Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  SEVEN

  The War in the West

  While von Lettow-Vorbeck set about putting extreme pressure on British East Africa’s Uganda Railway – nearly fifty separate raids were to be launched in a year, reducing the railway ‘to the verge of collapse’1 – the situation to the far west was equally perplexing for the Allies. Belgium had only taken over responsibility for the Congo in 1908, when the country was ‘removed’ by an international outcry from the personal clutches of King Leopold II: during the decades in which he had run it as a personal fiefdom between five and eight million Africans were reckoned to have lost their lives at the hands of the most cruel and exploitative colonial system that would ever be seen in Africa. The Belgian Congo had been the Africa of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the outbreak of war on the eastern borders of a country eighty times the size of Belgium was the last thing the Belgian government-in-exile in France needed as it sought to put its colonial house in order.

  Not surprisingly, given their predicament in Europe, the Belgians had considerable problems in preparing for Anglo-Belgian co-operation on the Congo front. At the outset, however, both sides were unusually fortunate in being able to secure the involvement of a man who knew the Ruanda-Urundi borderlands as well as any alive. Ewart Grogan, British East Africa’s most prominent business magnate and political firebrand, had passed through them on his great Cape-to-Cairo trek which had made him famous throughout the British Empire some fifteen years earlier; and by a fortunate coincidence one of the Belgian district administrators he had met at that time had been Commandant Josué Henry, now Commissaire-Général of the Belgian Congo and commander-in-chief of the Belgian troops in Kivu district.

  By the end of October 1914 Grogan, completely unbeknownst to Governor Belfield but with General Stewart’s approval, had set out on a mission to establish contact with the Belgian High Command and successfully reached his former stomping grounds around Lake Kivu. En route, he had crossed Lake Victoria at a time when the German steamer Muansa was still able to maraud at will, made his way right along the 200-mile Kagera front (the boundary between Uganda and German East Africa), and crossed 100 miles of German territory. It was a remarkable achievement for a man almost in his forties, accompanied only by a few porters and Ibrahim, his fiercely loyal Somali headman, and he eventually found Henry at Kibati, about five miles north of the lake. When Grogan appeared out of the blue he was received by his somewhat astonished old friend with ‘the greatest possible cordiality and consideration’.2

  Henry’s position was a difficult one. Belgium had abandoned its hopes of keeping the Congo neutral after repeated German incursions across its borders, but getting sufficient troops to those borders had taken time and a very great deal of effort. By the time Grogan arrived some 2,000 Belgian askari had succeeded in marching from Stanleyville in just two months to join Henry at Kivu, and bolster the numbers of the 1,500 men of the Force Publique already on garrison duty on the Congo’s eastern borders. Henry’s dilemma was what to do with an ‘army’ that was exhausted and desperately short of both ammunition and provisions, and he turned to Grogan for advice on how to improve morale. Grogan responded with a whirlwind of activity, and by the end of November he had led shooting parties to obtain hippo meat from Lake Edward, opened a supply line to Mbarara (100 miles away in south-western Uganda), and persuaded Henry to move his camp north to the healthier climes of Rutchuru (midway between Lake Kivu and Lake Edward). He then requested further instructions from Nairobi and at a meeting at Lake Kivu in January 1915 – attended by Henry, Grogan and Colonel Malleson, a former senior Staff officer with IEF ‘B’ – closer co-operation was agreed between the two allies. A telegraph line was laid which would put Henry in (almost) direct contact with Nairobi, and Grogan agreed to provide 100 ox-carts from his timber yards for a Belgian advance into German territory that was assumed to be imminent.

