“As international tensions raised the prospect of war between Germany and Great Britain, the Kaiserliche Marine developed a strategy to target Australian and New Zealand waters from bases in their Pacific colonies.”
By Stephen Robinson
AUSTRALIA IS strategically located near major maritime trade routes. In recognition of its importance, the Royal Navy established the Australia Station in 1859 — a vast operational area encompassing the seas surrounding the continent.
The station extended westwards into the Indian Ocean and eastwards past New Zealand while its northern boundary included the Solomon Islands and its southern border approached Antarctic waters.
The Australia Station had great economic importance for the British Empire as numerous Pacific trade routes converged at Sydney and Melbourne while Indian Ocean trade converged at Fremantle, Western Australia. The British economy needed imports from Australia and New Zealand but in wartime the protection of merchant ships would be difficult given the station’s vast size.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the importance of the Australia Station was also well understood in Germany. The German Empire had established the strategically significant colony of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland in northeast New Guinea and had also acquired Pacific colonies in the Solomon, Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands, as well as Samoa and Nauru. Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy) warships operating from these locations constituted a threat to the British Empire’s Pacific interests and to Australia in particular.
As international tensions raised the prospect of war between Germany and Great Britain, the Kaiserliche Marine developed a strategy to target Australian and New Zealand waters from bases in their Pacific colonies. At this time German ships in their ‘Australian Station’ operated from Apia in Samoa and Herbertshohe in New Guinea and specific vessels included the gunboat cruisers Seeadler, Cormoran, Condor, Geier, Falke, Mowe and the survey vessel Planet.
The head of Germany’s Australian Station was usually the senior officer on the Cormoran or Condor, who was also in charge of the Kriegnachrichtenwesen (War Intelligence System), which gathered information on naval activity, trade and diplomacy in Australia and New Zealand. In the event of war, this network would supply warships with operational plans, coal and other provisions. German naval planners also developed plans to target Australian and New Zealand harbours and coastal towns in order to disrupt local shipping.
In addition, Germany envisaged auxiliary cruisers (armed merchant vessels pressed into naval service) operating in Australian waters as commerce raiders. In December 1901, Korvettenkapitan Hans Grapow, the senior officer of the Australian Station, stated:
In my opinion it is necessary that the two cruisers [Seeadler and Mowe] and the auxiliary cruiser operate together. The best place to meet and join forces would be the Likieb atoll of the Marshall Island (after calling on Jaluit). From here they can strike against the coal depots in Butaritari (Gilbert Islands), Gavatu (Solomon Islands) and Moresby (British New Guinea), to then threaten the Thursday Islands. The annihilation of the first two coal depots (Butaritari and Gavatu) can be carried out by the cruisers on the way to Jaluit. The threatening and overpowering of the Australian and New Zealand coastal places should be considered after the conquest of the Thursday Islands.
More thought was also given to targeting specific locations in Australian waters in Kapitanleutnant Willy Hermann’s proposal of 1910, which stated:
The stretch from the Torres Strait westwards to Cape Leeuwin is the least advantageous for cruiser warfare. The stretch between Cape Leeuwin and Adelaide is used by most transoceanic trading vessels and thus far more advantageous. The stretch from Adelaide to Brisbane via the Bass Strait is the Australian trading centre, which includes Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the principal overseas trading ports of the three most profitable provinces, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. This is the obvious target for our operations. The remaining stretch from Brisbane to the Torres Strait is also busy, but used almost entirely by coastal traffic and therefore not suitable for our purposes.
In that year, Kapitan zur See Kranzbuhler, the commander of the Condor, revised his operational plans while the warship visited Sydney. His new plan called for the Condor to arm auxiliary cruisers at Daja-Hafen in the Solomon Islands before attacking the east coast of Australia and New Zealand, while the Cormoran would arm other auxiliary cruisers at Mowe-Hafen in New Britain before raiding the waters off Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. A Kaiserliche Marine study of cruiser warfare in the Pacific concluded:
Australia. . . is equally an “enemy” in an assumed war situation. . . When one looks specifically at the exchange of goods between Australia and the English Motherland, one sees for the year 1900 that the traffic is 92 per cent in British ships. It is sufficiently proven that there is no lack of opportunity for our cruiser squadron in Australian waters.
At the start of World War I, these plans to begin operations in Australian waters immediately came to nothing; by 1914, the gunboat cruisers which had served in the Australian Station were elsewhere or had been decommissioned. The sole exception was the gunboat Geier (Vulture).
In August 1914, the Geier was in the Java Sea but her commander Korvettenkapitan Carl Grasshoff did not know that a state of war existed between Germany and Britain. The gunboat proceeded to Kavieng, New Ireland, and after Grasshoff learned that hostilities had commenced, captured the British steamer Southport on Sept. 4.
Grasshoff then set course for the Marshall Islands, but a shortage of coal forced him to make for Hawaii. The Geier arrived at Honolulu on Oct. 15 only to be interned by American authorities – the United States was neutral at the time. Although the gunboat did not raid Australian waters, she demonstrated the vulnerability of the Australia Station. This point was acknowledged by Arthur W. Jose in the Australian Official History:
Although she [the Geier] did little actual damage, the uncertainty as to her whereabouts proved extremely hampering to British and Australian movements in the western Pacific, and delayed both the departure of the Australian convoy to Egypt and that of the expedition which was organized by the Australian Government to take over Yap from the Japanese.
The Australia Station would again be threatened when the German auxiliary cruisers Wolf and Seeadler voyaged to the South Seas in 1917, causing considerable damage to Allied shipping. During World War I, the Kaiserliche Marine understood the importance of the Australia Station had to the British Empire and where auxiliary cruiser raids would have the greatest effect.
At the start of World War II, Hitler’s Kriegsmarine also recognized the importance of these southern oceans. The region was a priority target for Germany’s secret auxiliary cruiser program. The German raiders Orion, Pinguin, Komet and Kormoran carried the war to the Australia Station in 1940 and 1941 with devastating consequences for British, Australian, New Zealand, American, Dutch and Norwegian merchant sailors. In the single deadliest encounter, the Kormoran sank the cruiser HMAS Sydney, the pride of the Royal Australian Navy, off the coast of Western Australia on Nov. 19, 1941. The Sydney’s entire crew of 645 sailors tragically perished during this battle which shocked an entire nation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Robinson is the author of Panzer Commander Hermann Balck: Germany’s Master Tactician. He also wrote False Flags: Disguised German Raiders of World War II. He studied Asian history and politics at the University of Western Sydney, graduating with First Class Honours. He has worked at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs researching British atomic weapons tests and as a policy officer in the Department of Defence. Robinson is an officer in the Australian Army Reserve and has served as an instructor at the Royal Military College. He also graduated from Australian Command and Staff College.
Hello- some of the translations here appear to be from my archival work and numerous publications (most findable on the internet) based on my doctoral thesis on the Cruiser Squadron at UQ 1995- could you please enter relevant acknowledgements if so. many thanks. [my website currently corrupted]