Dust Clouds of War

by John Wilcox

  ‘I quite agree.’ Fonthill strode to where Driscoll and his second in command were standing watching the looting, seemingly quite unconcerned.

  ‘Colonel,’ shouted Simon as he approached. ‘Can’t you stop this? Putting a defeated town to the torch is something that went out in Wellington’s time. Your chaps shouldn’t behave like this.’

  Driscoll waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, don’t be stuffy, Fonthill. We’re not exactly the Household Cavalry, yer know. This is all part and parcel of colonial warfare. And my men are nearly all colonials. They’ve fought like hell today and I’m certainly not going to stop them having a bit of fun. Nobody’s getting injured. The town is virtually deserted. Relax, man.’

  Simon suddenly realised that Alice was at his side, notebook in hand. ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ she said. ‘I intend to quote you.’ And she turned on her heel and strode away, her head in the air.

  Driscoll sniffed. ‘Your famous wife, I suppose, Fonthill. Well, let her quote away. People back home should know what happens in times of war. Look at what the Germans have done in invading Belgium.’

  Fonthill opened his mouth to respond but thought better of it and turned and followed Alice. Immediately, he felt ashamed. Why hadn’t he stayed and argued with Driscoll? Why did he always walk away from arguments these days? Why was it always Alice who showed the moral courage in confrontations like this? Perhaps it was just the advancing years. He must be more … More what? He didn’t know. Anyway, it was a bit late to change his personality. He trudged on.

  The Fusiliers – who were almost completely responsible for the looting and fire-raising – were quickly dubbed ‘The Boozeliers’ by the rest of the British troops. But no news of their after-battle behaviour reached the news-stands back home. The army’s censorship saw to that, much to Alice’s disgust.

  Once the British had completed their demolition work, the invaders counted the cost of the expedition. Only ten of Stewart’s command had been killed and some twenty wounded, from the total of 1,500. According to prisoners, the completely outnumbered defenders, on the other hand, had sustained casualties amounting to more than fifty from their force of 350.

  On hearing these facts, Fonthill shook his head. ‘These German colonials can fight,’ he muttered. ‘They are brave, well led and well disciplined. If they can do as well as that, given how greatly they were outnumbered, then it doesn’t auger well for this campaign. We are facing a long, hard slog, from what I can see.’

  Jenkins wrinkled his nose. ‘Better ’ave a drink, then, while we can. Can you pass what’s left of your bottle, thank you, bach sir?’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The news of the triumph of the Bukoba raid was greeted with jubilation from a British public starved of success on the Western Front in Europe and from the hard-pressed staff in the War Office in Whitehall. Kitchener immediately cabled his congratulations to Tighe and Stewart and it seemed as though the sacking of the town had been forgotten. But not quite, for Driscoll’s Fusiliers were immediately sent on border duty in British East Africa, interpreted by most observers in the colony as retribution for their misdeeds.

  On his return to Mombasa, Fonthill received a note of thanks and congratulations from both Tighe and Stewart. Alice had, indeed, raised with Stewart the possibility of a spy in the British camp having alerted the enemy but the general had refuted any such suggestion and Alice had been forced to leave out any reference to possible sabotage in her report on the action. Nevertheless, she made a mental note to pursue the matter when circumstances allowed.

  The Germans continued their attacks on the Uganda Railway and they made a second excursion across the border of Rhodesia with an attack on a British outpost at Saisi. It was beaten off, although only after the stiffest of engagements. A second fillip to British morale in the colony, however, was received when news came from Cape Town that enemy forces in German South-West Africa had surrendered to South African troops under the command of General Botha.

  ‘Nice to ’ave that bloke on our side, eh?’ commented Jenkins. ‘I wouldn’t want to be fightin’ ’im again, after the runaround ’e gave us fifteen years ago.’

  Fonthill nodded. ‘Splendid soldier and good politician. He’s been having trouble as Prime Minister of South Africa with some of his Boer right-wingers who still hate the British, but he’s handled them well. We could do with him up here.’

