To Arms
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The concomitant of mobility was a low casualty rate. The Union suffered greater losses in the rebellion than in the South-West African campaign proper: 113 had died through enemy action and 153 through disease or accident; 263 had been wounded. The determination of the Germans to keep their forces intact, and their readiness in pursuit of this policy to give ground rather than to fight, were only too evident at the final surrender: 4,740 men, with thirty-seven field guns, twenty-two machine-guns, and large stocks of ammunition (even after guns had been sunk in a deep-water lake, and 2 million rounds and 8,000 rifles at Tsumeb had been burnt141) had agreed terms without a climactic battle. Of the total of 1,188 German casualties, only 103 were killed and fully 890 were prisoners of war. The campaign’s legacy, for all its failure to cement English-Afrikaner relations as Botha and Smuts had hoped, was a rapid reconciliation between German and South African.
On 9 July Botha agreed to terms which allowed the German reservists to return to their homes, German schools to continue to function, and the German civilian administration to remain in place. Botha’s aim was white settlement. He recognized clearly the need for the ruling minorities to collaborate. The Germans could provide stability while Boer immigration got under way. On 25 June 1915 the Cape railway, extended from Prieska to Upington on 20 November, reached the German railhead at Kalkfontein. Into this local cooperation other, imperially derived considerations did not intrude. The glut of diamonds on the London market, and the freezing of diamond sales to prevent their export to Germany via Holland, put a major commercial pressure on South-West Africa into temporary abeyance. The vivid portrayal of German colonial atrocities, fed by the vicious suppression of the Herero rebellion, which had been ignored before 1914, took off after the war’s outbreak. Nonetheless, the cause of humanitarianism did not prompt the South Africans to remove Germans from South-West Africa. In 1918 there were still about 12,000 Germans resident. Only after the deportation of half that number in the same year were the remainder outnumbered by immigrant Afrikaners.142 By biding his time in 1915, Botha laid the foundations for South Africa’s own brand of colonialism in 1918.
EAST AFRICA, 1914–1915
On 2 March 1919 the Germans who had returned from East Africa marched through the Brandenburg Gate to be received by representatives of the Weimar government. At their head rode Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, wearing the slouch-hat of the Schütztruppen, his neck adorned with the pour le mérite. It was a victory parade. The following year, in his book Heia Safari!, Lettow-Vorbeck would tell German youth of his exploits, of how with inferior forces he had sustained the war in Africa until surrender in Europe had forced him to lay down his arms. The Schütztruppen of East Africa embodied the German army’s notion of its own invincibility; leadership and determination had enabled the few to prevail against the many; morale had triumphed over matériel.
Lettow-Vorbeck was indubitably a fine commander, who led by example and drove himself as hard as he drove his men. The loyalty he inspired in his troops became a key element in the agitation of German colonialists for the return of their territories after 1919. But his reputation has rested not simply on the needs of German militarism or German imperialism, on its supporting role in the argument that Germany was stabbed in the back. Beyond his own country, the Schütztruppen commander came to be venerated as a master of guerrilla war. The origins of such an interpretation lay with the South Africans who had fought him in 1916. The Boers among them, mindful of their own war against the British, and perhaps sensitive about their performance when the roles were reversed, responded happily to the idea that they had influenced Lettow’s strategic outlook.143 Lettow lived on until 1964. By then the practice of communist insurgency gave the techniques of guerrilla warfare fresh fascination, providing the lens through which Lettow’s achievements were reassessed, and augmenting his band of Anglophone admirers.
Thus, the campaign in East Africa has not met with the neglect meted out to the other sub-Saharan theatres of the First World War.144 But its analysis has been skewed by two mistaken premisses.
First, while it is true that Lettow himself remained active in the field throughout the war, his sustained defence of German East Africa extended to only twenty months (March 1916 to November 1917). Zimmerman’s battle in the Cameroons was comparable in length. Indeed, without the Cameroons and without South-West Africa British forces would have been able to concentrate against Lettow much earlier in the war and at a stage when he was much less ready. If Lettow had taken the command in the Cameroons and not in East Africa (as was originally intended in 1913), or if the Entente had elected to deal with East Africa before the Cameroons and not vice versa, Zimmerman, not Lettow, might have ridden through the Brandenburg Gate in 1919.
