Stephenson - The Siege of Tsingtau

The Siege of Tsingtau

For Scotty

My old pal: Peter William Scott

11 May 194827 November 2016

Death drives an Airflow Chrysler on the streets of man

A hit and run driver cruising since the world began

The German-Japanese War 1914

Charles Stephenson

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Charles Stephenson 2017

ISBN 978 1 52670 292 0

eISBN 978 1 52670 294 4

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52670 293 7

The right of Charles Stephenson to be identified as the Author of this

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword

Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family

History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select,

Transport, True Crime, Fiction, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper,

Praetorian Press, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail:

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

1. East Asia, Australasia and the Pacific

2. Significant islands, island groups and atolls comprising the German Pacific Island Territory, 18851914

3. The Kiautschou Protectorate, 18971914

4. German Samoa, 18991914

5. The Shantung Peninsula: the Kiautschou Protectorate, the Neutral Zone and Weihaiwei

6. The Japanese Advance, SeptemberNovember 1914

7. Tsingtau: the defences and the siege, 1914

P erhaps uniquely in terms of European Great Power royalty, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Hapsburgs, had a wife that protocol dictated he couldnt normally be seen with. Despite Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenberg, having been described as one of the cleverest and most accomplished women in Austria-Hungary, she was considered too socially inferior to sit at the top-table of the Imperial Court and most certainly wasnt to be generally observed on the arm of the heir presumptive. It was then ironic that on one of the few occasions that the couple were actually together in public they became immortalised for what happened to them. The place was Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, the territory recently (1908) annexed by Austria-Hungary, and the date was 28 June 1914. News of the event flashed around the world. As is well known, the assassinations with, according to Austria-Hungary, the complicity of the Serbian government led to war; Austria-Hungary made a declaration of such with Serbia on 28 July 1914.

But what might have been the Third Balkan War quickly escalated into a general European conflict. The reasons why this happened are still debated, but there is little controversy in arguing that it became a worldwide war, indeed the First World War retrospectively, when Germany, France and the United Kingdom became embroiled. This was so because those polities had extra-European empires. So, for example, when the UK declared war with Germany on 4 August 1914, and with Austria-Hungary some eight days later, so did the rest of the British Empire. This included the self-governing dominions; as the then Canadian Prime Minister (Sir Wilfred Laurier) had stated the matter in 1910: When Britain is at war, Canada is at war; there is no distinction. There was little or no distinction with respect to the other dominions either; this was so even in South Africa where the war between the British Empire and the Boers had only ended twelve years earlier and many Boers still preserved anti-British sentiments.