Tip & Run
Page 4
The voices and memorials of the Great War in East Africa are predominantly European. But African combatants and carriers called upon to march twenty miles a day for months on end, in searing heat and through pouring rain, subsisting on minimal rations and with only the most rudimentary medical resources, would undoubtedly have concurred with the sentiment expressed by one young British officer. In 1914 Lieutenant Lewis had witnessed the slaughter of every single man in his half-battalion on the Western Front and had experienced all the horrors of trench warfare. Yet sixteen months later, in a letter sent to his mother from the East African ‘front’, Lewis wrote ‘I would rather be in France than here’.29
Imagine a country three times the size of Germany, mostly covered by dense bush, with no roads and only two railways, and either sweltering under a tropical sun or swept by torrential rain which makes the friable soil impassable to wheeled traffic; a country with occasional wide and swampy areas interspersed with arid areas where water is often more precious than gold; in which man rots with malaria and suffers torments from insect pests; in which animals die wholesale from the ravages of the tse-tse fly; where crocodiles and lions seize unwary porters, giraffes destroy telegraph lines, elephants damage tracks, hippopotami attack boats, rhinoceroses charge troops on the march, and bees put whole battalions to flight. Such was German East Africa in 1914–18.
H.L. Pritchard (ed.),
History of the Royal Corps of Engineers, Vol. VII, p. 107
PART ONE
1914
OFFICER’S VOICE IN THE OFFING: ‘Pass the word down, Corporal Higginbotham, to advance in rushes of twenty paces, not firing till ordered and not exposing yourselves to danger.’
(Corpl. Higginbotham wishes himself somewhere in – France.)
Steam down to Tanga
Over the briny main
See our Major-General
And his brilliant train.
Three brigade commanders
Colonels, staff galore;
Majors count for little;
Captains they ignore.
Earnestly they study
Each his little book
Which, compiled in Simla,
Tells him where to look.
Local knowledge needed?
Native scouts of use?
For so quaint a notion
There is small excuse.
See them shortly landing
At the chosen spot,
Find the local climate
Just a trifle hot.
Foes unsympathetic,
Maxims on them train
Careful first to signal
Range to ascertain.
Ping, ping, go the bullets
Crash! Explode the shells,
Major-General’s worried
Thinks its just as well
Not to move too rashly
While he’s in the dark,
What’s the strength opposing?
Orders re-embark.
Back to old Mombasa
Steams B force again
Are these generals ruffled?
Not the smallest grain.
Martial regulations
Inform us day by day.
They may have foozled Tanga
But they’ve taken BEA.
Poem by W. Monson,
a government official in British East Africa.
ONE
‘The Germans Open the Ball’1
‘Tipsified Pumgirdles Germany Novel’ was the wording of the telegram which had Mr Webb reaching for his code book on 5 August 1914. As District Commissioner at Karonga, the headquarters of the Ross-Adam Trading Company in northern Nyasaland, he had been told a few days earlier that he might receive just such a message. A minute later he was certain of its meaning, and began despatching messengers to all outlying European settlements in his district. On the shores of Lake Nyasa one of the less fortunate ones was received with ‘ribald suggestions’2 from two planters whom he had surprised midway through a gargantuan drinking session. The news he brought seemed barely credible: Webb had been informed that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany.
All across East Africa the initial disbelief soon gave way to shock. In Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of German East Africa, the thousand or so European residents had spent weeks putting the final touches to preparations for a grand exhibition to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Schutztruppe, and the completion of the 780-mile Central Railway which now connected the capital with Lake Tanganyika. Regattas, sailing matches, beer evenings and an open day on the railway were all part of the plans which were to have culminated in a Grand Ball on 30 August. Crown Prince Wilhelm himself was to have been patron, an aeroplane had been shipped from German South-West Africa to do aerial displays, and the 6,300-ton SS Feldmarschall had arrived laden with provisions – but the advent of war had now ruined what should have been the greatest month in the life of the colony. It had also come as a rude ‘interruption’ to colonial life in Nairobi, the capital of British East Africa. The Muthaiga Club had opened that summer, boasting the best cellar in Africa, a shop which sold dreamy luxuries like Charbonnel et Walker chocolates, and a head chef from the Bombay Yacht Club. At its first fancy dress ball, attended by no fewer than 150 guests, Miss Henderson had been much admired for her Apache outfit, as were Mrs Hodgkinson (as Bo-Peep) and Mrs Gilkes (who came as a magpie). In the small towns of both colonies the prospect of hostilities was initially greeted with sceptical humour: the clenched fist of German East Africa was, after all, surrounded by hostile British territories (British East Africa, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland), an ocean over which the Royal Navy held sway, or colonies of ostensibly neutral European Powers (Belgian Congo and Portuguese East Africa) whose sympathies were thought unlikely to be pro-German.
