Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  1st King’s African Rifles occupying Longido early in 1916

  The 2nd Rhodesia Regiment entrains

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck observing British troop movements on the Kilimanjaro front, March 1916

  German lookout posts were swiftly constructed along the border with British East Africa, and formidable entrenchments were dug around many towns

  After the disastrous setback at Tanga Aitken’s two successors, Richard Wapshare (left) and Michael Tighe (right), were charged with preventing a German invasion of British East Africa

  Arthur Aitken, the commander of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’

  The transports carrying IEF ‘B’ approach Tanga in November 1914

  Men of the Royal Naval Air Service prepare one of their seaplanes for take-off

  German shore defences guarding the approaches to the Königsberg’s lair in the Rufiji delta

  Askari of 4th King’s African Rifles watching over a wounded comrade awaiting evacuation near Mzima

  An attempt by troopers of the East African Mounted Rifles to disguise a pony as a zebra

  A halt is called by a Belgian Cyclist Company

  Indian gunners in action on the Longido front

  British troops prepare to resist an attack on the Uganda Railway

  (painted by Philip Dadd)

  ‘Loyal askari’

  (painted by Fritz Grotemeyer)

  Three minutes after the airmen came down a huge explosion could be heard from the Königsberg, followed soon after by two more. Mersey now took up the gauntlet and closed in for the kill. Passing Severn at her anchorage between Gengeni Island and the west bank, Wilson skilfully manoeuvred his cumbersome craft to within 7,000 yards of Königsberg and anchored only when her passage upriver was barred by a shoal which Pretorius had warned seemed to stretch the whole width of the river. The German cruiser was still out of sight but a vast column of smoke rose into the sky from her decks and further explosions could be heard. Wilson ordered Mersey’s gunners to open fire and a hit was registered with her third shot. He continued firing until 2.45 p.m., also destroying on the riverbank what he suspected was a torpedo boat whose crew had bolted, and an observation post in a tub submerged in the mud just thirty yards away. By then it was clear to all that ‘Königsberg was no more’, and the order was given to cease fire and to retire on the falling tide. Flight Lieutenant Watkins’s Caudron, which had taken over spotting for Cull and was now the sole serviceable British plane, returned to Mafia where it landed in the swamp at the end of the runway, throwing Watkins clear but leaving his observer upside down with his head in the grime.

  As the monitors passed through the fleet to a colossal cheer, there was pandemonium on board the Königsberg. Looff proudly recorded that when the attack had started his crew ‘did not sleep like Pegasus people’. But this second attack was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. He was short of ammunition after loosing off 150 shells from four starboard guns, and at last was forced to recognise that ‘we would never leave the delta’. The Königsberg’s decks were strewn with wreckage and the fallen, fire was spreading through the ship, and the magazines had to be flooded. A ‘shake of the hand, some brief words’ were all he could offer as the wounded staggered past and just before 1 p.m. he had finally ordered Oberleutnant Georg Koch to blow up the ship with a torpedo warhead. The noise, though clearly audible to his assailants, was ‘more feeble than we had thought it would be, almost like the distant thunder of the enemy’s guns’. Königsberg juddered, listed to starboard and sank in the shallow water to the level of her upper deck. From her mainmast the Imperial Navy’s pennant still flew, but the fire on board had spread to the shore and it was only thanks to the timely and energetic assistance of Ulrich Dankwarth, the government forester at Salale, that the wounded were guided to safety. One of the longest continuous engagements in naval history was at an end.

  ‘Was this a victory?’ Looff asked himself. ‘Certainly not’24 was his defiant answer. His guns were not irreparable, the 125 wounded crewmen would mostly recover, and in the eight months of manning the shore defences only four members of Schönfeld’s 500-strong Delta Force were thought to have been killed. All of the Königsberg’s crew were awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class, thirty-two of them posthumously, on the Kaiserin’s birthday in October; and Looff won the Iron Cross 1st Class and the even more prestigious Pour le Mérite. On the other hand the abandonment of the Königsberg was not carried out in as orderly a fashion as Looff would later claim: there were still men on board when the torpedo warheads were detonated, and the Chief Engineer ‘behaved abominably, pushing away all the crew who stood in his way into the water’25 as he made for the shore. Furthermore ‘Das Ende der Königsberg’ was not a story that was run by German newspapers until April 1916. Monitors were not deemed good for morale, as a captured letter written by one of the crew subsequently made clear. ‘Those were hard days here’, it read, ‘if you never have any dealings with monitors you will have to congratulate yourself, dear Hans, they are beastly things and not to be trifled with . . . The Königsberg was shot to pieces as if she had been in a mousetrap.’26

