While the Australians were engaged in occupying German New Guinea and New Britain as an opening gambit in their Pacific game, at the other end of the Pacific the Japanese were engaged in another phase of their Pacific intentions, in a battle that might have received greater attention had it not been swamped by events in Europe. It involved Britain’s Pacific partner, Japan, and the enemy of the moment, Germany.
On 7 August 1914 the Japanese government had received an official request from Britain for help in destroying German raiders in the North Pacific, and sent Germany an ultimatum on 14 August demanding the withdrawal of German naval forces from the North Pacific. When this was not answered, Japan declared war on the Kaiser on 23 August 1914. The Japanese agenda in this war was not only to clear the German navy out of the North Pacific and seize its territory in the Chinese province of Shandong but also to end the German government’s pretensions to the control of the Marianas, Caroline Islands and Marshall Islands. Above all, it hoped to force on China demands which would reduce it to the level of protectorate. Only international opposition, especially from the United States, prevented the Japanese government from achieving that aim for now.
In August 1914 Tsingtao (Qingdao) was a great prize. Japan went about the long-planned business of seizing it with exceptional energy and overwhelming force. Four dreadnoughts, four battle cruisers, thirteen light cruisers and all attendant ships were deployed. The first landing force was to consist of the Japanese 18th Division’s 23 000 men. Great Britain despatched a small naval force to join them, as much to keep an eye on what was happening as to add strength. Under the command of Maximilian von Spee, Germany’s East Asia Squadron, the same one which so troubled the Australian government, was ordered to leave Tsingtao before the Japanese fleet could trap it there. The Japanese blockaded the harbour and looked through their binoculars at the orderly military town, with wide streets and artillery redoubts which abutted the old Chinese town. Here 4000 German and Austrian troops were garrisoned. The Japanese landed, dug a siege trench and began operations, ultimately storming the hills and capturing fortifications. An omen of the future revealed itself to the sailors of the British dreadnought—a small number of aircraft were launched from a deck extended out over the sea on one of the Japanese battleships. These were reconnaissance planes, but they also performed bombing raids.
By early November the British wanted to put an end to the doomed defence, but the Japanese leadership chose to take the city by storm. They suffered great losses in their charge up the slope to the final fortification. The New York Times reported, ‘The German garrison could not hold out, and the white flag was hoisted from Fort C, close to General Meyer Waldrick’s residence’.
Tsingtao was the North Pacific bookend to Australia’s success in New Guinea. While the Australian move could be looked at cynically too, enough had been seen by the British observers at Tsingtao to create unease about future Japanese intentions in the Pacific and certainly to reinforce Australian ones. It all echoed what Colonel Legge, the Dominion representative on the Imperial General Staff in England, had reported on 25 July 1913—that Japan possessed the capability to send off three divisions to Australia in under four weeks from the date of mobilisation, and without giving Australia any meaningful warning.
The Japanese would withdraw from Tsingtao in 1921 as part of the general post-war rearrangement of borders, and allocation of other protectorates and mandates over islands in the North Pacific they had also taken from Germany in 1914.
TRANSPORTS
The first 20 000 Australian volunteers for the war in Europe, and a strong New Zealand contingent as well, confident that with a few weeks’ training they were ready for any confrontation in the larger world, were waiting impatiently in barracks, frustrated and delayed. The British Admiralty was frustrated too, by the fact that no one on the British or Australian side knew where Count von Spee’s Pacific naval squadron were. It had been suggested that the Australia and three small cruisers should escort the twenty-seven Australian transports, to which the New Zealand convoy was to be added, to whatever destination was assigned. But the Australia was still in New Guinea when in mid-September von Spee’s cruisers, including the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, were sighted off Apia, Samoa. The German raider Emden, a cruiser disguised as a mere freighter, had also by now begun to sink a huge tonnage of British shipping all over the Indian Ocean.