Neither colony was on a war footing, although British settlers would subsequently speculate that their German neighbours’ cancelled celebrations had been nothing more than a smokescreen for stocking the colony with war materials; and their respective Governors were both aware that the 1885 Berlin Act excluded the colonies of the so-called ‘Congo Basin’ from any ‘universal war’, not least on the grounds that the spectacle of a war between European states on African soil might undermine white ‘prestige’ and lead to ‘native unrest’. Above all, it seemed impossible that war would break out for the simple reason that neither colony appeared to have the prerequisite resources for a fight. There were just seventeen companies of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in British East Africa and Uganda, comprising 2,400 officers and askari ; the full complement of German East Africa’s colonial troops amounted to 216 officers and 2,540 askari (see Appendix One); and the purpose of all these troops was the maintenance of internal security in the three principal colonies of East Africa, which encompassed almost three-quarters of a million square miles.
On the eve of war tension between British and German settlers, even between British and German colonial governments, simply did not exist. As one Nairobi wag put it, British East Africa ‘was not prepared. Why should it have been, with a German colony cheek-by-jowl across the border? Had German East Africa . . . been removed some thousands of miles away it is just possible that elaborate military arrangements would have been made years ahead in contemplation of a raid from it in the future. But German East Africa was much too near to be dangerous. Just a handful of comrades who spoke German, over the border as it were . . . So nobody worried. There was nothing to worry about.’3 But the war in Europe immediately created a climate of fear and suspicion, and by mid August it had ignited outright hostilities in eastern Africa.
The catalyst for this improbable strife was a single nine-year-old German light cruiser, the 3,600-ton Königsberg, which had put to sea from Dar-es-Salaam on 31 July (and was rumoured, among the port’s civilian population, to be bound for the Mediterranean). Her captain, Max Looff, had been warned of the possibility of war and had no intention of being trapped by the Royal Navy in German East Africa’s ‘Haven
of Peace’. According to one of his signalmen, Looff told his crew that he ‘would not seek battle’ but that they should all be at the ready ‘to defend ourselves if necessary’.4 The escape was timely: that night the Königsberg passed within a few thousand yards of two British cruisers from the Cape Station on their annual ‘East Coast summer cruise’. In the darkness Looff showed the older British ships a clean pair of heels but, as a midshipman on HMS Hyacinth later suggested, it would only have required ‘one nervous gunlayer to press his trigger and [the First World War] might have started four days earlier’.5
Although he was at sea, and not trapped in port, Captain Looff’s predicament was an unenviable one. The German Imperial Navy had never displayed any great enthusiasm for the Kaiser’s colonies, which had been acquired for reasons that had little to do with its own strategic interests, and colonies were a nuisance. In a bygone era it had been required to enforce the anti-slavery blockade of East Africa (acting in conjunction with the Royal Navy); and on two occasions serious rebellions against German rule had called for a naval presence. But since Germany had abandoned its strategy of using its colonies as Stützpunkte–bases–for numerous commerce raiders a decade earlier, in favour of a concentration on the Home Fleet, the Imperial Navy had ceased to present much of a threat to the British Empire in distant waters. In August 1914 only a handful of German warships therefore roamed south of the Equator, and Looff’s sentiments mirrored those of Admiral von Spee, commanding Germany’s South Atlantic squadron: ‘I am quite homeless’, wrote the latter, ‘[and] cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbour. I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, until my ammunition is exhausted, or a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me.’6
On 5 August Heinrich Schnee, German East Africa’s Governor, closed the door on Looff and the Königsberg. On 23 July he had been informed by the Reichskolonialamt – the Colonial Office – in Berlin that ‘the Imperial Navy [did] not intend to protect places on the coast of the German Protectorates’ in the event of war and his instructions were explicit: to ensure ‘that no pretext . . . be offered to hostile naval forces for the bombardment of our undefended maritime places’7 by declaring his colony’s ports ‘open’. This he duly did. A floating dock was sunk in the narrow entrance to Dar-es-Salaam harbour to prevent its use by any warship, he gave undertakings to the Royal Navy that all German vessels in the harbour would be considered British prizes, ordered the company of troops garrisoning the capital to abandon the town, and made preparations to move his seat of government 100 miles inland to Morogoro. All in all, Schnee seemed to be carrying out his task meticulously and allowing a 4,900-ton collier, the König, to leave port with coal for the Königsberg may have been nothing more than the result of an oversight which was quickly rectified by the Royal Navy when the König was turned back to port. But further ‘oversights’ followed. Two pinnaces from the SS Feldmarschall and a steamer, the Rovuma, were not intercepted as they made their way south to the Rufiji delta laden with coal and other supplies to await a possible rendezvous with the Königsberg ; in ordering the mobilisation of the colony’s Schutztruppe Schnee made Dar-es-Salaam’s railway station, which would facilitate troop movements along the Central Railway, a legitimate target for the Royal Navy; and he did nothing to disable the city’s high-powered wireless installation, which was capable of communicating with the Königsberg. Schnee certainly resented the Royal Navy’s overbearing presence, and the conditions created by war were chaotic. But he was a lawyer by training, fully conversant with the definition of an ‘open port’ contained in the 1907 Hague Convention, and he was therefore either acting naïvely or taking considerable risks in his interpretation of the Convention. As he was a man who, according to his Anglo-Irish wife, took decisions ‘after judging the risks . . . with calm consideration, displaying iron will and vigour’,8 Schnee’s actions were almost certainly in the latter category.
