Although British and Indian forces did succeed in entering Tanga, where they became engaged in street-to-street fighting, they were driven back by ferocious defending and the massed firepower of the German machine guns. One unit of Gurkhas captured the Kaiserhof Hotel, and for a brief moment the Union Flag flew over the town; but once again it was the arrival of enemy reinforcements that drove the attackers back. The constant onslaught of machine-gun fire decimated whole units in the plantations. Some – most notably the 63rd Palamcottahs – panicked and began to disintegrate. Men threw away their rifles and ran into the ocean. At one point, machine-gun fire slammed into the hives that bees had excavated in decaying tree stumps by the water line: thousands of furious bees swarmed out and attacked the British and Indian soldiers, adding to their misery and lending the battle its informal designation: ‘Battle of the Bees’. One signaller of the Royal Engineers, in what might well have been one of the most distinguished acts of bravery in the whole battle, stayed at his post throughout the bees’ offensive. He suffered 300 bee stings, mostly to his head. The Times later accused the Germans of having planted the beehives as part of an elaborate insectine trap.15 Amid the chaos, Richard Meinertzhagen, a man prone to uncontrollable rage and devoid of compassion, summarily executed a number of young and terrified Indian troops, as they took cover from enemy fire. He shot one terrified Rajput soldier for refusing to advance when ordered, reporting: ‘I shot the brute as he lay half-crazed with fear.’16 Later, in his diary, he condemned the Indian men he had executed as ‘scum’.17
The defeat of the Indian and British force might easily have become a complete rout. Lettow-Vorbeck, like many of the German officer corps, dreamed of achieving a battle of encirclement; it was a collective obsession, which stemmed from their study of the celebrated Carthaginian victory over the Romans at the ancient Battle of Cannae. IEF B and the British units at Tanga were arguably only spared this fate because an Askari bugler mistakenly sounded a call that was interpreted by Lettow-Vorbeck’s men as an order for a retreat, and en masse they moved to positions west of the town at the height of the battle. At that moment, as the Germans were rushing from the field of battle to their new lines, Aitken might still, against the odds, have won the day with a third attack, despite all his previous bungling. Yet instead of exploiting this unexpected and undeserved opportunity, he ordered his forces back to their assembly points on the beachhead. That evening, the battered, terrified, dehydrated and bee-stung remnants of IEF B gathered on the beaches or dug into their positions, trapped in small pockets by German rifle fire. The wounded were outnumbered by men who had simply lost their nerve. As with the Indian units then engaged on the Western Front, the fighting capacity of IEF B had been undermined by the loss of so many British officers who were fluent in Indian languages. Ill-prepared, badly provisioned, poorly led, and exhausted from a long and cramped sea voyage – and now lacking officers to transmit orders – the men of IEF B had been led to the slaughter. From the outset, Meinertzhagen had suspected Aitken was not fit for the command entrusted to him.
On 5 November, Lettow-Vorbeck – still outnumbered, although now with artillery support – prepared to counter a renewed British attack. But it never came. Instead, Aitken ordered a re-embarkation, and that evening the British ships were loaded and the shattered remnants of IEF B were evacuated. Aitken’s final blunder – and perhaps the most inexplicable of all – was his order that the great bulk of the expeditionary force’s equipment and stores be left behind on the beach. There, and in the plantations around Tanga, the British Empire left not only 817 dead but also 8 machine guns, 455 rifles and 500,000 rounds of ammunition. From the great hoard, the Germans salvaged a huge stock of uniforms and a number of field telephones too. For a German force cut off from the fatherland, the victory at Tanga brought with it a scarcely believable bounty.
