The World's War

by David Olusoga

  From the start, though, Schnee was at odds in almost every respect with the plans and priorities of Lettow-Vorbeck. Assessing the military situation in August 1914, Lettow-Vorbeck looked far beyond the borders of the colony in which he found himself to the wider war. He could only be certain of a handful of factors. As he was surrounded by the colonial territories of hostile nations, he could count on the fact that any invading force would be far greater than anything he could field. At least the force available to him was a known quantity. The Germans had enforced their rule in East Africa by creating a local army of African soldiers.5 The Askari – Swahili for ‘soldier’ – had been recruited initially from Sudan, and then later from among the tribes who had fought most determinedly against the first German invaders – the Wahehe, Wanyamwezi and Angoni – in accordance with what amounted to a German version of the British martial-races theory. They were in effect a mercenary, military elite, well paid and spared from menial tasks; they had their own traditions and a powerful sense of pride in their service and their abilities. Their self-belief was unquestionably justified as they were undoubtedly among the best-trained soldiers in all of Africa. However, like the indigenous armies of the other imperial powers, the Askari had been formed to crush local rebellions and not to fight Europeans or defend the whole enormous colony from external invasion. They were led by the officers and men of the German Schutztruppe, white colonial regulars of the German Army. The combined force was augmented by hundreds of German reservists. In a partly militarized white-settler society, German settlers were armed and used to being called upon to take part in military action. Many had formed local rifle clubs to hone their combat skills. The sett­ler-farmers also included a number of former soldiers, some of whom had taken part in past actions against the local tribes. By 1914 the entire German Schutztruppe force consisted of 2,542 Askari and 218 Germans, officers and men. The white reservists numbered 1,670, and there was a semi-military police force of 55 Europeans and 2,160 Africans.6

  Lettow-Vorbeck could be confident about one other factor, too, in late 1914: that the prospects of receiving reinforcements or even basic supplies of food and war materials from Germany were slim. While the sea lanes were patrolled by the blockading fleets of the Royal Navy from the first hours of war, Britannia showed herself determined to rule the airwaves too. The completion of the destruction of German radio transmitters in Africa meant that, alongside the maritime blockade, by September 1916 Germany’s empire was largely cut off from the fatherland.7 Incredibly, Lettow-Vorbeck did manage for much of the war to learn of news on other fronts in Europe, and at times even communicate with Germany, through the use of an improvised telegraph network.

  The generally haphazard and difficult communications with Berlin had another consequence: they left Lettow-Vorbeck free to devise his own strategy for war in German East Africa, side-stepping or simply ignoring Schnee. His plan was not, in essence, one for the defence of the colony; rather, it was a strategy designed to influence – as much as was in his power – events in the principal, European theatre of war. Lettow-Vorbeck hoped to draw into East Africa as many Allied troops and as much of the enemy’s military resource as was possible, thereby denying Britain and France the opportunity of deploying them in Europe. It was an unquestionably brave and ambitious strategy; but it was far removed from that favoured by Schnee.

  Thus, on the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, Schnee ordered Lettow-Vorbeck to refrain from aggressive actions. On 5 August, in another legalistic move, the governor declared the ports on the coast of German East Africa ‘open’, in accordance with the Hague Convention of 1907, and informed the Royal Navy that they would not be defended, in the hope of avoiding enemy bombardments to which the German navy would have no answer. The German garrison in Dar es Salaam was evacuated, but since, critically, the radio transmitter was left operational, it invited a British naval bombardment, which came three days later. Nevertheless, Schnee’s strategy was still to follow the pre-war plans and have the Schutztruppe fall back to defend the interior of the colony along the railway lines. But in early September Lettow-Vorbeck began launching small-scale attacks into British East Africa. The most significant was on the settlement of Taveta, just a few miles over the border. As Lettow-Vorbeck’s numerous apologists never tire of re-stating, this makes him the only German general to have invaded ‘British’ territory during the war. When Schnee heard that a German flag was fluttering provocatively over British territory, he became enraged and telegraphed Lettow-Vorbeck reminding him of the real priorities as Schnee saw them – among which the protection of the white population from ‘possible native uprisings’ was paramount.

