2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth

by Giles Foden

  An expert on every subject (even in the presence of genuine experts), Spicer also enjoyed telling jokes (nobody laughed at them) and singing (he was invariably off-key). It is not surprising that his fellow officers thought of him as at best peculiar, at worst downright dangerous. It didn’t help that he spoke in a curious manner. Nor that he tended to swagger and throw his weight around. In his groundbreaking history The Great War in Africa (1987), Byron Farwell describes Spicer as ‘a large, muscular, round-shouldered man with thin, close-cropped hair, a Vandyke beard, and light grey eyes, he affected a nasal drawl…He indulged in a proclivity for browbeating waiters and others serving on lower rungs of life than his own.’

  Spicer had always wanted to be a hero. After joining the training ship Britannia in 1890 as a cadet, he advanced some way through the ranks, serving in the Gambia and on the China Station, where he made the first hydrographic survey of the Yangtse River. But a series of bumbling errors and catastrophic misjudgements had left him stuck in the naval hierarchy, the oldest lieutenant commander in the Navy.

  There was, for example, that time during the Channel manoeuvres of 1905 when he suggested it would be a good idea for two destroyers to drag a line strung from one to the other in a periscope-hunting exercise. He nearly sank a submarine. Or there was the time when, in an exercise intended to test the defences of Portsmouth Harbour, he drove his ship on to a nearby beach. He was court-martialled for that.

  He was also court-martialled for sinking a Liberty Boat in a collision, after smashing his destroyer into it. Someone was killed. The incident was reported in the local papers. Lieutenant Commander Spicer-Simson had something of a reputation for disaster.

  In August 1914, at the start of the War, Spicer was put in charge of a coastal flotilla consisting of two gunboats and six boarding tugs operating out of Ramsgate. He felt confident enough of the anchorage of his gunboats to come onshore and entertain his wife and some lady friends in a hotel. He could see HMS Niger, one of the ships in question, well enough from the window, could he not?

  Fate answered this question with a resounding Yes.

  Yes, from the window of the hotel bar Spicer could see Niger as the Germans torpedoed her. He could watch her sink, too, in just 20 minutes. And going down with her, he could see his hopes of advancement to the highest echelon of the Navy disappear beneath the waves.

  Such was the state of Spicer’s fortunes on 21 April 1915 when a big-game hunter called John Lee arrived at the Admiralty with an appointment to see the new First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Jackson. Lee had great experience of Lake Tanganyika. He also had a scheme to bring it under British control. Britain had no ships on the lake and it was not an area Sir Henry knew anything about, so he was happy to listen to Lee’s plan and called for a map.

  How did the War stand in April 1915 on the ‘forgotten front’? The conflict on the plains, lakes and mountains of Central and East Africa had almost slipped from the mind of the British authorities. On a wooden chart table at the offices of the First Sea Lord at Admiralty House, Whitehall, Lee showed Sir Henry the lie of the land…

  Here was German East Africa, comprising the present territory of Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Here were Kenya and Uganda, under British control. So too were the Rhodesias Northern and Southern (now Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively). Further down was South Africa, which was British—though some of the Boers with whom Britain had fought a war between 1899 and 1902 could not be trusted. The South Africans had invaded German South-west Africa (now Namibia) at the start of the War. Superior in numbers, by September 1914 the British South Africans had more or less overrun the South-west German territory, though a pro-German rebellion by Boer officers rumbled on until February 1915.

  The Germans had more success in East Africa, mainly thanks to their force of Schütztruppen. These highly trained units of German officers and African askaris respected their commander, a military genius called Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. In November 1914 he had repelled a British landing of troops from India at the northern Tanganyikan port of Tanga. This was ‘a major setback for British ambitions in east Africa’, as Ross Anderson notes in his 2002 study of the battle—and it left many British guns and other supplies in von Lettow’s hands. Another problem was the continuing existence of a big German cruiser called the Königsberg, which was hidden in the swamps of the Rufiji delta further south near Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa. If we compare the German army marching into Belgium at the start of the War with the African experience a year or so later, we get a sense of how utterly different were the two theatres of conflict. Here is journalist Richard Harding Davis describing the Germans entering Brussels, mesmerised by their massed grey uniforms:

  It is a grey-green…the grey of the hour just before daybreak, the grey of unpolished steel, of mist among green trees. I saw it first in the Grande Place in front of the Hotel de Ville. It was impossible to tell if in that noble square there was a regiment or a brigade. You saw only a fog that melted into the stones, blended with the ancient house fronts, that shifted and drifted, but left nothing at which you could point.

