The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  The key to his approach was the use of mounted infantry on the lines favoured by the Afrikaners in both their previous campaigns. But horses in East Africa inevitably succumbed to the tsetse fly. The British knew which were the worst regions for fly, because German veterinarians had obligingly supplied them with maps before the war, but this information was not incorporated in the campaign plan. Basic procedures to prolong the horse’s life were not observed. Equine wastage ran at 100 per cent per month in 1916.

  Smuts’s transport services had assumed that he would not begin his advance until after the March-May rainy season was over. They were wrong. Humans succumbed to disease caused by malnutrition as supply collapsed. The medical services were no more integrated in Smuts’s organisation than were the veterinary. For men the principal problems were dysentery and malaria, which tended to be debilitating rather than fatal. The 2nd Rhodesia Regiment had an effective strength of 800 men, but with a wastage rate of 20 per cent per month it was often reduced to 100 men. Between March 1915 and January 1917 it deployed 1,038 all ranks in East Africa, and suffered only 68 deaths - 36 in action and 32 from disease. But it had 10,626 cases of sickness, one-third of them from malaria, a largely preventable disease.

  By the beginning of September 1916 the results of Smuts’s efforts looked impressive on the map. He had reached and overrun the central railway and he had control of Dar es Salaam. But he put no effort into establishing the German port and its communications infrastructure as the base for his push into the south of the German colony. His administrative staff remained at Tanga, and his principal base was still in Uganda, at Mombasa. When he was recalled to London in January 1917 to represent South Africa at the Imperial War Cabinet his forces stood on the Mgeta and Rufiji rivers. He claimed victory, presenting the war in East Africa as all but finished, the result of a great South African feat of arms. In reality, the advance had eventually stalled. The December rains, which Smuts had attempted to ignore, had turned the area between the Mgeta and the Rufiji into a continuous swamp. The Rufiji itself was a torrent hundreds of yards across. The nearest railhead was Mikese, 255 km away. The troops were sodden, hungry and sick. His successor, A. R. Hoskins, postponed any further action until April 1917.

  The German Schutztruppen were intended for internal policing, not for fighting foreign powers. Although professional soldiers, their loyalty was not as unconditional as post-war German propagandists, anxious to regain Germany’s African territories, claimed

  Smuts was determined that his campaign was going to prove the invincibility of the white man. The South-West African campaign had been an affair of whites only. When in 1915 mixed-race Africans had offered to rise in revolt in support of the South Africans, the latter rejected their cooperation for racial reasons. On arrival in East Africa the Boers had dubbed the German askaris ‘damned Kaffirs’. Over the course of 1916 Smuts had had to change his tune, at least privately. Africans seemed to have greater resistance to local diseases than Europeans. By the time Smuts left the East African theatre, it was clear that the only way to carry the fighting forward was to use African soldiers. But, by claiming that the campaign was all but over, and by implying that all that remained was to mop up the vestiges of resistance in the colony’s remotest corner, Smuts kept the self-esteem of the white man intact.

  The Africanisation of the East African campaign was also dependent on the completion of the conquest of the Cameroons. This had taken far longer than anybody on the British side expected - eighteen months - because nobody had appreciated the true nature of German intentions. The British wanted to secure Douala on the coast, the Cameroons’ principal port and wireless station, an objective entirely consonant with their original policy of August 1914. By 27 September 1914 they had done so, without a shot being fired. The French in French Equatorial Africa had meanwhile embarked on their own campaign in the south, without approval from Paris. They had two objectives: to recover territory ceded to the Germans in settlement of the 1911 Moroccan crisis, and to take the war into German territory. In the main the Germans in the south of the colony had no forewarning of hostilities, so these initial objectives, too, were soon achieved.

