Very early in the war, the South Pacific witnessed a clash of empires.
Compared to the battles in Europe, this was minor action, but it was significant for the
region and its people, and really shows the global scale of the war.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the First World War
in the Pacific.
In the late 19th century, German interest in several south pacific territories became
formalized under imperial rule.
German New Guinea and German Samoa were annexed and many small islands like the Marshalls
and the Marianas were acquired.
They weren’t really strategically or economically important, though, and the real German regional
military power when the war broke out was at Tsingtao, China - the German East Asia
Squadron under Maximilian von Spee, which we’ve covered a lot in our regular episodes.
There were no contingency plans to defend Germany's territories, though, which sat at
odds with war plans for raids on places like Australia or New Zealand.
Those plans were to target coastal facilities, disrupt shipping, demoralize the population,
and keep the troops at home.
German expansion in the region had prompted reactions from those two, and they believed
that the Royal Navy’s dominance of the area was essential for regional security.
They had made failed claims on German New Guinea, and New Zealand had a plan to seize
Samoa in the event of war.
Which now happened.
New Zealand’s first military action of the war was sending the 1,400 strong Samoa Expeditionary
Force to seize the wireless station there.
They arrived August 29th and faced no resistance, though the wireless station had been rendered
inoperable, and they occupied Samoa.
This was not, as many think, the first occupation of German territory of the war - that happened
days earlier in Togoland in Africa.
The escort elements of this force then met up with a 2,000 men strong Australian force
that had been assembled to take wireless stations at New Guinea, the Caroline Islands, Nauru,
and New Britain.
They reached New Guinea September 11th, and saw actual combat.
Seven Australians were killed - the first of the war, one German, and 30 Melanesians
of the native police.
All of the outposts were occupied over the next two months, though German Leutnant Hermann
Detzner, with 20 of the police, evaded capture for the duration of the war in the jungle
of New Guinea.
He surrendered in January 1919 in full dress uniform flying the flag of Imperial Germany.
The occupation of Samoa apparently involved billiards, cricket, and drinking, though there
were incidents of plundering.
Colonel Robert Logan, the military governor, was pretty autocratic and belligerent and
had a feud with nearby American Samoa.
When the Spanish Flu arrived in 1918 and he refused assistance from American Samoa, nearly
a quarter of the local population died and his refusal of assistance poisoned relations
between his administration and the Samoans.
Australia’s occupation of New Guinea also faced some difficulties.
Colonel Holmes established a military government and garrison, but he re-enlisted and was eventually
killed at Messines in 1917, and the garrison had disciplinary problems that included fairly
common looting and drunken brawls.
There were also accusations of brutality toward the locals.
So, by late 1914, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan had occupied Germany’s pacific
possessions, and the Pacific experienced the rest of the war in different ways.
One is obviously the manner of deployment of soldiers from there to other regions.
Australia and New Zealand had big commitments in Europe and the Middle East, and other Pacific
islanders fought in the war; there were 500 Cook Islanders and 140 Niuean soldiers that
served with New Zealand’s Maori Pioneer Battalion in France.
There were also quite a few naval engagements in the area, with the East Asia Squadron at
large and the British trying to neutralize it.
Von Spee ignored the plans to attack Australia or New Zealand and tried to make it to Berlin
via the Atlantic.
His two modern cruisers shelled Tahiti in September 1914, and the squadron would fight
and win the Battle of Coronel off the Chilean Coast before leaving the Pacific.
Some elements of the squadron remained in the Pacific as independent raiders, though.
The Emden, the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, and the Cormoran, for example, targeted Allied
merchant shipping and infrastructure in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Though they managed to tie up considerable allied forces hunting them, by 1915 most were
captured, destroyed, or non-operational.
Then Germany began refitting freighters as commerce raiders on extended voyages.
They relied on endurance and range rather than speed, and by 1916, they were operating
in the South Pacific.
The SMS Wolf had a 451 day voyage, beginning in November 1916, the longest voyage of a
warship during the war.
It sank 14 ships and laid mines that destroyed 15 more before returning to Kiel in February
1918 with 467 prisoners and its cargo of booty.
There was also the SMS Seeadler.
In December 1916, it began its voyage by slipping the British blockade of Germany.
It would enter the Pacific in April 1917 after boarding and scuttling 16 ships.
They always left the crews intact, though, and by this time the Seeadler was struggling
to feed nearly 300 prisoners in addition to its own crew.
It wrecked on a reef in August, and the captain, Felix Graf von Luckner, sailed a small open
boat to Fiji.
There he was apprehended and sent to a New Zealand POW camp.
The men left behind on the reef hijacked a passing French merchant ship, but struck uncharted
rocks off of Easter Island and were interned in Chile for the rest of the war.
Luckner, though, managed to escape the camp in December, seized the 90-ton scow Moa, and
with a handmade sextant and a map copied from a school atlas, made for the Kermadec Islands.
His pursuers intercepted him the 21st, and a year after his voyage began, it was over
for good and he was imprisoned for the rest of the war.
We’ll do specials on Wolf and Seadler, and we already have ones the Emden, von Spee,
and Guam, and you can follow things like the siege of Tsingtao and the Battle of Coronel
in our old regular episodes; today was just a general overview of the actions and occupations
of the region.
In captured territories, the Australian and New Zealand invasion forces became occupation
and administration forces, in some cases lasting long after the war.
Samoa had a New Zealand mandate for decades and the Australian mandate over New Guinea
would last until 1975, when Papua New Guinea gained independence, so you can see how the
war had a long term lasting impact on this region, far from the battlefields of Europe.
We want to thank Steven Loveridge for his research on his episodes, Steven actually
wrote a whole book about New Zealand in World War 1 and you can find a link to that in the
video description.
If you want to learn more about Guam and SMS Cormoran in World War 1, you can click right
here for our Guam Special.
Don’t forget to subscribe and see you next time.