by John Keegan
The Cameroon campaign differed little in character from those by which the British and French had subdued the warrior tribes during the original conquests. That which opened in German South-West Africa in September 1914 was of a different quality altogether. “German South-West,” now Namibia, is an enormous territory, six times the size of England, arid, infertile and populated then by only 80,000 Africans. Mostly Herero tribesmen, whose rebellion in 1904 had been put down with ruthlessness by the Governor, the future Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering’s father, they were kept under close control by the German garrison of 3,000 and the 7,000 German male settlers. The German government had hoped, as elsewhere in its African possessions, to avoid a conflict in “South-West”; they put their trust in a vague, mutual, pre-war commitment to neutrality in Africa between the colonial powers. The British, however, were determined otherwise and, despite the fact that the withdrawal of their garrison from the neighbouring Union of South Africa on the outbreak of war left them dependent on its Defence Force, of which their former opponents in the Boer War of 1899–1902 formed a large proportion, they embarked at once on an expedition by sea and land against the German colony. Some 60,000 troops were available. A few, the South African Permanent Force, were regulars, wholly loyal to Britain, from which many came. The Citizen Force was divided; some of its units, the Durban Light Infantry, the Imperial Light Horse, were Anglo-South African and loyal to the crown, as were the contingents of white Rhodesians (one of whom was the future Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris) who arrived from East Africa to take part. Others were a touchier proposition. Of the leading commanders of the Boer War now in British service, General Louis Botha had made his peace and would not shift; he had a personal commitment to Jan Smuts, one of the most dashing ex-Boer generals but now Prime Minister of the Union. Christiaan de Wet, a Boer hero, and Christiaan Beyers, who held post as commander of the Defence Force, went into active rebellion. So, too, did General Jan Kemp and Colonel Salomon Maritz; the former resigned his commission, the latter refused to obey orders. At the very beginning, therefore, Britain found itself engaged both in a colonial campaign against the German enemy and in a Boer rebellion.5
The rebellion, fortunately for the British, did not take fire. About 11,000 Afrikaners joined in but, opposed by 30,000 loyalists, Boer and British, they had all been forced into surrender or, a few, into German territory by January 1915. The war against the Germans then began in earnest. The army was formed into four columns. Mainly mounted, many of the soldiers Boer “burghers,” some of whom had fought the British at Majuba in 1881, they converged on the German centres of resistance from the coast, from the Orange River and from Bechuanaland, the enormous protectorate (now Botswana) to the north of the Union. The objective was Windhoek, the German colonial capital, on which the Germans fell back in a fighting retreat. Resistance continued after its capture on 12 May 1915, though with the exchange of courtesies on both sides. The Germans were in a hopeless position. Outnumbered many times, and forced to campaign in one of the most desolate regions of the world, without any prospect of resupply from outside, they eventually surrendered unconditionally on 9 July 1915. The German officers were allowed to retain their swords, the German settler reservists to return to their farms with arms and ammunition to protect themselves, their families and their properties.6 Windhoek remains today the only distinctively German city in the southern hemisphere.
By 1916, the last centre of German resistance to the British and French forces in the colonial empires was in “German East,” today Tanzania. The war in that enormous colony, almost exactly the size of France, had begun on 8 August, when the British cruiser Astraea had bombarded its port of Dar-es-Salaam. Hostilities then lapsed. When resumed, they were to last until after the negotiation of the European armistice in November 1918, testimony to the extraordinary tenacity and prowess in leadership of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander of the colony’s Schutztruppe. Lettow-Vorbeck, aged forty-four in 1914, was an experienced imperial campaigner; he had served previously in the German contingent sent to suppress the Boxer Rising in China and in German South-West. Appointment to German East Africa was a denomination of his standing; Baroness Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, who sailed with him on the boat out, remembered that no other German had given her “so strong an impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for.”7 This colony was, indeed, the pearl of the Second Reich’s overseas possessions. Togo was a trifle, Kamerun an unpeopled land of fever, “South West” a beautiful but empty desert. German East Africa, bounded by British Uganda and Kenya to the north, the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia to the west, British Nyasaland and Portuguese Mozambique to the south, straddled the Great Lakes region, the most romantic and potentially productive part of the continent. Its boundaries were crossed or formed by Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and Mount Kilimanjaro stood within its territory.
