Scenes of havoc met the eyes of the Japanese staff officers when they
entered the fallen forts of Tsingtau. With dynamite and nitro-glycerine
the German defenders had destroyed the guns and demolished all that
might be taken by the captors as trophies of war. Along the casemate
walls of the forts still lay the German and Japanese soldiers who had
been killed in the final assault, while the concrete forts themselves
were just a mass of shale and twisted steel rods where dynamite or
falling shells had done their work.
Into the forts the Japanese filed and, collecting all the German
soldiers together in lots, marched them to the barbed-wire
entanglements in the rear of the city and after a short rest took them
to the foot of Prince Heinrich Berg, where a prison camp had been
improvised. The German officers, however, through the courtesy of the
Japanese commander, were allowed to remain in Tsingtau.
The courtesy of the Japanese, for which the Orient is already
famous, received an excellent demonstration in the surrender of
Tsingtau. General Kamio, commander-in-chief, realizing that to march
his victorious troops through the city of Tsingtau would throw the
residents into much confusion and disorder, made the direct surrender
appear like a capitulation on terms. All German officers, including
Governor-General Meyer-Waldeck, were allowed to go about Tsingtau at
their freedom after the surrender, and General Kamio at once posted
orders that only the Japanese staff officers would be allowed to enter
the city for several days. Japanese pickets were placed along the roads
outside of the city to see that this regulation was enforced.
For several days, then, while the Japanese troops were quartered in
Moltke and Bismarck Barracks in the rear of Tsingtau, and the British
force was also in German barracks, the residents of Tsingtau were given
free opportunity to recover from their besieged life without being
ruffled by the sight of marching and quartered troops.
During that period between the surrender of the Tsingtau forts and
November 16, when the British and Japanese expeditionary forces made
their triumphal entry into the city, the Japanese officers busied
themselves in the final preparations for the transfer of the German
possessions into the hands of Dai Nippon. The rest of the troops spent
the days in examining the Tsingtau forts and gradually the "whyfore" of
their surrender was answered.
On Iltis Fort were mounted six twelve-centimeter guns, two of which had
been captured from the French in the siege of Paris in 1871. On the
left of this battery and toward the rear of the fort had been placed
four twenty-eight-centimeter mortars, while two 10.5-centimeter guns
cast in 1889, which had seen service in the siege of Taku in 1900, made
up the remainder of the fort's equipment.
Bismarck Fort, to the left of Iltis, seemed to be the most
strongly fortified of any of the Tsingtau defenses. Besides four
twenty-eight-centimeter howitzers and two twenty-one-centimeter guns,
it contained the Tsingtau battery of four fifteen-centimeter guns.
At Moltke Fort, on the bay side of the city, the German garrison had
mounted two fifteen-centimeter guns stripped from the Austrian cruiser
_Kaiserin Elisabeth_, a field battery of ten pieces, three field
howitzers, and several small guns taken from the second-class German
gunboats and cruisers that had been allowed to be bottled up in the Bay
of Kiaochow.
The two German forts which commanded the sea approaches were
Huit-chien-huk and Tscha-nui-va. The first was equipped with two
twenty-four-centimeter guns and three fifteen-centimeter guns, while
the latter's equipment consisted of two twenty-one-centimeter guns
which had been taken from the Chinese Taku forts in 1900.
The German garrison at Tsingtau at the opening of the war, knowing that
their surrender was inevitable, had made all plans to keep as far as
possible all trophies of war from falling into the enemy's hands after
surrender. The result was that early on the morning of the 7th, after
the Japanese infantry had gained the redoubt walls, all preparations
were made by the garrison for destroying the guns.
The breech-block of each was wound with nitro-glycerine and dynamite
was placed in the cannons up to the muzzle edge. The white flag
was the signal. A few minutes later, when the Japanese forces
swarmed the forts, they found the place a mass of wreckage. Big
twenty-four-centimeter guns were split in two as evenly and neatly as
if they had been cut by a jack-knife, while one hundred or more yards
distant could be found all that remained of the breech-block. The four
twenty-eight-centimeter mortars on Iltis had been dynamited and just a
mass of twisted steel and splintered plates remained.
On Bismarck and Moltke Forts, many of the guns had been backed in
against the sandbag walls and dynamited on their carriages. The
discharge had left the place scattered with the broken pieces of the
carriages and split sandbags. The guns in the majority of cases had
fallen down to the foot of the casemate walls. The explosions of the
dynamite also appeared to have wrecked adjacent walls, for the concrete
work about the gun-stands seemed to be so much shale. Exposed to sight
were the steel pipes and wire used in the construction of the forts,
all twisted and broken.
This desire to keep trophies of war from the hands of the enemy was not
confined alone to guns. From the various post-offices German officials
gathered the colony's issue of postage stamps and all were burned. Men
had evidently been detailed to handle the storehouses, for all about
them I found large cans of corned beef, sausages, milk, saurkraut and
German delicacies opened and lying in heaps, their contents untouched.
All valuable papers in the vaults of Government buildings that
contained military secrets or maps of fortifications throughout the
Far East, were also made way with; in fact the German garrison left
little that the Japanese could boast about, except the city of Tsingtau
itself.
As officially given out by the War Office, the Japanese forces
had a total of 142 guns on the firing line. They consisted of six
28-centimeter howitzers, 72 other siege guns of 15-and 24-centimeters,
18 mountain guns, 36 field pieces, and eight 4.7 and 6-inch guns of the
marine detachment.
According to figures given me by General Kamio, the total active
fighting force of the Japanese during the siege was 20,000 men, while
the British expedition force consisted of 925 regulars, with a regiment
of 300 Sikhs.
Opposing them was the German force of 4,500 men, more than 700 of whom
were sick or wounded or captured before the actual siege started.
Among the criticisms directed against the defenders of Tsingtau, which
I heard after the surrender, especially in the British camp, was that
the Germans fired away great quantities of ammunition at the beginning
of the bombardment of the fortifications so that, with their supply
exhausted, an excuse for the surrender could be made. In proof of this
they referred to the large number of shells which fell daily about
the Japanese forces while they were getting the big siege guns into
position. The estimate of "more than two thousand German shells in
twelve hours' firing with no casualties to the Japanese or British
forces," was further evidence given.