To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Britain’s readiness to concede to Japan can only be interpreted as weakness if strategy is interpreted in terms of war aims and their achievement. Britain’s global priority between 1914 and 1918 was a victorious conclusion to the war with Germany. The Anglo-Japanese alliance was so managed by the Foreign Office (and by the Admiralty) that it made a significant contribution to that objective. Japan’s principal purpose was somewhat different—the use of the war to fulfil its war aims in the Pacific region. Alone of the belligerent powers, Japan made sure that—for all the war’s inbuilt pressures to the contrary— conflict served the purposes of its policy. For the political theorist, what is extraordinary about this outstandingly successful use of war for the achievement of political objectives was that it was effected by a government that was weak and divided. In Japan cabinet government was hesitant, the party system ill-developed, the emperor a cipher, and the army disproportionately influential in politics. And yet Japan’s foreign policy attained a consistency and direction that eluded (admittedly under far greater pressures) the more developed political systems of western Europe.

  7

  THE DARK CONTINENT:

  COLONIAL CONFLICT IN

  SUB–SAHARAN AFRICA

  WAR IN AFRICA

  On 12 August 1914, in Togoland, Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi of the West African Frontier Force became the first soldier in British service to fire a round in the Great War. On 25 November 1918, two weeks after the signature of the armistice in Europe, at Abercorn in Northern Rhodesia Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck surrendered, the last German commander of the war to do so.

  As much from its outset as beyond its formal conclusion, therefore, the First World War was far more than just a European conflict. In August 1914 British, French, Belgian, and German belligerence embraced the entire continent of Africa with the exception of Liberia, Ethiopia, and the relatively smaller colonies of Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Not even these would remain exempt from the war, at least in its indirect forms.

  In the eighteenth century Britain and France had fought in North America and India for the possession of empire. Conflict between the great powers had as often originated in the colonies as in Europe itself. But in the course of the nineteenth century overseas expansion was conducted without such clashes: mercantilism gave way to free trade, and governments did not see territorial possession as the key to exclusive commercial rights. In 1898 Marchand and Kitchener, soldiers both, staked rival claims at Fashoda, on the upper reaches of the Nile, but neither France nor Britain resorted to arms in pursuit of those ambitions. Wars were plenty, but they were conducted against the native populations, and their purposes were local and limited. In 1914 none of the central governments of the belligerent powers was harbouring notions of imperial aggrandizement at the expense of its European neighbours through the use of battle. The Anglo-German antagonism had scant relevance to Africa. Britain encouraged the Germans to expand, possibly at the expense of Belgium and Portugal; Germany respected rather than reviled British rule. Thus, in 1914 the flow of major war was the reverse of that in the eighteenth century—from Europe to the colonies, rather than vice versa.

  Moreover, when the news of the crisis of late July 1914 reached the white settlers of Africa it rarely provoked the popular manifestations of enthusiasm exhibited in the capitals of their parent countries. The duty of Europeans, opined the East Africa Standard of Mombasa on 22 August 1914, was not to fight each other but to keep control of the Africans.1 The objective of colonial government was pacification. The advent of war was against the common interests of all whites, whatever their nationalities; their numbers were exiguous; their hold on the recently conquered African interior was precarious, and in many areas incomplete. The nominal title of government did not necessarily conform to the actual exercise of power, which often still lay with local chiefs and headmen. Economic penetration through the construction of ports and railways, through plantations and mining, had only just begun. Where mass meetings in support of the war did take place, for example in Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia, they emphasized the exceptional nature of such settlements—their urbanization and, in this case, their Englishness. But even in Rhodesia, German and Austrian reservists were able to leave for Europe in late August,2 and in South Africa not until May 1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania, were there riots against German firms operating within the Union.3

  The fear of the white settler was a dual one. First, the spectacle of white fighting white would reduce the status of the European. Secondly, war would either rekindle the warrior traditions of those tribes in whom they had only recently been crushed or train in the use of arms those to whom they were unfamiliar. Blacks would kill whites, and the forfeit would be white racial supremacy. In the event, the notion that the European hold on sub-Saharan Africa would be destabilized by the re-emergence of traditional forces proved misplaced; the impact of the war deepened collaboration, and its contribution to colonial decline was much longer-term—through the erosion of tribal loyalties and the broadening of new black elites that were urbanized, westernized, and politically aware.

