{"id":81795,"date":"2022-05-17T08:06:32","date_gmt":"2022-05-17T13:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81795"},"modified":"2022-05-17T08:06:32","modified_gmt":"2022-05-17T13:06:32","slug":"to-the-last-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81795","title":{"rendered":"To The Last Man"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For the handful of Australian troops on watch at the Finschhafen District military headquarters in Morobe, New Guinea, January 5th, 1919 seemed to be as nondescript as the multitude of days, weeks, months and even years before it.\u00a0 The region, formerly part of the provinces of German New Guinea, hadn’t seen meaningful combat in more than four years since Australian troops invaded and occupied the colony, driving out the Germans in some of the earliest combat of the Great War.\u00a0 The brief campaign had been Australia’s first independent military action and had kept region out of the hands out of British or Japanese interests.<\/p>\n

The sight greeting the Australians seemed more appropriate for 1914 than 1919 – a column of fully armed New Guinean native German troops, with a resplendently dressed Major in his pressed and cleaned field dress uniform – marching down the streets of Morobe, directly towards the headquarters.\u00a0 Upon arriving at the front door, the German Major drew his sword and presented it to the Australian commanding officer.\u00a0 Major Hermann Detzner and the last of his men would surrender – bringing to an end the longest, strangest quasi-guerilla campaign of the First World War.<\/p>\n

Hermann Detzner – after the war.\u00a0 His celebrity would be his undoing<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Had Otto von Bismarck had his way, no German soldier would have set foot in New Guinea – or anywhere outside of Europe, for that matter.\u00a0 The man nicknamed “the Iron Chancellor” for his mastery of 19th Century realpolitik<\/em> had little time for the expensive vanity projects that were often the result of colonial expansion.\u00a0 Overseas colonies required vast expenditures of resources without any guarantee of profit and could only further entangle Berlin in the foreign policies of France or Britain, all plainly without the naval might to secure such holdings.\u00a0 In short – Bismarck sought to avoid precisely most of the military and foreign policy missteps<\/a> that Germany ended up making in the 1880\/90s.\u00a0 But the allure of powerful financial interests, coupled with domestic political considerations (colonial policies sold well at the ballot box), pushed the Chancellor to embrace the establishment of private colonial ventures.\u00a0 It would only be a matter of time before private German interests became part of the national interest and forced Germany to send engineers, laborers and finally soldiers overseas.<\/p>\n

New Guinea would follow this path.\u00a0 In the early 1880s, noticing that the northeast portion of the huge island chain had essentially been left alone by Dutch traders who had colonized the western portions of the region, the New Guinea Company was founded to establish trading posts in “Neuguinea<\/em>.”\u00a0 By the mid 1880s, the Germans had control over the islands and had placed their stamp on them, naming regions like Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the Bismarck Archipelago and the German Solomon Islands.\u00a0 More regional territories would follow in the wake of the Spanish-American War as Spain unloaded the last of her Pacific colonies, although Germany would in most cases do little to develop them before the Great War.<\/p>\n

All of this had proceeded right under Australia’s nose – and fervent objections.\u00a0 It was one thing if neighboring New Guinea had been further colonized by the Dutch or Portuguese, both of whom held colonies in the region and were otherwise allied or neutral powers.\u00a0 But Germany’s growing world power status and increasingly hostile position to British and Commonwealth interests made for an uncomfortable dynamic.\u00a0 It didn’t help that a native uprising in German New Guinea ultimately resulted in a fairly large regional German military presence, with 4 warships and nearly 800 German soldiers, to say nothing of the hundreds of indigenous troops and the Polizeitruppe<\/em> – a paramilitary force of mostly white German settlers.\u00a0 The German East Asia Squadron of warships would increase to 6 armored cruisers by the outbreak of the war, representing a sizable naval challenge.\u00a0 In contrast, the Australian Army was nearly 30,000 strong, but all but 1,500 were essentially poorly trained militia, with over 11,000 them unpaid volunteers.\u00a0 The Royal Australian Navy actually had fewer warships in the region by the start of 1914 (they had far more overall vessels, just few of the size of the German ships), meaning that at land and at sea, for as relatively small as the German military presence was, it was the largest in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n

\"\"

German colonizers with New Guinea natives – the German occupation of New Guinea was relatively more peaceful than some of their African colonies, which involved borderline genocide to control.\u00a0 Still, the Germans were not welcomed in New Guinea and had done little development of the region before the war<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

