"In late 1940, the tiny tropical island of Nauru seemed about as far from the bloody battlefields of the Second World War as one could get. Also known as Pleasant Island, the 21 sq. km (8 sq. mile) paradise sits roughly 3,000 km due east of New Guinea and 5,000 km southwest of Hawaii – a long way from Europe and North Africa indeed. Yet by December of that year, German warships would carry to the fight against the Allies to the very shores of Nauru. The ensuing battle would represent the only Nazi military action of World War Two to take place in the South Pacific.
The Allies' Phosphate Island
Despite its remote size and location, Nauru supplied the Allied war effort with one-million tons of phosphate a year. A key ingredient in the production of fertilizer, phosphate was of particular importance to Australia's agricultural sector. Since the First World War, administrators from the British Phosphate Commission (BPC) had been overseeing the extraction of the precious commodity from the island. The agency employed nearly all working-age males out of Nauru's 1,700 inhabitants in the process and imported another 1,300 Chinese labourers to lend a hand. And while the small, oval-shaped island lacked any sort of natural harbor, BPC engineers outfitted Nauru with a massive steel jetty for cargo ships and a loading chute used in the export of the all-important resource. As such, the waters off Nauru were teeming with sea traffic as vessel after vessel came alongside to fill their holds with phosphate. Yet, despite the island's strategic significance, it was virtually undefended — even more than a year into the war.
The Battle of Nauru
Nazi Germany was only too happy to capitalize on Nauru's vulnerability. On Dec. 6, 1940, two heavily armed German commerce raiders, the Orion and the Komet, along with the supply ship Kulmerland, arrived in the waters surrounding the island. The vessels had already been laying mines and preying on Allied sea traffic in the Indian Ocean for weeks. Now the small fleet was about to turn its guns on whatever unprotected merchant ships they could find at Nauru…"
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