Military Naval History: The Samoan Showdown: How Germany and the U.S. Almost Came to Blows Decades Before WWI

“For several months, the two opposing fleets would face off in a tense game of brinksmanship. The standoff became known as the Samoan Crisis.”

GERMANY WAS A LATE BLOOMER among Europe’s imperial powers.

After attaining nation-state status in 1870, Otto von Bismarck’s newly unified Germany made up for its recent arrival on the world stage by snatching up overseas colonies as quickly as it could. In its relentless drive for what Kaiser Wilhelm II would later call Germany’s “place in the sun,” the burgeoning empire moved to secure territories throughout Africa, China as well as the Marianas, New Guinea, and the Caroline Islands. But it was the pursuit of a foothold in the remote islands of Samoa that would nearly bring the country to blows with another relative newcomer to the world stage, the United States.

One of the more remote landfalls in the South Pacific, the pair of islands that make up Samoa share just over 2,000 sq. kms between them. Despite their size and isolation, Samoa was not without its strategic value in the 19^th Century. In an era of coal-powered steam ships, far-flung anchorages, even ones as tiny as Samoa, would become vital ports of call for warships needing to refuel with coal.

Recognizing this, Berlin looked for ways to bring the islands into its sphere of influence. Plus, commercial interests in Germany were keen to exploit the local coconut and coca bean trade there.

Germany Plays King-Maker

When war broke out between two primitive tribal factions on Samoa in the 1886, Germany saw its chance to play a little ‘divide and conquer.’

Berlin backed a Samoan rebel chief named Tamasese, providing not just weapons and money to his faction, but also military advisers. In exchange, the Kaiser sought trade and territorial concessions once the new monarch was installed. By 1888, three German warships arrived in Samoa’s Apia Harbour and went so far as to openly lend a hand to Tamasese’s forces in this widening civil war against King Malietoa. The flotilla even put troops ashore to support the rebels. It was a provocation that did not go un-noticed in the United States. After all, the Americans were long-time trade partners of the ruling Malietoa and had no intention of being elbowed out of Samoa by a European power.

 

America Takes Notice

With U.S. commercial interests on Samoa suddenly at risk, Washington dispatched three warships of its own to the islands – the screw sloop USS Vandalia, the steamer USS Trenton and the USS Nipsic, a Civil War-era gunboat. Britain, who also had a stake in Samoa, sent HMS Calliope to monitor the situation.

For the next several months, the two opposing fleets would face off in a tense game of brinksmanship. The standoff became known as the Samoan Crisis. For many observers, including the famed Scottish novelistRobert Louis Stevenson who witnessed it first hand, all out war between Germany and the United States was in the offing.

Stevenson, the author of the classic Treasure Island, had become a resident of Samoa in the 1880s after making landfall there during a pleasure cruise across the Pacific. He even adopted a Samoan tribal name: Tusitala, which means “Teller of Tales.” The famed writer even recorded details of the crisis in his book A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa.

Tensions’Blow Over’

As the weeks passed and the tribal war continued in the Samoan jungles, the temperature between America and Germany continued to rise. While no shots had been fired between the two fleets, a confrontation seemed likely. Then nature intervened to settle the issue.

On March 16, 1889 a powerful typhoon struck the island. The force of the storm drove the British warship Calliope out to sea and destroyed both the German and American vessels as they tried to ride the tempest out in the harbour. Six ships in all were lost; more than 100 Germans and 53 American sailors were killed in the disaster. The survivors were taken off Samoa by trade vessels and later repatriated.

While the civil war continued, the immediate threat of a clash between Germany and the United States ended with the destruction of the two fleets.

Eventually, the Samoan question was resolved by the Tripartite Convention of 1899 in which one of the two Samoan islands was awarded to Germany, the other to the United States. The locals had no say in the decision.

New Zealand would end up seizing German Samoa in the opening days of the First World War. The island nation would not obtain independence until 1962. American Samoa remains a protectorate of the United States to this day.

