Surrender of Tsingtao

On the morning of 7 November 1914 white flags were hoisted over the German fortress of Tsingtao, today’s Qingdao. After a night assault by Japanese infantry, the governor of the Kiautschou leasehold, Captain Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, judged further defence pointless and asked for talks. The garrison surrendered the same day. A little over two months after the Japanese landing in Shantung, the only major land campaign of the First World War in East Asia came to an end.

The last night

From 31 October the fortress had been under a hurricane of fire from about a hundred Japanese siege guns, supported by warships. The bombardment destroyed most of the German batteries, the fuel tanks and the power station, tore down the wire entanglements and cracked the concrete shelters. The defenders were firing their last shells. A few days earlier the crew had scuttled the Austro-Hungarian cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, and on 6 November Lieutenant Gunther Plüschow flew out of the fortress in his Taube aircraft, taking the governor’s last reports with him.

On the night of 6–7 November Japanese units went into the assault on the central sector of the main line of defence, made up of five infantry works. The blow came from trenches pushed right up to the German fortifications. The central work fell first, and the Japanese infantry, getting into the rear of the neighbouring positions, took one after another. In some places the Germans held out for several more hours and fought hand to hand. By dawn the Japanese were already breaking onto the hills behind the main line, where the last batteries stood.

White flags

Meyer-Waldeck, who as recently as August had telegraphed the Emperor that the fortress would do its duty to the last, no longer had anything to fight with. The last guns were blown up, and during the night the gunboat Jaguar, the defenders’ last warship, was scuttled in the bay. So as not to carry the fighting into the streets of the town, the governor ordered white flags to be hoisted in the morning on the signal station and the observatory. The terms of surrender were agreed the same day. The town, the port and the whole leasehold passed into the hands of the Japanese and the British.

According to the most commonly cited figures, about 200 defenders were killed in the fighting for Tsingtao, and about 4,700 Germans and Austrians were taken prisoner. Japanese losses were higher, although estimates of them vary widely. On 16 November Japanese and British troops made a ceremonial entry into the town.

Prisoners in Japan

The prisoners were shipped to Japan and distributed among more than a dozen camps. Meyer-Waldeck was held first in the camp at Fukuoka and later at Narashino. The most famous was the Bandō camp on the island of Shikoku, where a benevolent commandant allowed the prisoners to run workshops, orchestras and lectures. On 1 June 1918 the prisoners’ orchestra at Bandō gave there the first performance in Japan of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Most of the prisoners returned home only at the turn of 1919 and 1920.

Japan in Shantung

The fall of Tsingtao closed the chapter of the German presence in China. Admiral von Spee’s squadron, then operating off the coast of South America, lost the last base to which it could ever have returned. The real winner, however, was Japan. It announced that it would keep the leasehold under its administration until the end of the war, and its troops already controlled the German railway from Tsingtao to Jinan and the mines in the interior of the province. Although in its ultimatum of August Tokyo had announced that Kiautschou was ultimately to be returned to China, it soon became clear that the Japanese had no intention of withdrawing.

As early as January 1915 the Japanese government presented the Chinese President Yuan Shikai with the Twenty-One Demands. The first group of them concerned precisely the takeover of the former German rights in Shantung. The dispute over the province was to weigh on Sino-Japanese relations throughout the war and long after it. Japan returned Tsingtao to China only in 1922, after the Washington Conference.