Germany’s African territories
At the outset it seemed that the pre-war understanding between the powers to exempt black Africa from hostilities might prevail. The German governor, Schnee, forbade offensive operations; the Governor of British Kenya declared his colony had no “interest in the present war.” Moreover, neither governor disposed of any force with which to fight. They reckoned without the aggressiveness of the young men on both sides. Lettow-Vorbeck simply ignored Schnee and began assembling his forces, few though they were, about 2,500 askaris and 200 white officers. Nairobi, capital of Kenya, meanwhile began filling up with bellicose young settlers and white hunters, all bearing arms and demanding uniforms and a mission. Like the Confederate bloods and dandies of April 1861, they formed military units of their own, with outlandish names—Bowker’s Horse, the Legion of Frontiersmen—and marched out to repel Lettow-Vorbeck as he made his first move. In September the war was under way, whatever the governors’ wishes.
The home governments wanted war also. A German cruiser, the Königsberg, was operating off East Africa before the war began and opened hostilities by sinking a British warship, HMS Pegasus. Small though she was, her loss drove the admiral commanding the South African station to concentrate all his force, of three cruisers, against Königsberg. She was soon driven into the swampy depth of the Rufiji river, where her captain conducted a brilliant exercise in evasion that lasted 255 days. The cruiser was eventually sunk only after the Admiralty had sent out two shallow-draft monitors, the Severn and Mersey, from Britain to nail her in her lair. Even as a hulk, however, she continued to contribute to the campaign. Many of her crew went ashore to serve with Lettow-Vorbeck’s askaris and some of her guns were dismounted and used as field artillery.
Lettow’s aggressiveness had by then caused Britain to prepare a full-scale military expedition against him. He was not only raiding into Uganda and Kenya, where he raised the German flag on British territory under Mount Kilimanjaro, but conducting inland naval operations on the Great Lakes; prefabricated gun boats were eventually sent out from Britain to regain control of those inland waters. The most important reinforcement, however, was two brigades of British and Indian troops from India. The Indian regiments were second-rate but the British regulars should have compensated for that. They did not; the expedition’s first landing at Tanga on 2 November 1914 ended in humiliation. The Indians ran away, the British got lost; though outnumbered eight to one, the Germans easily drove their enemies back to the beaches, where they re-embarked on 5 November, leaving sixteen machine guns, hundreds of rifles and 600,000 rounds of ammunition behind.
These supplies would help to sustain von Lettow’s campaign throughout 1915, a slack period in which the British built up their strength and he learnt the essentials of the war he was going to fight. Better British troops arrived; he won a small victory at Jassin. The cost in German lives there and in ammunition—his askaris had fired off 200,000 rounds—taught Lettow that “we had to economise our forces to last out a long war … the need to restrict myself to guerrilla warfare was evidently imperative.” That, thereafter, would be his
strategy.8 In March 1916, Jan Smuts arrived from South Africa, bringing the Defence Force troops released by the conquest of German South-West. He began to plan a convergent offensive, from Kenya, Nyasaland, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Mozambique, designed to crush Lettow’s little army in the interior. Lettow had no intention of being caught. Instead he would resist the British as fiercely as he could, springing savage ambushes as they pushed forward; then, before they could bring superior numbers against him, he would slip away, destroying anything of value as he retreated. Since his soldiers could live off the land, and resupply themselves with ammunition by capture from the enemy, his capacity to evade defeat in the enormous spaces of the bush was almost limitless, as he would demonstrate throughout 1916, 1917 and 1918.
