German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence

Susanne Kuss, Andrew Smith, Andrew Smith

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780674977587
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Germany fought three major colonial wars from 1900 to 1908: the Boxer War in China, the Herero and Nama War in Southwest Africa, and the Maji Maji War in East Africa. Recently, historians have emphasized the role of German military culture in shaping the horrific violence of these conflicts, tracing a line from German atrocities in the colonial sphere to those committed by the Nazis during World War II. Susanne Kuss dismantles such claims in a close examination of Germany's early twentieth-century colonial experience. Despite acts of unquestionable brutality committed by the Kaiser's soldiers, she finds no direct path from Windhoek, site of the infamous massacre of the Herero people, to Auschwitz.In German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence Kuss rejects the notion that a distinctive military culture or ethos determined how German forces acted overseas. Unlike rival powers France and Great Britain, Germany did not possess a professional colonial army. The forces it deployed in Africa and China were a motley mix of volunteers, sailors, mercenaries, and native recruits—all accorded different training and motivated by different factors. Germany's colonial troops embodied no esprit de corps that the Nazis could subsequently adopt.Belying its reputation for Teutonic efficiency, the German military's conduct of operations in Africa and China was improvisational and often haphazard. Local conditions—geography, climate, the size and capabilities of opposing native populations—determined the nature and extent of the violence German soldiers employed. A deliberate policy of genocide did not guide their actions.

Part I

THREE WARS

CHAPTER 1

The Boxer War

THE CHARACTER of the military intervention launched to crush the Boxer rebellion in China (1900–1901) was as new as it was unusual. The “old” colonial powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia made common cause with their ambitious arriviste competitors Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the United States, and Japan to form the first multinational intervention force in military history. Despite pursuing contrasting war aims, the powers were united by the common resolve not to invade the Chinese Empire. Instead, military planning focused on a short and geographically limited intervention designed to force China into accepting the “rules of the game” established by the so-called Western, civilized world. Those powers engaged in East Asia viewed the war as a necessary measure to protect their economic interests. The Boxer War, then, was a coalition war fought with German participation.

Origins and Phases

In 1897, Germany established her protectorate at Qingdao, in the northern province of Shandong—and so began her imperialist policy of Weltpolitik. Two years later, the same province was to see the birth of the Boxer movement. The name “Boxer” was derived from a grouping inspired by the traditions of a number of pugilist movements; the groups referred to themselves as yihequan (The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists). They subsequently changed their name to yihetuan (The Righteous and Harmonious Militias), and this appellation has been adopted by modern Chinese historiography and a number of Western scholars. The movement was characterized by their practice of callisthenic rituals—believed to bring invulnerability—and flat hierarchies.¹

Reflecting the almost exclusively agrarian nature of China, the Boxer movement principally recruited its followers from the young peasantry. The northern provinces with their monsoon climate specialized in the cultivation of cereals; famine periods during droughts led to increasing support for the Boxer movement, support for which grew in reaction to a capricious administration and a crippling tax burden. In addition to its peasant foundation, the Boxer movement also drew support and membership from a number of local civil servants, the so-called gentry.

The grievances of the Boxer movement focused primarily on the presence and economic significance of foreign nationals. The German colonization of Qingdao and the subsequent program of railway building served only to increase such resentments.² The ultimate source of foreign influence was identified, however, in the cultural sphere, with the Boxers expending considerable vituperation on the system of Jesuit missions which had been established as early as the seventeenth century.³ Although an earlier historiographical consensus focused on tensions between Christians and non-Christians in explaining the Boxer rebellion, modern scholarship emphasizes the importance of social change and the dissolution of traditional social bonds, a process that the missionary presence only intensified. Any explanation for the Boxer uprising should not be reduced to a “clash of civilizations.”⁴

The term “Boxer uprising” presents a number of difficulties. With its connotations of a seditious political movement aimed at overthrowing an existing system of rule, the term “uprising” is perhaps ill-suited to what was essentially a movement hostile to foreign religious and political influences and which alternated between opposition and loyalty to the ruling Qing dynasty. With the formal authority of the colonial powers restricted to their small coastal bases, the war of liberation that the Boxer movement unleashed can be viewed as an uprising only if viewed from the imperialist perspective. Although the Boxers directed their energies against the symbols of imperial rule such as foreign-built railroads, their movement remained an essentially Chinese matter.⁵