  Neither Paris nor London had any desire to conquer the German Cameroons. The problem for both governments was that they did not know how to stop what they had begun. The Germans still controlled the bulk of their colony, and their forces were intact. In 1913 they had drawn up a plan to defend the colony not from its periphery but from its interior. Its focus was Ngaundere in the northern highlands, well defended by nature and agriculturally productive. In the Cameroons, as opposed to East Africa, the German civil authorities remained paramount. So the Cameroons did not become simply a battlefield, sacrificed to the greater struggle in Europe, but was held because its defenders believed in the merits of colonisation, and especially German colonisation, as an end in itself. These assumptions had two implications. First, the Germans could rely on local support, and this in turn gave their defence greater resilience. Second, the initial losses at Douala and elsewhere were not of major strategic significance.

  The French and - more particularly - the British never appreciated the underpinnings of German strategy. As a result, their conquest lacked direction and purpose, too often hitting the Germans hard where it did not hurt them. On 10 March 1915 London, in conformity with the original policy of August 1914, told the British commander in the Cameroons, Charles Dobell, to go over to the defensive. But a month previously the governor-general of French Equatorial Africa, M. Merlin, had convened a meeting in Brazzaville designed to wrest control of the French side of the campaign from its column commanders on the spot and impose an overall plan. It adopted Yaounde as the focus of the different advances, so that the columns’ efforts should have mutually supporting effects. Merlin’s plan was not lacking in sense, but it did of course completely neglect the fact that the Germans’ pivot was not Yaounde but Ngaundere. The allies intercepted a signal which revealed Ngaundere’s importance on 4 February, but the intelligence was dismissed by Merlin.

  Dobell’s initial attempt to reach Yaounde failed. The French attacked from two directions, the south, where progress was slow and disjointed, and the east, where it was not. By June 1915 the Germans, cut off from resupply from Germany, were running low on ammunition. Rounds for the 1898-pattern rifle were restricted to use in machine-guns only, and the askaris had to employ older models firing bullets made from spent cases collected from the battlefield, percussion caps fashioned from brass ornaments, and black powder. The smoke gave away their position and the bullets themselves - if they did not get stuck in the breech - rarely ranged more than twenty yards. Even more serious for the Germans was the decision of their commander, Zimmerman, to reduce the garrison at Garua, in the north, so as to reinforce that at Banyo, protecting Ngaundere’s western flank. The British operating out of Nigeria were meant to be supporting Dobell’s advance by tying down Germans, but they now had an overwhelming superiority and were able to capture Garua on 10 June. The British did not know what to do next. They still assumed that Yaounde was the key to the German defence, not Ngaundere. But Colonel Brisset, commander of a French column in the north-east, persuaded the British to push on to Ngaundere. None of the British appreciated what had been achieved, any more than did Brisset’s French superiors: all saw him as insubordinate and bloody-minded.

  Britain’s African units needed officers with local knowledge and linguistic competence, and so drained the civil administration of local officials Subsequent fears for the internal order of Nigeria are about to be eased by this column, making its way back from the Cameroons.

  Now allied plans and German intentions fell into step for the first time in the campaign. The Germans could no longer use the northern highlands as their lifeline; instead they had to switch to the Spanish colony of Muni (today Equatorial Guinea), and neutral terrritory. At last Yaounde became the axis of the German line of communications. Forced to pause during the rains, the British and French resumed
their converging movement on Yaounde from the west and east on 15 November and 15 October respectively. Movement was also resumed in the north at the beginning of November. Although the columns moved in ignorance of each other, their effects were now reciprocal and on 8 January the British from the north and French from the east linked at the Nachtigal rapids, to the north of Yaounde.

  The allies’ attention had been focused on the north. They had neglected the south. The Germans’ route to neutral territory lay open and they took it. The allied columns were exhausted by their advance: when the French reached Yaounde they were 700 km from their intermediate base at Nola on the Sanga. Short of supplies, their pursuit was dilatory. About 6,000 askaris and 7,000 families and followers followed 1,000 Germans into Muni. From here, the Germans kept alive their hopes that the defeat was only temporary and that German colonialism could be revived.