The British Admiralty, under pressure to get the troops of Oceania to the battlefront, ordered the Royal Navy’s Minotaur and, in the spirit of the Anglo-Japanese naval treaty of 1905, the Japanese cruiser Ibuki to meet any Australian–New Zealand convoy at Fremantle and escort them onwards. But the Australian and New Zealand politicians were worried about danger to the transports in the Tasman Sea and the Southern Ocean. A German wireless transmission was intercepted ordering a collier, from which German raiders could refuel themselves, to New Guinea, which meant that raiders might be slated to operate in the waters between Australia and New Zealand. The New Zealanders might have to wait for the second convoy because of the danger of crossing the Tasman. Prime Minister Fisher and the minister for defence, Senator George Pearce, urged a delay, while the commander of the troops, General William Bridges, a British professional of considerable courage and character, sadly to be killed by a sniper’s bullet at Gallipoli, urged that the politicians should take a sturdier attitude and that transports should sail. The Admiralty persistently advised that the despatch of transports from New Zealand and Australian ports to the points of concentration in Fremantle was ‘an operation free from undue risk’. But Fisher was haunted by the possibility of Australia’s 20 000 finest boys drowning. At the Australian government’s order, some troopships which had already embarked from eastern Australian for the rendezvous at Fremantle were fetched back to Melbourne and Sydney. The Australian cruiser Melbourne itself was sent southwards from Sydney to bring back stragglers. Meanwhile, the Minotaur and Ibuki reached Fremantle at the end of September. The captain of the Ibuki sent a message to the Australian Naval Board: ‘We are grateful to Providence for the honour of cooperating with our Allies in the restoration of the peace of the world, and trust Providence will further honour us with an opportunity of cooperating actively and to some effect in the defence of a common interest in Far Eastern waters.’
When the German cruisers were found to have moved north in the Pacific and raided Papeete in French-controlled Tahiti, the Admiralty even more pressingly urged the departure of the Australian–New Zealand convoy. But the New Zealanders still delayed, concerned about the inadequacy of the escort across the Tasman. Finally, on 16 October 1914, ten New Zealand transports set out for Albany, and the eastern Australian transports began to move to join impatient troops from Western Australia. With the Melbourne standing off Gabo Island until the last transport from Sydney had safely passed, all Australian transports reached Albany by 28 October. On leaving Fremantle for the journey to the northern hemisphere, the Australian transports formed up three abreast, followed by the ten New Zealand vessels two abreast. The Minotaur led, the Sydney was on the port side to the west, the Ibuki to the east, and at the stern was the Melbourne. The concern was that they did not know where the Emden was, and if it sneaked amongst the convoy it could create mayhem, firing and torpedoing in both directions, drowning many Australians and New Zealanders and undermining their governments’ resolve.
At the start of the war, the Emden had been stationed in the passage between the island of Tsushima and the Japanese mainland and had captured a Japanese cruiser, the Riasan, which it manned with a German crew, renamed the Kormoran, and turned into a fellow raider. The Emden then separated from the Kormoran and made for the Molucca Passage in Indonesia with her special coaling ship accompanying her. Cruising on the steamer route between Colombo and Calcutta, she sank twenty-one vessels within six weeks, bombarded the fuel depot of Madras in India and raided warships at anchor in Penang. In just five days of its rampage it captur
ed or sank eight ships. Some of the surviving crew were transferred to her collier. Other ships were sunk off Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). One of the ships captured by the Emden, the Exford, contained 5500 tons of Welsh coal.
The captain of the Emden, Karl von Müller, was now attracted southwards to the Cocos and Keeling Islands. The Emden’s motive for coming south was to destroy the radio transmitters at this most remote of relay points and break British communications in the Indian Ocean. But it might also have intended to intercept the convoy. Trouble now broke out in South Africa with a pro-German Boer uprising and the Minotaur was ordered off to the Cape of Good Hope, leaving the Melbourne, with the Sydney and the Ibuki, in charge of the thirty-eight transports.