(Originally published in MilitaryHistoryNow.com on Oct. 8, 2012)

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Brush-Up On Your History: The Legacy of the “Sisters-In-Arms”; History’s Famous Female Fighting Units

“There have been a number of women’s brigades that have served in wartime. Here are a few of them.”

IT WAS 100 years ago this week that a coalition of armed republican factions seized the city of Dublin and proclaimed Ireland’s independence from Great Britain.

The disturbance, which began on April 24, 1916, would go down in history as the Easter Rising.

Four four days, 12,000 insurgents from the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Armyoccupied the capital as soldiers and local police battled to regain control. The two rebel armies were joined by a third outfit — an all-female paramilitary unit known as theCumann na mBan or the “Irish Woman’s Council”.

Formed in 1914 to “advance the cause of Irish liberty,” the 10,000-strong resistance movement trained young women volunteers with pistols and rifles in preparation for an armed confrontation with the British Empire.

Sixty of its members served as nurses, messengers and even snipers during the 100-hour rebellion. One of the group’s leaders, a 47-year-old Anglo-Irish aristocrat namedConstance Georgine Markievicz, famoulsy gunned down an unarmed city constable as fighting raged throughout the city. Dozens of Cumann na mBan soldiers were captured in the final hours of the disturbance, which was brutally crushed by British soldiers on April 28; all but 12 were released before the end of May.

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American History: The Plains of Abraham and American Independence

“The French presence in Canada stood between the American colonies and any thought of independence. ”

BEST KNOWN AS a clash between French and British armies, the Plains of Abraham was also an American battle.

One in every three soldiers in the British army at Quebec had been recruited in the American colonies. Hundreds more Americans served aboard British warships and the American transports from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia that carried part of that army up the St. Lawrence River. During the campaign, the northern colonies played a role similar to that of Britain at the time of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 by providing a nearby land base for a great amphibious offensive.

Americans at War

Rangers and Royal Americans aside, colonial soldiers and sailors are almost invisible in accounts of the beachheads and battlefields of the Quebec campaign. Yet they were there for every landing and every battle, and their actions shaped the course of American history.

Long before the emergence of anything resembling a serious independence movement, most of Britain’s North American colonies were nascent autonomous states. Governed by local elites, they were self-financing, economically and demographically robust, and capable when necessary of raising their own fleets and armies.

As early as 1690, colonial America demonstrated its ability to project power into the heart of New France when a New England fleet and army besieged Quebec, a feat Britain would not be able to duplicate for another sixty-nine years. In 1710 and 1745, American armies carried in American vessels and supported by Royal Navy and New England warships conquered Acadia, which became the British province of Nova Scotia, and captured the strategic French port of Louisbourg.

New France and American Independence

The French presence in Canada, however, stood between the American colonies and any thought of independence. Back in 1732, James Logan, a merchant and administrator from Philadelphia, had confidently asserted that the American colonies would never lose their loyalty to the British Empire.

“While Canada is so near, they cannot rebel,” Pehr Kalm, a Swedish botanist who visited North America in 1749-50, agreed. “As the whole country which lies along the seashore is unguarded, and on the land side is harassed by the French, these dangerous neighbours in times of war are sufficient to prevent the connection of the colonies from their mother country from being broken off.”

“Do you think,” he asked, “that we will give Canada back to you?”The British-American victory at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and subsequent conquest of Canada changed all that. Under British control, Canada was just as close but no longer a threat. Some British commanders in North America, including Brigadier James Murray, had thought all along that a British Canada would be less a conquered colony than an incitement to American rebellion. In 1760, Murray confided his fears to a French officer.

“I am not sufficiently familiar with high policy to see so far ahead,” replied the French officer,

“If we are wise, we won’t keep it,” the Scottish-born general observed. “New England needs a bridle to keep it under control, and we will give it one by not holding on to this country.”

