Capture of German colonies in Asia and the Pacific

When war broke out, Germany had an extensive but almost defenceless colonial empire in the Far East and the Pacific: the leased territory of Kiautschou with the port of Tsingtao in China, German Samoa, German New Guinea with the Bismarck Archipelago, and hundreds of islands in Micronesia. In little more than two months in the autumn of 1914 it lost almost all of it. Samoa was taken without a fight by the New Zealanders, New Guinea after brief fighting by the Australians, the islands north of the equator by the Japanese navy, and the only real fortress, Tsingtao, fell after a two-month siege to the Japanese, supported by a small British contingent. The German squadron that might have defended these possessions sailed off to the far side of the ocean. The campaign was short and comparatively bloodless, but it changed the balance of power in the Pacific for a long time.

Name and dates

These operations have no single established name in historiography. British and Australian works describe them separately, as the occupation of Samoa, the Rabaul expedition and the siege of Tsingtao, while Japanese works speak of the Japanese-German war and the occupation of the South Seas islands. On our site we treat them as one campaign, because they took place at the same time, against the same enemy and for the same reason: Britain wanted to deprive the German squadron of Admiral Maximilian von Spee of bases, coal and wireless communications.

We adopt the dates 29 August – 7 November 1914. On 29 August the New Zealanders landed at Apia, and this was the first German possession in the region taken by Entente troops. One could date the campaign earlier: on 12 August the British armoured cruiser Minotaur shelled the wireless station on the island of Yap, and on 27 August the Japanese fleet began the blockade of Tsingtao. These, however, were purely naval actions that did not take a single scrap of land from Germany. On 7 November the garrison of Tsingtao surrendered, the last place where the Germans offered organised resistance. The Australians went on occupying remote islands of former German New Guinea until December, and one German officer hid in its mountains until the end of the war, but the fate of the colonies had already been decided.

Background

Germany acquired its Pacific possessions late and in several stages. In 1884 it declared a protectorate over the north-eastern part of New Guinea and the nearby islands, in 1885 over the Marshall Islands, in 1898 it leased the bay of Kiautschou from China, and in 1899 it bought the Caroline Islands and the Mariana Islands, except American Guam, from Spain. In the same year it divided the Samoan islands with the Americans. All these colonies apart from Tsingtao had few European inhabitants and no real garrisons. Order was kept by small police units recruited from the local population under German officials.

Their military value lay elsewhere. On Yap, Nauru, Samoa and New Britain the Germans had built wireless stations, and submarine telegraph cables ran through Yap. They made it possible for the East Asia Squadron, based at Tsingtao and the strongest German naval force outside European waters, to operate. The outbreak of war found its main body far from China, in the Carolines, from which it sailed on 6 August in a direction unknown to the Allies. As early as 6 August, two days after Britain entered the war, London asked the governments of Australia and New Zealand to seize the German wireless stations in the Pacific, calling it “a great and urgent Imperial service”.

Britain also asked for help against the German warships from Japan, bound to it since 1902 by an alliance. The government of Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu saw in this a chance for much more. On 15 August Tokyo presented Germany with an ultimatum, demanding the withdrawal of its warships from Far Eastern waters and the surrender of the whole Kiautschou territory, and when it went unanswered, declared war on Germany on 23 August. The British, and even more the Australians and New Zealanders, feared Japanese expansion, but they could not do without the Japanese fleet. From then on it was clear that the German possessions in the region would fall; the only open question was who would take them.

Samoa and the wireless stations

The New Zealanders set out first. The force under Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Logan, called the Samoa Advance Party, numbered over 1,400 men. On 15 August it sailed from New Zealand in two transports, escorted by three old British cruisers, Psyche, Philomel and Pyramus. Because Spee’s squadron might be somewhere in the Pacific, the Admiralty directed the convoy to Nouméa in New Caledonia, where it was joined by the Australian battlecruiser Australia, the cruiser Melbourne and the French armoured cruiser Montcalm. Rear-Admiral George Patey took command of the whole expedition. By way of Fiji the convoy arrived off Apia on the island of Upolu on the morning of 29 August.

The governor of Samoa, Erich Schultz-Ewerth, had nothing to defend himself with and did not want to put the inhabitants at risk. When Psyche entered the harbour under a flag of truce, he replied that he would not resist. In the evening the New Zealanders went ashore, and around midnight they reached the wireless station, which the Germans had already largely destroyed. On 30 August Logan read a proclamation of the occupation of the islands in Apia in the name of King George V, and the British flag was raised. Samoa was the second German colony lost in the war, after Togoland. The governor and several officials were taken first to Fiji and then to New Zealand.

