The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Spee could have given the Falklands a wide berth, but once again his propensity for action got the better of him, even though his shell stocks were running low. As the Gneisenau closed on Cape Pembroke, its senior gunnery officer spotted the three-legged tripod masts characteristic of Dreadnoughts, the all-big-gun battleships pioneered by the British in 1905. Spee turned away, confident that he had the speed to outdistance battleships - if indeed they were there. But battle cruisers had been developed by Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, for action exactly like this. They combined the hitting power of the battleship with the manoeuvrability of the cruiser. Not only did they mount 12-inch guns, but they could make speeds of up to 25 knots (as opposed to the Dreadnought battleship’s 21 knots). They forfeited deck armour to do so, but when on the oceans, with plenty of manoeuvring space, the risk was - it seemed - neutralised by their ability to engage at great ranges and at great speed.

  In fact, the British ships managed 26 knots, while the German light cruisers, their hulls befouled by the long cruise, made 18. Inflexible opened fire at 16,500 yards, although her guns were calibrated for 12,000 yards. Sturdee avoided closing beyond about 14,000 yards, the maximum range for the Germans’ 8.2-inch main guns. Spee looked for a break in the weather, knowing that the British had the afternoon and evening of a South Atlantic summer to deal with their foe. Scharnhorst was sunk at 4.17 p.m. Aboard the Gneisenau, ‘debris and corpses were accumulating, icy water dripped in one place and in another gushed in streams through panels and shell-holes, extinguishing fires and drenching men to the bone‘.9 Out of ammunition, at 6.02 she, too, went down.

  The battle of the Falkland Islands a photograph taken just after 6 p m. on 8 December 1914 from Invincible of her sister battle cruiser, Inflexible, picking up survivors from Gneisenau

  One of Spee’s two sons, Heinrich, drowned with the Gneisenau. The other, Otto, was on the light cruiser, Nürnberg. She was overhauled and sunk, as was Leipzig. Only Dresden escaped: she was not run down until 14 March. By the end of 1914 the German cruiser threat to Britain’s maritime trade was all but eliminated. So large was Britain’s merchant fleet that the achievements of Spee, Muller and others were in statistical terms insignificant. By January 1915 German surface vessels had accounted for 215,000 of the 273,000 tons of merchant shipping sunk, but that was only 2 per cent of British commercial tonnage.

  WAR IN AFRICA

  However, one German cruiser continued her operational effectiveness beyond the year’s end. SMS Königsberg began the war attacking trade off the coast of German East Africa. She abandoned her base at Dar es Salaam for exactly the same reasons as Spee’s cruisers left Tsingtao. Instead she established herself in the Rufiji delta about two hundred miles to the south. By November she was blocked in, but as she drew up the river the overhanging branches protected her from aerial observation. Having consumed the efforts of a blockading squadron of twenty-five vessels for over half a year, she was finally sunk on 11 July 1915 by two shallow-draught monitors. Even then her war continued. Her crew and her guns, dismounted from the ship, joined the forces of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in the longest campaign in Germany’s global war.

  Lettow-Vorbeck became a legend. Forty-four years old when the war broke out, he was physically tough and extremely aggressive. He did not surrender until 25 November 1918, two weeks after the armistice in Europe. Here, at least, was a German commander who had never been defeated. But he became a legend to his enemies as well. Lettow-Vorbeck led them the length of East Africa from Uganda to the Zambezi, but they never caught him up. Their incompetence played a large part, but it suited them better to believe that he had conducted a guerrilla campaign. That was nonsense. Lettow-Vorbeck was a Prussian general staff officer, with all the preconceptions that that implies. His African soldiers, or askaris, were organised in independent field companies, and were trained in bush fighting, but his inclination was to seek battle, not shun it. Cut off from Germany, he was almost entirely reliant on what he could get from within the colony: fighting for fighting’s sake both depleted his ammunition stocks and endangered his irreplaceable European officers and non-commissioned officers. As with Spee and his cruisers, Lettow’s strength lay in dispersal and in striking against weakness, forgoing the temptation to concentrate for battle. Like Spee, Lettow could not resist the pressures of the traditions in which he had been brought up.

  A true guerrilla strategy would have rested the defence of German East Africa on the opportunities for fomenting revolution in the adjacent colonies of the enemy. The British colonial service was depleted by the need for its younger officials to join the armed forces, and the Belgians to the west and the Portuguese to the south had the reputation of being the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical of all the European colonial powers. Lettow-Vorbeck did not exploit this chance: he saw the fighting as a matter between armies in the field and the territories as simply ground over which they operated.

  By the same token, he never acknowledged - and perhaps never realised - how much he owed to the civil administration of German East Africa. Although there were certainly areas of the colony which gave support to the British forces, the Germans never had to cope with insurrection in their rear. The German governor, Heinrich Schnee, was not enthusiastic about the war, which he saw as undermining the progressive effects of colonisation. Initially, he embraced the Congo Act. For Lettow-Vorbeck, German East Africa fulfilled a purely military function: to draw British troops off from the main theatre in Europe. This could never be accomplished by neutrality. Lettow-Vorbeck therefore saw himself as constantly at odds with Schnee. In reality, he could never have lasted as long in the field as he did without the efforts of the civil administration.