 

The Fall of Quebec and the Road to Revolution

Murray’s fears to the contrary, the British conquest of Canada did not in itself cause an American rebellion. Victory in the Seven Years’ War produced a transatlantic outburst of triumphal pride in Britain and British America. Americans never felt more British than just before they tore the empire apart.

Winning the Seven Years’ War, however, had left the British government with a huge debt and more colonial interest groups than it could handle. Imposing taxes on the colonies to pay off war debts and support a North American garrison alienated many American colonials. So did attempts to accommodate non-British groups inside the empire by granting religious freedom and civil rights to Canadian Catholics and limiting western expansion to preserve the peace with Native Americans.

It soon became apparent that the British had chosen the worst possible time to antagonize the 13 Colonies. With the French threat eliminated, the Americans no longer needed British protection. With France humiliated in war and alarmed by the rising power of the British Empire, American rebels found a partner looking for a chance to cut Britain down to size and willing to support a rebellion to do it.

Beginning in 1775, British colonials from New England to Georgia who had come to see themselves as Americans rather than Britons rose up in rebellion against the Crown. Financed by French subsidies, equipped with French weapons, and assisted by French troops and warships, the American colonies won their independence and formed the United States of America.

The rebellion had begun in New England and its roots lay deep in American history. But the American soldiers who fought at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the American ships and sailors that carried them to the battlefield had—all unknowingly—been taking part in a campaign that would produce not just a conquered French colony but the creation of a great new nation.

D. Peter MacLeod is the author of The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War, a history of that conflict from a Native American perspective. As the Pre-Confederation Historian at the Canadian War Museum, he acted as host curator for Clash of Empires: The War that made Canada and curated The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 1759-2009. He is currently working as English language editor for theCanadian History Hall at the Canadian War Museum’s partner institution, the Canadian Museum of History, and writing a book on the Battle of Sainte-Foy, the second Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

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For those interested in further reading on this subject, I would also highly recommend Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and The Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766.

World War Two History: The Rosenberg Diary

Secret Nazi Journal Reveals Inner Workings of Third Reich

“Between 1936 and 1944, the Nazi mastermind kept a secret journal detailing his life in the corridors of power.”

ALFRED ROSENBERG was a true believer.

Remembered as the “chief philosopher” of the Third Reich, the Estonian-born National Socialist was member of Adolf Hitler’s early inner circle and helped author some of the party’s most notorious policies. Rosenberg’s fingerprints are on everything from the movement’s notions of Aryan supremacy and the concept of Lebensraum or “Living Space” to its pathological hatred of Jews.

Following the 1933 Nazi take-over of Germany, the 36-year-old intellectual helped run Germany’s foreign ministry and eventually headed up the Reich’s department of ideological education, an agency that would be known as the “Rosenberg Office”. Later, he became chief administrator of Germany’s occupied territories in the Soviet Union. As a Reichsleiter or “national leader”, he was equal in rank with such regime luminaries as Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler.And as Hitler rose to power, so too did Rosenberg.

A prolific writer, Rosenberg was editor of the official Nazi party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter,and would go on to produce 13 books. His best-selling Myth of the Twentieth Centurysold a staggering 1 million copies and eventually became the most popular publication in the Third Reich after Hitler’s own Mein Kampf. In it, the self-described “pagan” railed against everything from Jews and Bolshevism to Christianity and Liberal Democracy.

The Devil’s Diary

Between 1936 and 1944, the Nazi mastermind kept a secret journal detailing his life in the corridors of power. In addition to chronicling his political machinations, the book’s 425 hand-written pages contain glimpses into Rosenberg’s twisted racial hatreds, his views on the the conduct of the war and his petty rivalries with party insiders. He even recounts his frequent one-on-one meetings with his infamous boss.Interestingly, Rosenberg penned another book, although this one was not for publication.