  The three comrades had been given no further roles to play and Simon had begun to wonder if, despite the lauding of his work at Abercorn and Bukoba, he was now regarded as too old to be useful elsewhere in this vast and demanding theatre of war. He was on the point of suggesting that they all return to the farm in Rhodesia when suddenly attention was focussed once again on the eastern seaboard of the colony.

  When the war had broken out the Germans had only a handful of warships anywhere south of the Equator and only one, a nine-year-old light cruiser, the Königsberg, in Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa. Forewarned that hostilities could break out, the captain of the vessel, Max Looff, had no intention of being trapped within the port by the warships of the British navy who dominated the Indian Ocean. On the eve of the declaration of war, therefore, he slipped out of the port and took to the high seas.

  There was no way he could return home to Germany and he had no base from which to operate. But he determined to stay free as long as possible and so pose a threat to the British and to their merchant navy, whose many tramp steamers ploughed the waters off the German colony’s coast. Almost immediately he had his first success when he captured the British merchantman The City of Winchester, newly built at a cost of £400,000, in the Gulf of Aden. It was the British merchant navy’s first loss of the war and the cry ‘sink the Königsberg’ resounded loudly from the Admiralty.

  The hunt for the lone German cruiser therefore was launched immediately. In fact, Captain Looff’s early success was not repeated and he found it increasingly difficult to stay at sea with his supplies of coal running out and British warships combing the ocean for him. No ports were open to him. Where to go? He needed a hiding place.

  He found one in the maze of channels that formed the Rufiji Delta on the southern coast of the German colony at a place called Salale. It was ideal in that the Königsberg could penetrate far enough inland for its superstructure not to be seen by British ships patrolling the coast. And – at least in theory – it could slip its moorings at a moment’s notice to strike at passing merchant shipping and return to its hiding place without being detected. It was also supported by the German colonists, who sent food and other supplies to the fugitive vessel, tucked away in its jungle refuge. After a few days, coal began arriving in a succession of small craft sent from Dar es Salaam and, eventually, the cruiser was revictualled, refuelled and ready to put to sea. She lay for several days, moored in her deep-water lair, like some giant crocodile waiting for prey to pass the delta’s mouth.

  Then Captain Looff heard that a British cruiser had put in at Zanzibar, less than 200 miles to the north. Was she waiting there for reinforcements before combing the shoreline for his ship? He could not help but feel vulnerable. The British had so many ships! He decided to deliver a pre-emptive strike before the British Navy could concentrate its forces.

  He sailed at night and by dawn the harbour of Zanzibar was visible. Within it was the British cruiser, Pegasus, lying at the quayside. In fact, she was undergoing repairs to her boilers and was completely vulnerable. Looff did not know this but his 4.1-inch guns immediately opened fire at a range of some six miles. Unable to manoeuvre, the Pegasus was a sitting target and, although she did her best to respond with her venerable, fifteen-year-old guns, they were no match for the German armament and within minutes the British ship was ablaze. Loof continued to fire – fifty shells in all – until the stricken vessel began to sink.

  Looff had won the first naval battle of the Great War and he was jubilant. But one of his engines had broken down and he could not afford to linger, so, after firing at se
veral onshore targets, he retreated to the open sea, sinking a recently captured German ship on the way. Within hours, the Königsberg was snugly back in her lair in the Rufiji Delta, leaving havoc and a storm of cables from the Admiralty to Zanzibar in its wake.

  To the impetuous Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the presence of the German warship was an irritant – a constant rebuke to the most powerful navy in the world. She had to be found. Accordingly, he despatched the cruisers Chatham, Dartmouth and Weymouth to East Africa. As the months ticked by, intelligence began to mount, all pointing to the Rufiji Delta as the most likely hiding place of the Königsberg. And then a lookout on the Chatham’s masthead at the delta’s mouth reported seeing two masts inland. The elusive German cruiser had been found.

