Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  Captain Denis Crampton of Kinfauns Castle took to his innovative mission with relish, remarking that ‘it will be jolly if we go into action’; and on 19 November Cutler was ready for his first dawn flight over the Rufiji from Niororo Island. It was not an auspicious start to the aerial operations against Königsberg because he did not return. At one o’clock he was sighted on Okuzi Island way to the south of Niororo and rescued. Cutler seemed ‘quite undisturbed although on a desert island’ with his aeroplane ‘adrift’ and two days later was airborne again, with Crampton himself as observer. This time Cutler succeeded in staying airborne and was rewarded for the feat: the Königsberg was spotted about twelve miles upriver, ‘hauled in close to the bank of a small island and hidden by high trees so that she could not be seen until the hydroplane was almost over her’. Looff had also struck her topgallant mast and attempted to hide her topmast with branches of trees; and although it was safe to assume that Königsberg was ‘unable to escape . . . even if the river [was] not completely blocked’, it was also realised that her ‘destruction [was] impracticable by any means, except by means of bomb attack’.7 The 12-inch guns of HMS Goliath could not reach her and even fitting Goliath’s guns on the armed merchant cruiser Duplex, a former cable-laying ship with shallower draught, was dismissed as being too risky an undertaking in light of the strength of the German shore defences.

  Cutler’s third daring flight, in the first week of December, was unfortunately his last of the war. His plane came down about a mile upriver and he began three grim years as a POW in the bush for his efforts.* Only prompt and courageous action by Lieutenant Charlewood’s tug Helmuth saved his plane from falling into the hands of the shore defenders as well; but it sank while being hooked onto Kinfauns Castle and, though salvaged, was deemed irreparable. The loss of the indefatigable Cutler, who in his short period of active service had proved not only a great source of excitement but also extremely popular, was keenly felt; and the loss of the plane meant that other than hoping for ‘the most unhealthy river’ that was now home to the Königsberg to do its worst to crew and cruiser alike, there was seemingly nothing to be done except wait for the wherewithal with which to attempt the first ever aerial bomb attack of a naval vessel.

  In the meantime the Royal Navy’s attention reverted to the other tasks involved in blockading the East African coastline, and relations between Drury-Lowe and many of his officers took a turn for the worse. Captain Crampton considered him to be ‘rather a little fool’ and demanded to know ‘how the Devil he expected me to stop the Königsberg coming out when my speed can’t touch hers and my guns have 600 yards less range’. He was also not alone in believing that Drury-Lowe was running ‘grave risks’ in his conduct of the Königsberg operation, and after a timid reconnaissance of Tanga Crampton’s frustration boiled over. ‘Give me patience and preserve me from such warfare,’ wrote Crampton, ‘why on earth doesn’t he go in, or let me, and smash up their trenches’.8 The criticism was only partly justified: Churchill had rescinded an earlier order to ‘lay Tanga in ashes’9 for fear of harming British ‘prestige’ among the African population; but it echoed the remarks directed at the Fox’s Captain Caulfeild six weeks earlier at the very same place. East Africa was proving to be a singularly testing and nerve-wracking theatre of operations for ‘Jack Tar’, and by the end of November suspicions were mounting that Dar-es-Salaam required another close inspection.

  On 28 November Fox, Goliath and armed merchantman Duplex anchored off the German East African capital with the intention of searching the 8,000-ton German liner Tabora – which was newly painted in the livery of a hospital ship – and the smaller liners Feldmarschall and König. Acting Governor Humann was not at all happy with the request, or the expressed intention to disable the Tabora’s engines, and he asked if the inspection craft would be flying the white flag. The answer was negative and Humann departed, ostensibly to confer with his superiors. But before he left he went to considerable lengths to explain that if the capital was about to be bombarded the Royal Navy should be aware that the town’s women and children would be between the Evangelical Mission House and the Cathedral. It was a portentous declaration, the full significance of which apparently eluded the Royal Navy, as did the implications of Humann’s refusal to guarantee that no resistance would be encountered if the German ships were searched. The naval truce covering Dar-es-Salaam had been formally revoked by HMS Chatham on 21 October, and it was only out of a desire to appear ‘honourable’ that Humann was forewarned of the Navy’s intentions on this occasion. In the meantime, however, von Lettow-Vorbeck had had enough of having to conduct ‘fresh negotiations every time . . . we wanted to escape a threatened bombardment’10 and just two days earlier General Wahle had succeeded, at his commander’s behest, in persuading Schnee that Dar-es-Salaam should be vigorously defended the next time the Royal Navy called.