Spee appeared off Apia only on 14 September with his armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The Allied ships had left a few days earlier, and the admiral decided that attacking the port made no sense and sailed away without firing a shot. From then on the occupation of Samoa continued quietly until the end of the war.

German New Guinea

For the capture of New Guinea Australia raised a separate formation, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF), independent of the volunteer army being formed to fight in Europe. Within ten days Colonel William Holmes assembled an infantry battalion of about a thousand volunteers from New South Wales and about 500 naval reservists and ex-sailors who were to fight on land. On 19 August the force sailed from Sydney in the transport Berrima. Part of the force, including volunteers from Queensland, was left behind on the way at Port Moresby, and a second transport, Kanowna, was sent home after a mutiny by her stokers. On 9 September the cruiser Melbourne called at Nauru, where the German staff had themselves disabled the wireless station.

On 11 September the squadron arrived off Rabaul, the capital of the colony on the island of New Britain. Small parties of reservists landed unopposed at Kabakaul and at Herbertshöhe, today’s Kokopo. From Kabakaul a patrol of about 25 men advanced through the jungle towards the wireless station at Bita Paka, several kilometres inland. The colony was defended by only a few dozen Germans, mostly reservists, and a few hundred Melanesian police, but they knew the ground well. Fire from ambushes and from trenches blocking the road forced the Australians into a day-long fight. Only with reinforcements from the ships did they take one position after another, and in the evening they reached the abandoned wireless station. It was the Australians’ first battle of the war.

On 12 September infantry from Berrima landed at Rabaul, and on 13 September the Australians formally proclaimed the beginning of the military occupation of the colony. The acting governor, Eduard Haber, however, withdrew with the remaining forces inland to the settlement of Toma. On 14 September the cruiser Encounter shelled the hills around it, and the Australian infantry advanced towards it. There was no fighting. After a brief siege of Toma Haber accepted terms of surrender on 17 September, which Holmes extended to all German possessions administered from Rabaul. On 21 September about 40 Germans and about 110 Melanesian police laid down their arms at Herbertshöhe. On the same day that Encounter shelled Toma, the Australian submarine AE1 disappeared without trace near Rabaul with her entire crew of 35.

In the following weeks the Australians occupied the remaining parts of the vast colony. On 24 September they landed at Madang in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, in October on New Ireland, and on 6 November they placed a garrison on Nauru. In the colony’s waters they searched the hiding places of German ships, and on 11 October they captured the government yacht Komet without a fight. The Admiralty Islands and the northern Solomon Islands were occupied only in November and December, but no one resisted there any longer. Holmes left in place the German officials and planters who swore to remain neutral, because without them the colony’s economy would have collapsed. Part of Australian opinion considered these terms too lenient.

Japan in the islands of Micronesia

In early August Spee assembled his ships off the island of Pagan in the Marianas. There he detached the cruiser Emden, which sailed on an independent raid in the Indian Ocean. When it became clear that Japan would enter the war, the admiral decided that there was no place for him in the western Pacific and headed east, towards the coast of South America, where he could count on coal from neutral ports. On the way he appeared off Apia, and on 22 September he shelled Papeete on French Tahiti. On 1 November, off the coast of Chile, he destroyed a British squadron at the Battle of Coronel. The German colonies were thus left to fend for themselves.

The Japanese navy sent two squadrons into the Pacific, officially to search for Spee’s squadron. The first was commanded by Vice-Admiral Tanin Yamaya, the second, with the battleship Satsuma as flagship, by Rear-Admiral Tatsuo Matsumura. The navy minister initially ordered that no islands be occupied, but according to some accounts Yamaya landed a party on Jaluit atoll, the administrative centre of the Marshall Islands, as early as 29 September. When it turned out that no one else had occupied the islands, Tokyo changed its mind. On 3 October the Japanese finally occupied Jaluit, over the following days Kosrae, on 7 October Pohnpei and Yap, then Palau, on 12 October Chuuk atoll, and on 14 October Saipan in the Marianas. At Yap the crew of the German survey ship Planet scuttled her themselves so that she would not fall into enemy hands.

There were no forces on the islands capable of defending them, and neither the Germans nor the local inhabitants offered open resistance. The Japanese immediately set up provisional military administrations there. They offered the German officials temporary service under them, and when most refused, sent them back to Germany. Tokyo at first presented the occupation as a purely military and temporary step, and in London there was discussion of whether the Australians should take the islands over. It soon became clear, however, that Japan had no intention of handing them to anyone. In this way the equator became the de facto boundary: south of it the German territories were taken by the Australians and New Zealanders, north of it by the Japanese.