  Destroying it, however, was another matter. The Chatham used a spring tide to inch her way up the delta channels until she was virtually aground. She was near enough, however, to unleash a succession of broadsides on the enemy vessel at a range of 14,800 yards. This time it was Captain Looff’s turn to be outgunned and outranged and he was forced to sit and accept the punishment. Somehow, however, not one English shell landed on the German cruiser. For five days, the Chatham repeated the bombardment from long range, hampered by the shallow nature of the channel, but still the Königsberg escaped serious damage. Looff had erected a series of sophisticated shore defences in the jungle on the shoreline of the main channel, and although Chatham turned her guns on these, they too survived without being harmed.

  The change of target, however, allowed Looff to slip away even further upchannel so that, once again, the exact position of the fugitive ship was no longer known to the ships blockading it. And blockade it was, for although the mouth of the delta was forty miles across, there were sufficient ships available to prevent any attempt by the German cruiser to slip through the cordon.

  It was, in effect, a stalemate, and perhaps the sensible thing for the British to do was simply to let the Königsberg stew in her jungle juice for the remainder of the war, besieged by malevolent insects, baked by a tropical sun and sweating in the river’s intolerable humidity. But inactivity had never appealed to Winston Churchill and he turned to the latest weapon in the modern wartime armoury: the aeroplane.

  A 90hp Curtiss seaplane, armed with home-made bombs containing rock-blasting gelatine, was shipped out, complete with intrepid pilot, to find the enemy vessel and bomb her. Ninety horse power seemed to constitute a considerable amount of engineering muscle but, in the atmosphere of the delta, it was insufficient to lift even the very light aircraft to a safe height and it crashed near Okazi Island to the south.

  Aeroplane and pilot were saved and took off again two days later. This time, skimming the treetops, the fragile machine spotted the Königsberg. She was about twelve miles upriver, moored close to a little island and cleverly hidden by high trees. Her topgallant mast had been removed and verdant branches had been woven around her topmast. It was not possible to make a bombing attack using primitive bombs, and it was clearly impossible for large vessels to venture upstream near enough to bombard her. The strength and clever placing of Looff’s coastal defences also made it impossible to attack the ship by sending flotillas of small vessels through the channels to get close enough to launch torpedoes at her.

  Alas, the third flight of the Curtiss was its last and it came down about a mile upriver; the plane was lost and its pilot fell into the hands of the Germans and spent the rest of the war as a POW. It seemed that the cleverly hidden cruiser was virtually impervious to attack.

  The renewal of the campaigns on land – plus the demands exerted on the Royal Navy by the activities and eventual destruction of Admiral von Spee’s South Atlantic squadron off the Falkland Islands – diverted attention from the Königsberg for some months, but Churchill, chomping on his cigar in the Admiralty in London, was not the man to let sleeping cruisers lie. It seemed clear that an air attack offered the best means of destroying the cornered ship, or at least putting it out of action.

  Accordingly, the bustling, monocled Admiral Herbert King-Hall was despatched from the Cape to take personal command of the East Coast operations and with him came No. 4 Squadron of the newly formed Royal Air Service: twenty men led by Flight Lieutenants Cull and Watkins and two Sopwith 807 100hp seaplanes, specially shipped from Bombay.

  Unfortunately, the Sopwiths proved themselves to be little better in tropical conditions than the ill-fated Curtiss. They found it impossible to get airborne in the thin tropical air and one of the two was wrecked beyond repair almost straight away. The aviators found that, carrying bombs, it was only possible to take off in days of high humidity – and then carrying only one hour’s fuel and rising to a height of no more than 1,500 feet. Based on Niororo Island, some 100 miles south of Zanzibar, the aircraft were virtually useless.

  But Churchill’s and King-Hall’s faith in attacking the Königsberg by air was undiminished and, responding to the message that only ‘exceptionally powerful machines’ could overcome the tropical conditions, three Short seaplanes were sent out from Britain on board the Cunarder Laconia. On arrival, however, they were found to be old machines in a lamentable condition and certainly no improvement on either the Curtiss or the Sopwiths.

  King-Hall and Churchill continued their long-range arguments on the best way to crack the German nut. The admiral proposed sending a small boat armed with torpedoes upriver; the First Lord replied, ‘I do not think that the chances of a rowing boat with spar torpedo going 12 miles up a creek past a fortified fort with numerous trenches and trying to attack a ship with searchlights and modern guns is likely to be rosy.’ Churchill suggested sending in two battalions of Royal Marines with six 12-pounder guns; the Admiralty said that there were no Marines to spare.