  Primarily this was a matter of logistics. British naval supremacy meant that the Germans in Africa sustained the war very largely on the basis of their own resources. But it was also a matter of men. Many of them were soldiers procured through the agencies of colonial government. France enlisted over 600,000 soldiers in its colonies, the vast majority in West and North Africa. It even used its African soldiers in the war in Europe. The Germans took strong exception to what they interpreted as the barbarisation of war, although the performance of the French Senegalese was not as effective as their reputation. While European soldiers were citizens of the states on whose behalf they were fighting, Africans were - in general - pressed men or mercenaries. Some served on both sides in the course of the war. Kazibule Dabi, a German askari, was captured by the British:They said that we should become soldiers ... We asked them how much they would pay us if we enlisted. They said one pound, one , shilling, and fourpence [a month]. We told them that we would not accept that. We told them that when we were on the German side we used to receive three pounds and ten shillings. We refused and there was great talk about it. When they saw that we were not willing to give way, they decided not to give us food.... As a result we ended up by enlisting.10

  African porters could prove as vulnerable to diseases in East Africa as did European soldiers. The long distances required many to march way beyond their local areas, with changes to their diets and exposure to new climatic conditions

  However, the majority of the Africans who served were not soldiers but labourers. Sub-Saharan Africa had few roads or railways, and pack animals fell prey to the tsetse fly. Supplies were therefore carried by human beings. The British recruited over a million carriers for the East African campaign, drawn from the Belgian Congo, Ruanda, Uganda, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and Mozambique. At the end of the war, the British district commissioner in what had been German East Africa, an area where both sides had recruited labour, reported that a third of the male taxable population had been taken. Mobile operations demanded at least two or three carriers for every soldier, and the demands grew exponentially as the line of communications lengthened. The longer the line of march, the more likely that the carriers themselves would consume the loads they carried. Assuming an average ration of 3 lb per day and a load of 60 lb, a
line of communications of ten daily marches needed as many porters as there were soldiers in the front line. A march of three weeks and the porter consumed the entire load himself. Thus there was a trade-off between the nutritional needs of the porters and those of the troops. Porters in British pay in West Africa were given daily rations on two scales - either 2,702 or 1,741 calories - but in East Africa in 1917 porters were getting less than 1,000 calories a day. Natives were assumed to be more resistant to the effects of the climate and its local diseases, but very often they had been marched out of their own localities and their resistance to disease had been undermined by changes in diet, by poorly cooked food and, above all, by its insufficiency. Among East and West Africans employed as carriers the death rate was 20 per cent over the war as a whole: this was higher than the death rate for British soldiers in the war.

  On 15 September 1918, with the campaign reaching its conclusion, a doctor with Lettow-Vorbeck’s force, Ludwig Deppe, wrote: ‘Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture; our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years War.’11 For Schnee German colonialism was an end in itself; for Lettow-Vorbeck it was a means to an end. Both were defeated. Germany lost its colony: its active defence did not begin until March 1916 and it was overrun by November 1917. Thereafter German troops fought largely on Portuguese territory. In doing so, they did not draw off troops which could have been deployed in Europe. The British decision at the outset of the war, that only local forces should be used in the elimination of German colonies, broadly interpreted, remained good. Although about 160,000 troops, both British and Belgian, were deployed against Lettow-Vorbeck in the course of the East African campaign, few of them would have been available for the western front. Indeed, the fact that the campaign was not allowed to detract from the British army’s effort in France and Flanders was one reason why it was so protracted.

  The other British decision at the outset of the war, that the objectives of operations outside Europe were naval, created - unbeknown to them - an almost perfect symmetry between their objectives and the Germans‘. Precisely because of British maritime supremacy, the Germans had little intention of defending the coast, and planned instead to withdraw inland so as to use the interior in order to prolong their resistance. Germany’s cruisers were to put to sea and use alternative bases for coaling and supplies. Thus the British secured several quick successes but were then baffled as to why the fighting continued. The mutual incomprehension prevailed throughout the war and even after.

  The first speedy victory for the British was also the most important. By 25 August the wireless station in Togoland at Kamina, which linked Germany’s other African stations with Nauen in Germany itself, was destroyed, following a British invasion by the Gold Coast Regiment. The war in Africa lasted four more years but the principal objective had been achieved within three weeks of its outbreak.

  In East Africa, the principal port, Dar es Salaam, was a long way from the nearest British colony, Kenya. Moreover, the activities of the Konigsberg revealed to the Admiralty that the coastline contained several bases from which a cruiser could operate. The Admiralty therefore wanted mastery of the whole coast. The King’s African Rifles had been designed for internal colonial policing and were not strong enough for such a task. Two conclusions followed: the principal garrison of the British empire, India, was asked to provide the troops, and Tanga, because it was in the north, was chosen as the first target. It stood at the foot of the Northern Railway, and an attack on it could be combined with a thrust on the other end of the line which reached into the foothills by Mount Kilimanjaro.