  LONDON, 5 AUGUST 1914. On the same day that Governor Schnee declares all German anchorages in East Africa ‘open ports’, the British Committee of Imperial Defence meets in London to discuss plans for the conquest of the German colonial empire. As well as agreeing to silence the radio station at Dar es Salaam, it is decided to capture the ports of German East Africa in order to deny German warships access to coal and provisions. The importance of this strategy becomes clear the next day, when the German light cruiser SMS Königsberg captures and sinks a British merchantman, the City of Winchester. Having slipped out of Dar es Salam some days earlier, to escape an impending British blockade, the Königsberg is now on the loose in the Red Sea.

  Over a month later, on 20 September 1914, the Königsberg raids the harbour of British-administered Zanzibar and sinks the British cruiser HMS Pegasus. In order to neutralize German East Africa, prevent the Königsberg from re-supplying in a friendly port, and ensure that German forces in the region pose no threat to British East Africa, the Committee of Imperial Defence reconvenes and activates a contingency plan originally drawn up by the War Office in 1897. The Scheme for Operations Against German East Africa is a document that was drafted by the Director of Intelligence of the British Indian Army, because since 1897 the defence of Britain’s East African territories has been sub-contracted by Whitehall to the British Government of India.8 Among those at the meeting is the Inspector-General of the indigenous King’s African Rifles, Brigadier General A.R. Hoskins, who happens to be home in Britain on leave. He paints a picture for the Committee of the conditions in German East Africa, of the malarial heat of the coastal strip, of the lack of roads, of the suffocating humidity. His warnings appear to have little effect.

  The plan initially adopted by the Committee of Imperial Defence involved the deployment of two Indian forces, one to attack Dar es Salaam, the other to defend British East Africa alongside the locally recruited King’s African Rifles. However, the Königsberg’s raid on Zanzibar (and the disruption caused by another German cruiser, Emden, in the Indian Ocean) meant that this plan was expanded by October to require the capture of all ports on the German East African coast. The first target was to be the most northerly, at Tanga, and it would involve two components of an Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF). IEF B would seize Tanga in an amphibious attack, while IEF C would march south from British East Africa, wind its way around Mount Kilimanjaro, and attack the settlement of Longido just a few miles over the border. IEF B would then proceed to march north along the railway to Moshi, on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, thereby trapping the Germans between the two forces.

  As plans were laid, in Nairobi Governor Belfield remained avowedly disinterested in the war. But there were those in both Whitehall and Delhi who regarded the prospect of hostilities as a golden opportunity. German East Africa was the missing link in the ‘red line’, the continuous strip of British territories dreamed of by the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his followers ever since the 1890s. It was across this red line that Britain could drive a Cape–Cairo railway. Indeed, the British impulse to seize Sudan in the 1890s, which had led to the Fashoda Incident, was motivated by this dream, while what had taken the Frenchmen Marchand and Mangin to Fashoda was a comparable fantasy of a French railway running from Dakar in Senegal to the Indian Ocean.

  In British India, in those
same tumultuous decades, a different form of colonialism had gripped the imagination. The possession of German East Africa could open the way for the Government of India to realize one of its longest-held strategic ambitions of ‘sub-imperialism’, whereby the colony might become a region into which Britain could direct Indian emigrants. The British had already encouraged Indian immigration into British East Africa, albeit with mixed results. They now talked of extending this policy into conquered German territories creating a new zone of future colonization. It was thought that the development of Africa could be significantly accelerated by the importation of Indians, who were widely regarded as being racially and culturally superior to Africans. In 1901 the British colonial administrator and theorist Sir Harry Johnston had written that: ‘Indian trade, enterprise, and emigration require a suitable outlet. East Africa is, and should be, from every point of view, the America of the Hindu’.9 The idea was supported by voices in South Africa and by some in India itself. By 1916, Theodore Morison, a member of the Council for India in London, had no doubt that German East Africa was ‘a colony for India’, in which Indians could ‘play a part in the civilizing of the wild’ and ‘share the white man’s burden’ in Africa.10

