The World's War

by David Olusoga

  Chapter 9

  ‘Your sons will remember your name’

  Remembering, resenting and forgetting

  KASAMA, NORTHERN RHODESIA, 12 NOVEMBER 1918. The sun rises over the equatorial scrub lands at around 5.30 in the morning. On the Western Front, it is not until around 7am that the first tendrils of pale, winter sunlight will stretch out across the frozen battlefields. In France and Belgium, as in Asia and the Americas, today’s dawn heralds the first full day of peace, after 1,561 consecutive days of war. But for the German-led forces in Africa, today has no particular significance – it is merely business as usual, the 1,562nd day of a long war. Cut off from the outside world, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, still commanding his rag-tag army of sickly German officers, and exhausted and exploited African Askari and conscripted carriers, is completely unaware that an armistice has been signed.

  Lettow-Vorbeck’s brutal safari – always darkly surreal – has become, by now, preposterous. His columns have marched from the town of Kasama to the Chambezi River, while Lettow-Vorbeck, emaciated and half-blind, rides alongside on a rickety bicycle. Despite his own ill-health and the appalling condition of his army, he remains obsessively determined to battle on. Yet the state in whose name he fights has, as of three days previously, ceased to exist. Unbeknownst to him and his army, they are no longer the subjects of the Imperial German Reich but the uncomprehending citizens of a new German republic. The German emperor, to whom Lettow-Vorbeck has remained unswervingly loyal, has been dethroned and Kaiser Wilhelm II is now merely Wilhelm Hohenzollern, a private citizen and a foreign refugee in a Dutch country villa. Oblivious to all this, Lettow-Vorbeck plans his next move. Having recently seized a large stock of quinine, he calculates that he has sufficient supplies of that essential medicine to fight on until June 1919.

  Both Lettow-Vorbeck and Heinrich Schnee – technically his superior, being the former Governor of German East Africa – have gleaned enough information from British prisoners and captured dispatches to know that the war has entered a climactic stage. Yet both men remain confident that any peace will be favourably disposed towards Germany’s interest, and at the very least guarantee the nation’s honour and independence. Although Lettow-Vorbeck is unaware of the pitiful state of his distant fatherland, the appalling condition of his own army is – if he chooses to notice it – painfully evident. In this ersatz force, the sergeants are acting as officers, while carriers have been ‘promoted’ to Askari. The most sickly of the remaining German officers are carried through the bush in improvised litters.

  Their war has ranged across the region – skirmishes and plunder in Portuguese Mozambique, before crossing back into German East Africa in September 1918, and then on into British-ruled Northern Rhodesia. But in approaching their homelands, Askari and carriers have been deserting: for men who have not been paid for two years, the draw of villages, families and children they have not seen for years overwhelms any latent sense of duty. They slip away into the darkness of an African night. The Schutztruppe commander complains bitterly that ‘The Niggers’ love of home is too strong.’1

  Today, 12 November 1918, Lettow-Vorbeck forces the British into one more engagement, near the abandoned town of Kasama. In the aftermath of the skirmish, there is an important discovery. The German commander learns of the capture of a British motorcycle dispatch-rider, whose documents contain momentous news. They are instructions to the local British forces to locate Lettow-Vorbeck and inform him of the Armistice. Shocked by this news – but still believing that Germany must have secured good terms – on 13 November Lettow-Vorbeck rushes to the Chambezi River to notify another of his commanders of the end of hostilities, and to forestall what might otherwise have been the last battle of the African war. There, on a bridge across the river, a British officer, Hector Croad, walks across the firing lines under a white flag to meet Lettow-Vorbeck, to formally deliver news of the Armistice, and to discuss the German surrender.

  In fact, Lettow-Vorbeck’s formal capitulation does not come until twelve days later, on 25 November, at Abercorn (later known as the Zambian town of Mbala). The surrendering force consists of only 155 Germans, drastically reduced from the 3,000 at the start of the war. The Askari number 1,168, and alongside them there is a strange caravan of 3,000 others – carriers, but also the wives, children and servants of Askari. Their presence, more than anything else, explains why so many Askari have remained ‘loyal’ to Lettow-Vorbeck: with their families in train, they are in no position to desert or abandon the cause.