  For the Great War in Africa, although the product of European devices and desires, was fought principally by the Africans themselves. In all, somewhere over 2 million Africans served in the First World War as soldiers or labourers, and upwards of 200,000 of them died or were killed in action.4 By comparison with Europe such figures are low—the first represents between 1 and 2 per cent of the total population of Africa. But in a local context a comparison with twentieth-century industrialized nation states is inappropriate; never before in the history of Africa had manpower been mobilized on such a scale.

  Both during the war and after it, British and French propaganda accused the Germans of militarizing Africa: they had, said Lloyd George on 24 January 1919, ‘raised native troops and encouraged these troops to behave in a manner that would even disgrace the Bolsheviks’.5 Such rhetoric was fed by the ferocity with which the Germans suppressed the wave of resistance that struck their colonies with simultaneous force between 1904 and 1906. Genocide and famine were both deployed against the Herero in South-West Africa and the Maji-Maji in East Africa. Thereafter, however, German colonial administration became more liberal. Military responsibilities were circumscribed, commercial development promoted, and settlement doubled. As a result, the German colonial forces, the Schütztruppen, could draw in more whites: from 1913 conscripts were allowed to complete their reserve service overseas rather than remain liable for recall to Germany. But the settlers themselves became increasingly reluctant to meet the costs of an inflated military establishment, and order on a daily basis was handed over to an expanded police force. Admittedly their armament was similar to that of the Schütztruppen, and they could be and were, incorporated with it.6 Nonetheless, the point remains that it was not so much Germany as the Entente which was responsible for arming the African.

  The idea that the immense manpower pool of the African colonies might be harnessed for military purposes was given its most coherent and ambitious pre-war expression in France, by Charles Mangin in his book La Force noire, published in 1910. Mangin predicted that French West Africa could raise 40,000 men, or 4 per cent of the total population of 10.65 million, and that enlistment in some areas could rise to 8 or 10 per cent. At the time such projections looked far-fetched, but by the end of the war France had enlisted 200,000 soldiers in West Africa.7 When Britain declared war, the Africans involved, directly or indirectly, in hostilities totalled 50 million.8 The actual burden of service was unevenly distributed. In West Africa Britain recruited about 25,000 soldiers9—a relatively large figure, but small by comparison with French efforts in the adjacent areas. Southern Rhodesia, influenced by the South African opposition to using blacks as soldiers in a white man’s war, enlisted no Africans until 1916. But by then 40 per cent of the white adult male population was on active service, and sufficient fresh drafts for the Rhodesia Regiment could not be procured. The Rhodesia Nat
ive Regiment, formed in 1916, had embodied only 2,360 men by 1918, less than 1 per cent of the total African male population, and 75 per cent of them originated from outside the colony.10

  The majority of those Africans enlisted during the war were not soldiers, or not primarily so. They were carriers.11 The major problem of conducting operations in Africa, as it had been in all the small wars of European conquest in the nineteenth century, lay ‘not in defeating, but in reaching the enemy’.12 Lettow-Vorbeck likened the march and supply of a single company in East Africa to the movement of a division in Europe.13 Railway construction had only just begun to open up the hinterland; roads were few, and motorized vehicles fewer. Draught or pack animals, although usable in the highlands and savannah of some parts of Central Africa and in South Africa, fell prey to the tsetse fly in many tropical areas. For the campaigns in the Cameroons and East Africa, therefore, a human chain linked troops to their bases, and without it they could not move, feed, or fight.