  In August 1914, while the Lahore and Meerut divisions of the British India Corps were being readied for eventual service in Europe, the Government of India placed schemes for the future colonization of Africa to one side and prioritized preparation and planning for the conquest of German East Africa. By September 1914 most of the finest units of the British Indian Army had been dispatched to Europe, and a further force was being assembled for deployment in the Persian Gulf, for fear that Ottoman Turkey would enter the war. Thus, the units that the Government of India was able to cobble together to form IEF B and IEF C were made up from the less well-regarded regiments. Richard Meinertzhagen, a former officer of the King’s African Rifles appointed as British Intelligence Officer to IEF B, and one of the singularly most unpleasant characters in the whole history of British colonialism, was dismissive of the Indians on first sight:

  They constitute the worst in India and I tremble to think what may happen if we meet with serious opposition. I have seen many of the men and they do not impress me at all… Two battalions have no machine guns and the senior officers are nearer to fossils than to active, energetic leaders of men.11

  Doing slightly better than their comrades destined for the Western Front, the Indian troops of IEF B were issued with the short-magazine Lee-Enfield rifle on leaving India, rather than on arrival in the theatre of war; but once again, the historical shadow of the Indian Mutiny loomed large, and a British Indian army was sent into combat carrying a weapon with which it was unfamiliar and on a continent of which they knew almost nothing.

  While not all British officers were as negative as Meinertzhagen, serious doubts were raised in many quarters about the capabilities of many of the Indian units, especially those that had not been drawn from the peoples regarded as ‘martial races’. Of the ten battalions that made up IEF B, only three units – the 101st Bombay Grenadiers, the 2nd Kashmir Rifles and the 2nd Battalion, Loyal North Lancashire Regiment (which had been based in Bangalore at the outbreak of war) – were looked on as effective combat troops units, while the 63rd Palamcottahs and the 98th Infantry Pioneers were regarded with particular suspicion.12 Nevertheless, while the British commander, Major General Arthur Aitken, knew little about Africa or Africans, he was a firm believer in imperialism’s racial hierarchies and remained convinced that even those Indians from the least martial of races, when trained and led by British officers, were superior soldiers to German-trained Africans. Despite not having served in Africa since 1885, and then only briefly, Aitken was in no doubt that ‘the Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers’.13 In a refrain that must have begun to ring hollow by November 1914 – after the British retreat from Mons and the catastrophic French defeats on the German frontiers – Aitken confidently assured his subordinates that the fighting in German East Africa would be over by Christmas.

  British optimism was also fuelled by the belief that Tanga would not be defended. In the absence of the more cautious and knowledgeable local commander, Hoskins, others predicted that any attack would incite the downtrodden locals to rise up against the Germans; and it was widely believed that the German settler population would not put up much resistance. It was poor intelligence of this sort that encouraged Aitken to refuse the assistance of the 3rd King’s African Rifles, men who were familiar with the terrain and the climate of East Africa.14 With similar abandon, Aitken rejected the idea of blowing up the German railway lines between Tanga and Kilimanjaro. Most disastrously of all, he refused to allow the men of IEF B shore leave to rest and recover after their two-week-long journey in crowded army transport ships from India, although the men were clearly in poor health and lacking fitness. Aitken decided that these exhausted, disorientated men could be thrown straight into action after their ocean crossing. Having stepped off the dockside at Bombay, leaving their native soil for the first time in their lives, their next step on land would be onto the sands of an enemy-held shoreline.