  On surrendering, the Germans are permitted to retain their personal arms – swords and pistols – and hurried to Dar es Salaam, where they are treated as civilians rather than as PoWs. The disarmed Askari are, by contrast, housed in PoW camps at Tabora, in the centre of the former German colony, and from there slowly sent home; but their dispersal fuels the final catastrophe of the war in Africa, for since the summer of 1918 the men have been struck by outbreaks of Spanish Flu. The disbanded Askari become one means by which the pandemic spreads to their families, villages and communities. The number of Africans who will die of this ‘disease of the wind’ (as the Ethiopians call it) is unknowable, as it pulses across the continent in the coming year.

  Armistice Day – 11 November 1918, the date that passed Lettow-Vorbeck by – is perhaps the most resonant day of the whole twentieth century. Superficially, it appears to offer a neat end to a messy war. What took place, however, on the ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ was a cessation of hostilities rather than a definitive end to war or an agreed peace. Two enormous armies, Allied and German, remained in the field, and among Allied politicians and generals there remained suspicious hostility towards Germany’s old generals and the new civilian leaders following in the wake of the Kaiser’s abdication. Was this just a ruse to secure Germany a breathing space to regroup and carry on the war? Lloyd George had other concerns, that the exhausted and traumatized men of Britain’s volunteer and conscript armies might not be easily persuaded to resume combat operations if the Armistice broke down.2 He was not alone, as the spectre of revolution weighed on the minds of political leaders and military commanders alike. Germany’s leaders feared that their armies might be needed to keep the peace at home in a coming civil war.

  In most conflicts the liberation of occupied lands and cities comes as the precursor to final victory; but in 1918 hostilities ceased, and only then did liberation follow. Behind the German front line still lay a great swathe of western France, much of Belgium and all of Luxembourg. Ushering those German troops out of the occupied lands, as the French, British, American and Belgian forces advanced, was the delicate task of the last weeks of 1918. The Allied armies picked their way forward carefully, surveying endless miles of ruins on the way. They first passed across what had been the German rear areas and then through towns, villages and cities that had been occupied for four years. One French civilian recalled, with striking eloquence, the surge of emotions at the moment of liberation, having spent the entire war living under German occupation while the thunder of nearby battle echoed across the landscape. ‘For four years,’ he wrote, ‘we were buried like miners listening to the picks and shovels which we could hear far off, announcing our rescue… and suddenly the dark pit opened and we saw light.’3 As Allied forces reached the German border, it was now the turn of German civilians to be subjected to enemy occupation.

  On 17 November the first American troops reached the German frontier. They were none other than the African Americans of the 369th Infantry Regiment. As the Allies advanced eastwards, the German Army was crossing the Rhine and – as stipulated under the terms of the Armistice – withdrawing from what had been designated a neutral zone on the right bank of the river. The lands on the Rhine’s left bank were then occupied by Allied forces, as were three key bridgeheads at Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz. There were to be no further inroads into Germany, to the horror of Charles Mangin, who had railed against the decision with characteristic fury and unchara
cteristic prescience: ‘No no no! We must go right into the heart of Germany. The armistice should be signed there. The Germans will not admit that they are beaten. You do not finish wars like this… It is a fatal error and France will pay for it.’4

  The make-up of the forces that occupied the Rhineland in late 1918 reflected the international multiracial forces that had defeated the Germany Army on the Western Front. They included not only the 369th Infantry but also the African-American 371st Regiment – as well as some black troops among the British occupation force and the Belgian contingent.5 The French occupation force at this stage numbered 250,000 men, around 10 per cent of whom were non-white colonial soldiers, including battle-hardened veterans of Mangin’s Tenth Army, two regiments of West African troops (5,000 men), a regiment of Madagascans, and North Africans.6 Despite their small numbers, the sub-Saharan French soldiers would become the focus of a furious German campaign of propaganda and racial hatred.