Secondly, Lettow was never consistently a practitioner of guerrilla warfare. The Schütztruppen were trained to bush fighting, and in this both they and their commander excelled. But Lettow’s own operational priorities remained those of the German military doctrine in which he was trained. His memoirs contain no theory relevant to the guerrilla; instead, they again and again bear testimony to his desire for envelopment, encirclement, and the decisive battle. Wintgens’s great raid into the north of British-occupied territory in 1917, a model of guerrilla practice, was criticized by Lettow as undermining the principle of concentration.145 Most telling of all, contemporary theories of guerrilla war are grounded in ideas of national liberation; nothing could have been further from Lettow’s mind.
The primary strength of the guerrilla rests not on force of arms but on his knowledge of the country and on the material support vouchsafed him by its population. Lettow’s protracted resistance was sustained by both factors. And yet Lettow himself never fully recognized the political and economic foundations on which his campaign rested. His views were shaped by the circumstances of his appointment. Both Heydebreck in South-West Africa and Zimmerman in the Cameroons were creatures of the military department of the Colonial Office; hence, their priority was to protect their respective colonies. Lettow was the product of a bureaucratic takeover, an appointee of the general staff.146 On 15 May 1914, four months after arriving in East Africa, he reported to Berlin that war in the colony should not ‘be treated as a self-sufficient episode. It and the great war can react off each other.’147 By taking the offensive, the Schütztruppen would draw British troops away from the main theatre and employ British warships in oceanic escort duties distant from home waters. German East Africa was therefore a means to an end. African interests were subordinate to German, local political stability and economic progress secondary to European military necessity. On 15 September 1918, as the war drew to its conclusion, Ludwig Deppe, a doctor with Lettow’s force, wrote in his diary: ‘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.’148 ‘Lettow-Vorbeck’s brilliant campaign’, Tanganyika’s historian has concluded, ‘was the climax of Africa’s exploitation: its use as a mere battlefield.’149
Lettow’s pre-war proposals never found formal sanction. The old East African hands, military as well as civilian, anticipated disaster. The concentration of the Schütztruppen’s field companies for the attack would remove the main peace-keeping force at the local level. Between 1889 and 1904 Germany had conducted over seventy-five punitive expeditions in the area, some of breathtaking brutality. As recently as 1905–6 the Maji-Maji rebellion had rocked Germany’s hold on the south of the colony, and in 1914 two districts, Iringa and Mahenge, were still under military administration. For every German in East Africa there were 1,000 natives. To take away the soldiers, to enlist porters, requisition food-stocks, to suspend overseas trade—all these were direct routes to the incitement of rebellion.
In Wilhelmstal a great redoubt was built, behind which the white civil population could seek refuge. But its wooden palisades be
came a joke. The great unspoken assumption on which Lettow’s campaign in East Africa rested was the absence of rebellion. Broadly speaking, where German administration remained in place, there order and loyalty persisted. The exceptions were minor. In the north the Masai on the frontier used the power vacuum to revert to their cattle-stealing and lawless ways; during the course of 1915 some of them were won over to the British. In the south, fears of fresh rebellion—while persistent—proved greater than their actuality. The scorched-earth policies of the Germans after the Maji-Maji rising had caused famine and depopulation around Mahenge. The rains then failed in 1913. The Germans’ war-driven demands for grain and manpower therefore struck a region ill able to provide either. The Wahehe, as well as the Watusi (or Tutsi) to the east, resisted, and punitive expeditions were mounted against both. When the actual fighting reached the Wahehe and the Makonde in late 1916 and 1917, their peoples helped the British and impeded the Germans. Nonetheless, early British hopes that Germany’s position would be eroded from within proved groundless.150
MAP 21. EAST AFRICA
Effective civil administration was thus the foundation-stone of Lettow’s strategy. But precisely because Lettow’s preoccupations were narrowly professional, the Schütztruppen’s commander was blinded to the achievements of German colonialism. The Schütztruppen had been subordinated to civilian control in the wake of the military’s brutal suppression of the Herero rebellion. Lettow, himself a veteran of that campaign, was determined to subvert this aspect of its legacy. Hostility characterized civil-military relations throughout the war. Efforts to maintain domestic order were interpreted, then and subsequently, as obstructive of military needs. Yet without them Lettow would have had no recruits, no porters, and no food.