  Tanga today is a nondescript city on the northern tip of Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast. It boasts some moderately interesting colonial architecture, a railway station to which trains no longer travel and a decaying German hospital that has become home to an energetic roost of fruit bats. Its deep-water port is still active, and the town has all the energy and dynamism of twenty-first-century Tanzania; but most visitors are merely stopping over on their journeys to and from Mount Kilimanjaro.

  In 1914, Tanga was the second port of German East Africa and the terminus of the shiny new Usambara Railway, which linked the Usambara Highlands to the Indian Ocean. At dawn on 2 November, a flotilla of fourteen transport ships with one escort, HMS Fox (the expedition’s other escort, HMS Goliath, had broken down at Mombasa), gathered fifteen miles off the coast, lurking beneath the horizon to avoid being spotted – though they had already been given away. At this point in the story, blame for the impending disaster shifts, if only temporarily, from Aitken to Captain Caulfield of the Fox. Concerned about mines, and eager to avoid inflicting civilian casualties with a naval bombardment, Caulfield sailed into Tanga at 7am and gave the German District Commissioner, Dr Auracher, the opportunity to surrender, which he politely declined. Instead, Auracher promptly dispatched telegrams to Lettow-Vorbeck informing him of the arrival of a British invasion fleet, slipped into his own German reservist’s uniform, and prepared to take part in the defence of Tanga. With the advantage of surprise now squandered, Aitken – for some unaccountable reason – waited until late that evening before beginning to land. Even then, he sent ashore only part of his force. The Indian and British units landed some distance from the town and assembled on an increasingly disorganized beachhead, after having hacked their way through the thick mangroves that fringed the shoreline. The lights of Tanga were clearly visible.

  Aitken had been right in that Tanga was poorly defended; but that state of affairs was rapidly changing as Lettow-Vorbeck was rushing his troops from Moshi, on the slopes of Kilimanjaro just 185 miles away, using the Usambara Railway. Even so, on the morning of 3 November the German defenders of Tanga still numbered only about 200 men. By 8am about half of the Indian and British force was ashore, and when Aitken heard from a patrol that the town remained lightly defended, he ordered an attack. The assault began tentatively on the morning of 4 November. Things went tolerably well until the lead units were about 2,000 yards from the town. There, the 13th Rajputs, one of the more favoured of the Indian units, came under heavy fire. At the height of this engagement the first of Lettow-Vorbeck’s reinforcements arrived and entered the battle. A powerful counter-attack by Askari forced the Indians back, and under German machine-gun fire the whole time they were forced into a retreat. The attack had been a shocking failure.

  It had been in the very early hours of 4 November that Lettow-Vorbeck himself arrived at Tanga, by
train. He and his officers, at this point, still believed that they could probably not defend the town successfully against a British force several times larger than anything they could assemble. After speaking to the German wounded in the hospital and consulting with senior officers, Lettow-Vorbeck set off on a bicycle to reconnoitre the empty streets of Tanga and view the British positions, which he did almost unmolested. It changed his mind, for what he saw of the British beachhead convinced him there was some chance of success. He prepared to counter the next British attack.

  Having allowed the Germans a full fifty-four hours to prepare their defences, Aitken, at about noon the same day, launched that second attack. He still outnumbered the German defenders, at this point by about eight to one. In the initial advance, the Indians and British were slowed by the thick vegetation of the rubber and sisal plantations that ringed the town, and by the oppressive heat. Communications between attacking units was difficult, too. Advancing as one long line, in a formation that was as antiquated as it was ill-advised, the Indians got to within 600 yards of the town, before they were again cut down by machine guns. Aitken at this point was unable to reply with artillery support, as he had not landed his guns, and Caulfield was as reluctant as ever to bring HMS Fox close enough to shore for her heavy guns to be effective. By the time he relented, it was too late in the day for his bombardment to affect the outcome.