Early on the morning of 9 November, when soldiers were exercising on the decks of the troopships, Cocos Island wireless station transmitted the signal, ‘Strange warship approaching’. An SOS was then appended with the news that a three-funnelled warship was landing a party in boats. That was the last transmission from Cocos Island. The Melbourne turned to the island but the captain soon swung back into his position, realising the convoy was his responsibility. He signalled the Sydney to veer away and find the ‘strange warship’ which dominated so many imaginations from Melbourne to the Admiralty in London. By 9.15 a.m., the Sydney was off the island and saw the enemy cruiser. The Emden began firing. Shot fell either side of the Sydney, and fifteen shells landed aboard her, of which only five burst. Two hit the after-control platform and wounded everyone there, another hit the bridge and killed a man but did not explode. Other shells hit a gun crew and started a fire in cordite charges. Aboard the Sydney that day were a number of boys of about sixteen years of age from the training ship Tingara, and they fortuitously were all at their battle stations when a shell destroyed their mess. They were especially praised for coolness. When a German shell tore off the range-finder operator’s leg, a Tingara boy named Roy Millar, thrown to the deck, rose, shook himself and asked, ‘Where’s my bloody telescope?’
The Emden fired at such a hectic rate because she knew she must disable the Sydney before her guns got their range. But soon the Sydney’s shells had smashed the wireless room aboard the Emden and wrecked the steering gear. The forward funnel went over the side of the ship. A shell fell into the after-ammunition room, which von Müller ordered flooded. As his third funnel was blown away, von Müller saw that he was three miles closer to North Keeling Island than the Sydney. The Emden drove itself up onto a reef by the island. This accomplished, Captain John Glossop then turned the Sydney away to chase the collier Buresk, which had left the Emden earlier in the day. When the Sydney overtook the Buresk the German captain surrendered, making the point that there were many non-combatant Chinese aboard from the German possession of Tsingtao. Before sinking the Buresk, Glossop allowed its crew to take to boats, which he then towed back to North Keeling Island.
He arrived there about four o’clock in the afternoon and saw that the grounded Emden’s flag was still flying. His claim, and that of other Sydney officers, is that von Müller temporised and pretended he had no signal book to answer the Sydney’s question, ‘Will you surrender?’ The official historian maintains that German officers captured on the Buresk told Glossop that von Müller would never surrender. After the message was sent again and went unanswered, the Sydney ran in to about a two-mile range and fired two salvos. Later, von Müller would claim that the men who were hit by those shells and then died, or who dived overboard and drowned trying to swim ashore, could have been saved.
When the Emden was boarded by a crew from the Sydney, the ratings, who had never seen war’s mayhem before, were shocked at the sight of men lying in heaps, by the damage their shells had done to the deck and the superstructure. The wounded were not in good condition since they had only one surgeon to work on them, the assistant surgeon having been blown overboard and then died ashore. Captain Glossop borrowed the wireless staff doctor, H.S. Ollerhead, to help the medical officers of the Sydney and the half-deranged doctor of the Emden treat and operate on the wounded of both the Sydney and the Emden. The Emden’s killed and drowned numbered 133, including three Chinese laundrymen.
Earlier in the day a party of German officers and men had also been landed on Direction Island, near North Keeling, to destroy the cable station there. They would now be captured, but the landing party on Cocos commandeered a small ship named Ayesha, on which they would ultimately sail all the way to Arabia, connecting up there with the Turkish railway system which would take them to Istanbul and then, through friendly country, home.
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The Anzac convoy was by now approaching the Dutch East Indies on its way to havoc such as would dwarf any damage the Emden could have done it.
The Australian navy’s role in the war from then on was divided between the Indian-Pacific region, the Mediterranean and as part of the Grand Fleet in the North Sea. Fortunately perhaps for many young sailors, a collision with a New Zealand vessel disqualified the Australia from participation in the huge Battle of Jutland in 1916. This did not mean that for its sailors the war was not an education in geography and—to an extent—politics, or that the life of a naval rating in the North Sea was delightful. The sailors were, however, saved the mud and the gas and the horror ashore.