  The allies’ victory in the Cameroons released black troops from West Africa for service in East Africa. The Gold Coast Regiment arrived there in July 1916. The four Nigerian regiments of the West African Frontier Force were delayed by worries about possible rebellion within Nigeria, but sailed in November 1916. In East Africa itself, the King’s African Rifles, composed of three battalions at the outset of the war, had risen to thirteen by January 1917 - and reached twenty-two by the war’s end. Britain never considered using these African troops in Europe, although the French did: in this the British reflected the difficulties their Indian soldiers had encountered from the cold on the western front in the first winter of the war. So Lettow-Vorbeck’s contribution to the wider war was undermined.

  Lettow-Vorbeck aimed to hold the line of the Rufiji until the crops ripened in April 1917. The supply position of the Germans to his left, to the north of Songea, was also desperate. They split, one column under Georg Kraut going south and the other, under Max Wintgens, going north. Setting off at the end of January 1917 Wintgens led his column clean across the allied lines of communications, and up to the central railway near Tabora. Wintgens, sick with typhus, surrendered on 21 May, but Heinrich Naumann, his successor, held out until 2 September. By then he was right back in the north of the colony. This was a classic guerrilla operation. Naumann’s men marched 3,200 km between February and September; they had found a population which was passively supportive; and they had drawn up to 6,000 men away from the main battle.

  Lettow-Vorbeck never appreciated what had been achieved: such independence smacked of insubordination not initiative. His own instinct still was to give battle not to adopt guerrilla methods. The British resumed their advance at the end of May, after the rainy season, but under the command of another Afrikaner. Hoskins’s delay - given that Smuts had said that the campaign was over - had exhausted London’s patience, and he was replaced by ‘Jap’ van Deventer. The frontal push was supported by thrusts from the coastal ports of Kilwa and Lindi. Lettow met the Kilwa column with head-on battles - at Narungombe on 19 July and at Nahungu in an eighteen-day struggle beginning on 19 September. In the battle of Mahiwa, begun on 15 October and extended over four days, the Lindi force faced eighteen out of Lettow’s total of twenty-five available companies. Ground was won and lost up to six times. The British suffered 2,700 casualties out of 4,900 men engaged. Although the German losses were comparatively light (about 600), the battle - the fiercest of the campaign so far - broke Lettow-Vorbeck’s force as a combat-ready formation. All its smokeless ammunition was expended, machine-guns had to be destroyed, and only twenty-five rounds remained for each of the older-pattern rifles. However, Mahiwa enabled Lettow-Vorbeck to break contact with the British and on 25 November he crossed the Ruvuma river into Portuguese East Africa (today Mozambique). In July his rifle strength had been 800 Europeans and 5,500 askaris; on 25 November he took with him 300 Europeans and 1,700 askaris. Over 1,000 soldiers had to be left behind because there were no longer the weapons or munitions for them. The last of the Königsberg’s guns was destroyed.

  Lettow-Vorbeck carried on fighting and marching for a whole year longer. His column, a self-contained community with 3,000 women, children and carriers, was able to exploit the weakness of Portugal’s hold on its colony and the incompetence of its forces. Portugal’s greater concern was with internal order: the northern parts of the colony had never been properly pacified, and in the south the Makombe in Zambezia rose in revolt in March 1917. The Portuguese turned Ngoni auxiliaries on the Makombe, and suppressed the rising by the end of 1917 by condoning inter-tribal terrorism and slavery. However, Lettow-Vorbeck did not fan these flames for his own ends. He paid for goods with worthless paper currency, and the German doctors attended to the sick - albeit without medicines - but he continued to regard Africa and Africans as neutral bystanders in a wider conflict. Lettow·-Vorbeck marched straight through Portuguese East Africa and reached Quelimane on the coast. At Namakura on 1-3 July he defeated a Portuguese-British garrison and plundered large quantities of food and ammunition. He then set off north again, skirted the top of Lake Nyasa, and was in Northern Rhodesia when the war ended. Some of his party had favoured making for Angola, others for Abyssinia or even taking ship for Afghanistan.