  Grogan was assured by Henry that ‘without wishing to commit the Belgian government in respect of any post bellum adjustments of frontiers . . . [its] policy specifically excludes any intention of territorial gain aggrandisement or war of conquest’; and the Belgian commander added that he assumed that ‘it was the policy of the British Government to annex German East Africa’.3 All he asked for was clarification of his ally’s military plans and a simplification of communications – being required to deal with several Whitehall ministries and the civilian and military authorities in Nairobi had already been the cause of countless misunderstandings. To Grogan, these seemed like perfectly reasonable requests and Henry’s desire to be as co-operative as possible was evidenced by the despatch of 500 Belgian troops to Uganda’s Kagera front and Belgium’s affirmation of ongoing assistance in protecting the Northern Rhodesia border. Such support was vital: on the Kagera front the ravages of disease were proving so great that one in four men of a company of the 2nd Loyal North Lancs posted there in January were in hospital within a matter of weeks, while in Northern Rhodesia British troops were bracing themselves for another German invasion attempt.

  In the first three months of 1915 Belgian troops had succeeded in repelling a number of further incursions from German East Africa, even beating off a determined assault by Captain Schimmer on Luvungi, between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Kivu, and killing the German commander in the process. Confidence rose steadily as a result of these successes, and by March Henry suggested that his troops should invade Ruanda and Urundi while British troops simultaneously attacked Mwanza – a move which might well cause German troops to abandon Bukoba and the whole of the western littoral of Lake Victoria. On paper the plan looked attractive, as did a second initiative discussed by the Belgian and British governments for joint operations against Neu Langenburg and Bismarckburg. But at this critical juncture Anglo-Belgian co-operation began to falter as the expectations of the Belgian government-in-exile became increasingly unrealistic.

  Henry’s call for an immediate offensive was made at the behest of Jules Renkin, Belgium’s ambitious Colonial Minister in Le Havre, who was determined to ensure that if the war ended soon Belgium would not take her place at the negotiating table empty-handed. There was no imminent likelihood of ending the German occupation of Belgium – but if Belgian troops occupied the rich and fertile German colonies of Ruanda and Urundi, Renkin would at least possess a valuable bargaining counter. Such bellicose intentions caused a good deal of suspicion in Whitehall: on the Western Front Belgian troops had played no part in the battles at Ypres or the spring offensive of 1915 which had cost hundreds of thousands of British and French lives; and in spite of the useful propaganda value of King Albert and the ‘poor little Belgians’, Belgian self-interest began to arouse increasing indignation. Furthermore, Belgium’s troops in the Congo were entirely dependent on Britain for their supplies of military hardware; and the War Office was adamant that it could not approve, or provide the wherewithal for, any more ‘risky expeditions’ by Wapshare and Tighe for the foreseeable future even in the name of Anglo-Belgian co-operation.

  The Belgian government’s response to what it perceived as British stubbornness was to pursue as independent a course of action in Africa as Europe. This started to become evident when Henry was subordinated to General Tombeur, the Vice-Governor of Belgian Congo’s copper-rich Katanga province and a former aide-de-camp to King Albert. His instructions were to ensure that Belgian troops were on German soil as fast as possible, and as he set about preparing for an independent offensive he declared that ‘Belgium is not only taking the most appropriate stance to maintain the integrity of her colonial domain; it is intended that her resolve will demonstrate once more to the world her indomitable spirit and unshakeable vitality’.4 Jules Renkin had seemingly prevailed, but the magnitude of the challenge confronting Tombeur made a mockery of his ambitions. The deployment of his troops for an all-out offensive against German East Africa, Ruanda and Urundi could not be effected in less than seven months (and, according to the Belgian official history, eighty-four steps); and there was no prospe
ct of Britain finding spare shipping tonnage to provide the necessary arms and ammunition before the end of 1915. Furthermore, all Belgian attempts to capture Kissenyi – a vital precursor to any offensive – in the period May–September 1915 were successfully beaten off by the German garrison commanded by Lieutenant Peter Langen, who had recovered from a severe wound inflicted at Jasin. In other words Tombeur’s ‘offensive’ was a figment of the imagination of his political masters, and his refusal to acknowledge the practical difficulties inherent in his proposed strategy caused further political ructions with Britain.