In early 1900, the Boxer movement spread from Shandong to the neighboring province of Zhili, in the center of which lay the Chinese capital. Mobilizing considerable support, the Boxers made for Peking and Tianjin, leaving a path of destruction—focusing on churches, houses, and railroads—in their wake. Those Chinese Christians that they found were robbed and murdered on the way. European and American nationals living in China were unsettled, especially in view of the official Chinese disinclination to take any measures against the unrest. Western observers blamed the Chinese government of the dowager Empress Cixi for its indecisive management of the crisis and amateurish attempts to quell the uprising.

Viewed from the Chinese perspective, however, such inaction was entirely rational, as Western displeasure represented far less a threat than domestic discontent. Tied up with questions of legitimation and the need to balance competing ethnic, regional, factional, and professional interests at court, in the bureaucracy and the Chinese military establishment, the threat to royal power from internal unrest was far greater than international pressure. The limited and primarily defensive official response to the uprising (culminating in the eventual flight of the Chinese government) was designed more to appease international pressure than as a serious effort to put down the insurrection. This situation was compounded by western misunderstanding of Chinese cultural conventions. The delay, evasion, obfuscation, prevarication, deception, and flight, characteristic of a traditional Chinese response to conflict situations, were interpreted merely as an unwillingness to confront the Boxer movement. Moreover, Chinese inaction was partially the result of divisions at court regarding both the ultimate goal of policy and the most expedient means of its realization. Many senior policy makers even advocated cooperation with the Boxers in order to take advantage of the situation and expel the foreign powers and their nationals from the country.⁶

Not only did the majority of the rural population provide at least passive support for the Boxers, the movement even split the local authorities, raising the specter of civil war in a number of provinces. The Chinese units sent to engage the Boxers were not of the first order and often either accepted their defeat or joined the ranks of the Boxer movement. Made up of a number of separately organized Manchurian and Chinese formations, the army serving the Manchurian Qing dynasty was supplemented after 1890 by what was known as the “New Army,” equipped with modern weaponry and having enjoyed Western training. In 1900, 68,000 of its number were stationed in the insurgent province of Zhili. The international coalition force eventually dispatched to the region was thus (at least initially) faced by a larger and entirely modern opponent.⁷

The conflict came to a head in April and May 1900 as the Boxer force attacked a group of foreign railway engineers in Baoding, destroying the railway embankment and telegraph lines in the process. The dangerous proximity of the insurgents to the Chinese capital and the alarming news of their violent actions mobilized the Western Powers into what emerged as the first phase of confrontation with the Chinese government. Characterized by threats and sabre rattling, this phase, beginning in April 1900, saw an international naval force of significant size converge in international waters off the coast by the Dagu forts, the fortified maritime entry point to inland China. This move was followed in May by the reinforcement of the legation troops in Peking by a number of contingents, drawn from various nations. The German mission was reinforced with an additional fifty members of the III Sea Battalion (Marine Infantry) stationed at Qingdao.⁸

The second phase of the intervention began on 17 June 1900 with the shelling of the Dagu forts. Despite these bellicose actions, there was no official declaration of war from the Western Powers, as such a step would have provoked the whole of China into entering a conflict that the Great Powers hoped could be restricted to its northern provinces. Indeed, the Times believed in the possibility of conducting “military operations” against mixed groups of Boxers and Chinese soldiers without provoking (or indeed requiring) a declaration of war and the associated financial consequences involving increased pay and pensions claims. Contemporary opinion was clear in its assessment that a state of war, as defined by international law, did not exist between China and the Great Powers.⁹ Despite such legal gymnastics, the soldierly mindset viewed the action as a war. Even Alfred Graf von Waldersee (subsequently commander in chief of the allied intervention force) wrote in his diary of the “diplomatic fiction” that the campaign did not amount to a war with China.¹⁰