To arrange the ceasefire necessary for the evacuation, Meinertzhagen had, on the morning of the 5th, been dispatched to the German lines, carrying a white flag and a bundle of medical supplies for the wounded British prisoners. He was taken to Tanga’s German hospital, which had become a command centre. There, he handed over a note from Aitken apologizing for the accidental bombardment of the hospital the previous day. Meinertzhagen was greeted warmly and given a breakfast of ‘good beer, ice, plenty of eggs and cream and asparagus’. Then he and a group of German staff officers excitedly discussed the battle as if, in Meinertzhagen’s words, ‘it had been a football match’. It was this moment of unlikely German victory, along with the image of an exotic, supposedly gentlemanly, war, in which opposing white officers could remain on cordial terms, that first drew the attention of the German public to the conflict in Africa. After a string of defeats in the other African and Pacific colonies, the victory at Tanga was seized upon by the German press. The Kaiser rushed to offer his personal congratulations, and the newspapers and state propagandists set about transforming Lettow-Vorbeck from a little-known colonial officer into a German legend.
The Official History of the war later described the Battle of Tanga as ‘one of the most notable failures in British military history’,18 though British newspapers of the day were not given the opportunity to express a view. The press remained mute, muzzled by a government that believed – perhaps correctly – that in November 1914 the British public was already overburdened with bad news. On the German side, one effect of Lettow-Vorbeck’s victory, and his elevation to the status of national hero, was that the balance of power between him and Governor Schnee tipped permanently in his favour. Although Schnee remained by his side for much of the war, and from time to time felt justified in reprimanding Lettow-Vorbeck for allegedly neglecting his duties to protect the white settler population, the Schutztruppe commander was to a great extent now freed from civilian oversight. Lauded by his troops and commended by his nation, Lettow-Vorbeck and his war in Africa were presented to an excited German public as a romantic, colourful and glorious distraction from the mechanized slaughter in France and Belgium. Not only had he recorded a spectacular victory against the most hated of Germany’s enemies, Tanga had been the most delicious type of triumph – one achieved against the odds. In the Reichstag, one deputy described Lettow-Vorbeck as ‘a German David’ who was ‘fighting alone against a British Goliath in Africa’. But then, putting his finger squarely on Lettow-Vorbeck’s key vulnerability, he made an earnest appeal for the assembly ‘to ensure that his gallant struggle shall not be lost for lack of encouragement to sustain him. If we cannot fight by his side, at least we must make sure that he is well supplied with shot for his sling.’19
Lettow-Vorbeck had indeed gathered a great deal of ‘shot for his sling’ from the beaches of Tanga. His next significant engagement, in January 1915 – a siege of the British forces that had captured the German border settlement of Jasin, to the north of Tanga – was another triumph, although one achieved at a cost in men and war materials that was unsustainable. There, the Schutztruppe expended 200,000 rounds of ammunition and, more worrying, sustained around 300 casualties, including many key officers. Lettow-Vorbeck himself was lightly wounded and was lucky not to have been killed. Like almost everyone else, Lettow-Vorbeck in early 1915 was still of the view that the war in Europe would be short. This assumption encouraged him to be far less cautious at this time than he was later to become. Rather, he remained determined to cause as much damage as possible to the British before a German victory in Europe brought hostilities to an end.
In July 1915 a second bounty fell into Lettow-Vorbeck’s lap. SMS Königsberg had finally been hunted down and destroyed by two British, shallow-draft ‘monitor’ boats in the Rufiji Delta, south of Dar es Salaam. The ship’s captain, in a moment of genius, had set fire to her wooden deck, giving her pursuers the impression that the damage they had inflicted had spread to her hold. He then scuttled the ship, leaving her listing to one side in the shallow waters. The next day, after the British had retired, the Germans were able to begin salvaging war material from the waterlogge
d but still intact hold. Their haul included six field-guns, a stash of rifles and literally millions of rounds of ammunition. In addition to the contents of the Königsberg’s hold, the ship’s ten guns were removed and set on mobile carriages, giving Lettow-Vorbeck heavy artillery. With these weapons and resources, the commander was able not only to re-supply his force of 1914, but in 1915 to equip and train more Askari. By the end of that year he had under his command an army of 2,712 Europeans and 11,367 Askari, along with another 2,000 auxiliaries.20 Lettow-Vorbeck was now in a position to fight a protracted war. But for now he did not have the opportunity.