  As Severn and Mersey anchored off Mafia their captains assessed what it had cost in ordnance to finish the Königsberg. In the two attacks they had between them fired 943 6-inch shells, 389 4.7-inch shells, 1,860 3-pdr shells and 16,000 rounds from their machine-guns. ‘So,’ remarked Wilson, ‘you can imagine what one’s hearing was like at the end of the day.’27 For the airmen, led by Gordon and Cull, there was considerable pride in their indispensable and courageous spotting during the second attack, and the knowledge that they were the first aviators in history to participate in the destruction of a warship. DSOs were awarded to Fullerton, Wilson, Gordon, Cull and Arnold; while six DSMs were won by the crew of Severn, three by Mersey’s men and one by Air Mechanic Boggis for his unstinting efforts to keep the British planes in the air.

  The Royal Navy had more than twenty warships of various types and sizes off the delta on 11 July. There was a strong feeling on board most of them that a lot of trouble, and tremendous cost, could have been saved but ‘no one had the resolution to go after [Königsberg] at once’.28 This was not entirely fair, but King-Hall was generally blamed. An utterly fed-up Captain Crampton on Weymouth was disgusted at the ‘misplaced hot air’29 talked by his admiral in the debrief of 12 July. A young lieutenant on Hyacinth also suggested that ‘had we served under more inspired leadership than we had from King-Hall I am sure we would have left with a different feeling, for we had taken part in a campaign that was to say the least unusual’.30 All felt that it had, even at the end, been ‘a narrow squeak’ and that ‘the luck was all on our side and entirely against the Germans’.31

  Of those naval officers who took part four, including Fullerton, were destined to become admirals. But for the man who had commanded them, there was considerable disappointment. Having overseen what he described as ‘a very neat job’,32 King-Hall left the East Africa Station on 18 July. He was refused an active command at sea and ended the war in command of the Royal Naval base at Scapa Flow. And his superior, Churchill, was – for the time being – brought down by the debacle at the Dardanelles.*

  For six days after the events of 11 July the weather was rainy and misty, preventing aerial assessment of the exact extent of the damage inflicted on the Königsberg. But on the seventh the weather cleared and Pretorius led a landing party to take a look up the delta. ‘One would scarcely have known what she had been,’ he wrote; ‘for here, beside the bush-crowded edge of the small island against which she had been moored, lay little more than a vast disorder of tortured steel.’33 Within two weeks, while the wounded recovered in the care of Dr Eyerich and Dr Seitz at Neustieten, Koch led the fit crewmen of the Königsberg off to Dar-es-Salaam to begin their war as soldiers rather than sailors and Franz Köhl, a Bavarian gunner, began the salvage of the ship’s ten guns. Only fifteen of the Königsberg’s original crew would ever see Germany again, and by then the wreck
of their former vessel had been bought for £ 200 by none other than Commander Ingles, the skipper of the Pegasus.

  TEN

  ‘The Lion and the Springbok’1

  The surrender of German South-West Africa to South African troops in July 1915 was an event of considerable significance. It was the second German colony in Africa to fall, following the capture of Togo in the first month of the war, leaving only the Cameroons and German East Africa still to be ‘squared’, and it had been achieved at an acceptable cost of £15m (£675m in today’s money). More importantly, however, it constituted the first major Allied victory of the entire war and was regarded as a welcome boost to morale midway through a year of disastrous setbacks in Europe and at the Dardanelles.