  None of the major belligerents had anticipated the numbers of carriers which major operations would demand. The pre-war colonial units of all three powers, Britain, France, and Germany, had been designed primarily for internal policing, employing limited numbers in each column, and projecting themselves over short distances. For these purposes some units, but not all, had their own enlisted carriers. However, in 1914–15 Britain and France launched offensive operations deep into German territory. In the Cameroons both the British and the Germans reckoned they needed between two and three porters for each soldier; the French tried to make do with less, but continually found their communications close to collapse.14 Thus, in West Africa the forces of Britain and Germany in the Cameroons each employed a force of about 40,000 carriers.15 In East Africa the distances were greater, and the numbers grew accordingly. The British recruited over a million labourers for the campaign.16 They were drawn from a vast area, from the eastern Belgian Congo, Ruanda, Uganda, Kenya, German East Africa, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and the northern areas of Mozambique. The district commissioner of Tanganyika, an area where both sides had recruited labour, reported that a third of the taxable male population had been taken.17 For the East African and other theatres, the British West African colonies provided over 57,500 carriers, twice as many as they did soldiers, and in 1917 Nigeria specifically had to procure 4,000 carriers a month.18 British East Africa and Nyasaland each raised over 200,000 men (83 per cent of the total available manpower in the latter case), and Uganda 190,000. The Belgian Congo drew in 260,000 porters during the war, both for domestic and external needs; Portuguese East Africa contributed 30,000 porters to the British and 90,000 to its own forces.19

  Such numbers could not be raised voluntarily. Most were impressed, either directly or indirectly. Chiefs would undertake to provide quotas. In British East Africa settler pressure to maximize the available labour supply led in 1915 to conscription. Desertion was therefore endemic. A convoy dispatched from Bangui in French Equatorial Africa in September 1914 had only forty-nine of its original complement of 298 porters left when it arrived at Boda.20 One solution, adopted on this particular route but practicable only where the lines of communication were clear and local manpower abundant, was to fix the stages between villages so that the porters could return home each night. The alternative and more frequently applied check to desertion was to remove the porter from his native locality, and thus eliminate the temptation to abscond. But, once away from his own area, the carrier became prey to disease, the second major cause of high losses.

  The carriers chosen by headmen were frequently those who were locally dispensable, and probably the less fit. Distant from their own homelands, they were often issued with rations with which they were unfamiliar. Many Europeans thought that mealie meal, made up of maize flour and cobs, was the standard African diet. In reality, maize was only just being introduced in inland areas. Ugandans subsisted on bananas, sweet potatoes, and beans. Fed on grain, they developed intestinal diseases and 40 per cent of the contingent raised in August 1914 were invalided within three months. In March 1917 Uganda focused its recruiting efforts on grain-eating tribes, but could pass only 5,763 of 41,706 called up as fit for service. Rice-eating tribes given maize fell victim to beri-beri. Even for those accustomed to mealie meal, the problems of its preparation undermined its nutritional value. In the porters’ villages food was prepared by women. The men, therefore, lacked culinary skills. However, on the march they were expected to cook their own food. Mealie meal had to be boiled for one and a half hours, and the largest size of pot required six hours. The halts at night were too brief to allow sufficient wood to be collected for the fire, and for the food to be dried and properly cooked. Dysentery was the consequence: it was responsible for half the porters’ hospital admissions, and intestinal diseases of all sorts for half the fatalities.21 Finally, the nutritional content of the porters’ diet was often inadequate. Porters in British pay in the Cameroons received daily rations on two scales, either 2,702 or 1,741 calories: neither was sufficient for a man expected to carry up to 60 pounds for 24 kilometres a day. In East Africa in 1917 porters were getting less than 1,000 calories a day.22

  Wastage levels were enormous. Among East and West Africans employed as carriers in the war the death rate (including those reported as missing) was—at about 20 per cent—similar to that of an army on a so-called major front.23 Belgian porters succumbed in comparable numbers, which were five times those suffered by the native soldiers—or askaris—in Belgian service.24 Many more were invalided, victims of ulcerated feet, malaria, and chest infections. Of 20,000 porters sent to the Cameroons by the British, 574 died and 8,219 were invalided.25 The West African carriers in East Africa, after nine months service, could muster only 37 per cent effectives in the case of southern Nigerians and 8.3 per cent in that of northern Nigerians.26

  Thus, a series of interlocking problems kept the lines of communication constantly on the verge of breakdown. Better provision for the care of carriers reduced death and disease, and so eased the demands for fresh recruitment. But it also threatened to place the personal needs of the porter ahead of those of the fighting troops. The longer the line of march, the more likely would the porters be to consume larger loads than they carried. Assuming an average ration of 3 pounds per day and a load of 60 pounds, a line of communication 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 his entire load himself.27 Thus, there was a trade-off between the porter’s own nutrition and the needs of the soldier, both in food and munitions.