  Poor communications, and Tighe’s reservations about Tombeur’s strategy, compounded the mounting confusion. A telegram from Rutchuru to Nairobi took anything up to ten days, by which time Nairobi had often heard of the response of the Belgian government-in-exile in Le Havre to the matter currently under discussion; and after Tombeur began his four-month journey from Katanga to Kivu he was barely contactable, which meant that his order for the three Belgian battalions which were assisting with the defence of Northern Rhodesia to proceed northwards was ignored by their commanding officer, Major Olsen, pending its clarification. Indeed for much of 1915, most of Tombeur’s commanders remained completely unaware of their roles in his ‘grand plan’.

  As 1915 wore on King Albert further distanced himself from his British and French allies and, on several occasions before the war was over, Belgium would consider the possibility of concluding a separate peace with Germany. But amid all the political horse-trading there was one offensive measure on whose merits both Britain and Belgium agreed wholeheartedly, namely the need to wrest control of Lake Tanganyika from the enemy. Even Tombeur recognised that as long as the Germans held the lake his troops would not be able to advance without exposing their flanks to the depredations of General Wahle’s Westtruppen or the German askari companies in Ruanda and Urundi commanded by the fiercely competent Captain Max Wintgens; and the British military authorities recognised that without a Belgian advance from the west any eventual offensive of their own would surely be doomed to failure.

  The vast Rift Valley lakes – Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa – represented the entire theatre of war in microcosm in as much as supremacy could be maintained by possession of a single craft which would not have attracted attention on any of the principal lakes or rivers of Europe. There was something faintly ridiculous about this fact but supremacy, as both sides knew, was vital. The lakes were not only the highways along which troops could be transported long distances at speed and reasonable cost, but with each passing month they assumed greater political significance. Command implied possession and, with all the colonial powers anticipating a rich commercial future for Central Africa, possession would convey an advantage when the hostilities in Europe ceased.

  British supremacy on Lakes Nyasa and Victoria had already been achieved. On the former, although there were bouts of periodic nervousness that the Germans would succeed in refloating the crippled Hermann von Wissmann and arm her with a Königsberg gun, this did not occur until 1918 (when she took to the water flying British colours and renamed the King George). In the meantime Lieutenant-Commander Dennistoun ran what he described as ‘a sort of maritime Pickford’s Carrier service . . . up and down the Lake’,5 and it was well-nigh invincible after the Guendolen had been armed with two 6-pdrs from Pegasus. The contest for Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake with a surface area of some 27,000 square miles, was also settled with relative ease when the elusive 80-ton German steamer Muansa was finally sunk in March 1915; and even after she was refloated her two 7-pdr guns were no longer a match for the armaments placed on board the British ‘fleet’ of six steamers (the largest of which were the Nyanza and the Usoga, each displacing 1,000 tons) and three tugs.

  Lake Tanganyika, covering an area of approximately 400 miles by thirty, was a challenge on an altogether different scale. The sinking of the Belgian Alexandre Delcommune early in the war had robbed the Belgians of any mobility on the lake; and in November 1914 a German raid had disabled the African Lakes Corporation’s steamer, the Cecil Rhodes, burnt the British company’s stores and seized 150 miles of telegraph wire which was then used by the Germans to lay a line connecting Neu Langenburg with Iringa. After that Belgian caravans straying too close to the lakeshore were frequently attacked and relieved of their loads, further huge quantities of Belgian telegraph wire were ‘appropriated’, and even the Belgian harbour defences at Lukuga were regularly bombarded. In December, German troops from Neu Langenburg also attacked Fife on two occasions and, although the British defences held firm, the attacks led to growing concerns about British ‘prestige’ among the African population on the 200-mile border, particularly the ‘warlike’* Angoni who had rebelled against British rule in 1897–8 in the Fort Jameson area, and steps were taken to bolster its defences. Among those detailed to the border was a column of Northern Rhodesia Police from Schuckmannsburg, in the Caprivi Strip, commanded by Major J.J. O’Sullevan, who marched 430 miles in torrential rain through Katanga to arrive in Abercorn just twenty days later. O’Sullevan was then sent to establish a garrison at a farm thirty miles east of Abercorn where the Stevenson Road crossed the Saisi River.

