Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  Spicer-Simson’s approach to the war was also personal. HMS Good Hope, sunk at Coronel by Admiral von Spee the previous year, had once been the command of his cousin Sir Willmot Fawkes; and he had learned his German at the Moravian school in Neuwied-am-Rhein under the threat of the punishment of Stillstrafe, the strict imposition of silence on any pupil caught speaking English. To his delight, his appointment was confirmed by the end of April and he was given free rein to find suitable craft and the requisite personnel for ‘The Lake Tanganyika Expedition’. Spicer-Simson’s first challenge was to find men with appropriate skills who were available, and it was the RNVR, the ‘Wavy Navy’, that came to the rescue by providing twenty-seven of ‘the strangest and queerest characters’.7 Spicer-Simson was equally fortunate that two appropriate motor boats were unearthed by Messrs Thornycroft, part of a consignment of eight built for the Greek government before the war.

  It did not take long for Spicer-Simson’s crew to discover that their commander was more than mildly eccentric: when undergoing a crash-course in naval lore at the RNVR training camp at Crystal Palace, it was revealed that he had named the expedition’s two motor boats Mimi and Toutou.* But during the ‘sea trials’ on the River Thames of these forty-foot craft, capable of achieving a speed of 18–19 knots, he also showed his ingenuity. Extensive modifications were carried out on Mimi and Toutou, and by 29 May – just three weeks after receiving their orders – the ‘road-making’ advance party left England on the first leg of a 10,000-mile journey to Lake Tanganyika. All the men were sworn ‘not to divulge, even to their nearest and dearest, where they were bound nor what was their mission’.8

  EIGHT

  ‘A Brilliant Affair’

  In April 1915, Brigadier-General Wapshare was promoted Major-General and transferred to command the 33rd Division in Mesopotamia, a move which caused him ‘great anxiety’1 in case it should be viewed as censorious of his time in British East Africa, and Brigadier-General Mickey Tighe took the helm. This was a mixed blessing. As a ‘fighting man’ Tighe was undoubtedly popular with the troops, but his tendency to blow hot and cold and to eschew all forms of administrative work was regarded by Staff officers as a liability. He also loathed sitting on the defensive, as the War Office instructed after the very costly defence of Jasin, and was certain that if his troops remained inactive the ravages of disease would soon reduce their fighting capability to nought.

  Nowhere was this more evident than on Uganda’s Kagera front, where the local defence force had succeeded in holding its own until reinforcements – the 13th Rajputs and two companies of 4/KAR – became available towards the end of 1914. If Tanga had proved unfamiliar in terrain and clime to the rank and file of the 13th Rajputs, the Kagera line was an altogether different, and menacing, planet. A considerable proportion were invalided at any one time by malaria and dysentery and by the end of the year ninety-five per cent were ordered to take three months’ rest and undergo intensive malaria treatment. Elsewhere, almost one in five of the 900 men of the Loyal North Lancs were also on the sick list by March 1915, a further one in seven required daily hospital treatment, and their generally debilitated state forced Tighe to order the evacuation of Longido in early April. Similarly, the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment, which arrived in March and assisted in the withdrawal from Longido before being posted to Tsavo and Voi, soon found itself in need of large, regular drafts to keep its strength above 500 men.* As for further new regiments, ‘bits and bobs’ were about all the hard-pressed War Office was able to provide. One squadron of the 17th Cavalry was sent from India; the 130th Baluchis (‘Jacob’s Rifles’) arrived from Rangoon, their reputation as a ‘fighting regiment’ with first-class marksmanship somewhat battered by two recent mutinies among the Mahsuds, tribesmen from the North-West Frontier, in its ranks; and the appearance of the 25th Battalion (‘Legion of Frontiersmen’) Royal Fusiliers gave Tighe the use of what was without doubt the most colourful – and one of the most courageous – units to take to the field in the entire campaign.

