Siam declares war on Germany and Austria-Hungary

At dawn on Sunday 22 July 1917 the Kingdom of Siam announced that it was at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The decision was taken personally by King Vajiravudh, who reigned as Rama VI. That same morning the American chargé d’affaires in Bangkok, Arnold, cabled Washington: “Siam declared war on Germany and Austria about six this morning. Germans and Austrians are interned. German and Austrian legations protected by special guards. All German ships interned at once.” Siam was the only independent state in South-East Asia to enter the war of its own free will. It needed the war not for gains at the front but for a place among the victors.

A kingdom between two empires

In 1914 Siam was an island of independence between French Indochina and British Burma and Malaya. It had kept that independence at the cost of painful concessions. Between 1893 and 1907 it ceded to France the lands of Laos and Cambodia, and in 1909 it gave Britain four Malay sultanates, including Kedah. It was still bound by the unequal treaties of the 19th century. Foreigners enjoyed extraterritoriality there, meaning that they were subject to the courts of their own consuls rather than Siamese ones, and the treaties limited the duties the kingdom could levy on imports. This was one reason, among others, why the treasury depended on revenue from the licensed sale of opium.

Vajiravudh, who had succeeded his father Chulalongkorn on the throne in 1910, had been brought up in England. He had graduated from the military academy at Sandhurst, trained with the Durham Light Infantry and studied at Oxford. He did not, however, enjoy his father’s popularity, and in 1912 a plot by young officers against him was foiled. The British held a strong position in Bangkok, but the Germans were active there too. German shipping lines dominated traffic between Bangkok and Singapore and Hong Kong, German engineers built Siam’s railways and telegraphs, and German technology and medicine were considered the best. Siam did not regard Germany as a colonial power in its part of the world and treated it as a counterweight to France and Britain.

Three years of neutrality

On 6 August 1914 the king proclaimed neutrality. Nobody in Bangkok questioned it. Siam had no interest in the war, and no one could foresee its outcome. German shipping vanished overnight and the kingdom’s foreign trade came to a standstill for several weeks before British and Norwegian ships filled the gap. Nine German steamers took refuge in neutral waters behind the bar at the mouth of the Chao Phraya, where Entente warships could not reach them.

As time went on, neutrality became harder to maintain. Bangkok became a battlefield of propaganda, and both sides courted the court. The princes who ran the state were divided. The foreign minister, Prince Devawongse Varoprakar, made no secret of his sympathy for the British but preferred to remain neutral. The chief of the general staff, Prince Chakrabongse, and the minister in Paris, Prince Charoon, wanted to enter the war on the side of the Entente. Several other princes educated in Germany, led by the navy minister Prince Paribatra, favoured Germany. The king himself sympathised with the Entente and accepted an honorary rank of general in the British Army, but in public he remained cautious. The Siamese did, however, help the British break up a plot in which German diplomats in Bangkok and Shanghai were organising a camp near the Burmese border for Indian revolutionaries of the Ghadar Party, who were to raise a rebellion in British India.

In February 1917 the United States, which had just broken off relations with Germany, encouraged neutral states to follow its example. Siam replied that it understood the Americans’ motives but preferred to remain neutral. In May the French urged Washington to join the Allies in putting pressure on Bangkok. They argued that every opportunity should be used to weaken German influence in the Far East. Secretary of State Robert Lansing decided that the moment was not right to renew the request. In the first months of 1917, however, the supporters of war in Bangkok gradually gained the upper hand, and the final decision rested with the king. According to the historian Stefan Hell, Vajiravudh decided to follow the “young Siamese”, as he called them, rather than the old guard.

Why Siam went to war

There were several reasons. The most important was political. Siam wanted to sit at the table after the war as an equal partner of the victors and to free itself from the unequal treaties. Declaring war on a European power was without precedent in the kingdom’s history and was meant to show the strength of the monarchy and, at home, to serve to foster the patriotism around which Vajiravudh had for years been building his rule. After three years of war there was also a conviction in Bangkok that Germany could not win it militarily. After the news of the use of gas and the sinking of passenger ships, joining the Entente required no great courage, and the entry of the United States into the war in April allowed Siam to present its decision as a defence of international law. Material gains mattered too, for the Germans were to disappear from the country’s economy and their firms, property and ships were to be taken over by the state. Hell notes, however, that the decision was also a concession to growing Allied pressure. The British gained most from it: they got rid of a competitor in trade, shipping and railway construction, and at the same time of German spies in the neighbourhood of India.

Sunday 22 July

The operation had been carefully prepared. At dawn all the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in the kingdom, about 320 men, women and children, were placed under guard, and during the day the men outside the diplomatic staff were rounded up and interned without bloodshed. The German and Austrian legations were then run by chargés d’affaires, because both ministers had gone home in 1914 and had been unable to return. The Siamese seized nine German ships on the Chao Phraya before their crews could seriously damage them. German firms, shops and restaurants were closed and all German property was confiscated. British merchants in Bangkok rejoiced that their competition had vanished overnight.

193 men of military age were sent to a prisoner-of-war camp set up in a military hospital in the centre of Bangkok, and 124 women and children, including the Siamese wives of Germans and their children, were interned in the German Club. Conditions were good, which allowed the government to show the world the face of a civilised state. The ships became a matter of dispute among the Allies. As early as the beginning of August the British demanded all nine, citing their heavy losses in tonnage, and the French, Japanese and Americans also wanted their share. Siam declared that it would accept the Allies’ decision, and after a few months handed over the seven largest ships to its allies, keeping the two smallest.

In Berlin the news took the Foreign Office by surprise. German officials and the press quickly began to play down its significance and to present it as a militarily worthless act of obedience to the British. Nine Siamese students remained in Germany, whom the legations had not managed to get out to Denmark or Switzerland in time. They were arrested in Berlin at the beginning of August.

Under a new flag

The king wanted to show at once that Siam would not be an ally only on paper. On 28 September 1917 he introduced a new flag with red, white and blue stripes, called the Trairanga, which replaced the old white elephant on a red ground. Its colours were to symbolise nation, religion and king, and according to many authors they also deliberately echoed the flags of Britain, France, the United States and Russia. In September the war minister called for volunteers for a corps that was to carry the Siamese flag to Europe. In 1918 just under 1,300 airmen, mechanics, drivers and medical orderlies sailed to France. The drivers carried supplies at the front in Champagne, and after the armistice the Siamese took part in the occupation of the Rhineland and in the victory parade in Paris in July 1919. Nineteen of them died, all from disease or in accidents. In February 1918 the German internees were shipped off to camps in India.

The king’s calculation paid off. Siam took part in the Paris Peace Conference and became a founding member of the League of Nations. In 1920 the United States, and in the following years Britain and France as well, agreed to revise the old treaties and gradually gave up extraterritoriality. Hell calls participation in the war a key step on Siam’s road to regaining full sovereignty.