nd the German flag hauled
down, to be replaced by the Union Jack. The Germans taken prisoners were
rewarded for the kind treatment they had accorded British residents
before the appearance of this British force, and were sent to New
Zealand.

The next German possession to be taken was that in the Bismarck
Archipelago. It was known that there was a powerful wireless station at
Herbertshoehen, the island known as New Pomerania. A small landing party
was put ashore on the island in the early morning of September 11, 1914,
and made its way, without being discovered, to the town. The surprised
inhabitants were too frightened to do anything until this party left to
go further on to the wireless station. By that time it met with some
resistance, but overcame it. A few days later another landing party had
captured the members of the staff of the governor of New Pomerania,
together with the governor himself, at Bougainville, Solomon Islands,
whence they had fled. The wireless stations on the island of Yap, in the
Carolines, and on Pleasant Island were destroyed during the following
month.

Perhaps the strangest operations of naval character ever performed were
the inland "sea" fights in Africa. The great Nyassa Lake in Africa was
the scene of this fighting. With its entire western shore in British
possession and with a goodly part of its waters within the territory of
German East Africa, it was not unnatural that fighting should take place
there. Both countries maintained small armed vessels on the lake. The
British ship _Gwendolen_, a 350-ton craft, had been built on the Clyde
and had been sent to Nyassa Lake in sections and there assembled and
launched in 1898. During August she fought with a German ship and
captured it. The fighting on the lake could not, however, determine the
success of the military operations taking place in those regions.

The preponderance of British naval strength was beginning to tell
severely upon German trade by the end of 1914, and her boast that
through her navy she would starve out Germany aroused the German
Government greatly. In answer to these British threats, Grand Admiral
von Tirpitz, German Secretary of Marine, in an interview given to an
American newspaper correspondent, hinted that Germany's retaliation
would be a war on British merchant ships by German submarines.

The interview at the time aroused but mild comment; the idea was a new
one, and the question immediately arose as to whet