CRUISER WAR
Before Lettow set off on his extraordinary venture into the vastness of the African interior, while indeed he was still conducting his opening border skirmishes, another, briefer but dramatic campaign had been mounted by the overseas squadrons of the Imperial German Navy in the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Germany’s main fleet, built to confront Britain with “risk” to its dominant maritime position, was deliberately concentrated in Germany’s North Sea ports. It was from those places that it could menace the Royal Navy with the threat of a break-out on to the high seas and with the danger of a surprise encounter in which Britain’s superior numbers might be outbalanced by the vagaries of weather or chance. Germany also maintained, however, small forces in the Pacific, at Tsingtao and in the islands. In August, the cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were in the Carolines, Emden was at Tsingtao, Dresden and Karlsruhe were in the Caribbean, Leipzig was off the Pacific coast of Mexico and Nürnberg was en route to relieve her; the Königsberg, already mentioned, was on a lone mission off East Africa. Though few in number, these eight ships represented a major threat to Allied shipping, particularly to convoys bringing Australian and New Zealand troops to European waters, for they were of recent construction, fast, well-armed and commanded by officers of ability, notably Admiral Maximilian von Spee, who led the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau squadron. It was a major weakness of British naval planning that its own cruiser fleet consisted either of old, so-called “armoured” ships too slow to catch their German equivalents, and too poorly protected and armed to harm them if taken at a disadvantage, or of light cruisers which had speed to match that of the Germans but lacked the firepower to fight. The technological gap was supposed to be filled by the newly fashionable battlecruisers, fast, lightly armoured Dreadnoughts, but their high construction costs had kept their numbers small while absorbing the funds which might have gone to modernising the conventional cruiser fleet. This unintended consequence would, in the first months of the war, cause the Royal Navy heavy loss of life and ships and grave damage to its prestige.
The navy lacked, moreover, any concerted plan to deal with an aggressive German cruising campaign. Its vast network of coaling stations diminished the incentive to plan for resupplying a pursuit across oceanic distances; the Germans, by contrast, had a train of colliers and began at once to capture prizes as a source of coal, food and water. They also sailed victualling ships from home waters to rendezvous with the raiders, and to act independently as armed merchant cruisers. If there was a weakness in the German arrangements, it was that meetings had to be arranged by wireless, in a code which the British quickly broke.
Two of the raiders were swiftly run down. Königsberg, the least well-handled, ceased to count after she was driven into the Rufiji delta. Emden, under an energetic captain, Karl von Müller, caused havoc in the Pacific and Indian oceans, though pursued at times not only by British but also French, Russian and Japanese ships. She was eventually intercepted and sunk by the Australian cruiser Sydney at Direction Island in the Cocos and Keeling group on 9 November 1914, after the local wireless station managed to get off a signal before the German landing party destroyed the transmitter. Sydney had been detached from one of the large escorted convoys bringing Australian troops to the Mediterranean. That was not quite the end of Emden’s remarkable cruise. The commander of the landing party on Direction Island evaded the Australians, appropriated a schooner, sailed it to the Dutch East Indies, got passage aboard a German steamer to Yemen in Arabia, fought off Bedouin attacks, reached the Hejaz railway built to bring pilgrims to Mecca and eventually arrived to a justifiably extravagant welcome in Constantinople in June 1915.9
Karlsruhe was destroyed by a mysterious internal explosion off Barbados on 4 November, after sinking sixteen merchant ships. Leipzig and Dresden, with varied adventures behind them, rendezvoused with Admiral von Spee in South American waters in October; Nürnberg had joined him earlier. These five ships then formed the most formidable threat to Allied control of the seas outside the North Sea. Spee exploited his advantage. Deterred from operating in the northern Pacific by the menace of the large Japanese fleet which cruised widely and aggressively in the early months of the war, mopping up many of the German island possessions it would use so successfully in 1941–4, Spee acted against the French possessions in Tahiti and the Marquesas but met resistance and found coaling difficult. With bold strategic sweep, he therefore decided to transfer from the Pacific to the South Atlantic, signalling Dresden, Leipzig and his colliers to meet him near Easter Island, the most remote inhabited spot on the globe.10
Interception of his insecure signals alerted the British admiral commanding the South American station, Christopher Cradock, of his intentions. Passing through the Straits of Magellan, Cradock brought his squadron into Chilean waters. The light cruiser Glasgow went ahead; Cradock followed with the cruisers Monmouth and Good Hope and the battleship Canopus, so old (1896) and slow that it was left to escort the accompanying colliers. Monmouth and Good Hope were almost as old, not much faster and poorly armed. They steamed to join Glasgow, which had put into the little Chilean port of Coronel. Intercepted intelligence then gave Spee the advantage. Hearing that Glasgow was at Coronel, he waited outside for the old cruisers to appear. When they did, on the evening of 1 November, he kept out of range until darkness fell, then opened fire in the gloaming. Monmouth and Good Hope were quickly sunk, not one of the 1,600 sailors aboard surviving. Glasgow escaped to warn Canopus and save her from a similar fate.