  The Legion of Frontiersmen was only a decade old, having been founded by Roger Pocock as a body of ‘colonial territorials . . . of good character who have trained in wild countries, at sea, or in war’.2 The General Council included Sir John French, Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, among other well-known names, while its members were drawn from all walks of life, from aristocrats to trappers; one of them even listed his previous occupations as ‘soldier, explorer, prospector, mining engineer, mail rider, freighter, cowboy, horse-breaker, rancher, veterinary surgeon, scout to Lord Roberts in South Africa’. The Frontiersmen were not without former combat experience as a distinct unit – in 1906 2,000 of them had volunteered at a moment’s notice to assist the South African government to suppress the Zulu ‘Bambatha’ rebellion in Natal – and by 1914 there were more than 10,000 Frontiersmen spread across the globe. Within months, 7,000 had tired of waiting for the War Office to allow them to form their own unit but by the spring the persistent entreaties of Colonel Daniel Patrick Driscoll, DSO, a veteran scout of the Boer War with a voice like a fog-horn, finally secured the formation of a battalion under the umbrella of the Royal Fusiliers.

  The news that it was destined for East Africa did not meet with universal approval. One of Tighe’s more ‘Poona-Poona’ Indian Army officers spoke for many when he wrote: ‘Driscoll threatens to arrive. God help us! Fancy being reduced to rescue by a curly-headed buck-nigger who couldn’t even get into the Mandalay Club. I suppose they hope for loot!’* Such snide remarks were to persist, even after 1,500 ANZAC Frontiersmen and all but eighteen of 600 Frontiersmen who joined Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry died at Gallipoli. In the meantime, Driscoll set about combing Britain for members of the Legion who had not already signed up with other units, and a remarkably heterogeneous rank and file soon emerged. Youngsters who in peacetime were Post Office clerks in Bolton and book-keepers from Sheffield joined the music hall comedians, border gunmen, university professors, Moroccan bandits, ex-MPs, cowboys, prize fighters, and acrobats; and there was even ‘a member of Six Brothers Luck, a vaudeville team, who could climb stairs on his head’.3 The recruitment campaign appealed for ‘any young and fit men who would like to participate in what undoubtedly will be a great trip, chock full of glorious incident and adventure,’4 to report to a Mr Banning in Sheffield immediately; and the mention that such famous ‘Africa hands’ as photographer Cherry Kearton, and ‘white hunters’ George Outram and F.C. Selous, were also part of the ‘adventure’ was greeted with considerable enthusiasm. To Selous, the most famous ‘white hunter’ of them all, belonged the distinction of being the oldest soldier in the British Army: he was sixty-three at the start of the war, but still ‘as active as a cat and hard as nails’.5

  All in all the battalion was ‘the oddest crew’,6 and so great was its expertise presumed to be that no training took place before departure for East Africa. In fact almost half its number had never fired a rifle, and the initial reaction of some of the ‘old-timer’ Frontiersmen to the new recruits was not always positive. ‘The conversation among the Yorkshiremen and Londoners is vile’, wrote Canadian Private Angus Buchanan; ‘I’ve been among rough men before but never among such a debased, thoughtless lot as this – generally speaking I am ashamed of them – and ashamed of the England that mothered them’.7

  Whatever the misgivings inside and outside the ranks of the Frontiersmen, their arrival was a huge boon for Tighe. Although the majority of his troops were in a seriously debilitated state he was desperate for an opportunity to do something decisive to restore morale in East Africa – and the Frontiersmen provided the necessary additional manpower. Rather surprisingly, given what had happened at Jasin, permission was secured from the War Office to attack Bukoba, thirty miles south of the Uganda border on the German side of Lake Victoria, with a view to relieving pressure on the Kagera front and severely denting German ‘prestige’. A further consideration was that the naval conflict on Lake Victoria was also getting incre
asingly ‘dirty’, with the Germans accusing the British fleet of steamers of bombarding undefended settlements and the British accusing the Germans of leaving booby-trapped piles of tempting firewood by the lakeshore. A demonstration ‘for destructive purposes’8 at Bukoba would, it was hoped, underscore British supremacy on the lake once and for all and put paid to German ‘shenanigans’.