For a conflict that would ravage Europe and consume millions, we’ve written before that some of the first casualties of the Great War would occur in remote, distant battlefields<\/a>.\u00a0 From Togo to Tsingtao, much of the early British concern with the war effort centered around capturing Germany’s vast colonial empire.\u00a0 Some of this clearly represented the last gasps of the 19th Century “Scramble for Africa” mindset that had consumed the European powers, but there were strategic concerns at play as well.\u00a0 Togoland contained the Kamina Funkstation, one of the largest wireless transmitters in the world at the time, more than capable of helping sending messages directly from Berlin to anywhere in Africa or the South Pacific.\u00a0 For New Guinea, the islands held a number of wireless and coaling stations to support German raiders who could wreak havoc on Allied merchant shipping across the globe.\u00a0 Capturing New Guinea would blunt Germany’s Pacific naval effectiveness and block Japanese ambitions<\/a>, as Tokyo seized the German-held Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands all without much of a fight.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The British-led Australia Squadron immediately went on the offensive, looking to engage the German East Asia Squadron and destroy their bases of operation.\u00a0 The seven-warship Squadron was under-gunned compared to their would-be German opponent, with the exception of the battleship HMAS Australia<\/em>, but spent most of early August escorting small landing parties that destroyed radio towers.\u00a0 These minor forces would be insufficient to hold German New Guinea.\u00a0 Australia had to organize an invasion force and quickly, before the Germans could organize their efforts or the Japanese beat them to it.\u00a0 2,000 Australian soldiers, largely reservists and ex-sailors, were cobbled together and attacked New Pomerania (now New Britain) and Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (mainland New Guinea).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of Germany’s New Guinea defenses were scattered on New Pomerania as the main naval base of Rabul was located there.\u00a0 The main “battle” of the campaign, at Bita Paka, would only see 500 Australians against a mixed force of 300 Germans and local native police.\u00a0 The Germans put up limited resistance, which the Australians would later exaggerate into a dogged defense that “threatened” the invasion.\u00a0 With just over 50 casualties on all sides, the remaining German defenders surrendered.\u00a0 German forces on Kaiser-Wilhelmsland put up even less of a struggle, surrendering without a fight.\u00a0 By September 24th, 1914, the war in New Guinea was considered over, with Australia now formally occupying the colony.\u00a0 Outside of limited reports of Australian soldiers looting the homes of some German civilians – most of whom were allowed to stay in New Guinea without supervision – the entire endeavor had been a model campaign and a source of pride for the Australians as their first independently organized military expedition.\u00a0 Few Australian troops were left in the colony as the region no longer appeared to require much in terms of defending.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The breakdown of eastern New Guinea.\u00a0 The British controlled the southern portion of the region while the Dutch held the entire western half (not seen here).<\/p><\/div>\n

One German would attempt – and mostly comically fail – to prove them wrong.<\/p>\n

\n

Major Hermann Detzner was less a soldier than a surveyor.\u00a0 In the years before the war, Detzner had been in German Kamerun, exploring and mapping the colony.\u00a0 In 1913, he was asked to perform a similar task in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, as the exact border between German New Guinea and British-held Papua New Guinea had been drawn on a map without consideration to actual geography in 1909.\u00a0 Neither the Germans or the British had actually explored most of the area, and Detzner would in some cases be in the first European to make contact with some of the natives who were now, in theory, living under German rule.\u00a0 It would be a long, grueling mission with little direct support from German authorities.\u00a0 In essence, Detzner, along with his 25 native troops (others call them “police”), 45 carriers and a handful of other Germans, was being asked to trek into the jungle largely on their own.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

By November of 1914, Detzner and his team had been in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland for over 10 months, mapping out the border and marking a number of findings that placed more territory under German claims.\u00a0 It was only at a resting camp that month that one of Detzner’s carriers had run into an Australian patrol whose commanding officer informed them about the war and sent a message that Detzner’s party needed to march to Nepa on the Lakekamu River and surrender.\u00a0 Upon learning of the war, many of Detzner’s native carriers left, returning to their homes.\u00a0 Detzner was now fully cut off from any reinforcement and with only a handful of lightly armed men in the middle of a hostile jungle.\u00a0 By all logic, Detzner should have surrendered – the German Major had other ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Detzner [center] and his men pose for a photograph<\/p><\/div>\n

Detzner and his roughly 30 men at first attempted to cross the entirety of German New Guinea in the hopes of reaching the Dutch side of the massive island.\u00a0 With the Dutch a neutral power, Detzner reasoned he might be able secure eventual passage back to Germany.\u00a0 At a minimum, surrendering to Dutch authorities would prove more honorable than surrendering to the invading Australians.\u00a0 It wouldn’t matter as Detzner’s party didn’t make it far.\u00a0 By the Langimar Valley of the Morobe province, not all that removed from the coastline, the group would clash with locals, further hindering their advance and weakening their numbers.\u00a0 With escape no longer a realistic option, Detzner opted for resistance.\u00a0 Detzner was no Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck<\/a>\u00a0and New Guinea would definitely not be East Africa.\u00a0 Lacking any weapons beyond basic rifles and pistols, and very limited ammo, Detzner opted for a more “creative” sort of guerilla war – a musical campaign.\u00a0 You read that correctly.<\/p>\n

Throughout the brush of the New Guinea jungle, villagers could hear a brass band marching.\u00a0 A column of native musicians, carrying a hand-made German flag, played songs like “Watch on the Rhine” and other pro-German ballads to great confusion.\u00a0 For Detzner, he was being openly defiant to the Australian demands that he surrender – for the occupying Aussies, news of Detzner’s brass brashness never reached them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