  The British forces’ supply lines in German East Africa collapsed in 1916-17 Coastal communications eased the situation Indian troops embark at Dar es Salaam for Kilwa in October 1917

  In the eighteenth century Britain and France had fought each other in India and America for the control of continents. This was not why war came to Africa in 1914. The powers did not fight to take territory. Indeed, the most obvious immediate effects were to loosen the holds of empires. Most whites in the colonies feared that the sight of Europeans fighting each other would promote rebellion and resistance. Those fears could only grow as local administrators joined up, and as local forces turned from their policing function to that of confronting an external enemy. But such fears proved exaggerated. Where colonial authority collapsed, anarchy was more likely than revolution. In the Cameroons German pastors were interned and German doctors fled to Muni: the French took over much of the colony in 1916 but were in no position to provide replacements. Education collapsed and witchcraft revived. In South-West Africa, the South Africans wisely left the German settlers in place - at least until the peace settlement in 1919.

  That settlement completed the last stage of the partition of Africa, allocating the German colonies to the victorious powers. Although it was not an intention at the outset, the war promoted imperialism - even if the ambitions of South Africa were in the end thwarted. Moreover, it was not only the peace settlement that had this effect. Where the campaigns were conducted, white men penetrated areas which they had never entered before. Soldiers spread the cash economy and the market; they mapped; and they created the rudiments of a communications network. Above all, they conscripted men. Traditional patterns of authority were broken down as adult - and not-so-adult - males were taken for the army and for labour. Particularly for those who left Africa, and who were treated with respect in Europe, the war could open the door to political awareness: ‘We were not fighting for the French’, Kamadon Mbaye, a Senegalese, recalled; ‘we were fighting for ourselves [to become] French citi-zens.’ 14 The long-term consequences would be the emergence of modern resistance movements to colonialism. But immediately colonial rule was deepened and extended in order to serve the war efforts of the belligerents.

  Africa comes to Europe Smuts, the former Boer commando but now member of the British Imperial War Cabinet, inspects the South African Native Labour Contingent in France in April 1917

  The Entente powers wished to stabilise their hold on their empires by closing down the global war outside Europe. But the demands of the war within Europe meant that instead they had to mobilise overseas resources almost as much as domestic resources in order to wage it. That in turn was more a reflection of Germany’s success in extending its own frontiers within Europe, rather than outside it. In 1916 the South Africans went to France, and reports of Senegalese cannibalism were propagated to terrify the
Germans at Verdun. The efforts of Spee and Lettow-Vorbeck may have been contained, but Germany’s idea of weakening the Entente by widening the war did not stop there. Through an alliance with the Ottoman empire, Germany aspired to lead Muslims to war not just in Africa but across the Middle East and Central Asia.

  4

  JIHAD

  THE GERMAN-OTTOMAN ALLIANCE

  O Muslims, who are the obedient servants of God! Of those who go to the Jihad for the sake of happiness and salvation of the believers in God’s victory, the lot of those who remain alive is felicity, while the rank of those who depart to the next world is martyrdom. In accordance with God’s beautiful promise, those who sacrifice their lives to give life to the truth will have honour in this world, and their latter end is paradise.1

  In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the Sheikh-ul-Islam declared an Islamic holy war against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro on 14 November 1914. He spoke on behalf of the Caliphate, a combination of spiritual and temporal authority claimed by the Sultan, and justified by the fact that the holy cities of Mecca and Medina fell within the purlieus of his rule. But the reach of the Ottoman Empire, which at its height in the sixteenth century had extended from the Persian Gulf to Poland, and from Cairo to the gates of Vienna, was contracting. In 1914, of 270 million Muslims in the world in 1914, only about 30 million were governed by other Muslims. Almost 100 million were British subjects; 20 million were under French rule, most of them in North and Equatorial Africa; and another 20 million were incorporated in Russia’s Asian empire. Those Muslims in the British, French and Russian empires who opposed the Ottoman Empire’s summons to holy war were promised ‘the fire of hell’. The Muslims in Serbia and Montenegro, who were likely to commit the lesser offence of fighting Austria-Hungary, would merit only ‘painful torment’.