  The town of Bukoba, the peacetime garrison of 7/FK, lay straddling the Kanoni River on a small marshy plain surrounded by grassy hills and colossal limestone kopjes. Its importance to the enemy was twofold. Not only did it possess a high-power wireless transmitter, which if destroyed would increase the isolation of the north-west corner of the German colony; but its surrounding district was thickly populated and of considerable economic importance. Coffee, much desired by the colony’s European population, grew in abundance; and a lively trade was carried on with Ruanda and Urundi in hides and skins, large quantities of which were required by the Schutztruppe. Disruption of these supplies had long been an aim of the British General Staff; but only after the sinking of the German steamer Muansa in May 1915 and the arming of the British steamers Winifred, Usoga, Nyanza, Rusinga, Kavirondo and Percy Anderson with guns from HMS Pegasus and other warships did an attack on Bukoba become a realistic possibility.

  Tighe deputed General Stewart to lead the attack. It was to be fully supported by the armament on the British ships of the lake flotilla and was intended to be rapid: although the German garrison commanded by Major Willibald von Stuemer numbered only 300, five times that number of enemy troops were thought to be within three days’ march of Bukoba. Stewart took with him 1,500 of the best troops available: detachments from the Loyal North Lancs, the newly arrived 25th Royal Fusiliers, 3/KAR with two guns of the 28th Mountain Battery, a full machine-gun section from the East Africa Regiment, and the four machine-guns of the Volunteer Maxim Company.* Before dawn on 22 June, under the light of a half-moon, the ships carrying the troops put them ashore a few miles north of the town in a bay surrounded by a semicircle of hills. The landings were a conspicuous success by comparison with those carried out at Tanga: although an early-warning post on Busira Island had spotted the British flotilla and raised the alarum, the British force had caused confusion by splitting. Nyanza executed a feint towards Bukoba’s Customs House where, 100 yards offshore, she and Winifred narrowly missed being hit by a German gun; while other ships executed the landings far enough away from the town to prevent any advance guard from opposing them in any force. Despite most of the ships’ guns being ‘a decade behind the times’† over 1,000 shells were fired on Bukoba during the landings.

  Once onshore at Kiaya Bay the Frontiersmen were ordered to scale the first ridge, Rwonga Hill, before pushing on through a matoke plantation and swampland to secure Karwazi Hill without opposition. There they halted to cover the disembarkation of the rest of the force. The relative ease with which this first phase of the attack was executed was attributable not only to the confusion caused by the plethora of British ships offshore, but also to von Stuemer having split his force. The day before the attack, responding to a British ‘feint’ on the Kagera River, he had marched eighty askari thirty miles to the river’s Kyaka ferry crossing in anticipation of a simultaneous thrust on Bukoba from there, while Lieutenant Eberhard Gudowius was left to defend Bukoba with just 150 rifles. Gudowius was therefore alone in Bukoba when the attack was launched and, although his askari fought stubbornly, they were forced to cede ground as the British landings continued throughout the day. By the time von Stuemer returned to Bukoba that evening the Frontiersmen had fought their way, sometimes chest-high in water, across more swampy ground and taken another ridge, ‘Fusilier Knoll’; while to the north the Loyal North Lancs and 29th Punjabis had taken ‘Arab Ridge’. As the German troops withdrew they deployed the field gun which had nearly hit the Winifred earlier in the day against the British advance. But by dusk Stewart’s force commanded the heights overlooking the town.

  At dawn on 23 June the advance from the heights resumed in torrential rain. The ships’ guns forced the two German guns shelling the advancing troops in the open to shift positions several times, but German resistance remained fierce until all its troops had been pushed back to the outskirts of the town. Fearing the annihilation of his troops, von Stuemer then ordered his men to retreat over the hills to the west and in the early afternoon 3/KAR and the Frontiersmen were the first to enter Bukoba. The honour of lowering the flag flying above the German boma fell to Lieutenant Dartnell, an Australian Frontiersman, and it was soon realised that whereas von Stuemer had sustained fifteen per cent casualties among his 350 men Stewart’s force had captured Bukoba at a cost of just ten men killed and about twenty wounded. As one naval officer remarked, ‘the whole operation would hardly constitute an incident in a larger campaign, but at the time it was the first undisputed success we had achieved in the country’.9 Even Lord Kitchener, who had never been keen on British troops becoming embroiled in East Africa, sent a telegram to Tighe and Stewart congratulating them on ‘the brilliant success of the Bukoba operation’, while The Leader trumpeted that ‘the Germans are not allowing natives to enter the ruins of Bukoba for fear of the moral effect it will have’.10

