Overview
This postcard titled ’German War Flag captured at Samoa by New Zealand Expeditionary Force’ is one of a small group of items at Te Papa that reference the New Zealanders’ landing and occupation. According to newspaper reports at the time, the flag was captured by members of the Fiji defence force who joined New Zealand troops at Apia Samoa on August 29, 1914.
The story of capture
The Evening Post newspaper reported that the flag was captured by Private Herbert F. Bailey (Bayley) who was a member of the Legion of Frontiersmen in Fiji. He enlisted in the New Zealand Samoan Expeditionary Force when they passed through Fiji en-route to Samoa. When the troops landed, Bailey spotted the German flag and rushed forward and lowered it. New Zealand troopers who witnessed the event remarked that there was quite a dramatic scene as the flag was hauled down, with German Government officials standing in the vicinity. As ‘they saw it lowered they one and all reverently saluted’. Bailey was given permission to keep the flag by military authorities. However, later on, he and other members of the Fiji contingent decided to present the flag to the New Zealand Government. In front of the headquarters at camp, the flag was handed over to the commanding officer of the troops from the Auckland district of New Zealand. The Fiji contingent expressed a hope ‘that the Government would see fit to retain the flag in Auckland’.
Over a decade later, on August 2, 1930, the same ‘story of capture’, resurfaces again in the Evening Post. The article quotes Herbert F. Bailey writing to the newspaper:
It was only by accident that I saw a picture of the official German flag hauled down at Samoa on 29th August, 1914, by myself, cut from one of your papers, a week or so ago, and as I understand there is a controversy between the Parliamentary Library of Wellington and the Auckland Public Library as to the ownership.
"The story of the flag"
Bailey goes on to tell the ‘the story of the flag’, as described above, ‘to clear the matter up’, reiterating that he ‘presented the flag…to the New Zealand Government, and…especially asked…to have the flag kept in Auckland and hung either in the Auckland Museum or the cathedral’. He concludes: ‘I have stated all the facts. The flag was my property, and, I think, in fairness to me should be kept in Auckland. Only the citizens of Auckland have a claim to it’. The Auckland Star then reports a few weeks later on October 8, 1930 that the library committee of Auckland City Council recommended that a German flag captured at Apia, Samoa, which for years had been on view at the Auckland Public Library, should be sent to the Auckland War Memorial Museum.
The article does not specify whether it refers to the flag captured by Bailey, nor does his name appear in the current online collection records at Auckland War Memorial Museum where several flags are held and one is on display. The newspaper records tell us that in the decades after the war, several flags captured in Samoa appeared. For example, a third flag for Auckland Museum appeared in the New Zealand Herald on January 14, 1938; and the same newspaper states on January 29, 1938, that ‘a claim of the capture of two more German flags at Samoa has been made, bringing the total to eight’.
Material Traces
The most intriguing aspect about these claims is not their factual accuracy or exact provenance, but rather their efficacy in pulling the flags as material traces of the Samoan-German legacy into regional rivalries and civic competitions played out in New Zealand, as seen in the example of the controversy between the Parliamentary Library of Wellington and the Auckland Public Library addressed and contested by Bailey through his initial intent and subsequent reclaim.
These flags, then, do not just represent material remains of a past gone but are entangled with, and constitutive of, ongoing processes in the present – in this case the institutionalization of war heritage for the making of cities, regions and the nation, and even for the (re)making of international relations.
From war loot to gift
The New Zealand Herald reported on February 13, 1934, that a flag, which was taken from a German planter’s house when the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (including Bailey) landed at Samoa, was presented by the Auckland Harbour Board to the German barque Magdalene Vinnen. ‘The officers of the vessel regard the presentation as a most-friendly gesture’, the article said, so it seems as if the flag was turned from war loot to gift, thus turning former enemies into maritime comrades and thereby assisting in mending fences of global diplomatic affairs, at least for a while, until the next major conflict loomed on the oceanic horizon.
Philipp Schorch (2016)