by Edward Paice
A further complication also arose as a result of the Uganda Railway’s difficulties in handling tonnages which had been unimaginable in peacetime – difficulties that were greatly exacerbated by the ever-increasing number of German raids on the line. The appropriation by the railway administration of new engines and 160 wagons ordered before the war by the Magadi Soda Company for its private branch line certainly helped, as did the arrival of more rolling-stock from India. But the demands of the military continued to escalate by the month and so huge were the quantities of fuel, for example, arriving at Mombasa that new storage facilities for 2¾m gallons had to be built there and at Kisumu. At the same time the tonnage of coffee available for export doubled, and that of cotton rose by almost a fifth, with the result that by November 1915 ‘the incidence of the war was making it more and more difficult to maintain the economic life of the Uganda and East African Protectorates’.18 Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that Tombeur’s demand that his materiel should receive priority requirements was disregarded.
Unbeknownst to both Tombeur and Tighe, a Belgian advance through Ruanda and Urundi in July would indeed have had, as Tighe had put it, ‘every possibility of success’. This was not because the attack on Bukoba had inflicted irreparable damage on the German forces in the north-west, but because the number of companies facing the Belgians was considerably fewer than was thought: at exactly the same time as Tighe was planning the Bukoba raid von Lettow-Vorbeck was preparing to strike a blow against Northern Rhodesia. In April von Lettow-Vorbeck ordered 18/FK and 23/FK to proceed to Bismarckburg from Dar-es-Salaam, where they would join 22/FK and newly formed 29/FK from Kigoma. Von Langenn-Steinkeller was put in charge of the initial concentration, but when he set off for Neu Langenburg with three of these companies in May Wahle arrived from Dar-es-Salaam with 24/FK and 10/SchK to direct the whole offensive. On 17 June Wahle sailed from Kigoma to Bismarckburg.
The timing of the offensive was excellent. Colonel Tombeur had issued orders for the three Belgian battalions co-operating with British forces on the border to proceed north for his planned advance into German East Africa – but only one had actually begun its trek up the west side of Lake Tanganyika. The other two, under the overall command of Major Olsen, remained at Abercorn and Pweto (on Lake Mweru), considerably strengthening the British defence force of 1,000 askari of the Northern Rhodesia Police, 250 Northern Rhodesia volunteers and 350 Europeans of the British South Africa Police. Soon after arriving at Bismarckburg Wahle, aided by the launch of the Goetzen on Lake Tanganyika, was ready to move forward, and the point at which he decided to probe the Anglo-Belgian defences was Major O’Sullevan’s outpost at the little farm at Saisi. On 28 June 24/FK, 29/FK and the European reservists of 10/SchK – a force 700-strong – launched their attack in dense mist before dawn. Neither the initial bombardment by two 1873 field guns nor the subsequent advance against Saisi’s formidable network of trenches and fortifications yielded any result; Karl Proempeler, the company commander of 24/FK, was killed; and the following morning all German troops had withdrawn back over the border. But when dummy graves dug by the retreating Germans were discovered to contain ammunition it became clear that the attack was no more than a reconnaissance, that the enemy ‘would make more serious attempts to occupy Rhodesia’.19
For a month only minor skirmishing occurred along the border. Then, on 25 July, the main attack began, led by Wahle himself; and for a week the 450 British and Belgian troops at Saisi were under siege from a force more than twice the size. The fighting was almost continuous, day and night, for four days. On 28 July Belgian troops from Abercorn, led by Major de Koninck, were prevented from breaking through to their beleaguered allies, and three days later Wahle called on Major O’Sullevan to surrender. Despite an acute shortage of water, which could only be collected at night from between the lines, and the fact that the German forward positions had reached to within 600 yards of the British trenches, O’Sullevan refused. At 7.30 p.m., just after dark, Wahle launched another determined attack with some troops advancing as close as sixty yards from the trenches. But still the Anglo-Belgian defences held, and during the night of 2–3 August the German troops slipped away.