By the summer of 1915, the German radio transmitters in Africa had been silenced, the German naval threat in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf neutralized, and British Imperial forces in Africa were otherwise engaged. German East Africa had slipped precipitously down Britain’s list of priorities, and for much of 1915 Germany’s new military hero was left to his own devices. It was a year of small skirmishes. The Germans launched raids against the British Uganda Railway, which put thirty-two trains out of action and destroyed nine bridges; but there were very few larger engagements. British forces generally contented themselves with defending colonial borders as best they could. In both London and Nairobi, blame for the disaster at Tanga was apportioned between Aitken and the inadequately prepared men of IEF B. Their poor performance encouraged the British to look to their two most effective armies in Africa, the British West Africa Frontier Force and the South African Defence force; the local King’s African Rifles, based in Kenya, were too small a force to take on the Germans. Yet, in 1915 there was little chance that either might be configured to confront the Germans in East Africa. In February 1915 the South Africans recommenced their stalled invasion of German South West Africa, while throughout the year the West Africa Frontier Force remained mired in an increasingly frustrating campaign against the Schutztruppe of German Cameroon. It was only after the South Africans had soundly defeated the Schutztruppe of South West Africa, in July 1915, that attention turned again to German East Africa. In mid-November, a sub-committee of the Committee for Imperial Defence agreed to place the conquest of German East Africa back on the top of the agenda, and towards the end of 1915 the South African Defence Force finally began to assemble in Mombasa for this purpose.
The army now being put together in British East Africa consisted of an initial force of 13,000 white South Africans and Rhodesians. Among the South Africans was also a battalion of Cape Corps – mixed-race soldiers of European and San origin, the latter of a similar heritage to the Nama of German South West Africa, whom Lettow-Vorbeck had fought a decade earlier. To this force were added 9,000 Indian troops and the men of the King’s African Rifles, who between them were already defending British East Africa from Lettow-Vorbeck’s incursions during 1915. In total the British Imperial army that was readied for action in German East Africa reached 73,000 – an enormous force in the context of the African war. It was equipped with 71 field guns and 123 machine guns, and supported by a Royal Flying Corps squadron. It was supplied by a huge and growing corps of carriers and labourers. In the view of one commander it was as ‘strange and heterogeneous an army’ as had ever been assembled – though in reality a similarly heterogeneous army was at the same time serving in and behind the lines in France and Belgium.21
South Africa’s willingness to embark upon a second major campaign was not motivated solely by loyalty to the British Crown and Empire. The Union of South Africa also nursed sub-imperialist ambitions as expansive as those of the government in British India, and which involved a radical re-drawing of the map of the southern third of the African continent. The defeat of German South West Africa in summer 1915 had been secretly regarded by Pretoria as the prelude to the post-war incorporation of that long-coveted territory into South Africa. Germans’ past mistreatment of the territory’s people fed this goal, for, having captured a huge haul of official German records and documents, the South Africans quickly began an investigation into the Germans’ 1904–08 genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples: the information, collated into a devastating official report from 1917 onwards, was later used at the Paris Peace Conference to demonstrate German unfitness to be a colonial power or the guardian of ‘primitive peoples’. Yet South West Africa – a desert colony of dubious economic value, despite the diamond fields of the far south – was not in itself enough to satisfy Pretoria’s territorial appetite. Like the Government of India and the dominions of Australia and New Zealand, South Africa had other, long-suppressed ambitions that had been suddenly freed by the fluidity of war. South Africa’s leaders, aware of the deep internal divisions between Briton and Boer, were only willing to be drawn deeper into the war if they were to be further rewarded for their loyalty.
One proposed scheme was for the outright annexation of German East Africa, which John X. Merriman, the former Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, believed would then become ‘a colony with a planter aristocracy resting on black labour’ – a description that could have been reasonably applied to much of southern and eastern Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. An alternative plan, more diplomatically intricate, was for the southern half of the confiscated German colony to be awarded to the Portuguese, in return for their relinquishing of the southern portion of Portuguese East Africa – Mozambique – which would be absorbed into South Africa. This area included the ports of Beria and Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay), a natural harbour first claimed by the Portuguese in 1502. Such a revision of southern Africa’s borders would, so Pretoria hoped, promote economic development in the Transvaal and thereby appease Boer opinion. The scheme – pushed energetically by Minister of Defence Jan Smuts – was no less grandiose than the Government of India’s dream of creating an ‘America for the Hindu’ in East Africa, and far less ambitious than Berlin’s plans for a post-war re-ordering of Africa should Germany win the war.