  It was, Davis adds, ‘typical of the German staff striving for efficiency to leave nothing to chance’.

  In Africa, by contrast, von Lettow’s Schütztruppen—cut off by British naval power from German supply lines—quickly became a raggedy, make-do outfit that depended on chance and thrived on opportunism. Motor fuel was improvised from cocoa; quinine was brewed from the barks of trees; ammunition was captured from the British. Hippopotamus were shot for their meat and fat, the latter being used to make candles and soap. As Hew Strachan points out (in The First World War, 2001), the most important difference between the two theatres was that the individual was not tyrannised, as he was on the western front, by the industrialisation of warfare.

  Yet if there was a great material and psychological difference between von Lettow’s rag-tag force and the Prussian Junker—the ‘road-hog of Europe’ as Lloyd George once described it—they shared the same philosophy, the same sense of belonging to a military brotherhood. It was an emotional business, as the memoirs of one German captain reveal. Describing the moment when the German Army crossed the Rhine into Belgium, Walter Bloem wondered: ‘Was it real or was I living in a dream, in a fairy-tale, in some heroic epic of the past?’

  No stranger himself to such feelings of fraternal heroism, von Lettow had something else, too. Nous, you might call it: that quality of cunning which brings Odysseus home to Ithaca and saves the fox from the hounds. Like Odysseus, von Lettow did not follow a straight line. He made the British chase him all over Central and East Africa.

  Nor would Spicer-Simson, on the great journey that was to come, follow straight lines. But he wanted to. He strayed from the path through error, showed nous not by design but by mistake. It was his dream, his hope, to be an epic hero. What kind of hero he turned out to be instead—well, that is what this book hopes to show. It is not necessarily the story of a career in decline, because there was nowhere left for him to fall. Much later, his friend Dr Hanschell, who would accompany him to Africa, recalled Spicer’s dilapidated office in the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty office:

  Light filtered through the upper part of a dusty window and showed its meagre furnishings—a filing cabinet, an empty fire grate with a bare yellow mantelpiece, and above it a signed photograph of His Majesty the King in a heavy frame. There were two swivel armchairs, and two desks piled high with papers—it appeared that it was only the room, and not Spicer, that was in the Intelligence Division, for the papers dealt with the transfer of Merchant Marine Officers and Seamen to the Royal Naval Reserve. A cracked teapot on a tray with two empty cups was perched on a corner of the mantelpiece.↓

  ≡ Peter Shankland, The Phantom Flotilla (1968).

  To Spicer at that time it must have seemed that the First World War was his last chance to make good and win the laurels he longed for. His sculptor brother Theodore Spicer-Simson was famous for his portrait medallion
s of celebrities such as the conductor Toscanini and the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Why shouldn’t he have his share of glory too? Why was he now stuck in a desk job in Whitehall and not out on the high seas in the thick of the action?

  John Lee, the big-game hunter, explained to the Admiral that the Germans had two steamers under military orders on Lake Tanganyika: the 60-ton Hedwig von Wissmann and the 45-ton Kingani. There were two petrol motor boats as well. One of them, the Peter, had been donated to the German forces by the Gesellschaft fur Schlaftkrankheitsbekampfung (The Society for the Fight against Sleeping Sickness). The Germans also had a fleet of dhows and a number of ‘Boston whalers’—wooden boats based on an American design that were originally brought to East Africa in the early 1900s.

