Tahiti's Great War

Tahiti's World War I Memorial to the Fallen,  Papeete

By James Patton

You can’t get much farther away from the Western Front than Tahiti, but after all, it WAS a world war. Then, as still today, Tahiti and the surrounding islands were French territory.

Enter the German Navy’s East Asia Squadron, under the command of Vizeadmiral Maximilian von Spee (1861–1914). Home-ported at Tsingtao in China, when the war began most of the unit was steaming towards German New Guinea, and von Spee was ordered to divert to the island of Ponape in the Carolines to await orders. 

His squadron consisted of the heavy cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisnau, the light cruisers Emden, Nürnberg, Leipzig and Dresden, some auxiliaries and several colliers. However, at this time Emden was still at Tsingtao, Nürnberg and Leipzig were on detachment visiting the U.S. west coast, and Dresden was showing the flag in the Caribbean. 

Click to Enlarge

Route of von Spee's Fateful Voyage

On 6 August, von Spee was ordered to the island of Pagan in the Marianas, where the Germans had a high-power wireless station. While there the squadron was reinforced by the arrivals of Emden, Nürnberg, and Leipzig, plus another auxiliary, the Prinz Eitel Friederich. On 14 August, the Emden was detached to serve as a commerce raider in the Indian Ocean. 

On 8 September the Nürnberg, being the fastest ship in the group at the time, was dispatched to Honolulu to get news and further orders. Upon reuniting with Nürnberg at Fanning Island, von Spee learned of the capture and occupation of Samoa by New Zealand forces and decided to proceed there to try to engage British or Australian ships in the area. Finding none, he decided against attacking the Allied troops ashore, since doing so would risk killing civilians and damaging German property. 

Damage to Central Papeete

Instead, von Spee set off for Tahiti, where the French had a depot containing 5,500 tons of coal, a tiny garrison and no wireless station. Dispatching his colliers to safety at Nuku Hiva, guarded by Nürnberg, his force arrived at Papeete, Tahiti on 22 September. In a brief encounter they sank the French gunboat Zélée, damaged or destroyed some merchant ships (including one that was German) and were futilely engaged by a few French shore batteries. The German ships then fired over 100 shells into the commercial center of the town, doing an estimated two million francs worth of damage, essentially destroying the economy of Tahiti. Due to evacuation the civilian casualties were light, with only two reported dead, and there were no military casualties on either side. 

However, the locals had started a fire in the coal depot, thus denying this resource to the Germans as they had no time to put out the blaze, so they had to steam away. Their story doesn’t end here, and it doesn’t end well. 

On 3 November, the fleet put into Valparaiso, Chile, for the allowed 24-hour neutral post call, where the Dresden joined them, having rounded the Cape. While there, von Spee told his hosts: 

You must not forget that I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbor. I must fight my way through the seas of the world doing as much mischief as can, until my ammunition is exhausted, or a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me. But it will cost the wretches dearly before they take me down.

They had sunk two older British cruisers off of Coronel, Chile, on 1 November, but by 8 December they were running out of both coal and luck. In a last-ditch effort to refuel they aimed for the Falkland Islands. Unfortunately, there was in front of them a British task force which significantly outnumbered and outgunned them and the German squadron was destroyed; only Dresden and the auxiliary Seydlitz survived. Dresden made it back to Chilean waters, where she was scuttled in March 1915, and Seydlitz was interned in Argentina. Von Spee and his sons Heinrich and Otto were among the 1,871 seamen lost.

However, even before the Germans attacked Papeete, WWI had begun in Tahiti when, on 29 August 1914, 165 volunteers had been sent to New Caledonia to join a new unit named Le Battalion des Tirailleurs du Pacifique (BTP). The French governor had the authority to conscript if there were insufficient volunteers, and eventually 1,057 men from Tahiti and the surrounding islands were called to the colors out of a total population of about 32,000. 

On 4 June 1916, the BTP was sent to Europe, where the men were mostly employed as stevedores in Marseilles and Salonika, although a small number did see combat against the Bulgarians on the latter front.

Troops of the BMP Ready to Head to Europe

With the addition of an artillery battery, the unit was retitled as Le Battalion Mixte du Pacifique  (BMP) and transferred to the Colonial Corps on the Western Front that was commanded by Gen. Charles Mangin (1866–1925), known as “The Butcher”. The BMP was heavily engaged in the Second Battle of the Marne (15 July–6 August 1918), and they distinguished themselves in the Oise-Aisne Offensive (18 August–16 September 1918), fighting alongside the American 28th, 32nd, and 77th Divisions to break the Vesle River line. On 10 December, General Mangin cited the BMP for the capture of Vesle, Caumont and Petit Caumont. 

There is an impressive WWI memorial standing in the center of the old section of Papeete, in a style  evocative of La Gloire de France, which commemorates the service of the BMP and the 203 men who died. 

Close View of the Memorial

Tahiti has another WWI connection. After the war the former aviators Charles Nordhoff (1887–1947) of the Lafayette Flying Corps and James Norman Hall (1997–1951) of the Lafayette Escadrille took up residence on Tahiti, each marrying a Tahitian. They wrote 12 books together between 1920 and 1945. Two of these are about their experiences in the air war over France, The Lafayette Flying Corps (1920) and Falcons of France (1929). Nordhoff left Tahiti in 1941, Hall died there, and his daughter Nancy Hall Rutgers still lives on his former property.