  For Germans, to be ‘occupied’ by Africans – men considered well down in the hierarchy of races – was a form of humiliation. But that general view of the status of black Africans was held widely in Europe, and beyond. Back in 1858, when a British committee pondered the garrisoning of post-Mutiny India with colonial soldiers, a pamphleteer railed that it was ‘out of the question to impose upon India an army of Africans’ because it would be ‘humiliating and disgusting’ for Indians. The author was appalled at the very thought of ‘putting in the hands of the most untameable and treacherous beings upon the earth the arms which we dare not trust in the hands of our own Asiatic subjects’.7 During the First World War, the British government had quietly sought to avoid, wherever possible, placing non-white troops in positions of authority over white enemy civilians. In 1917, the British had even secretly insisted that the German civilians rounded up by the Siamese on their declaration of war be evacuated to white-run camps in British India; the Siamese government was fully awake to the implicit racial slur, but in order to maintain cordial relations with his more powerful ally, Rama VI did not protest, though the move was deeply resented in Bangkok.8*1

  To Germans, the black soldiers who arrived at the end of 1918 represented the first large-scale black presence in German history. Those Germans who had encountered black men before had done so mainly under the very different circumstances of the earlier Völkerschauen or had come across isolated members of the nation’s tiny pre-1914 black community, made up of temporary visitors, sailors in transit or lone settlers. Few Germans actually made it out to the German colonies in Africa. Some of the initial trepidation and fear now felt among the population of the Rhineland was genuine; but these concerns were to be harnessed, amplified and distorted by a highly effective propaganda campaign that was able – with considerable outside assistance – to transform local unease and opposition into something approaching a contemporary global scandal. It went on to cause divisions between the wartime Allies, influence relations between France and Germany for a generation, and it flowed directly into the policies, rhetoric and murderous wartime practices of the Third Reich. It also stands out as perhaps the only great success story of Germany’s propaganda war. Germany’s attempts to portray the deployment of non-white troops had largely failed to gain traction during the war. But now, after other failures – to incite Jihadi fervour, to ‘turn’ African American troops, or to foment revolution in India – at the very end of the conflict and under occupation, Germany’s propagandists found their moment. Race presented a fertile cause with which to mobilize whole sections of the population and inspire international sympathy. Germany was, at last, a credible ‘victim’, and Germans were even portrayed as such within the newspapers and debates of their erstwhile enemies.

  Within weeks of the arrival of the occupying armies, the German press began to circulate rumours of violent attacks and sexual assaults by black troops on German civilians, and in particular the rape of German women. Although only around 2 per cent of the French occupation forces were black Africans, the campaign focused almost exclusively on them. Hostility against the occupying forces quickly developed. A sign outside one shop read: ‘An Franzosen und Neger wird hier nichts verkauft’ – ‘Nothing will be sold here to French and Negroes’.9 But more than that, a concerted and organized campaign dubbed the presence of black troops as ‘die schwarze Schande’ – the Black Shame. The propaganda picked up where wartime efforts had left off by claiming that black troops were guilty of violence and mutilation – but particularly rape. It was a campaign that fixated upon the long-standing racist myths of black men as irredeemably savage, being possessed of an irrational propensity for brute violence, and uncontrollably hyper-sexual.