  Lee had also heard vague talk of another steamer (his spies among the Holo-holo tribe had definitely said the Germans had three big boats), but he made no particular mention of it to Sir Henry. Nor did the Belgian army intelligence report which Sir Henry commissioned as a follow-up. This omission, as it turned out, would have devastating consequences.

  Lee’s scheme to attack the German steamers was simple in conception, but difficult in practice: if two British motor boats could be sent to South Africa, up the railway to the Belgian Congo, and dragged through mountains and bush to the lake, they could then sink or disable the Hedwig and the Kingani. Taking control of Lake Tanganyika in this manner would allow Belgian forces from the Congo and British forces from Kenya and Northern Rhodesia to drive the Germans back to the eastern seaboard. That was the idea, anyway.

  In one of the Admiralty’s beautifully appointed rooms—all oak panels and heavy chairs and paintings of Drake and Franklin—naval experts quizzed Lee on why it was not better to take much bigger boats. The Germans had taken out the Hedwig in sections in 1900, they told him. Why could we not do the same?

  The hunter explained that African spies told the Germans everything. If they heard that a big ship was being assembled on the lakeshore they would land and try to damage or destroy it, just as they had done with the Belgian ship the Alexandre del Commune. This, and associated problems with the supply of parts, was why the Belgians were keeping back their biggest steamer, the Baron Dhanis, which remained in pieces at a railhead in the Congolese interior. After great energy and expense in transporting similar sections of a large warship to Africa, the same thing was likely to happen to a British scheme of this nature. The advantage of using light motor boats instead was that they could be put into action the moment they reached the lakeshore.

  Accepting this argument, the Navy then asked Lee why it was not possible to launch the expedition from British territory in Northern Rhodesia at the lake’s southern end, thereby avoiding the likelihood of disagreements with the Belgians. Lee answered that the southern end of the lake was too far from the German base in Kigoma, 200 miles away. The issues were further thrashed out by the War Office, when it discovered that Belgian forces were currently spread out along Lake Tanganyika, trying to keep the Germans at bay. If the Allies could get command of the water, men could easily cross and start attacking the German railway, which came in to Kigoma.

  Lee was right; it made sense to attack immediately opposite Kigoma and his route was the best one. Sir Henry ratified the plan, largely on a matter of principle. ‘It is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship,’ he noted in a memo.

  The only question remaining was who would command the Naval Africa Expedition? Sir Henry sought out candidates, but the service was short of officers. He drew a blank and promptly handed over control of the idea to his junior, Admiral Sir David Gamble. Despite its strategic importance, the war in Africa was still regarded as little more than a sideshow.

  The First Sea Lord could not be blamed for handing on the baton of the Naval Africa Expedition. It must have seemed like a fanciful proposal compared to his other business at the time. The Gallipoli operation had put the Navy under a great deal of pressure. Sir Henry had been personally involved in working out the detailed plans for a naval attack there—as opposed to a joint naval and military attack, which is what Churchill favoured. Sir Henry’s predecessor, the combative and cunning 74-year-old Admiral Fisher, believed only ships should be used. But Fisher had resigned on 15 May when it became clear that delays and disagreements were provoking errors of judgement. It was taken as read in the House of Commons that Fisher’s opposition to landing troops meant the less experienced and impetuous Churchill was wrong to have insisted upon it. And so it seemed. Three days after Lee’s visit, Australian and New Zealand troops had landed on the Gallipoli peninsula too late to prevent a strengthening of the Turkish position. Men were dying.

  The affair provoked a crisis in the Liberal war leadership that went to the very heart of British politics. Two days after Fisher’s resignation, Prime Minister Asquith announced in Parliament that a Coalition government would be formed comprising both Tories and Liberals. Part of the deal was Churchill’s removal from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty, which was insisted upon by one of his fiercest opponents, the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law. A ‘teetotal, chain-smoking Scots-Canadian devotee of the chessboard’,↓ Bonar Law was one of many to loathe Churchill for crossing the floor and joining the Liberals more than a decade earlier.

  ≡ Graham Stewart, Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party (London, 1999).