East Africa’s governor was the antithesis of the soldierly types required for the job in the early days of conquest. Heinrich Schnee was a lawyer and professional colonialist—’full of cunning, by no means a fool, but not a gentleman’, in the view of one British general who met him in 1918.151 In 1912 Schnee took over a German territory that was moving from conquest and suppression to prosperity and liberalization. In 1906 the colony’s trade was worth 36 million marks; in 1913, with imports doubling and exports tripling, trade was valued at 89 million marks. The European population, which totalled 2,000 in 1901, reached 5,336 in January 1913, most of them planters drawn to the production of sisal, rubber, wool, copra, coffee, and groundnuts. Two railways thrust inland from the coast. The first, the northern or Usambara line, connected the port of Tanga with Moshi, situated at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. The fertility of the region and the healthiness of the uplands made this the major concentration of population and productivity. Further south, the colony’s capital and major harbour, Dar es Salaam, stood at the head of the central railway, running through Tabora to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika. In July 1914 preparations were afoot to celebrate the completion of this second railway, and in Dar es Salaam pavilions were being erected for an exhibition scheduled to open on 15 August.
Neither Schnee nor the rest of the German population of East Africa could muster much enthusiasm about the outbreak of war in Europe. The achievements of the previous decade were to be thrown into the balance. But while neutrality would serve Schnee’s purposes, his hopes for its fulfilment were never unrealistic. On 2 August 1914 the colonial office in Berlin, uncertain about the likelihood of British involvement, instructed Schnee to quieten fears of war among the settler population. This, and not a naive faith in the Congo act, buoyed Schnee’s hopes. On 5 August Schnee knew that Britain and Germany were at war, and told the German population to expect an attack from British East Africa. If the Congo act had really affected Schnee’s calculations it would have been evident in his dealings with his western neighbours, the Belgians, who in August did pursue a policy of neutrality in Africa. But on 9 August Schnee (wrongly) concluded that Belgian belligerence embraced Africa as well as Europe, and it was an attack by a German gunboat against a Belgian on Lake Tanganyika on 22 August that precipitated Belgium’s abandonment of neutrality.
Nonetheless, the neutrality question generated the first major clash between Lettow and his nominal superior, Schnee. Lettow argued in terms consonant with his European military priorities: neutrality would be to Britain’s advantage, not Germany’s, since Britain would be able to redeploy its assets in other theatres, whereas Germany, by dint of its naval inferiority, would not. Schnee’s concern, however, was not with the grand strategy of European war but with the immediate issue of coastal defence. None of German East Africa’s ports had been fortified. The only major naval unit in the region was the light cruiser Königsberg, based at Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam was a better harbour than any of those possessed by Germany on Africa’s west coast. But a British colony, Zanzibar, lay athwart its entrance. The German navy, therefore, had no intention of using it in wartime. In accordance with her orders, Königsberg put to sea on 31 July rather than risk being blockaded in harbour. Her captain, Max Looff, was clear that he would be unable to return to Dar es Salaam. Schnee’s position was most unsatisfactory: he possessed a port which he knew the British would regard as a base for cruiser warfare but which the cruiser in question had no intention of using. The Royal Navy’s Cape Squadron already had Künigsberg under surveillance; that it would bombard Dar es Salaam, killing women and children and destroying civilian installations, was highly probable; the Germans’ inability to reply would dent their prestige with the native population. On 5 August Schnee declared Dar es Salaam an open town, and ordered the troops within it to positions outside. His solution to his defencelessness was therefore partial neutrality—to abandon the protection of the coast and so counter the only imminent external threat.152