One of only three diaries known to have been kept by the top Nazi officials (the others were from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland), Rosenberg’s ramblings would go on to become a veritable treasure-trove of evidence for the Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Lost and Found

A new book by New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Wittman and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Kinney entitled The Devil’s Diary charts the long search to track down the lost journal, as well as the remarkable story of how it was finally recovered.While excerpts of Rosenberg’s log were read into the record during the famous proceedings, the original page mysteriously vanished after the author went to the gallows in 1946. Amazingly, they turned up in Lewiston, N.Y. in late 2013.

Today, the property of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.,Rosenberg’s writings are free to view online. In the meantime, the publishers of The Devil’s Diary have compiled excerpts from the memoirs that reveal the dark inner thoughts of one of the Third Reich’s most eccentric minds. Here is a selection:

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World War Two History: The Secret Speeches Ike Never Had To Give

Despite the seeming inevitability of an Allied triumph, the success of the cross-channel invasion in 1944 seemed like anything but a foregone conclusion.”

“SOLDIERS, SAILORS AND AIRMEN of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.”

General Dwight Eisenhower offered these now famous words in his address to British, American and Canadian troops in the hours leading up to the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion.

But as the Supreme Allied Commander spoke, he carried in his pocket a slip of paper bearing a much different statement — words he hoped that he’d never have to speak. That other speech, which Ike hastily jotted down earlier that day, was to be read if the Normandy invasion force was wiped out on the beaches and drop zones of Nazi occupied Europe.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” the 66-word, hand-written message began. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

In hindsight, the success of Operation Overlord was a virtually certainty. By mid-1944, Germany’s war machine was stretched perilously thin as the Nazis found themselves on the defensive everywhere. American and British bombers were pounding the Reich around the clock and Soviet tanks were pressing in from the East. The western powers, long since having driven Hitler from North Africa, were at that moment advancing up through Italy. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had already been meeting face-to-face to map out the shape of the post-war world.

Ike’s “In Case of Failure” letter was recovered by an aide a month after D-Day.

Yet despite the seeming inevitability of an Allied triumph, the success of the cross-channel invasion seemed like anything but a foregone conclusion at the time.

Would the weather hold? Had the months of deception about to the time and location of the invasion succeeded in confusing the Germans? Would the five infantry and three airborne divisions slated for the first wave of the attack be enough to force the Allies’ way into France? No one, least of all Eisenhower, could be sure.

Ultimately the landings on Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold beaches were successful and by D-Day plus one, the Allies had carved out solid footholds through which materiel and men would soon be pouring.

According to an article on the 60^th anniversary of the invasion, Eisenhower forgot the about the note, which he folded up and tucked into his wallet shortly after composing it.

More than a month later, the general discovered the 4 x 7 inch slip of paper it and showed it to an aide before tossing it into a waste basket. The adjutant, a navy captain by the name of Harry Butcher, asked if he could keep it and Ike obliged.

Eventually, the note, which became known as the “In the Event of Failure Letter”, was added to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas where it is still on display.

Oddly enough, the original draft was dated “July 5” rather than “June 5”, an error that suggests the general’s preoccupation at the moment he penned the message.

Ike to America: That’s All, Folks!

The famous D-Day failure letter wasn’t the only bad news that Eisenhower hoped not to have to deliver in his career as a public servant.

During his eight-year presidency (1953 to 1961), the former Allied commander, recorded a series of public service announcements that were to be broadcast from the massive fallout complex at Mount Weather, Virginia in the event of an all out Soviet nuclear attack on the United States.

The messages assured Americans that despite all the devastation their government was intact and still functioning, while also providing a series of handy post-apocalyptic survival tips for listeners.

The top secret tapes featured President Eisenhower, in addition to trusted television personalities of the day like Arthur Godfrey and even newsman Edward R. Murrow. The recordings have never been released to the public, but at least one organization is calling upon the government to declassify these fascinating Cold War relics.

(Originally published on MilitaryHistoryNow.com on Aug. 28, 2013.)

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