  Compromise had also to be sought in determining the European component of the forces engaged. Both sides were firmly convinced that the morale of their troops depended on the presence of white officers who were known to their men. But each British officer in East Africa needed between seven and nine porters. Such a ratio was not unusual: a Belgian officer had eight porters, and a German officer in West Africa had four to six porters, a servant, and a cook. The French scoffed at what they saw as luxurious over-provision. In the Cameroons two Frenchmen were reckoned to require three porters.28 In reality such proportions were a reflection of the cavalier French approach to supply problems, not an indication of French immunity to the hazards of war in the tropics. Even in the final stages of their epic march through Portuguese East Africa, the Europeans in Lettow-Vorbeck’s force were allowed three porters each.29

  Disease, not battle, disabled armies in Africa. Thanks to the elimination of typhus and cholera, the armies fighting the war in Europe were the first to suffer more casualties through combat than through sickness. Outside Europe the old order prevailed. In East Africa 3,156 whites in British service died; 2,225 of these were victims of disease.30 But the true scale of the problem is revealed by reference to non-fatalities: men fell sick rather than died. In West Africa the allied forces lost a total of 4,600 men through death or wounding in action or through death by disease; by contrast, over 35,000 cases were admitted to h
ospital.31 Casualty evacuation was therefore another load for the hard-pressed carrier.

  The conventional wisdom argued that not only was the European more reliant on the maintenance of the lines of communication, he was also less immune to local diseases. Of the vulnerability of whites, particularly in East Africa, there is abundant evidence. On 31 October 1915 one British battalion had 836 of its strength in hospital and only 278 in the field. By the end of 1916 12,000 out of 20,000 South Africans had been invalided home.32 The 2nd Rhodesia Regiment, whose effective strength was 800 men, was often reduced to 100, and had a wastage rate of 20 per cent per month.33 Malaria was the principal cause of sickness: it resulted in 50,768 hospital admissions among the British forces in East Africa between June and December 1916. But it was not the most fatal of illnesses: only 263 deaths resulted, whereas 3,795 of the 8,902 admitted with dysentery succumbed.34

  The argument that therefore campaigns in Africa should be fought by those native to the continent was not the straightforward solution it seemed. The health problems of the porters provide abundant evidence to the contrary. In the Cameroons, of the British forces 151 out of 864 white soldiers were invalided through sickness, and 434 out of 5,927 Africans; the French figures similarly showed only a marginal health advantage in favour of the native.35 In East Africa African soldiers in British service suffered 1,377 deaths through combat as against 2,923 from disease.36 In some respects the medical problems of the African were different from those of the European. His bare feet were vulnerable to jiggers, and 40 per cent of the West African Frontier Force were lame by the end of the Cameroons campaign.37 One German doctor thought typhus, smallpox, meningitis, and sleeping sickness were all more dangerous to blacks than to whites.38 The Europeans were convinced that the Africans enjoyed a relative immunity from malaria, or that they suffered it less acutely. But an African from a malaria-free region was no less vulnerable than a European if moved to an area where the illness was endemic. The migration of so many Africans out of their native localities exposed them to fresh infections, and the physical and psychological demands lowered their resistance to disease. By the same token, those fighting in or close to their own homelands proved more hardy. The health of the German forces in the Cameroons, most of them native to the area, held up remarkably well through eighteen months of campaigning. They were lucky, in that they had just taken delivery of a year’s worth of medical supplies when war broke out. But the efforts to treat the sick as far as possible within their own companies showed the Germans’ recognition of the value of familiarity in the morale of the patient.39