  But the problem of by-passing the shore defences rankled with King-Hall. And it was here that a despondent, virtually redundant Simon Fonthill and his two companions crept into the picture.

  Consulting with his army colleague, General Wapshare, the admiral was told of the scouting role carried out at Bokuba by Fonthill, Jenkins and Mzingeli. He had heard of Fonthill and knew of his reputation for getting and operating behind enemy lines, but his ears pricked up when he was told that a black tracker, who had served with Fonthill and Jenkins for some years, was part of the trio.

  So it was that Simon received a message in Mombasa, asking him to meet with the admiral the following day. No reason was given.

  ‘Bloody ’ell,’ muttered Jenkins. ‘We’re not joinin’ the navy now, are we? You know I can’t swim.’

  Simon waved the note. ‘This tells me nothing of the reason why he wants to see me, but I am more than happy to go. I’ll take any job they offer me, even if it means commanding a rowing boat. I am fed up with moping around Mombasa while people are losing their lives upcountry and, of course, in Europe.’

  He told nothing of the appointment to Alice who, in the absence of further military action, was busy writing colour pieces about the terrain over which the war was being fought. Better to delay the inevitable argument about whether she could accompany him until he knew more about what lay ahead.

  On arrival, he was ushered into the Naval C-in-C’s office with no delay. He knew a little about the admiral: that he had joined the navy, Nelson fashion, as a boy of twelve in 1874, weighing, it was said, five stone and standing just under four feet four inches in height. As King-Hall stood to receive him, hand outstretched, Simon realised that the man seemed to have grown very little, although he had the width of chest and bushy eyebrows, plus the ever-present monocle, of a man of character.

  ‘Delighted, Fonthill,’ he barked. ‘Glad you could come in at short notice. Do take a seat. Tea?’

  ‘No thank you, sir.’

  ‘Oh, don’t sir me, my good fellow. We are almost the same age I would guess? How old are you, by the way?’

  Simon smiled inwardly. Ah, the key question early on! This was a man who didn’t beat about the bush. Best not to dissemble
.

  ‘I am a smidgeon under sixty, Admiral, so older than you, I fear. But I am as fit as a fiddle, as I think I have proven in Abercorn and, recently, at Bokuba. And, may I say, I am absolutely fed up with hanging about Mombasa, waiting for a job. I want to fight.’

  ‘Does you credit, Fonthill.’ The admiral extracted his monocle from under one shaggy eyebrow, breathed on it and began to polish it. He had a remarkably formidable face: jowled and heavily lined. Simon recalled that he liked to describe himself as ‘the ugliest man in the British Navy’. He wondered idly if he was married and if his wife cared about appearances.

  ‘Not worried too much about your advancing years, Fonthill, but what I have in mind will demand that you really are fit. What do you weigh?’

  ‘Oh, about eleven and a half stone. I’ve lost a bit in this climate.’

  ‘Haven’t we all. Good. A paunch will be rather out of place where I would like to send you.’

  ‘And where would that be, Admiral?’

  The little man stood. ‘Come over here,’ and he walked to where a large wall map of the British East Africa coastline dominated the room. He jabbed his finger onto the Rufiji Delta. ‘Ever been here?’

  ‘Ah,’ Simon nodded. ‘So it is to be the Königsberg, is it?’

  ‘It certainly is. Been in these channels, have you? I understand you’ve travelled widely in Africa?’

  Fonthill felt his heart sink. ‘Not been exactly there, Admiral.’ He paused and then his heart lifted a little. ‘But my man, Mzingeli – he’s a black man, of course, originally a tracker from the Malakala tribe in what is now called Rhodesia. He has been with me from my days with Rhodes, through the Boer War and would have come with us to Tibet if I had not needed him to run my farm here in Africa – but the point is that he does know the delta. He told me so when we were discussing the Königsberg the other day. He used to fish there, I gather. He’s a first-class chap. I would trust him with my life.’