  In April 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, German representations had attempted to gain assurances, to no avail, that ‘coloured troops should not be made a part of the army of occupation’. The situation was exacerbated when, amid Germany’s turbulent and violent political struggles, German forces entered the demilitarized region of the Ruhr in 1920 to confront left-wing strikers. The French responded by sending their forces further into Germany on 6 April, and during their seizure of Frankfurt a group of French Moroccan soldiers opened fire on rioters, killing and wounding German civilians. This moment of violence sparked a great surge of propaganda centring on claims of rapes committed by black troops. At the height of it, a special medal was struck by the German artist Karl Goetz, carrying the words ‘die Schwarze Schande’ and depicting a white woman chained to a phallus, on the tip of which rested a French Army Adrian helmet. The reverse side showed an African soldier with exaggerated, racialized features and the slogan ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ – ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, a satirical reference to a German patriotic anthem. At the same time, newspapers condemned African troops as ‘vertierte Neger’ – ‘animal niggers’ – and a poster was produced in which a black soldier, naked except for his Adrian helmet, clutched a white German woman to his chest.10 A German Socialist in the Reichstag, Frau Rohl, condemned an ‘utterly unnatural occupation’ while former chancellor Prince Max von Baden appealed to ‘the whole civilised world’ that ‘an end may be put to the occupation of a European country by coloured troops and the unavoidable consequences connected therewith’.11

  Prince Max von Baden’s call did not fall on deaf ears, and the figure that was to do so much to propagate German complaints was an Englishman. In the early years of the twentieth century, the journalist E.D. Morel had become world-famous as the hero of the ‘Red Rubber Campaign’; more than anyone else, he had exposed the genocidal brutality that was taking place within the Congo when it was still a personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Morel’s great moral struggle brought him not only fame but also influence. He was regarded as a ‘friend of the African’ and viewed as what we today would call a humanitarian. Opinionated and anti-war (he went to prison for his views in 1917), he was a man of the Left, too, as Secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, and he would go on to become a Labour Party MP. Yet, whatever his views about Africans on their own continent, in an article in the left-wing Daily Herald on 10 April 1920 he also revealed himself to believe passionately that African people were racially inferior, morally deficient and had no place on the continent of Europe.

  Morel’s article was run beneath the headline ‘Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine’. His prose was as lurid as anything produced by German propagandists – and in fact much of it was regurgitated German reporting, lacking in dates, times, places and other verifiable details or confirmations. Although, as Morel admitted, ‘my information is not yet as complete as I should wish’, he justified his haste to publish on the basis that because ‘France is thrusting her black savages still further into the heart of Germany… I do not propose to hold my hand any longer.’ Despite this, Morel felt confident in reporting that women and girls had gone missing and that the bodies of young women had been found on manure heaps.12 He listed a long catalogue of ‘Horrors’, most of them sexual. The ca
use of all these atrocities, Morel confidently asserted, was the ‘barely retrained bestiality of the black troops,’ adding that ‘for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results’.13

  Morel expanded his arguments in the pamphlet The Horror on the Rhine (1920), which ran to eight editions, the first two selling out within weeks. It was translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and, inevitably, German. Echoing claims made by the erstwhile German Chief of Staff, Erich Ludendorff, Morel pointed the finger of blame at the French for bringing in men ‘from tribes in a primitive state of development’.14 He explained that for Africans, ‘the sexual impulse is a more instinctive impulse, and precisely because it is so, a more spontaneous, fiercer less controllable impulse than among European peoples’. He reiterated, too, the fear that black soldiers, once deployed in Europe, would not thereafter be easily controlled. ‘The militarised African, who has shot and bayoneted white men in Europe,’ Morel wrote, ‘who has had sexual intercourse with white women in Europe, would lose his belief in white superiority.’15 This sort of view tapped directly into the fear that had haunted the British and their partners in the dominions since 1914, and which lay behind the British refusal to deploy black men from Africa and the Caribbean in combat duties on the Western Front.

  The Horror on the Rhine pamphlet fuelled a self-perpetuating, self-animating scandal. The author of one letter published in The Spectator in October 1920 felt that whether Morel’s ‘facts and figures are or are not true’ was an issue that:

  …scarcely affects the case. It is repugnant to ninety-nine out of a hundred Englishmen to think of black savages from the Congo being forced into any European homes. The consequences of the proximity of the Senegalese, who have been separated from their own women for two years, to white women, and conquered white women, are too obvious to require discussion. It may be said that we too have occupied various lands with coloured troops, but in this case there is surely a difference to be observed. The Indians are unrelated to the full-blooded negro; they have neither his passions nor his ferocity.16