Had the Königsberg been swiftly apprehended by the Royal Navy, whose orders were to neutralise all threats to shipping in the southern hemisphere, Schnee’s brinkmanship would have mattered little. On 6 August, however, the Königsberg captured the City of Winchester, newly built at a cost of £400,000 (£20m in today’s money), in the Gulf of Aden. It was the British Empire’s first merchant shipping loss of the war, confirmation that Looff’s vessel was a menace to Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean, and as such implicated its most recent home port – Dar-es-Salaam – in an act of war if it had not satisfied the ‘open port’ conditions of the Hague Convention (which it had not). Reprisals were immediately planned by the Royal Navy, and on 8 and 9 August Dar-es-Salaam’s wireless installation and railway station were subjected to bombardment by HMS Pegasus and HMS Astraea. Schnee’s reaction was variously described as one of surprise and one of complete outrage as he ordered the destruction of the wireless station and the scuttling of an armed survey ship, the Möwe, in a belated attempt to achieve full compliance with the ‘open port’ rules.* It was a disingenuous response. Dar-es-Salaam was no more open than Dover. But the naval bombardment was seized upon by German East Africa’s military and civilian authorities as an unprovoked act of aggression on a par with Belgium’s refusal to allow the free passage of German troops into France.
With the bombardment of Dar-es-Salaam, and the reaction it provoked among the more bellicose quarters in German East Africa, the likelihood of the war at sea spreading to land suddenly became a very real possibility. Indeed this had already occurred in West Africa where, on 7 August, Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi had gained lasting notoriety by being the first British soldier to fire a shot in anger in World War I as joint operations commenced to eliminate any naval threat emanating from Togo and destroy the German colony’s high-power wireless station at Kamina. As far as German East Africa was concerned Schnee’s orders from Berlin stipulated that, having established the neutrality of the colony’s ports, he should mobilise the Schutztruppe for ‘a defence of the rest of the Protectorate’9 in the event of attack and intern all British subjects in the colony. Schnee had followed these instructions to the letter, and issued a decree on 5 August telling the colony’s 5,000 or so Germans that it was ‘expected that we too [defend] to the death the soil of German East Africa entrusted to us’.10
With that he had summoned Major Kepler, the acting commander of the Schutztruppe in Dar-es-Salaam, and Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck, the commander-in-chief of the Schutztruppe, for consultations. Schnee’s principal concern was that no action should be taken that would jeopardise the bright future he envisaged for German East Africa, which had generated revenue of 120 million Marks (£330m in today’s money) in the decade prior to 1914, or compromise internal security. There had been two major rebellions in the colony’s short history, the most recent only a decade previously; and Schnee recognised, rather prosaically, that a number of tribes among German East Africa’s eight million indigenous population had ‘a certain tendency towards belligerence’.11
As forty-two-year-old Schnee was the supreme authority in the colony, he had every justification for expecting that his plans for defence would be obeyed without question. But in suggesting that ‘the exact orders for the troops in the event of them having to be mobilised’ were ‘to be left to the discretion of the Governor as well as the commander [of the Schutztruppe]12 his superiors in Berlin had unwittingly placed Schnee in ‘an extraordinarily difficult position’13 due to the character of his ‘commander’. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, ‘tall, sinewy and blond with blue-grey eyes’,14 was a career soldier who had served in China during the Boxer Rebellion; had played a leading role in the ‘pacification’ of German South-West Africa in 1904–6, during which he lost the sight in his left eye;* and had commanded the Marine 2nd Seebataillon at Wilhelmshaven before his appointment as German East Africa’s commander-in-chief in 1913. Schnee, far from being the slightly weak, ‘quiet and peace-loving’15 character portrayed by some accounts of the war, was a ruthlessly efficient, zealously patriot
ic and cunning official; but in von Lettow-Vorbeck he had met his match.