  In what remained of daylight on 23 June Bukoba’s wireless mast was dismantled and destroyed by the Faridkot Sappers and a German field gun was removed, only to fall off the lighter transporting it to the British flotilla into the lake. An apology was also given to Père Barthélemy of the White Fathers’ Mission, in whose grounds one of the German guns had been positioned, and whose chapel was consequently damaged by responding fire from the Nyanza. Other than Barthélemy, a fellow missionary and a handful of relieved British subjects, the town was almost deserted; even the bishop, Mgr Sweens, had recently been ordered out by the Germans.11 Something then occurred that would not perhaps have pleased Kitchener so much, and was not mentioned in the public plaudits for the victory: Bukoba was thoroughly and systematically sacked. One Frontiersman watched as fellow members of his regiment went ‘through homes, picking up loot of all kinds’12 while another, with champagne in hand, witnessed a comrade emerging from the governor’s house with ‘a lady’s toilet set in ivory’ and another with ‘the governor’s ceremonial helmet’.* Colonel Driscoll regarded all this as part and parcel of colonial warfare and the incident contributed greatly to the creation of the Fusiliers’ new moniker – the ‘Boozaliers’.

  When the British troops departed that evening every house in which ammunition had been found was burned to the ground; one officer remarked that it was a ‘spectacular but somewhat sad sight to see such beautiful houses destroyed’.13 Von Stuemer did not authorise his troops’ return to the town until the following evening. By then local Africans had also been on the rampage – an occurrence that was recorded by the newspapers – and a returning German officer described the scene thus:

  The darkness of the night only allowed us to see that which could be seen at close distance. In our mission station, all that was left were beds. As far as we could see, wardrobes, commodes and chests had been broken into and their contents had been stolen. Whatever hadn’t been taken lay torn or damaged on the ground. We were, however, just happy to at least have our Bukoba back. Beds and rest places were prepared with care for the ill and injured. The buildings of the mission remained unscathed apart from the storeroom, which had been hit by an incendiary grenade. In the town itself all the regional administrational buildings as well as most of the housing had been burnt down. Pictures of the Kaiser had been broken by the enemy and at times stabbed through with bayonets.14

  The largest haul of loot, which included the uniform of a German soldier mortally wounded in the attack, was found at the house of the chief Muntu. He was imprisoned, but chief Ntale was publicly hanged in front of the Post Office, and von Stuemer placed Lieutenant Gudowius – known locally as bwana lazima (‘you must’) – in charge of the town.15 The Frontiersmen, meanwhile, were sent straight to border duty in British Ea
st Africa, interpreting this as ‘punishment for the misdeeds’16 of some of their number.

  Tighe was jubilant at the much-needed boost to morale provided by Bukoba, even to the extent of crowing about the success to his Belgian allies. It was through Bukoba district that any Belgian advance was likely to proceed, and in the wake of the British victory Tighe informed the War Office that Tombeur’s troops could now invade Ruanda ‘whenever they want’, and would stand ‘every possibility of success’. At the time, however, Tombeur was completely out of contact not only with his government but even his own troops as he made his way north from Katanga; and while Belgian troops continued to probe the German defences at Kissenyi it was obvious that there was no immediate prospect of breaking through. Tighe’s remarks may have been provocative and even critical – he considered that no matter how bellicose the declarations of the Belgian government, ‘the local inertia is considerable’17 – but they were also correct. The fact remained that a Belgian advance was still a figment of the imagination. Belgian troops on the Kagera and Kivu fronts would remain wholly dependent for supplies on British East Africa until the end of September, and arms and ammunition being shipped from Europe were being delayed by Britain’s dire shortage of shipping tonnage.