Schnee’s decision was in accord with the plan concerted with the German general staff before the war and essentially adopted by Lettow at its outset: to abandon the coast and withdraw inland to where the British could not easily follow.153 But Lettow was furious. Schnee’s plan appeared to deny the use of Dar es Salaam to the Künigsberg but permit it to her British opponents. In reality the German navy, not Schnee, had deemed Dar es Salaam superfluous. To underline the point, the commander of the survey ship Möwe ordered that a floating dock be sunk across the harbour entrance, and then scuttled his own command in the harbour itself. On 8 August two British cruisers bombarded the harbour, their objective being to destroy the wireless station. Under the protection of a white flag, Schnee’s representatives explained their policy, blew up the wireless station, and withdrew into the interior. On 17 August the Royal Navy’s Cape Squadron accepted the neutralization not only of Dar es Salaam but also of Tanga. Thus was British naval weakness in the region writ large: inferior to the Künigsberg in speed and no more than its equal in armament, the Cape Squadron was much more concerned about threats to the Indian Ocean’s trading routes than it was about the East African coastline.154
Lettow’s bellicosity in these early days of the war seemed faintly ridiculous: among the German population he acquired the nickname the ‘Mad Mullah’.155 Schnee’s policy in relation to the coast infuriated him because of its connotations of cowardice; strategically, it served Lettow’s purposes extraordinarily well.
In 1912 Schnee’s and Lettow’s predecessors had agreed a plan that anticipated an all-round defence of the colony combined with limited offensive thrusts. By leaving the Schütztruppen scattered, the purposes of domestic order as well as of colonial defence would be simultaneously satisfied. The plan presumed that the defence of the coast would be abandoned at an early stage. However, on his arrival in East Africa Lettow had proposed to recast the 1912 plan in the light of his European priorities. He argued that the Germans should not scatter their forces but should unite in the north for an attack into British East Africa, thus forcing the enemy over to the defence and so relieving the Germans of their own defensive obligations. Lettow’s proposal had received an ambivalent response in Berlin. In East Africa itself the fear of rebellion cautioned agains
t concentration. When war broke out, therefore, Schnee favoured a more limited grouping at Pugu, outside Dar es Salaam. But on 15 August the Germans captured Taveta, south-east of Kiliminjaro, just across the frontier into British territory and a vital staging post for any British advance. With his northern defences more secure, Lettow’s case for thrusts against the Uganda railway, running from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, gained in credibility. On the German side of the northern frontier were the resources—both men and food—which would permit troop concentrations to be sustained and supplied; on the British side was a waterless expanse which would inhibit any enemy counter. British agreement to Dar es Salaam’s neutrality, by relieving the Germans of any residual obligations to protect the coast, confirmed Schnee in his acceptance of Lettow’s proposals. Between 20 and 24 August seven field companies began their move from the central railway to the northern.156
The strength of the Schütztruppen on the outbreak of war stood at 218 Europeans and 2,542 askaris, divided into fourteen field companies. Each company numbered between 150 and 200 askaris, and had sixteen to twenty German officers and NCOs. With its complement of porters and auxiliaries, its total ration strength could rise to 400. Four further companies were raised on mobilization, although the number of fit and young reservists was—owing to the long service of the regular askaris—small. The European civilian population had formed rifle associations in the years preceding the war, primarily for self-defence in the event of rebellion, and these contributed three more companies: by the end of 1914 1,670 German reservists had been called up. Finally, the police numbered fifty-five Europeans and 2,160 blacks. Lettow was scathing about their military qualities and resented their ability to draw recruits from the Schütztruppen. Moreover, not until 1917 was the last of them incorporated into the military forces. But it may not be fanciful to see in their numbers and in their subordination to civil control a reason for the unexpectedly good order of the colony during the war.157