Not all of the allied forces engaged in the intervention participated in the assault on the Dagu forts. Arguing that until the morning of 17 June 1900, the Chinese government had not committed any acts of aggression toward the multinational force assembled off its coast, Rear Admiral Louis Kempff, commander of the American flagship Newark, held his forces back from the assault. Fearing that an allied attack would endanger the lives of American citizens in inland China, he viewed what he saw as precipitate and aggressive action as counterproductive.¹¹ Whereas naval personnel from the German ship Iltis participated in the storming of the Dagu forts, the American contingent restricted itself to rescuing women and children from merchant ships in the immediate vicinity of the battle zone.¹²

In northern China, the storming of the Dagu forts was followed by an escalation of the situation on three fronts. In Tianjin (population 700,000), fierce fighting in the international settlement between 17 and 23 June was only brought to a final end in mid-July following its relief by a mixed force of German, Russian, and British troops. With 1,800 Russian and 400 British troops involved in the relief of Peking, the German contribution of 190 Marine Infantrymen was comparatively modest.¹³ The preponderance of Russian and Japanese forces in the early phase of the war can be explained by their geographical proximity to China and the corresponding speed with which they were able to dispatch a large body of troops. Great Britain was able to establish a presence of similar significance in an equally short time by dispatching troops from their garrisons (predominantly in India), while the American force was deployed in June 1900 from the Philippines.¹⁴

The international force dispatched to Tianjin was highly heterogeneous, in terms of not only its military composition but also the ethnic backgrounds of its constituent troops. Consisting mainly of units of the Indian army, the British contingent also included a number of troops from the Chinese-manned Weihaiwei Regiment. They were joined later by the Zouaves and chasseurs d’Afrique of the French army. It was not just the presence of Japanese forces that indicates the impossibility of delimiting this war along racial lines of “white” versus “yellow” or “colored” and thus precludes any interpretation of the Boxer War as a clash of civilizations.¹⁵

The conquest of Tianjin was followed by extensive looting. With each of the Western Powers blaming its allies for the unrest, many Chinese also took the opportunity to abscond with large quantities of silk and works of art. The widespread thieving focused on not only private property but also Chinese state and imperial possessions. In particular, the American troops purloined a number of silver bars from the safe of the Tianjin state treasury. The silver was deposited in the (British-owned) Hong Kong Bank, and it is unclear whether this represents a further act of theft or an attempt to protect it from loss.¹⁶

The second area of conflict centered on Peking. The murder of the German ambassador Clemens Freiherr von Ketteler on 19 June 1900 (three days after the storming of the Dagu forts) was committed not by a Boxer, but by a Chinese imperial soldier. The exact reasons for the murder of the German ambassador remain unclear. His unpopularity probably rested on his reputation as a supporter of the division of China and his provocative behavior toward the Boxers.¹⁷ Whoever held ultimate responsibility for ordering the murder, the act was followed two days later by an official Chinese declaration of war on the imperial powers. Having altered its stance to one of support for the Boxers, the government launched the now-legendary siege of the diplomatic quarter in the Chinese capital lasting until 14 August 1900. After destroying the telegraph lines to Tianjin, Chinese forces managed to isolate and encircle the area around the foreign embassies for a full fifty-five days. Coming under daily fire from both Boxers and imperial soldiers, the legation quarter provided refuge not only to allied diplomats and their families, but to thousands of Chinese Christians seeking the protection of ramshackle barricades made of household furniture, brocade draperies, and sandbags. Sustaining casualties—of 450 soldiers from eight nations, sixty-five, including twelve Germans, were killed and 156, including fifteen Germans, were wounded—and an alarming supply situation, the garrison waited for relief.

The area of operations of the expedition force sent to relieve the besieged diplomats represents the third area of conflict in the Boxer War. A force of 2,117 allied soldiers under the command of the British admiral Edward Seymour left Tianjin for Peking on 10 June 1900. Although Seymour’s force registered victory in a number of minor engagements, its progress was slowed by stiff resistance from a numerically superior opponent and the destruction of the railway line between Peking and Tianjin. Succeeding only in reaching Langfang, Seymour was forced to abandon the advance on 18–19 June. Indeed, threatened with the breakup of his force, Seymour opted to retreat to Tianjin. The official ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Three Wars
• Part II: The Colonial Theater of War
• Part III: Evaluation and Memory
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index