  That victory should have been secured by the popular South African Premier Louis Botha – a man recently described as ‘a sort of Sir Edward Grey on horseback’2 – was equally reassuring to the War Office. Little more than a decade had passed since the end of the Anglo-South African, or ‘Boer’, War in which Botha and his deputy, Jan Smuts, had been prominent ‘enemy’ generals. But from a position of total defeat these two men had vigorously supported union between the formerly British South African territories and the old Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State; and when this was finally achieved in 1910 the South African electorate had voted for an Afrikaner majority in parliament. This remarkable outcome, which seemed to indicate that it was Boer not Briton who had finally won the war, was not the one anticipated by the British government; but any fears about a renewal of hostilities were allayed by Botha’s firm conviction that South Africa’s interests would be best served by a future within the British Empire.

  At the outbreak of war, Botha had reaffirmed South Africa’s loyalty to the Crown, much to the relief of those in Britain who feared the possibility of a declaration of neutrality or even tacit sympathy with Germany. Such fears were not unjustified. Germany had supported Kruger during the Anglo-South African War, and the threat posed to British shipping by German South-West Africa’s ports and its high-powered wireless station at Windhuk might have been construed by Botha to have been no concern of South Africa’s (even after a relatively minor German cross-border incursion). Furthermore, there were tens of thousands of German settlers living in South Africa. But Germany’s growing belligerence, and the implicit threat to South African interests of the Kaiser’s doctrine of ‘Unser Feld ist die Welt’ – ‘The whole world is our playing field’ – determined Botha’s course of action; and by the end of August 1914 the seven British infantry battalions and one cavalry regiment stationed in South Africa were able to begin making their way to Europe as a result of his declaration that the country would assume responsibility for its own defence.

  Botha’s decision was a bold one. It was taken against a background of immense internal strife in South Africa, and in no time old grievances between Afrikaner and Briton, Afrikaner and Afrikaner, and Briton and German were resurgent. The tension among Afrikaners was the greatest concern. For the moderates, led by Botha and Smuts, allegiance to Britain was accepted as both a de iure and a de facto obligation for the ultimate greater good of South Africa. But there were ‘as many kinds of Dutchmen as there are nations in Europe’.3 Some were resolutely pro-British, believing that if Botha and Smuts thought it best to fight for the British that was good enough for them, no matter how great their grievances against the verdomde rooineks – ‘damned rednecks’ – had been after the Boer War; some were all for participating in the war but, like General Coen Brits, who had accepted his call-up from Botha with the words ‘who do we fight, Germans or English?’, were unsure where South Africa’s allegiance would lie; and there was a substantial faction of Afrikaner bitter-einders – the ‘bitter-enders’ – who either vigorously opposed South Africa’s incorporation within the British Empire or accepted it only grudgingly. The republican and nationalist sentiments of this latter group found a spokesman in a man who, like Botha and Smuts, was a former Boer general. James Barry Munnik Hertzog possessed ‘a dangerous face, that of a fanatic, brooding, intense and rather cruel’,4 and was described by his many enemies as ‘a good hater’, ‘a rigid martinet’, and ‘narrow in the extreme’.5 In short he seemed – to his detractors – to embody the most despicable characteristics of the extremist wing of Afrikaner society, and in 1912 he was even left out of Botha’s Cabinet.

  In spite of, or perhaps because of, his objectionable personal traits and invective, Hertzog’s parochialism appealed to the concerns of the deeply conservative, the dispossessed, the malcontent, the reactionary, and the plain ignorant elements of Afrikaner society; and he wasted no time in making his views on the war known. Hertzog saw no merit whatsoever in siding with Britain against those whom he regarded as the Boers’ ‘fellow Teutons’, and his virulent criticism of de Engelse knew no bounds. Afrika voor de afrikander (‘Africa for the Afrikaner’) was his relentless cry, a concept from which not only black Africans were excluded but also the likes of Botha and Smuts, whom he cast as ‘turncoats’, scourges of ‘Afrikaner culture’. Hertzog may have been ‘a hysterical dunderhead’,6 but he was a dangerous one; and the fact that parliament was not in session during the first month of the war gave him ample opportunity to foment sedition.

  By the time the Royal Navy and South African troops captured the German South-West African port of Lüderitz on 15 September 1914 the criticism of Botha’s pro-British stance had reached fever pitch in Nationalist circles, despite the invasion of the German colony being retrospectively approved by a massive parliamentary majority. General Beyers resigned as Commandant General of the Defence Force in protest at Botha’s rejection of neutrality and he, General Koos De la Rey and Hertzog embarked on a campaign to air their grievances in those sections of Afrikaner society where they would be received most favourably. This was more than just filibustering; and when De la Rey, as big a hero of the Boer War to the Afrikaner population as was Lord Roberts to the English, was accidentally shot at a police roadblock near Johannesburg on the very day that Lüderitz fell a full-scale rebellion erupted.