  The consequences of this ‘misunderstanding’ were calamitous. The Helmuth visited the Feldmarschall and König, taking the crew of the latter prisoner and disabling her engines, while Commander Ritchie took Goliath’s steam pinnace up the palm-fringed creek to the Kaiser Wilhelm II to destroy her engines as well. But finding no one on board the Wilhelm II made Ritchie extremely suspicious and he fastened lighters abaft and to both beams of his pinnace for his return journey. Meanwhile, Lieutenant-Commander Paterson, having finished his demolition work on the Feldmarschall and König, ordered Helmuth to put a search party under naval surgeon Holtom on the Tabora, and then to return to Duplex with the two boatloads of prisoners from the König. The crew of the Helmuth assumed that Paterson would be picked up by Ritchie as he returned from the Wilhelm II.

  As this merry-go-round of small craft neared its conclusion in the sweltering heat of a tropical afternoon, the captain of the Goliath – still anchored offshore – decided to inspect Dar-es-Salaam’s floating dock (which had been sunk in the harbour entrance in August). But when his cutter approached the harbour the sharp crack of rifle fire was heard emanating from the exact area in which Humann had said the town’s civilians would be concentrated. Two white flags still fluttered in the breeze, but the rifle fire intensified as Helmuth, with its boatloads of prisoners, also approached the harbour neck from the opposite direction; and after Helmuth’s gun was put out of action by a lucky rifle shot, Duplex was ordered to open fire on Dar-es-Salaam with her 12-pdr. With that, the guns of Fox and Goliath joined the fray and as Helmuth passed the harbour neck her crew were gratified to look back and see ‘portions of Government House flying over trees’,11 the more so as their vessel now had the appearance of ‘a porcupine below the gunwale and a nutmeg grater above it’.12

  Back in the harbour, Ritchie’s pinnace had still to run the gauntlet and was unable to pick up Holtom from the Tabora. German field guns were now in action and by the time Ritchie had reached the harbour neck he had been wounded seven times. Once through it he was hit again, in the leg, and by the time his pinnace reached the Fox seven of her crew were also wounded. Only then did it become clear that in addition to Holtom being stranded on the Tabora, Paterson’s demolition team was still on the König and had taken cover below decks.* By the end of the day a total of thirty-five British officers and ratings had been rounded up by German troops, and the only consolation for the Royal Navy for its losses in the ambush was the awarding of nine decorations to men in the boats that had entered the harbour. Most prestigious among these was the Victoria Cross conferred on Commander Ritchie, the Royal Navy’s first such award of the Great War.

