True Stories of the Great War, Volume 2 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
History
True Stories of the Great War, Volume 2 (of 6): Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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