Occupation of German Samoa
Other than native Samoan police, Germany had no armed forces stationed in the islands. The small gunboat SMS Geier and the unarmed survey ship Planet were assigned to the so-called "Australian Station" (encompassing all German South Seas protectorates, not the British dominion Australia), but Geier never reached Samoa.
At the behest of Great Britain the colony was invaded unopposed on the morning of 29 August 1914 by troops of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Vice Admiral Count Maximilian von Spee of the German East Asia Squadron gained knowledge of the occupation and hastened to Samoa with the armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau, arriving off Apia on 14 September 1914. However, he determined that a landing would only be of temporary advantage in an Allied dominated sea and the cruisers departed. New Zealand occupied the German colony through 1920, then governed the islands until independence in 1962 as a (1) League of Nations Class C Mandate and (2) United Nations Trust Territory after 1946.
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