  The flimsy pretext for the attack on the British vessels was – according to Humann – that neither the intrusion of more than one pinnace into the harbour nor the disabling of the German ships’ engines had been agreed to. As for the white flags which flew throughout the conflict, Humann claimed in response to an official letter of protest that they could not be lowered ‘owing to the intense fire’.13 The truth of the matter was that von Lettow-Vorbeck, having seized the initiative at Tanga, had no intention of r
elinquishing it. The more trouble he was able to cause, the more successful he would be in his attempt to force Britain to divert men and materiel to the campaign in East Africa. Churchill’s response to the news from Dar-es-Salaam was to order the Royal Navy to ‘bombard it severely and then offer not to renew if officers and men are surrendered’.14 At 10.30 a.m. on 30 December the Navy put its demands to Humann, no British prisoners were handed over, and in a systematic thirty-salvo bombardment shells further wrecked the Governor’s Palace and Bismarckstrasse, the railway station and coaling depot, and the signal station on the beach. Many naval officers were at a loss to understand why any warning was given, especially as fifty or more soldiers and a field gun were clearly visible near the harbour at the time. The only possible explanation lay in a desire to avoid being accused of ‘atrocities’, but if this was the intention it failed. In Dar-es-Salaam the bombardment was painted as an outrage against ‘a poor little crowd of human beings, exposed to the fury of a force which cannot be compared for sheer terror to any natural force’; and it further kindled the ‘warlike spirit’ that von Lettow-Vorbeck sought to instil in the colony. One resident of the town proudly declared that ‘the timidity [had] gone’ from the civilian population of Dar-es-Salaam, and expressed great satisfaction that ‘now at last our government has shown some backbone, reawakening the idea of a greater Germany’.15 The fact that Pilsen and French champagne were still available in any hotel in the town even after four months of being blockaded by the Royal Navy was a further boost to morale.

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck need not have worried unduly about the possibility of a further attack on Tanga. With the War Office in the process of taking over responsibility for the campaign from the Colonial and India Offices, and Aitken being replaced by Wapshare, his opponents were neither able nor willing to do anything other than mark time. The deployment of IEF ‘B’ was the first priority, and it had a very marked effect on administrative and civilian life in British East Africa. Belfield suddenly found himself superfluous to requirements and, after being subjected to ‘a few electrics’16 by the military establishment, he complained of feeling ‘a bit neuralgic in Nairobi’ and retired to the coast. ‘Nobody knows what [the military] are up to’, he lamented in a despatch to Lord Harcourt, and he was largely correct. An ‘air of mystery and secrecy’17 prevailed, compounded by the fact that Wapshare seemingly gave Tighe (at Mombasa) and Stewart (at Bissil, fifty miles south of Nairobi) a free rein to run military affairs in their respective zones. This caused a good deal of confusion, and tensions soon arose between Belfield’s government officials and their military counterparts.

  Supply issues proved particularly contentious. Captain Routh, a supply officer with IEF ‘B’ whose enterprise was attested to by his having bicycled from Port Said to Ostend in 1906, was astounded at the ‘hyper-parochialism’ of Belfield’s officials and derided them as ‘men of fifteen years’ accumulated EA inertia, unspoilt by the race for life now disturbing [them] so distressingly’.18 When he needed new telephone lines for Longido he was told by the Postmaster-General that there were none available because the Post Office only had ten spares and ‘several new subscribers were coming on the exchange’;19 and when Belfield was asked for a rebate on customs duty on all stores purchased locally by the troops since August 1914, the Governor refused, thereby claiming a ‘profit to the Protectorate at the expense of Imperial War Funds’.20 In similar vein, when Ewart Grogan, the owner of British East Africa’s largest timber concern, offered the military 100 tons of desperately needed timber for nothing the offer was blocked by the government as constituting ‘an unfair risk’21 to its own Public Works Department. Routh’s overall impression was that the government ‘didn’t take the war too seriously’, and that any vestigial interest had ‘evaporated since Force “B” arrived’.22 ‘The atmosphere’, he wrote, ‘was “we have done very well up to now” – which was true, but I consider something more than smug complacence and an empty market was required.’23

  Routh’s observations regarding official inertia would have come as no surprise to British East Africa’s settler population. A marked antipathy had characterised settler – official relations in the decade before the war, engendered by the settlers’ clamour for greater participation in running the country and the Colonial Office’s perceived aversion to ‘development’, and the settlers were unimpressed by the fact that officials had not yet participated in the war. Leslie Tarlton, Bellasis, Kay-Mouat, Sandbach, Le Page – these were the names of just a few of the settlers who had died for their country during the first three months of war, and yet civil servants were conspicuously absent from the roll of honour. But any hopes that Wapshare’s General Staff was about to embrace the settlers with open arms were soon dashed. A ‘Poona-Poona’ attitude to using civilians in the field prevailed among Indian Army officers, who regarded ‘the local obsession . . . that any pack of fools can use guns’24 with derision. All in all, the conclusion was that ‘settlers are great fellows in a bar, and some few outside it, but they make one quite nervous fighting’.25 Settlers were also expensive, and in an effort to trim India’s share of the costs of the campaign, which had mushroomed to £400,000 (£20m in today’s money) against a budgeted £100,000, only 130 men were retained in the volunteer East African Mounted Rifles by the end of the year. Meanwhile their comrades were given the choice of returning to their peacetime occupations or joining other units.