Saisi had been held, an achievement for which O’Sullevan was to win the DSO, and the Northern Rhodesia border was not attacked again in 1915 on any scale. Many British officers thought at the time that Wahle’s incursion was a last-ditch attempt to break through to German South-West Africa, but Wahle knew that the German colony had surrendered to South African forces a few weeks earlier and his attack had been launched for defensive purposes. As early as February 1915 von Lettow-Vorbeck feared that ‘the enemy appeared to be preparing to attack’20 across his south-western border, and it was this that explained the increase in German strength there to almost 2,000 rifles, von Langenn-Steinkeller’s return to Neu Langenburg after a number of months in Urundi, and Wahle’s decision to pull his attack on Saisi when his artillery and attempt at frontal assault failed to make any impression on its defences. In Wahle’s opinion, Saisi did not constitute a defeat; rather it ensured, at a cost of about sixty German casualties, that no British advance from Northern Rhodesia was possible ‘until the middle of 1916’.21 No such advance was envisaged; but Wahle’s aggression did have the effect of delaying the departure northwards of Olsen’s two remaining Belgian battalions until November.
Olsen’s decision to keep the Belgian I Bataillon and III Bataillon on the Rhodesian border ‘for the time being’,22 a decision taken independently of Tombeur, hadproved exceptionally fortuitous.But the attacks on Saisi had again demonstrated that no Belgian advance would be possible while German vessels still controlled the waters of Lake Tanganyika; and unfortunately Lieutenant Lee’s obsession with ‘native uprisings’ was working directly contrary to the paramount need for secrecy of the Admiralty’s Lake Tanganyika Expedition. On reaching Northern Rhodesia and Katanga, in the company of Frank Magee, an American journalist with the appearance of a prize-fighter, he appears to have launched a one-man propaganda campaign to restore faith in the British Empire in the area. In July reports were received by the British High Commissioner in Cape Town that Lee and Magee, who’d started his career at The Daily Mirror under the famous journalist (and spiritualist) Hannen Swaffer, had ‘given the whole business of the expedition away all the way up the line’.
The enthusiasm of Lee and Magee for their task was considerable, but their reputations were soon called into question. Both men were said to have been reported by the police to the civilian authorities in Katanga for being drunk and patronising ‘the lowest haunts’ in Elizabethville; and when asked for his opinion of Lee the British Vice-Consul in the town reported that his ‘antecedents were questionable’ and confirmed rumours that Lee had been ‘convicted of drunkenness, had been employed in a local bar, and still owed considerable debts in town’. As a result of such conduct the Belgian authorities ‘considered [Lee’s] appointment a direct insult to them’,23 but Spicer-Simson was not prepared instantly to terminate the involvement of a man whose local knowledge was so important to the expedition.
The transportation of Mimi and Toutou on cradles from Cape Town to the lakeshore was an epic feat beside which even the Goetzen’s own journey to Lake Tanganyika paled; in the words of one member of the expedition, it made ‘Fiction look like Truth’s shabby sister’.24 The rail junction at Elizabethville was reached easily enough on 26 July and in a bar which went by the name of ‘Le Chat Noir’ the crew discovered just how widely Lee and Magee had publicised their impending arrival: Lee’s fondness for ‘the lowest haunts’ meant that people ‘knew as much about [the mission] as, if not more than, we did’.25 The services of Magee, as official scribe to the expedition, were retained and his monkey Josephine became the official mascot; but Lee was quietly recalled to Cape Town in the hope of avoiding further ‘talk and scandal’26 in Katanga. His departure was euphemistically attributed to ‘sunstroke and fever’.27
Whatever Lee’s p
ersonal shortcomings he had reconnoitred, and begun to construct, a 150-mile route for Mimi and Toutou to progress through mile upon mile of bush and over the formidable Mitumba Mountains from the railhead at Fungurume, 100 miles north-west of Elizabethville, to Sankisia. But its completion now passed to another member of the crew with local knowledge, Arthur ‘Ginger Dick’ Davison. Snow-blindness affected many as the surface soil was full of mica, over 150 bridges needed to be built, the temperature regularly reached 118°F in the shade, and ‘wandering’ swamps of water cabbage and forest fires moving at 30–40mph had to be negotiated on this first stage of the journey ‘proper’.