Coronel was the first British defeat at sea for a hundred years. The outrage it caused was enormous, far exceeding that following the loss of Hogue, Cressy and Aboukir, three other old cruisers sunk by submarine U-9 off Holland on 22 September. Admiral Sir John Fisher, who had become First Sea Lord on 31 October, at once set in motion a pan-oceanic redeployment of forces designed to intercept Spee wherever he moved. The Cape, South American and West African stations were reinforced, while the Japanese navy also repositioned units, so threatening Spee’s freedom of action in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans.11 Most dangerously for Spee, Fisher decided to detach two of his precious battlecruisers, Invincible and Inflexible, from the Grand Fleet and send them to the South Atlantic. Spee might still have remained free to cruise for a long time, losing himself in the vast expanses of the southern oceans and coaling from prizes and remote neutral ports, had he not decided to act aggressively and attack the British Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Having left the Pacific after Coronel, he arrived off Port Stanley on 8 December. Fatally for the Germans, Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, commanding the battlecruiser squadron, had also decided to visit Port Stanley and was coaling his squadron when the Germans appeared. Making steam in haste, Sturdee left harbour and worked up speed to run the five German ships down. None was a match, for the battlecruisers were both faster than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, his strongest ships, and far more heavily gunned. Bravely, Spee turned them to cover the escape of the others but was overwhelmed by salvoes of 12-inch shells at ranges his 8.2-inch guns could not match. Two of his light cruisers were also run down by Sturdee’s light cruisers. Only Dresden got away, to skulk for three months in the sub-Antarctic inlets around Cape Horn, until cornered and forced
to scuttle on 14 March 1915, by a British squadron that included the only survivor of the Coronel disaster, HMS Glasgow.
The victory of the Falklands terminated the high seas activity of the German navy. A few armed merchant ships would subsequently manage to slip through the North Sea into great waters and raid the shipping lanes, but the navy’s regular units were not risked in such adventures. After the Falklands, indeed, the oceans belonged to the Allies and the only persistent naval surface fighting, pending a clash of the capital fleets in the North Sea, took place in landlocked waters, the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Adriatic. The Mediterranean was wholly controlled by the Royal and French Navies, assisted by the Italian after Italy’s entry, and their command of it was to be disturbed only by the appearance of German U-boats there in October 1915. Inside the Adriatic, cordoned at its bottom end by an Italian mine barrier anchored on Otranto, the Austrians waged a tit-for-tat war with the Italians, of which the only strategic point was to deny the Allies more direct amphibious access to the Balkan war zone than the Mediterranean coast allowed. A similar war was waged in the Baltic between Germany’s light forces and pre-Dreadnoughts and Russia’s Baltic fleet. There was much mine-laying, which deterred the Russians risking their Dreadnoughts far from Finnish ports, coastal bombardment and, eventually, some daring British submarine operations. Russia’s beautiful British-built Rurik (1906), model of the cruisers Britain should have been building for herself, was frequently and effectively engaged until badly damaged by a mine in November 1916.12 From a naval point of view, the war in the Baltic was most notable for what did not happen there. Fisher, as ready with bad as with good ideas, had advocated a large-scale naval penetration of the Baltic as early as 1908. In 1914 he converted Churchill, equally undiscriminating if a strategic project were grand enough, and even secured funds to build three huge shallow-draft battlecruisers to make the attempt. Fortunately better sense prevailed and the monsters, which could outrun destroyers at speed, were spared inevitable destruction in the Baltic’s narrow waters to become post-war aircraft carriers.13