HUGHES, GERMANS, MINERALS
After Fisher came to power in late 1914, one of the first issues that Billy Hughes faced as attorney-general was the question of minerals—lead, copper and zinc in particular—and the fact that at the outbreak of war the control of much of the mining and export of these minerals in Australia was in the hands of a small group of German firms. Hughes had been unaware of the issue when the war began but, finding out, took up the matter with characteristic zeal. The whole output of zinc, for example, was sold in the form of concentrates to metals-trading firm Henry R. Merton (HRM) of London or to the Australian Metal Company of Melbourne, both of whom were subsidiaries of Frankfurt’s Metallgesell-schaft AG. The German agencies which sent metals to Germany shrouded their identity under that disarming name Australian Metal Company, and shipped considerable quantities of lead and zinc to Germany through various channels, but mostly via America.
The export of metals was now embargoed, but workers at Broken Hill, Port Pirie and Port Kembla were put off and appealed to the Labor government over their lost jobs. Indeed, the methods used by Billy on all mining and metal-trading companies were at first heavy-handed, and on 8 November, at his order, raids were mounted by police and customs officers on the offices of all the main firms producing and exporting metals, including Broken Hill Proprietary.
Hughes now employed a technical adviser, John Higgins, a metallurgist who had retired to the country after being driven out of business by German competition. Higgins does not seem to have been vengeful but advised Hughes that there were extant contracts that would be revived after the war to give Germany effective control of the industry for many years thereafter. Governments, especially that of Asquith, the British prime minister, were loath to interfere with these contractual relationships—contracts were in some eyes a supreme consideration—and Billy Hughes inveighed against possible ‘paralysis of zinc production during the war, and the renewal of German control afterwards’.
W.S. Robinson of BHP was offended by Hughes’ fervour on the matter, but Hughes won him over and asked him if he would be so kind as to give advice when the attorney-general needed it. He told Robinson he wanted a metals exchange to control and register all dealings in metals and ores and so ensure that none found their way to Germany. But he also wanted results which would enrich Australian and British companies—a substantial increase in the Australian output of refined lead; a plant for making copper wire; and a scheme for the treatment of zinc concentrates.
In the middle of the year, when the Gallipoli campaign was in full bloom, Hughes accused the Mount Morgan Mining Company, the biggest copper producers, of continuing to sell through HRM, and Gold
sborough Mort and Company of having applied for permission to act as Merton’s agents. This brought on a further brawl with the miners. He boasted now, ‘The Australian Metal Company was closed and its presiding genius, a plausible gentleman named Franz Wallach, put into cold storage.’ Wallach took a writ of habeas corpus in the Supreme Court of Victoria. The War Precautions Act, however, said Hughes with some pride, ‘clothed the executive with authority that barely stopped this side of absolutism’.
The hearing of the matter in the Victorian Supreme Court attracted great interest. Hughes puts his bias against Wallach in these terms: ‘Tens of thousands were being killed or wounded by bullets and shells made from lead and zinc mined and smelted in Australia and shipped through devious channels to Germany by the Australian Metal Company.’ The Commonwealth had to appeal to the High Court to get Wallach interned, but Sir Samuel Griffith came down on the side of the minister of defence and Wallach was locked up for the duration of the war.
Hughes brought to his later narration of some of his endeavours in wartime an amused tone, even levity. He would tell the story of Mr Johnson, a competent businessman, to whom he gave the task of producing canned fish for the Australian market so that less money and cargo space were spent on salmon imports. Johnson produced cans with salmon labels on them, but they fell foul of the Chief Commonwealth Health Officer, Perry Norris, who claimed they were not salmon. ‘Of course it’s not salmon,’ Johnson admitted. ‘There are no salmon in these waters.’ It was jewfish, he confessed.
‘Holy Moses,’ Hughes said. ‘But it’s pink!’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Johnson. ‘We had to give it a touch of cochineal!’
But by now it was the casualties from Gallipoli who were having the profoundest impact on Hughes, and dampened even his taste for satire. The idea for conscription was already forming in him.
THE BLOOD MYTH UNASSAILABLE