If Detzner’s party wasn’t having any effect on the Australian occupation, the New Guinea jungle was definitely having an effect on the German Major’s men.\u00a0 Several Germans in the party became ill and turned themselves over to the enemy in order to gain medical treatment; being among the first signs to the Australians that Detzner was even still alive.\u00a0 Detzner would eventually camp out at a Lutheran mission at Sattelberg; his remaining 24 men being housed by the missionaries and locals.\u00a0 The Germans presence at the mission wasn’t overly welcomed; supplies at the mission were already tight and the missionaries had signed pledges of neutrality to the governing Australians in return for being allowed to stay and continue their attempts to convert the populace.\u00a0 If Detzner and his men were discovered, the missionaries risked losing everything.\u00a0 It didn’t help that Detzner viewed the missionaries as “cowardly” for their refusal to actively resist the Australians, even as he slept in their beds and ate their food for next nearly four years.<\/p>\n

Detzner’s book – his “exploits” would temporarily give him global acclaim and would lead to the truth of his experiences being revealed<\/p><\/div>\n

Detzner would attempt to make one more significant escape during his years in New Guinea.\u00a0 In 1917, Detzner took a small contingent of his men and trekked to Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen on the coast, bringing two small canoes in a far-fetched plan to traverse the coastline of New Guinea to reach the Dutch side of the island.\u00a0 Perhaps fortunately for Detzner and his men, an Australian ship sat in the harbor, blocking the path the Germans had planned to use.\u00a0 It was here in the coastal city that Detzner learned the Australians now had orders to shoot the Major on sight.\u00a0 Seeing no viable option to escape unharmed, Detzner retreated back to Sattelberg, spending his days recording the local flora and fauna.\u00a0 The Australians had no idea of Detzner’s whereabouts and showed little interest in capturing him.<\/p>\n

\n

In late November of 1918, one of the Sattelberg staff members had returned from a supply run with news that the war in Europe had at last ended.\u00a0 Concerned that orders for him to be shot were still valid, Detzner negotiated his surrender with the Morobe commander.\u00a0 Detzner, accompanied by about 20 native soldiers and a couple of other Germans, became the last soldiers of the First World War to surrender on January 5th, 1919.\u00a0 And in the process, Detzner became a national hero in Germany.<\/p>\n

The German public immediately likened him to Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck’s determined resistance past the end of the war and Detzner was more than happy to go along with such a narrative.\u00a0 At first, Detzner spoke little about his experiences, happy to receive promotions, medals and accolades.\u00a0 He wrote some articles about what he had encountered in New Guinea and was well received in the scientific community.\u00a0 But science journals don’t sell and Detzner’s adventures grew into novel form with “Four Years Among Cannibals : New Guinea.”\u00a0 Side by side with his popularity grew Detzner’s version of his years in the jungle.\u00a0 Now, Detzner had conducted a guerrilla campaign that was supported by the New Guinea natives who had been reduced to a state of “slavery” by the Australians and British.\u00a0 The locals were eager for the Germans to return and were even taking up collections to build statues to honor the former German occupation, so Detzner stated.\u00a0 Detzner turned himself into a sort of German Indiana Jones, discovering amazing creatures and peoples while fighting and evading the brutal occupying Australians for years.<\/p>\n

Most of Detzner’s time was spent like this – carefully recording scientific findings.\u00a0 There’s no evidence he and his men actually fought back against the Australians<\/p><\/div>\n

It was – mostly – lies.\u00a0 And as Detzner’s notoriety grew, his book soon was published overseas, leading to a quick exposure of the reality of his years looking at plants while insulting his religious hosts.\u00a0 The Australians had been the first to complain about Detzner’s narrative, especially the claims of their treatment of natives, but the German public largely ignored the counter-charges.\u00a0 By the end of the 1920s however, two former missionaries came forward to reveal the complete truth and Detzner was now forced to concede that his book was mostly fiction.\u00a0 He offered no actual apology, stating merely that there were “misrepresentations,” and leaving the impression that the novel was always intended as a romanticized view of his time in the jungle.\u00a0 His post-Great War reputation would only decline further as Detzner joined the Abwehr (German military intelligence) under the Nazis.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, Detzner’s novel would resurface in the early 2000s.\u00a0 While the adventurous elements of the book were clearly fictionalized, many of Detzner’s observations on heretofore undiscovered indigenous plants and animals would be found to be accurate, albeit many decades later.\u00a0 Given his lack of documentation beyond his own notes, it had been assumed that anything that couldn’t be immediately proven by Detzner was a lie.\u00a0 In the end, Detzner had indeed shown he was a better surveyor than soldier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the handful of Australian troops on watch at the Finschhafen District military headquarters in Morobe, New Guinea, January 5th, 1919 seemed to be as nondescript as the multitude of days, weeks, months and even years before it.\u00a0 The region, formerly part of the provinces of German New Guinea, hadn’t seen meaningful combat in more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,281],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-ringer","category-ww1-fact-and-myth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81795"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82103,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81795\/revisions\/82103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}