  Churchill, who at the end of the year would leave to serve in the trenches, was aware of the planned operation on Lake Tanganyika. Indeed, he would have a role to play in its endgame. But for now he was persona non grata in political circles.

  All this was going on, more or less, while Sir David was planning the Naval Africa Expedition. He had yet to find somebody to take command. As a civilian, Lee was not eligible (though it was pointed out he had served in the Anglo-Boer War). The hunter gladly accepted the position of second in command and immediately set about organising the transport of the boats with South African Railways, and hiring African carriers to help haul them over the mountains in the Congo. He also began selecting members of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) who might be suitable for such a venture: men with experience of Africa and machinery.

  As well as seeking out various specialists, Lee was also looking for people who could keep their mouths shut. As one of his recruits later recalled:

  It was important that no news of the departure or object of the expedition should leak out and get to the enemy. Consequently, officers and men were put on their honour not to divulge, even to their nearest and dearest, where they were bound nor what was their mission.↓

  ≡ Frank J. Magee in ‘Transporting a Navy through the Jungles of Africa in Wartime’, National Geographic, October 1922.

  Meanwhile Sir David focused on the problem of finding a leader. It seemed a Royal Marines Officer would be ideal for an expedition like this, and he began casting about. Most marines were on active service on the high seas, but he happened to look in on a certain major working in the Intelligence Division. Next to the Major—in an office with a cracked teapot and a photograph of the King above an empty grate—sat a man named Spicer-Simson. He was an ordinary naval officer. Or seemed to be.

  ‘And how do you think I got the command?’ Spicer later asked the expedition’s medic, Dr Mother McCormick Hanschell, in that same room one morning a few months later. ‘Simply by eavesdropping!’

  The doctor had known Spicer for a long time. Their wives had been schoolfriends and were reacquainted by chance when both couples were staying at a hotel off London’s Russell Square. He knew Spicer well and he also knew, in the words of that brilliant naval historian Peter Shankland (who interviewed Dr Hanschell at length shortly before he died in 1968), how ‘mischievous fortune seemed to invest everything he did with a faint tinge of absurdity’. Everyone seemed to know this, actually, which explained why Spicer was the oldest lieutenant commander in the Navy. Or had been. For the purpose
s of the Naval Africa Expedition, he’d been promoted to acting commander.

  Given his chequered career, it is surprising that Spicer was ever considered for the post, let alone given it. Perhaps Sir David saw some streak of heroism in Spicer hitherto unperceived or perhaps, as seems more likely, there was simply nobody else available. In any case, promotion meant Spicer was at long last permitted to wear gilded oak leaves on his cap. He had coveted them for so long. And perhaps, while setting his newly adorned cap on his head the moment it came back from Gieves (later Gieves and Hawkes), the naval tailors in Bond Street, Spicer smiled at his mirror image. Things were going to turn out just fine. The years of romancing were over. At last he could be what he had always known he could be: the best of men.

  Or maybe not. When Spicer invited Dr Hanschell to join his African expedition, the Major who shared that spartan office tapped his temple while Spicer was speaking, implying he was mad. He was probably right. But Africa was an exciting proposition and a man had to do his duty in wartime. Dr Hanschell accepted and his first responsibility the next day was to visit a Lieutenant Higgins, one of the men Lee had selected, who was ill.

  Spicer had sworn the doctor to absolute secrecy, so when he returned home the night after he had accepted the job, he told his wife only that he was joining Spicer on an expedition abroad.

  ‘Oh, didn’t he tell you, dear?’ she replied. ‘You’re going to Lake Tanganyika via Rhodesia and the Congo River. Amy Spicer-Simson telephoned me this afternoon and we had a long talk about it.’

  The following day Dr Hanschell did his best with Lieutenant Higgins, but it was hopeless. The man had blackwater fever from a previous tour of duty as a mining engineer in Africa. He died the day after. It did not seem a good omen for the Naval Africa Expedition; but the doctor was a strict rationalist and did not believe in omens. Undeterred, he threw himself into the task of collecting the necessary medical supplies for the expedition.