  On 2 November 1914 Indian Expeditionary Force B went ashore at an undefended beach close to Tanga. The town was held by a single company, and Lettow-Vorbeck’s attention was focused on the danger to the other end of the railway. But the preparation of IEF B had not been a high priority for the Government of India, which had already diverted its best troops to other theatres - France, Mesopotamia and Egypt. ‘They constitute the worst in India, and I tremble to think what may happen if we meet serious opposition’, the expedition’s intelligence officer, Richard Meinertzhagen, wrote in his diary. ‘The senior officers are nearer to fossils than active, energetic leaders of men.’12 They had been at sea for the best part of a month, and they were not trained in bush warfare. Moreover there was no attack from the other end of the northern line until 3 November. Lettow-Vorbeck could have suffered a major defeat at the very outset of the campaign; instead he was able to snatch a crucial victory. IEF B’s dilatory and demoralised approach gave him time to concentrate seven companies by the morning of 4 November, with two more due to arrive that day. Deprived of effective artillery support by a decision not to disembark its guns, and confused by the thick bush, IEF B none the less fought its way into Tanga by late afternoon on 4 November. At this juncture some German company commanders instructed their buglers to sound the recall in order to regroup. But the signal was mistaken as one for a general retreat. On the British side, Meinertzhagen recognised the call for what it was, but others insisted it was the charge. For a second time the Germans were given a chance to recover an apparently irredeemable situation. Tanga was empty and, as British naval gunfire at last began to take effect, Lettow-Vorbeck prepared to continue the fight to the west of the town. But the British commander, A. E. Aitken, had decided to give up. IEF B had completed its evacuation by 3.20 p.m. on 5 November. Tanga was only the first of Britain’s amphibious expeditions to fail because of divided ministerial authority, lack of army and navy cooperation, and confused and irresolute command.

  Lettow-Vorbeck was now given a breathing space of over a year. This was the product not of his own efforts but of those of the men defending Germany’s colonies in other parts of Africa. Given the inadequacies of the Indian forces in East Africa, the British had two alternative sets of ‘local’ troops to turn to. One was the South African Defence Force, and the other was the West African Frontier Force. But both were fully committed, the former in South-West Africa until July 1915, and the latter in the Cameroons until January 1916. Although Lettow-Vorbeck never acknowledged it, the conduct of the second campaign in particular stands comparison with his own achievement - and indeed underpinned it.

  Just as Australia and New Zealand harboured ‘sub-imperialist’ designs in the south Pacific, so South Africa - particularly its defence minister, Jan Smuts - wanted to push the frontier of the Union to the Zambezi river. By securing the ports of Delagoa Bay and Beira, South Africa could open up the Transvaal and further the interests of the Afrikaner population, many of whom were still smarting from defeat at the hands of the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902. The war in Europe threatened to deepen their feeling of grievance : the most obvious contribution South Africa could make to the British war effort would be to overrun German South-West Africa (modern Namibia) - a move which would hit a power which had been pro-Boer and which would benefit the status of the English-dominated Cape Town as a port. Smuts’s scheme could mollify Afrikaner sentiment, but it had a big hurdle to overcome: the territory up to the Zambezi was already part of Portuguese Mozambique. Smuts’s solution was to conquer German East Africa, keep the northern part for Britain, give the southern part to Portugal, and ask the Portuguese to give the southern part of its existing colony to South Africa.

  To achieve this the South Africans were prepared to provide troops to conquer East Africa. But in 1914 and 1915 the South African forces were not free. First, they had to deal with rebellion in their own territory. The idea that Britain was engaged in a war for the defence of small nations did not convince those who had been on the receiving end of the British army in 1899-1902. Second, Britain had asked the Union to seize the harbours and wireless stations of German South-West Africa. The commandant-general of the defence forces opposed the invasion of German territory, and he and othe
r senior officers resigned. Open rebellion flared in October, but the Germans could not give it effective support from across the frontier and it was suppressed by early December. Thereafter the conquest of South-West Africa was carried through in six months.

  In 1915 the South African government could rely on the loyalty of white Rhodesians - even if not all Boers - for the invasion of German South-west Africa By 1916. 40 per cent of Rhodesia’s white adult male population was on active service.

  The South Africans’ opening experience of the First World War, in a territory adjacent to their own, was sufficiently like the Boer War to leave intact too many of the assumptions that they had inherited from that war. Smuts had led a commando of about 400 men in the Boer War and in South-West Africa he commanded a column of three brigades. Both campaigns were fought in comparable climates, with the horse as the pivot of manoeuvre. When Smuts took over the East African command at the beginning of 1916, he had a ration strength of 73,300 men deployed for the conquest of a tropical colony, much of it barely mapped. He was a fine leader on a personal level, a man of courage and intelligence, but he had limited command experience and no staff training. None the less, his first step was to dismantle the professional staff that had been put in place and bring in men like himself - South Africans without proper training and devoid of local knowledge. His second was to manoeuvre the Germans out of their colony rather than fight them: ‘he told me’, Meinertzhagen wrote, ‘that he could not afford to go back to South Africa with the nickname “Butcher Smuts”.’13