  In April, with the Belgians and British still locked in protracted negotiations, an extraordinary solution to the problems caused by the German attacks on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia presented itself to the Admiralty in the shape of John R. Lee, professional big game hunter, veteran scout of the Boer War and infamous ‘old Africa hand’. Lee had become aware in February that the Germans were in the process of launching a very large steamer, the Goetzen, on Lake Tanganyika. Its construction had been undertaken at a cost of £20,000 (£1.1m in today’s money) at the Meyer shipyard in Papenburg under the approving eye of the Kaiser himself and, once complete, the vessel was disassembled, packed into 5,000 crates and shipped to Dar-es-Salaam. From there she had been transported across German East Africa on the Central Railway and, for three months, by porter to Kigoma where she had been reassembled by her three shipwrights. The completion of such a journey was some achievement. The crates were hardly designed for shouldering by porters, the propeller shaft was damaged by fire en route, and the shipwrights were required to direct operations in an environment with which they were wholly unfamiliar. But on 5 February 1915 engineers Wendt, Tellmann and Rüter completed the structural work on their ship, which measured 220 feet in length by 32 feet in the beam and displaced 1,575 tons, and she was ready for arming by Friedrich Hübener, a retired infantry colonel renowned for his engineering skills. Originally intended as the flagship for German commercial enterprise in Central Africa, the Goetzen’s sheer size threatened to make Germany’s control of the lake unassailable.

  Lee explained to the Admiralty that the Goetzen would be capable of supporting ‘raiding operations’ into Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo ‘with impunity’ and he insisted that ‘the effect of this on the native mind’ would be ‘a very serious matter indeed’. Among ‘the old hands of North Rhodesia’ it was already believed that ‘a general rising of the natives north of the Zambezi may take place at any moment’ and that what was required was an immediate display of ‘the power of the [British] Empire’. The possibility of ‘native uprisings’ and the obliteration of Belgian forces in the Congo were highly charged issues in Whitehall and Lee’s warnings were heeded. But naval resources were severely limited, the more so as the preparations for an attempt to seize the Dardanelles were well advanced, and the Admiralty was initially unsure what it could provide at such short notice that might be of use.

  Lee’s solution to the problem was as modest as his scheme was outrageous. He suggested that the German feat of manhandling the Goetzen from Europe to Central Africa should be trumped by sending a motor boat capable of 15 knots and with a gun ranged to more than 7,000 yards. He was convinced that such a craft could both outrun and outgun the Goetzen. On the other hand, the gunboat would have to be transported from Cape Town by rail, traction
engine, and human porterage – but Lee declared himself to have ‘a wide experience of heavy steam transport’ as well as being ‘a first class handler of small craft’. With that confident assertion he requested permission to proceed immediately to Northern Rhodesia to establish contact with ‘longstanding loyal African friends’6 and assure them that the British Empire was not going to let the German supremacy of Lake Tanganyika last long.

  Britain had a long tradition of sending gunboats to parts of the British Empire about whose exact location the Admiralty was far from certain, and Lee seemed exceptionally well informed about recent developments on Lake Tanganyika. After rapid consultation with the Belgians, the Army Council, and Tighe, Lee’s plan was approved and he set off for Cape Town bearing the rank of Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Meanwhile the Admiralty started to cast around for an appropriate vessel to send after him – and some unlikely character to lead the ambitious expedition.

  Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson had not had a particularly remarkable naval career, but he was about as cosmopolitan an officer as the Admiralty could wish to find at such short notice. The brother of the world-famous medallion portrait artist, Theodore, Geoffrey had spent his childhood in Tasmania, France, Germany and at Stubbington Royal Naval College. His father had a great love for the sea and had himself served in the mercantile marine before becoming a stockbroker for Rothschild’s in India, a sheep farmer in Tasmania and a businessman in Le Havre. As a result of this peripatetic upbringing Spicer-Simson was fluent in French and German, had broad horizons, and was tenacious. He had recently completed a four-year survey of the Gambia River in West Africa, and this mission had furthered his already extensive knowledge of small craft, of leadership of tightly knit crews, and of operating in ‘the tropics’.