While Lieutenant ‘Paddy’ Wainwright, an irascible Irish rancher from Rhodesia, took charge of the convoy of 130 tons of supplies, a lorry and trailer with the boats’ guns and ammunition, and Mimi and Toutou on two traction engines with a predilection for finding ant-bear holes, his commander busied to and fro on a bicycle. On 8 September the summit of the Mitumba Mountains, 6,400 feet above sea level, was attained and, having descended with immense difficulties to the valley of the Lualaba River, the expedition had just thirty-five miles to go before Mimi and Toutou could be launched into their more natural environment. With the river in sight, however, water became so scarce that the men and their 400 porters had to subsist in the searing heat on a daily ration of just half a pint per man. The traction engines were the first priority, but just as they came to a ‘full stop’ scouts reported water nearby and hundreds of local women were ‘bribed with some gaudy waist-cloths’ to bring it in.* All the while scribe Magee noticed that ‘a fine example was set by the commander. He went around encouraging his officers and men with a kindly word (and sometimes a curse) and so got things done.’28 His charm and joviality also kept the porters willing, although all the crewmen were occasionally taken aback by their choice of marching tunes which included a vigorous, mission-inspired rendition of ‘Now the Labourer’s Task is O’er’.
Tick fever and jiggers were a constant problem for the crew, and at night their encampments were invariably surrounded by lions, whose roaring would keep the men awake until the small hours. But at 2.30 p.m. on 28 September 1915 the expedition eventually reached Sankisia. It had taken six weeks to cover the 150 miles from Fungurume, an average of just four miles per day, and there, in the absence of any cranes or hoists, Mimi and Toutou, each weighing 4 tons, were manhandled onto railway trucks for the fifteen-mile run to Bukama on the Lualaba River. As the dry season was drawing to a close time was running short. Furthermore, the Lualaba was so low that Captain Mauritzen, a Danish pilot sent by the Belgians to assist the expedition, reported that his riverboat, the Constantin de Burlay, had been unable to navigate the river any closer than fifty-eight miles downriver. There was no alternative but to paddle Mimi and Toutou the intervening distance, an exhausting and frustrating task. On a single day the two gunboats ran aground fourteen times in just twelve miles, which Spicer-Simson wryly speculated was ‘a record, I think, for HM ships’,29 but the Constantin de Burlay was finally spotted on 11 October and Mimi and Toutou loaded onboard her lighter. Regular groundings still occurred in the crocodile-infested Lualaba, while by day the men ‘were baked alive’ and by night were ‘tormented by all the flying pests of the Congo’. But after seventeen days on the river the town of Kabalo was reached, everything was manhandled onto yet another railway and, after all that had gone before, the 175-mile run to Lake Tanganyika seemed ‘but a stone’s throw’.
With the exception of Lee and Lieutenant Hope, who had (genuinely) succumbed to sunstroke, all the men were in astonishingly rude health and the expedition doctor had ‘had a far busier time treating natives and their children than attending to members of the expedition’.30 The privations had been great but the only one that had caused ‘considerable despondency and consternation’ was the exhaustion of the supply of Pusser’s naval rum with which the men had daily toasted ‘Simson’s Circus’ (also known as ‘The Tanganyika Tits’).31 At Lukuga, or Albertville, on the lakeshore Spicer-Simson was met by Commandant Stinghlhamber, the commanding officer of the Belgian garrison, on 24 October. The expedition, its two valuable charges and crew intact, had completed their 3,000-mile journey from Cape Town, using almost every terrestrial means known to man, in under four months. They had also beaten the rains, and could now commence in earnest the task of robbing Germany of dominance on the lake. It was a signal achievement.
NINE
The End of the Königsberg
After a tremendous amount of work Cull’s aviators finally rendered the ‘new’ flying machines sent from Britain serviceable. An aerial bombardment of the Königsberg was no longer regarded as a realistic possibility, but on 25 April – the day that the Gallipoli landings commenced – Cull reached a height of 1,200 feet and a speed of 60mph on his maiden flight before down bumps over the entrance to the delta forced him back to 800 feet. Soon afterwards he was rewarded for his efforts: below him was the Königsberg, ‘looking as though she had been newly painted, her side screens and awnings spread, [and] smoke was issuing from her funnels’. His conclusion was that the German cruiser looked ‘very spick and span’,1 though he was forced to beat a hasty retreat when the Königsberg and the shore defences opened fire on him. Given the nature of Königsberg’s armament, firing at planes was akin to ‘throwing stones at swallows’,2 but a lucky burst of shrapnel punched a hole in Cull’s air intake and his engine packed up half a dozen miles from Mafia. He brought the plane down safely and ‘very satisfactory’ aerial photographs of the Königsberg were the prize for his hair-raising escapade.