What mattered to London in 1915 was whether South Africa’s long-term, sub-imperial plans could be squared with the immediate military needs of the war effort, so Britain’s politicians kept all options on the table and did nothing to dampen South African ambitions. The British general who was to lead the conquest of German East Africa was the veteran of Fashoda (and later Mons, in 1914), General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien; but pneumonia contracted en route to Cape Town, and a subsequent relapse, forced his resignation. Leadership passed to Smuts himself, a South African hero who – like General Botha – had led Boer commando units against the British in the Second Anglo-Boer War, and whose participation now added a dash of glamour to the coming campaign.
However, Smuts’s previous military experience was of almost no relevance to the task he now faced. The commando tactics perfected by the Boers, and more recently successfully deployed in South West Africa, were those of fast-moving, lightly equipped, almost self-sufficient mounted units of just a few hundred men. Such tactics had outfoxed the British Army at the turn of the century on the veldt and had proved too much for the Germans in the Namib Desert in 1915. But Smuts now had the prospect of leading a campaign in a tropical colony, much of it covered in thick bush or forest, with limited infrastructure and endemic diseases dangerous to both men and animals. His forces were not going to be compact and mobile Boer commando units, but rather a large multi-national, multi-race, polyglot army, tens of thousands strong – and these numbers would be dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of carriers and labourers attempting, against odds, to keep the campaign supplied. The political pressure for results was intense, too. Yet he was facing an elusive enemy, fighting on its home territory and led by a highly capable commander. Had Smuts recognized the extent to which these challenges would shape the conflict, he might well have sought better counsel and listened to in-country experts. Instead, he gathered around him too many South African commanders whose military experience was as narrow as his own, and he too often sidelined men who had a better understanding of the region and clearer insight into Lettow-Vorbeck’s army and tact
ics.
The first phase of Smuts’s strategy was to secure the border of British East Africa. It proved the only phase of the war in which the conditions and the terrain favoured Smuts’s tactics, and things went well. By the end of March 1916 the Germans had been pushed out of the Kilimanjaro area; but the South Africans had been unable to force Lettow-Vorbeck into a decisive fight, and a pattern of confrontation and evasion was set in train that was to continue.
The total strength of Lettow-Vorbeck’s force in 1916 stood somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 troops, though Smuts and his intelligence officer, Meinertzhagen, remained convinced throughout the year that the Germans were far stronger. Now, Smuts’s forces were drawn ever deeper into the malarial, tsetse-fly infested interior to pursue them. Converging on German East Africa from multiple directions – Portuguese troops were crossing the German colony’s southern border in April 1916, and from June 1916 Belgians from the Congo were entering Urundi in the colony’s north-west – the invasion forces very quickly began to stretch supply lines and break spirits, as the campaign developed into one that in many respects overthrows our vision of the First World War. Three-thousand miles away from the Western Front, the war in East Africa pitched armies of the continent’s black and white tribes against one another in a campaign that was in truth more akin to nineteenth-century wars of colonial conquest. As he advanced, Smuts had to operate with maps that were unreliable and communications that were haphazard, carried along telegraph lines that were vulnerable to the ravages of the weather and even the attentions of giraffes. As the army under Smuts’s command grew to its maximum strength, the problems of supply became almost insurmountable. When food failed to reach the troops, men who were already exhausted by long marches and sickness were further weakened by malnutrition. For months on end the fighting was simply an endless series of indecisive skirmishes or bloody ambushes. Small patrols encountered one another in the thick bush, often by accident, and there were cases of men firing on their own side. In this war of movement, advances were measured in miles, rather than in yards as on the Western Front; but the ground gained was easily lost and arguably not worth the fight.
The World's War Page 15