  Whitehall received the first reports of fratricidal hostilities in South Africa with considerable consternation. There was no telling how many Afrikaners might take up arms, especially as the rebellion was exclusively led by former heroes of the Anglo-South African War. Christiaan De Wet, the Boer ‘Pimpernel’ of that conflict, occupied towns in the Orange Free State which soon contributed three-quarters of the rebel commandos; General Beyers organised resistance in the Transvaal; and in the northern Cape Colonel Solomon ‘Manie’ Maritz and 1,000 troops joined their erstwhile enemies in German South-West Africa and commenced operations against the Union. All in all, Admiral King-Hall, who at the time had not yet departed to take charge of the operations against the Königsberg, was not exaggerating when he warned Churchill that the situation was ‘very grave’,* and it worsened when rumours began to circulate that German missionaries were encouraging the Zulus to rise up as well. All loyal troops were either campaigning in German South-West Africa or deploying against the Afrikaner rebels, leaving only the police to face this new threat to peace. One of them anticipated that ‘if the Zulus do rise . . . it will be bon soir for us all’;7 but fortunately the rumours proved exaggerated.

  As ‘tribal leader’, Botha acted decisively. Martial law was proclaimed, operations in German South-West Africa were suspended, and the South African Premier personally led 40,000 predominantly Afrikaner troops against their mutinous brethren. Beyers was defeated at Rustenburg in December, and drowned while crossing the Vaal River to escape his pursuers. Christiaan De Wet was defeated and captured at Mushroom Valley the same month. ‘Manie’ Maritz remained in German South-West Africa and was joined, after a remarkable crossing of the Kalahari, by rebels led by Major Jan Kemp; but in February 1915, Maritz fled to Portuguese West Africa and Kemp surrendered. By the end of the month the remnants of the ‘Ten Bob Rebellion’, so called because of the token fine subsequently levied on
De Wet, were all rounded up.

  The relative ease with which the rebellion was put down could not disguise its potential danger to Botha’s government and to the British war effort. Indeed so great was the concern in Britain that the War Office had made contingency plans to divert 30,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers en route for Europe to South Africa. Nor did the suppression of the rebellion preclude the possibility of further insurrection. Union in South Africa had only been achieved through compromise on the part of a deeply divided society, and the fact that just 12,000 men had actually taken up arms against the state was no cause for optimism. In 1913 imperial troops had had to be called upon to extinguish widespread strikes, and a severe drought in 1913–14 had been a contributory factor to a general strike a few months before the war that had required the mobilisation of the Union Defence Force. In other words, South Africa was markedly unstable even before the war, and the outbreak of war had simply exacerbated that instability. From a British point of view it was therefore ‘fortunate indeed’, as King-Hall put it, that ‘General Botha, supported by his brilliant colleague, General Smuts, was the one political power at this time’, because he was by common consent the only man who commanded sufficient respect to counter the ‘well-nigh insuperable’8 divisions in South Africa’s white population.

  Neither Botha’s physical appearance, nor his reputation for being ‘a man above the ordinary’,9 suggested that he might be a sensitive man. But he was greatly troubled by the sight of Afrikaner fighting Afrikaner, and deeply hurt by the treachery of former close friends and the ‘abusive and threatening letters which were showered upon [him]’10 by rebel sympathisers. However he showed extreme leniency to the rebel commanders, only one of whom was executed (for having failed to resign his commission in the Defence Force before joining Beyers); and, in King-Hall’s words, ‘his eye remained fixed on the Pole Star of duty’11 even when he suffered from a chronic attack of dysentery while campaigning in German South-West Africa. Having committed South Africa to fight alongside Britain, Botha meant to see it through, and as soon as the German South-West campaign was over he undertook not only to despatch the 5th Battery of the South African Mounted Rifles to bolster the defences of Nyasaland but also to raise a full brigade for ‘overseas’ service.*