In the course of the next few weeks the difficulties encountered by the airmen were legion. During one flight a bullet passed clean through the cap of Flag Commander Bridgeman, who regularly volunteered to accompany Cull as his observer; Flight Lieutenant Watkins was forced to ditch his plane in the water after a bullet hit the rudder; and any aviator deposited in the Indian Ocean was wont to have an anxious wait of many hours before being picked up. The lack of spares was also a constant worry and in May Cull wrote to their Air Department to give his superiors ‘some idea of the state of affairs’: ‘glue not holding on any propellers, wood only for one more propeller. Has India rubber tubing been sent as all ours has perished? No fabric and few spares left.’3
While the RNAS maintained its watch on the Königsberg to the best of its abilities, Admiral King-Hall continued to urge Churchill to authorise a night torpedo attack using the RNAS’s motor boat with a jerry-built ‘super-silencer’ or an electric launch from England. Bridgeman, Cull and Watkins had devised the plan, working in league with officers on board Hyacinth, but to their ‘great disappointment’ Churchill vetoed it. He did, however, inform King-Hall that two monitors and four ‘really modern aeroplanes’4 were on their way to East Africa. News of the Admiralty’s munificence caused an immediate stir. Cull began moving his men to Mafia to start construction of a new aerodrome, a fine corrugated iron hangar was built in Zanzibar and shipped down to Mafia in sections, and on 18 June HMS Laurentic joined the throng off the East African coast bringing not only the biplanes – two Henry Farmans with Canton Unne engines and two Caudrons with Gnome engines – but Squadron Commander Gordon, seven officers and CPOs, and eight mechanics. In just thirty-six hours the new arrivals were ready to fly and more regular reconnaissance of the delta began. WT signalling tests were made, bomb-dropping was again practised, and confidence soared. After eight months of effort and the expenditure of ‘vast sums of money’5 an end to the Königsberg operations finally seemed to be approaching. All that was required was confirmation that the monitors were as ready as Cull’s airmen.
The monitors Mersey and Severn were two of triplets, their sister ship being the Humber. But these were not their original names: they had been commissioned as Javary, Solindes and Madeira, Solimões-class river gunboats for the Brazilian Navy. Their war had been an active one, taking part in the action at Ostende covering the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force, and the Dunkirk
raid. April had found Mersey and Severn in Lazzaretto Bay, Malta, charged with sailing up the Danube as the Dardanelles were ‘forced’. It is the clearest measure of any of the magnitude of the Admiralty’s obsession with destroying the Königsberg that Churchill saw fit to order them to East Africa instead. On 6 May Mersey and Severn were towed through the Suez Canal by the tugs of their parent ship, Trent, and set a course for Mafia where they arrived on 3 June. Measuring 265 feet in length and displacing 1,260 tons, monitors were essentially mobile gun platforms drawing just five to six feet; their armament consisted of two 6-inch guns, two 4.7-inch guns, four 3-pdrs and six machine-guns. Deployed in appropriate conditions they were truly formidable craft.
On arrival in East Africa the monitors’ hulls and decks were fitted with steel boiler-plates, empty kerosene tins by the thousand were placed below-decks to maintain buoyancy if hit, and sandbags were piled around the conning towers, quarter-decks and fo’c’s’les. Different shades of green paint, a rudimentary attempt at camouflage appropriate to conditions in the delta, were daubed all over; and by the end of June joint operations were practised with the planes that were to spot for them during their attack on the delta. It was an anxious time. The crews of the blockading vessels were becoming increasingly impatient, as one rating’s shanty indicated:
Ar I loodle I Loodle I tay
I loodle
From aeroplane island to Königsberg Bay
We do a trip just 3 times a day
But what we are doing no one can say
From aeroplane island to Königsberg Bay.6
Furthermore, one of the new Caudron planes and one Henry Farman had already been wrecked, and the vital intelligence regarding the delta that would be essential to the success of the attack was still incomplete.
