied the island “temporarily” and were ready to hand it over to Australian forces. London therefore asked the Australian government to prepare a force to relieve the Japanese.

The Australians, however, were short of ships. Rear Admiral George Patey’s squadron was hunting Admiral von Spee’s cruisers in the Pacific and could not spare vessels to escort transports, and Rabaul, from where the expedition was to set out, was short of coal. At the end of October the prime minister, Andrew Fisher, agreed to the conversion of merchant ships to carry troops, and in November a special battalion was formed, called the Tropical Force. Under the command of Colonel Samuel Pethebridge it was to garrison the German islands in the north, including Yap and the phosphate-rich Angaur.

Japan changes its mind

By the time Australia was ready to send the expedition, the situation in Tokyo was entirely different. Japan had just taken Tsingtao, and its ships were taking part in the hunt for the German cruisers and escorting convoys from Australia and New Zealand. At home agitation was growing against the government of Prime Minister Ōkuma, which was accused of giving the Allies a great deal and getting nothing in return. Handing back the captured islands would have been a political blow to the cabinet. Tokyo therefore let it be understood that it intended to keep them and to claim them at the peace negotiations.

London decided that a dispute with Japan would be too costly. To an enquiry of 24 November as to whether only Angaur was to remain under Japanese control, the Colonial Office replied that for the time being the expedition should not sail to any islands north of the equator. On 6 December Harcourt explained the reasons to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson. He wrote that the British fleets had been so occupied in the North Sea, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and in escorting transports across the Indian Ocean that Britain had had to call on Japan in the Pacific. He mentioned that the use of the Japanese fleet in Europe was still being considered. All this, he admitted, had changed the character of Japan’s part in the war, and probably also Tokyo’s future claims to compensation. He added that there was strong agitation against the government in Japan.

A border on the equator

The decision of early December settled the division of the German Pacific. The islands south of the equator, including German New Guinea, Nauru and Samoa, remained in Australian and New Zealand hands. The islands to the north were kept by the Japanese. The Tropical Force eventually sailed to Rabaul, where it relieved the first Australian contingent. In January 1915 Pethebridge took over command of the occupied colony from Colonel Holmes.

The decision caused bitterness in Australia. Fisher is said to have remarked that Japan had moved her border all the way to the equator, to meet the Australian one. Japan had no intention of giving up the islands, and in February 1917, in return for sending Japanese destroyers to the Mediterranean, Britain undertook in a secret agreement to support its claims. After the war the islands became a Japanese League of Nations mandate. During the Second World War the Chuuk atoll was one of the Japanese navy’s most important bases in the Pacific, and some Australian military historians regard the 1914 decision as a mistake that Australia felt painfully less than thirty years later.