  Amid the ‘sanity and a solid settling down to the job in hand’26 in December came a realisation that Britain was now playing for high stakes in East Africa. ‘To the German,’ wrote the editors of The Leader, ‘Africa is the key continent of the world, and its owners will possess the balance of power between the old world and the new.’27 The military situation therefore remained extremely nerve-wracking and real martial law was finally declared in December in an attempt to keep secret a planned expedition to the Umba Valley – a vast plain of ebony trees, baobabs and euphorbia on the coastal borderlands between British and German East Africa – whose Wadigo inhabitants had requested British protection from German raids. The spectre of invasion again loomed large, not only on the coast but also on Uganda’s weakly defended Kagera ‘front’.

  The job of clearing the Umba Valley of German troops and ‘Arab’ levies fell to Mickey Tighe. This time he made quite sure he had sufficient troops for the purpose – 1,800 rifles in all* – and a simultaneous ‘demonstration’ north of Tanga was arranged by the Royal Navy. By Christmas Eve a new coastal headquarters had been established at Msambweni to replace the one at Gazi (which had become so unsanitary that a smallpox epidemic had broken out); and Tighe’s troops had occupied Vanga, on the border with German East Africa. Just for good measure Tighe then ordered the two companies of 3/KAR and the 101st Grenadiers to attack Jasin, a few miles the other side of the border, on Christmas Day. The German garrison withdrew after a short scrap, and the post was then garrisoned so as ‘to ensure ample warning of any German advance from the south’.28

  By New Year Wapshare was able to report to London that for the time being British East Africa was ‘clear of the enemy’.29 But the real significance of the Umba Valley operation lay in Tighe’s choice of combat and support personnel. Although Aitken had refused an offer of the use of 3/KAR at Tanga, it was askari of this regiment that fought alongside a company of the 101st Grenadiers to seize Jasin; and the mobility of the whole Umba Valley force depended on 5,500 African porters. After Tanga The Leader had remarked that it was ‘of course . . . an understood rule that in these wars the natives are not brought into the row’, and the paper’s editors accused von Lettow-Vorbeck of ‘ignoring all the rules of civilised war’30 by deploying his askari in the battle. Yet two months later it was quite clear that any absurd aspirations to limit the participation of East Africa’s indigenous population had been dispensed with by Britain as well, and the campaign was destined to become no more a ‘White Man’s War’ than the war between Britain and the Boer Republics a decade and a half earli
er. The Great African War had begun.

  PART TWO

  1915

  SNIPING NOTE FROM EAST AFRICA

  ‘Picking off the enemy’

  Perhaps the blokes in Flanders our little bit will scorn,

  ’Cos we’ve never had an order that gas masks must be worn,

  And have never heard a ‘nine point five’ or a Hymn of Hate at morn.

  But how’d you like to tramp it for a solid month on end,

  And then go on another month till your knees begin to bend,

  Or when you’re out on picquet hear a lion answer ‘Friend’?

  And what about a scrapping up a mountain three miles high,

  A-swearing and a-panting till you thought your end was nigh,

  And then to bump a Maxim gun that’s dug in on the sky?

  And would you like anopheles and jigger-fleas and snakes

  To ‘chivvy’ you from dusk till dawn, and fill you up with aches,

  And then go on fatigue all day in a heat that fairly bakes?

  There wasn’t any Blighty, no, nor mails in twice a week: