Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  For two months Pretorius, King-Hall’s chief scout, had made repeated incursions into the delta from Koma Island, he and his men making their way stealthily past Werner Schönfeld’s shore defences. On at least two occasions he observed the Königsberg from a distance of 300 yards; he captured prisoners who were taken back for interrogation; and he learnt just in time of young Lieutenant Richard Wenig’s plan to launch one of his five torpedoes at a British cruiser if one ventured too close to the delta mouth. Pretorius’s most arduous challenge began when it was confirmed that monitors were to be used against the Königsberg: he was the only man to whom the vital task of charting the delta could be entrusted. So began weeks of manoeuvring a dugout up and down the various entrances at night taking soundings with a pole, the only relief to the monotony and discomfort being ‘a sense of adventure brought by the possibility of a Teutonic face suddenly peering at me out of the bush’.7 Before the rains broke the heat and mosquitoes at night were appalling, the danger of being caught in the glare of searchlights constant; after they broke he was permanently soaked to the skin. Eventually he found to his satisfaction that the northern channel would be navigable for the shallow-draught monitors for a distance of seven miles; and from there he walked to the Königsberg to confirm that she would then be within range of the monitors’ 6-inch guns. His final task even Pretorius described as ‘a simply ghastly job’: it was to measure the tides at the entrance to the channel for a whole month. During his comings and goings Pretorius made a huge impression on all who came across him. One naval volunteer on Laconia described the ‘awe and anticipation’ of meeting him ‘fully justified’, adding that he ‘learned also, for the first time, the quality and understanding of a great man, possessed of fine qualities and great experiences himself, towards lesser mortals. He was a quiet, gentle person who was genuinely more interested in enquiring about one’s own background and comparatively short and mediocre experience of life than in talking about himself.’8 Armed with Pretorius’s charts and invaluable intelligence – for which he would be awarded the DSO – King-Hall was now ready for the fray.

  Captain Looff knew what was in store for his ship, but other than continuing to work on successfully launching a torpedo there was little he could do to frustrate King-Hall’s preparations. On 24 June, he sent a despatch to Berlin stating that ‘all is well on board’, confirming that ‘the unloading of the cargo of the auxiliary ship [Kronborg] is completed’, and informing his superiors that he was sending the Kronborg’s debonair Captain Christiansen to South Africa so that he could ‘make a report on the situation and to order additional auxiliary ships in case the war lasts long’. This would seem to indicate that he had no fear of the monitors, of whose presence he had been informed by spies in Zanzibar, and his statement that ‘after the conclusion of Peace the Königsberg must be sent home to undergo a thorough overhaul’9 was equally optimistic. It was true that in spite of the ravages of disease during the rains on his depleted crew Looff was once again in a position to move his vessel: many of the 105 sailors from the German vessels Planet, Khalif and Zieten, interned in Portuguese East Africa, had begun arriving in dribs and drabs and had replaced a similar number of ratings who, led by Lieutenant Angel, the Königsberg’s torpedo officer, had been detailed for onshore service by von Lettow-Vorbeck earlier in the year. But on the other hand, most of his crew had long since given up hope of breaking out of the delta and many were certain that the arrival of the monitors meant that the Royal Navy was about to come at them, in the words of a signalman on the Königsberg, ‘in real bloody earnest’.10

  King-Hall’s orders to the blockading fleet were issued amid worsening relations between him and the many captains on his station. Captain Crampton, who had assumed command of Weymouth after its previous incumbent returned home with a ‘bad carbuncle’, remarked on the plethora of ‘extraordinary general memo[s]’ from his admiral and concluded that King-Hall was ‘mad’.11 Captain Fullerton of the Severn was inclined to agree, especially after King-Hall chose 6 July for the decisive attack in response to his own request for the attack to take place on 3 or 4 July. To make matters even worse, Fullerton and Commander Wilson of Mersey heard that Churchill was insisting that the monitors should attack up two different channels of the delta. As this would render them unable to protect each other the order was ignored.

  There was no moon on the night of 5–6 July as King-Hall’s plethora of vessels took up their positions. Laurentic, Barjora and a collier steamed north to execute a feint landing at Dar-es-Salaam at dawn; Hyacinth stood off the centre channel into the delta, Pioneer off the southern with Trent, and Weymouth and Pyramus covered the north. The monitors anchored ten miles off the northernmost Kikunja mouth of the delta at 11 p.m. At 4 a.m. they started for their destination, flying ensigns eighteen feet by twelve, and reaching the mouth just before light at 5.45 a.m. At much the same time a plane dropped four bombs near the Königsberg as a diversionary measure and at 6 a.m. the monitors were in the channel. The tide was low, making any torpedo attack less likely, but small weapons fire opened from both banks and a well-concealed German field gun on the starboard side fired three blanks to signal the alarum before directing its fire at Severn. In the dim light the men on the monitors ‘saw very little with the exception of a few men in trees and bullets . . . pattering against the ship’s side’.12 A small boat, suspected of housing a torpedo, was sunk about half a mile up the channel, and at 6.30 a.m. the monitors anchored in their intended positions five to six miles into the delta.

  Severn fired first at Königsberg at a range of 10,600 yards and was immediately answered with one or two guns until the Königsberg found her range; and soon after 7 a.m. she straddled Mersey with all five starboard guns. On board Echo Lieutenant Charlewood, the fortunate survivor of Königsberg’s foray to Zanzibar, remarked on hearing ‘the sharp crack of [her] salvoes’: ‘I had heard that sound before and was not likely to forget it.’13 In the Königsberg’s control tower Lieutenant Apel, the gunnery officer, rapidly increased the rate of fire to five or six salvoes per minute. One shell pitched just two feet short of the Mersey’s quarter-deck; another hit a motor boat tied to her quarter abaft the steel plating; and finally one hit the shield of her 6-inch forward gun. One gunner’s head was left in its ear protectors while the rest of his body disintegrated. The gun-layer lost four fingers and had his throat skinned. The gun-trainer and breech-worker were killed instantly. For a matter of seconds the survivors watched aghast as the charge that was being loaded just at the moment of impact caught fire, the fire spreading to another charge and then jumping down to the monitor’s magazine. Had the petty officer below had a charge in his hand Mersey, by the admission of her skipper, ‘would almost certainly have blown up’.14 Even then Mersey’s ordeal was not over. The crew had donned their kapok life-vests as protection against shrapnel splinters but these caught fire, severely burning two men, who would die later in the day; the rapid deployment of a hose only just saved a third horrifically burnt rating. Wilson slipped the Mersey’s anchors, a shell landing with a great spout of water just where he had been moored, and ordered full speed ahead to a position 700 yards downriver to assess the damage while Apel turned his attention to Severn.

  In the air all was not going to plan either. Cull, with Flight Lieutenant Arnold observing, had been circling over the delta since 6.17 a.m. – the first time in the history of naval warfare that planes had been used to spot the fall of shots from battleships – but there were problems with the two-letter signalling system used to communicate with the monitors. When both monitors were firing at once he also had difficulty in spotting which were whose shells. At 8 a.m. Arnold did manage to signal that Severn had hit Königsberg and Mersey moved back upriver, anchored on the opposite bank and commenced firing with her aft gun to try and draw fire from Severn. Severn then moved towards Mersey, and the latter succeeded in registering another hit on the Königsberg whose fire, using just two guns in an effort to conserve valuable ammunition, became m
ore erratic. Apel had been seriously wounded, and when Mersey put a 4.7-inch shrapnel shell and three 6-inch high-explosive shells over a German observation platform watching the monitors, he also had to fire blind: in the main lookout on Pemba Hill, Lieutenant Georg Schlawe, a retired naval officer, could not assist as the monitors were hidden from view.

  After a pause in the hostilities Cull took to the air again at 11.50 a.m., and at 1.30 p.m., in the searing heat of the delta, Mersey shifted closer to her prey and recommenced firing. But again the signalling system vital to the monitors’ indirect firing broke down and a stalemate ensued. The Königsberg was still only firing intermittently when, at 3.30 p.m., the monitors retired from the delta, firing ferociously at the shore defences on both banks as they went and in turn again coming under accurate fire from a German field gun. As they emerged into the open sea, Charlewood remarked ‘what a relief it was to see those ungainly craft! There had been a time when we had thought that our ships stood no chance of surviving Königsberg’s fire. The sight of these two vessels as they drew slowly towards us, wrapped in smoke and belching fire . . . and the ever-increasing volume of sound, are impressions that time failed to erase from my memory.’15 At dusk the monitors passed through the fleet and the crews returned in sombre mood to Tirene Bay on Mafia. The six dead and dying men on Mersey represented almost a third of her complement, while the airmen were so cold they had to be lifted from their machines. Using the only two serviceable biplanes at their disposal they had stuck at their task despite the signalling difficulties, logging fifteen hours of flying time and a distance of 970 miles. Their final flight over the Königsberg, with Flag Commander Bridgeman as observer, confirmed the worst: only one of the cruiser’s 4.1-inch guns appeared to have been put out of action, despite the monitors having scored six hits in all. ‘From all points,’ noted Cull, ‘the day had been discouraging.’16

  On board the Königsberg the crew collapsed on deck, exhausted. Looff, Apel and one other senior officer were wounded; and young Wenig, who had been striving unsuccessfully for so long to improvise a torpedo attack against a British cruiser, had lost his left foot. Among the ratings five lay dead and seven wounded. But the cruiser was most certainly not destroyed and Apel’s control of the guns had, even in the estimation of his adversaries, been ‘splendid’. For one officer, however, the strain of months of virtual imprisonment had proved too much. The minute the monitors opened fire reserve Sub-Lieutenant Josef Jaeger had shot himself; ‘the cause of his suicide [was] presumed to have been insanity’, but among his shipmates a rumour circulated that he had been exposed as a spy and that ‘he was the reason why our attempts to torpedo the English had always failed’.17 The crew were aware that they had not seen the last of the monitors, and Looff ordered all inflammables removed from the ship.

  Out to sea the atmosphere among the blockade captains and King-Hall worsened at the post-mortem. King-Hall hurriedly telegraphed the Admiralty to say that ‘the task of the monitors was an extremely difficult one, on account of the jungle and the difficulties of accurate spotting’.18 But recriminations directed by him against Fullerton, the captain of Severn, were not popular. Crampton wrote that ‘Fullerton like all the rest of us is fed up with K-H . . . and he cannot talk to him without the little man being thoroughly rude . . . everyone is fed up with the little man’s methods, and indeed incompetence’.19 The only good news, received three days after the attack, was that German South-West Africa had capitulated to General Botha’s South African forces – a victory that made the destruction of the Königsberg all the more important to the pride of those serving on the East Africa Station.

  As the darkness lifted on 11 July, Pretorius counted sixteen ‘smidges’ on the horizon – the British fleet – backed by an ‘angry dawn’.20 His reconnaissance of the Kikunja channel had proved invaluable for the monitors, but they had still had to work principally from a captured German chart which Wilson deemed ‘the most inaccurate thing one could ever want to use . . . nothing appeared to resemble anything’.21 Undaunted, Wilson, Fullerton and Cull resolved that this time the monitors would take it in turns to fire to make spotting the results from the air less confusing. At 8 a.m. the monitors left Mafia, pulled by their tugs, for the twenty-mile journey to the delta. There could be no surprise about this second attack. By the time they arrived off the river bar at 10.40 a.m. the temperature in the engine rooms was 125°F, and the reception that awaited them as they entered the delta forty minutes later was equally ‘hot’. The German field gun ranged on Severn and then hit Mersey twice, wounding three men manning her 6-inch gun aft. But once past the reception committee the monitors’ captains had the distinct impression that the banks were less well guarded than during their previous visit and they were able to anchor successfully at their firing position fifty minutes later. The true explanation for this relative tranquillity was that on this occasion the cruisers supported the monitors with a proper bombardment of the shore defences and Lieutenant Schlawe’s observation position on Pemba Hill; and the greater participation by the offshore fleet in this second attack also thwarted an attempt by the Wami, one of the Königsberg’s tenders, to torpedo one of the monitors. On board Hyacinth, bombarding the Simba Uranga and Kiomboni channels with Pioneer, Pretorius looked on in awe as ‘orders were sung out to the men already at their stations, and our guns spoke . . . all previous noises faded to insignificance as salvo after salvo belched out’. Yet another cruiser, HMS Challenger, had also arrived to assist in the attack, and what struck Pretorius most was ‘the nonchalance of the English sailors’ in the heat of battle. ‘One group’, he noticed, ‘not engaged in the firing, were calmly sitting on the deck mending their boots, and others were stitching canvas just as if nothing untoward were happening. They did not even trouble to watch the bombardment.’ For him, however, this was the culmination of months of clandestine handiwork and the excitement was ‘terrific’.22

  As Mersey swung broadside on to Königsberg’s position and opened fire the incoming shells soared overhead at first and then began to fall short – the erratic pattern being due to the ferocity of the fleet’s bombardment of the German observation posts. Meanwhile Severn moved 100 yards further upriver, drawing Königsberg’s fire in the process, and when she was ready to commence firing Mersey ceased. On board Severn the atmosphere was one of controlled bedlam. Apel had found his range at last and his salvoes were turning the water around the monitor into a vortex – forty-seven shell fragments would later be found strewn across her deck. But with communications with the planes now working smoothly, and only Severn firing, Mersey also began to close in on her prey. Wilson’s first direct hit was scored at 12.35 p.m. and Königsberg’s accuracy immediately started to falter. Arnold, Cull’s observer, signalled two more hits from Severn and soon afterwards noticed that only three of Königsberg’s guns were still firing. Just before one o’clock, however, one of Königsberg’s last two QF shrapnel shells exploded right in front of Cull and Arnold’s plane, even though it was almost in the black clouds 2,400 feet overhead. Arnold coolly signalled the hit to Mersey, and continued signalling on the descent, his last message informing Severn that ‘all hits are right forward’. The plane crashed into the water not far from Mersey. Arnold was flung twenty-five yards clear on impact but Cull still wore his belt and was somewhere beneath the upturned plane. It was some time before, to their great relief, Wilson and the crew of Mersey saw him emerge from underneath and struggle clear, having ‘swallowed a good deal more than his fair share of the Rufiji’. Both men were safely picked up, all crocodiles having moved off when the firing had first started, and Cull and Arnold were congratulated on what Wilson considered to be ‘one of the most gallant episodes of the war’. Meanwhile Severn was scoring hit after hit on the Königsberg, nine from fifteen shots in twelve minutes; and Weymouth and Pyramus had – for the very first time – crossed the bar at the entrance to the delta and were ‘fairly giving both banks “Tommy Up The Orchard”’.23

  East African sett
lers report to Nairobi’s recruitment office in August 1914 . . .

  . . . and take to the field

  The execution of spies in Zanzibar

  SMS Königsberg, commanded by Max Looff (inset), at Dar-es-Salaam

  Salvaging the cargo of the German blockade-runner Kronborg in Mansa Bay

  One of the starboard gun crews of HMAS Pioneer with their mascot, Ben

  HMS Mersey passes HMS Severn during the second attack on the

  Königsberg in the Rufiji delta, July 1915

  Examining the wreckage of the Königsberg

  29th Punjabis and 25th Battalion Royal Fusiliers embark for Bukoba, June 1915

  King’s African Rifles’ machine-gun position overlooking Bukoba

  Looff addresses the crewmen of the Königsberg as they prepare to join von Lettow-Vorbeck’s land forces

  German control of Lake Tanganyika, and therefore of the whole western theatre, rested on the presence of the Goetzen

  The Daily Mirror hails the remarkable achievements of Commander Spicer-Simson’s ‘Lake Tanganyika Expedition’

  Spicer-Simson (inset) signalling from the deck of the Belgian vessel Netta

  HMS Fifi at anchor

  A German column makes its way across the pori

  One of the Königsberg’s guns being manhandled into position (the gun is out of picture left)