Internment of Cormoran at Guam

On 14 December 1914 the German auxiliary cruiser Cormoran entered Apra Harbor on Guam, an American island in the Mariana archipelago. She had only a few dozen tons of coal left in her bunkers. The Americans refused her the fuel she needed to continue her voyage, so the ship remained at Guam and was interned together with her crew.

A prize of the Emden

Cormoran was in reality the Russian passenger ship Ryazan, built in 1909 at the German Schichau yard in Elbing. In the first days of the war she was captured by the German cruiser Emden and taken to Tsingtao. There the Germans armed her with guns taken from the old cruiser Cormoran, which had been withdrawn from service because of her poor condition, and transferred that ship’s crew and name to her. The commander of the new auxiliary cruiser was Korvettenkapitän Adalbert Zuckschwerdt.

Four months in the Pacific

On 10 August Cormoran left Tsingtao. At the end of August she joined the squadron of Admiral Maximilian von Spee in the Marshall Islands, which sent her, together with another auxiliary cruiser, Prinz Eitel Friedrich, to wage commerce war. Cormoran, however, did not sink a single enemy ship. For the following months she cruised the Pacific, avoiding British, Australian and Japanese warships and constantly struggling with a shortage of coal. In New Guinea she took on board German colonial officials, including the deputy governor. When she tried to operate near Yap, she found the Japanese already there; they had occupied the island in October.

In the end Zuckschwerdt hid the ship at the remote atoll of Lamotrek in the Carolines and from there sent men to look for a neutral port and fuel. The only realistic destination was Guam, which had belonged to the United States since 1898. On 14 December Cormoran, unseen by Japanese patrols, reached Apra Harbor.

No coal

Zuckschwerdt asked for the coal he needed to reach safer waters. The Governor of Guam, Commander William Maxwell of the US Navy, refused. The law of neutrality allowed a belligerent warship to take on in a neutral port only as much fuel as it needed to reach the nearest port of its own country, and the Germans no longer had any such ports in the Pacific. Coal was in any case short on the island itself. Cormoran could not put to sea, where she risked meeting Japanese warships, and, like the gunboat Geier at Honolulu a month earlier, she was interned.

There were several hundred people on board, including sailors from New Guinea who had served earlier on the old Cormoran. Because there was no room for them on the island, they lived on the ship. When Maxwell was replaced by a new governor, relations with the Americans and the islanders became friendly, and the Germans spent more than two years on Guam.

America’s first shots

On 7 April 1917 the news reached Guam that the United States had declared war on Germany. The governor demanded the surrender of the ship and her crew. Zuckschwerdt agreed to hand over the men, but not the ship. When the Americans noticed that the Germans were preparing to scuttle her, one of them fired a warning shot from a rifle. It is regarded as the first shot fired by the United States in the war. The crew nevertheless finished the job, abandoned the ship and blew her up. Seven Germans were killed, or nine according to some sources. The rest were taken prisoner in the United States and returned home only in 1919. The dead were buried with military honours in Hagåtña. The wreck of Cormoran still lies on the bottom of Apra Harbor and is one of the most popular dive sites on the island.