Siege of Tsingtao

Tsingtao, today’s Qingdao, was the only German possession in the region prepared for defence. The port was covered by coastal batteries, and on the landward side by a line of five infantry works with artillery on the hills behind it. The governor of the territory, Captain Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, had, according to various figures, from about 3,600 to over 4,500 men: the III Marine Battalion, sailors, reservists gathered from all over China, and volunteers. Also in the harbour was the Austro-Hungarian cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, part of whose crew went ashore. Emperor Wilhelm II is said to have remarked that surrendering Tsingtao to the Japanese would shame him more than surrendering Berlin to the Russians. The defenders knew, however, that they could not count on relief.

On 27 August the Japanese fleet of Vice-Admiral Sadakichi Katō began a blockade from the sea, joined by the British battleship Triumph and the destroyer Usk. Against the fortress Japan sent the 18th Division of General Mitsuomi Kamio, reinforced with heavy artillery, according to various figures about 20,000–24,000 soldiers and more than 140 guns. On 2 September the first units landed at Longkou, on neutral Chinese territory, more than 150 kilometres from their objective, and later seized the German railway into the interior of Shantung. Torrential rain turned the roads into a quagmire, so on 18 September part of the force was landed much closer, in Laoshan Bay. On 22–23 September the British contingent of Brigadier-General Nathaniel Barnardiston landed there, about 1,500 men of the South Wales Borderers and the 36th Sikhs from the garrison at Tientsin.

At the end of September the Japanese took the German forward positions, including Prince Heinrich Hill, from which the whole town could be seen. Kamio did not attempt an assault on the run. His soldiers dug parallel lines of trenches ever closer to the German works, while the gunners brought heavy guns into position. Japanese seaplanes from the transport Wakamiya carried out over the fortress the first air raids in history by aircraft launched from a ship. The defenders achieved only one major success: on the night of 17–18 October the torpedo boat S90 torpedoed the old Japanese cruiser Takachiho, which sank with about 270 sailors.

On 31 October the Japanese began a great bombardment from about a hundred heavy guns and from the ships. For a week they destroyed forts, batteries, fuel tanks and the port. On 2 November the crew scuttled Kaiserin Elisabeth, which had run out of ammunition, and the German batteries fired less and less often. On the night of 6–7 November the Japanese infantry attacked the central sector of the main line and took one work after another. On the morning of 7 November Meyer-Waldeck ordered white flags to be raised, and the surrender was signed the same day. The last German ships in the harbour had already been scuttled by their own crews. On 16 November Japanese and British troops staged a ceremonial entry into the town.

Casualties

The capture of the Pacific islands cost both sides little. Samoa and German Micronesia changed hands without a fight. At Bita Paka, according to the Australian War Memorial, six Australians were killed and four or five wounded. Some works give seven killed. On the defenders’ side one German and about 30 Melanesians were killed. The Australians’ greatest loss was the submarine AE1, missing with 35 men.

The siege of Tsingtao was much bloodier, though the figures vary widely. On the German side about 200 men were killed and from about 400 to over 500 wounded. About 4,700 Germans and Austrians went into Japanese captivity. Japanese army losses are given as from about 240 to over 700 killed and about 1,300 wounded, plus about 270 sailors from Takachiho and other naval losses. The British lost, according to the National Army Museum, 12 killed and 53 wounded. Chinese civilians from the surrounding villages also died in the fighting, according to Japanese figures nearly a hundred.

Significance

By the end of 1914 Germany had lost all its possessions in the Far East and the Pacific. Spee’s squadron had nowhere left to return to, and the wireless stations on which German communications across the ocean depended fell silent. For the Entente this meant safe routes for the convoys from Australia and New Zealand carrying troops to the Middle East and Europe. For Australia and New Zealand these were the first operations of the war, carried out by hastily assembled forces, and although they demanded no great sacrifices, both countries showed that they were ready to act independently in their own region.

The greatest winner, however, was Japan. At little cost it took Kiautschou, the Shantung railway and all of German Micronesia, and in January 1915 it presented China with the Twenty-One Demands. It kept the islands north of the equator despite Australian unease, and in 1917 Britain agreed in a secret understanding to support its claims. After the war the former German islands became a Japanese League of Nations mandate, and the territories south of the equator became mandates administered by Australia and New Zealand. The award of the Shantung rights to Japan at the peace conference in 1919 provoked a wave of protest in China, and Tsingtao returned to China only in 1922. The boundary on the equator drawn in the autumn of 1914 lasted until the next war, when Chuuk, Saipan and other former German islands became Japanese bases in the Pacific.