Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  ELEVEN

  A Velha Aliada – ‘The Old Ally’

  The South African conquest of German South-West Africa and its mobilisation for deployment in British East Africa was accompanied by Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) joining the fray. Portugal remained officially neutral, both in Europe and Africa; but the Portuguese government, like the Belgian government, was gravely concerned about its position in the event of any new, post-war carve-up of Africa. As early as January 1915 there were signs of Portugal’s intent – 20,000 Mauser-Vergueiro rifles and 12 million rounds of ammunition were provided to South Africa for use in the German South-West Africa campaign, and troops from Portuguese East Africa were sent to the Nyasaland border to assist Britain in quelling a ‘native uprising’; by the end of the year Portuguese neutrality had, de facto if not de iure, largely been abandoned.

  Portugal’s insistence on playing a proactive part in the campaigning in eastern and southwest Africa was to plunge the country into a nightmare, because its domestic political situation was even less stable than that of South Africa. Four years before the outbreak of war a revolution had forced King Manuel into exile in Twickenham and Portugal had been declared a Republic. But no diminution in the violence and factionalism which had led to its creation ensued, and by 1926 no fewer than forty-five governments had held power. The outbreak of war exacerbated the instability, as did Portugal’s parlous financial state; and it vastly complicated the process of dealing with Portugal’s predicament in Africa, where the Republic had inherited a colonial domain the size of western Europe whose beginnings predated the ‘Scramble for Africa’ by more than four centuries. Determining a course of action in relation to its vast African ‘possessions’ was to prove a Sisyphean challenge, with adverse consequences for all of Portugal’s allies as they sought to defeat von Lettow-Vorbeck.

  The birth of the Republic had placed particular strain on the ‘old alliance’ between Britain and Portugal which dated back to 1373. In the nineteenth century Britain had exercised ‘trusteeship’ over Portugal during the Peninsular War against Napoleon and remained treaty-bound to ‘defend and protect all conquest of colonies belonging to the Crown of Portugal against all his enemies, future as well as present’. But there was no longer a monarchy, and the altered state of affairs was recognised by a Foreign Office memo of 1910 which declared that ‘many of the clauses of the old treaties are . . . now obsolete, because referring to conditions which have passed away’, and pointed out that Britain had never ‘in more recent times . . . admitted that she is necessarily bound to espouse all Portugal’s quarrels’.1 Two years later, when considering Anglo-Portuguese treaty obligations in the event of a European war, British policy had hardened. Given that the prevailing view in Whitehall was that ‘neither the Portuguese Army, nor Treasury, has any effective war value that could strengthen the position of Great Britain’, it was decided that Britain reserved the right ‘to judge for herself in every case whether a casus foederis has arisen’. An Admiralty War Staff memo expressed this position even more bluntly: however old the alliance existing between Britain and Portugal, there were now ‘no direct advantages’ accruing from it to Britain ‘as regards strategic considerations’;* and by 1914 it was admitted that if Britain ‘had to choose between the friendship of Portugal and the friendship of Spain, that of Spain is of the greater value’.2

  Republican Portugal was keenly aware of British attitudes, and strong suspicions were aroused about the intentions of the velha aliada Gran-Bretanha. In theory Portugal could have ignored them and maintained absolute neutrality on the outbreak of war. But in practice this was not a viable option. The new Republic feared that exclusion from the war might prove catastrophic for the country’s interests, and possibly even for Portugal’s very existence. Portugal’s keenness to participate in the war mystified many in Whitehall who thought that Portugal’s interests would be best served by non-participation; and the result was the exposure of successive republican regimes to four years of almost constant indignity suffered at the hands of her oldest ally. Even those British officials who understood the Portuguese predicament had little patience with it. In their opinion it was of Portugal’s making, and if Portugal insisted on assuming a role in the war for its own reasons then the country’s leaders would have to be told what to do and be kept on a tight leash.

  The man charged with ‘running’ the Portuguese was Sir Lancelot Carnegie, the British Minister in Lisbon (and a son of the 9th Earl of Southesk). As a skilled diplomat, Carnegie was always scrupulously polite in his dealings with the Portuguese and frequently emphasised the need for an understanding in Whitehall of Portugal’s internal crises. He was also always quick to praise in public Portugal’s desire to comply with ancient treaty obligations. But his task was complicated by the fact that the issue of Portugal’s participation or non-participation was not one of overarching importance to anyone but the Portuguese; and conveying official policy that was high-handed to an extreme when he towered over most of his Portuguese counterparts was far from easy. Portuguese pride was frequently pricked, creating further paranoia and jealousy among political elites in Lisbon who – though they would never admit it – were only too well aware that once-mighty Portugal was no longer a world power. British imperiousness also played into the hands of Portuguese monarchists, whose leanings tended towards being pro-German, and even alienated many politicians who were resolutely pro-British. ‘Britain is very close to Portugal,’ began an old saying in Portugal; ‘close enough to screw us.’

  The British ‘instruction’ to the Portuguese to declare neither neutrality nor belligerence in 1914 failed to take account of the fact that stasis was one course of action no Portuguese government could afford to follow. It might help to assuage Portuguese nervousness about Spain’s reaction to her neighbour siding openly with Britain, but it neither enhanced the international prestige or confidence of the new Republic nor helped to quell the destabilising faction-fighting which characterised it.*So ‘quasi-neutrality’ was adopted as the only viable option, despite British concerns that it might facilitate Germany’s use of Portuguese ports in Africa. Outright belligerence on the part of Portugal was not deemed practicable at the outset: the Portuguese Army was not keen to be involved as a pawn in the republicans’ political manoeuvrings, was of suspect loyalty, and had ‘a capacity to make war . . . so limited as to be almost non-existent’.†

  Amid the confines imposed by quasi-neutrality, Portugal placed a far higher importance on defending its African colonies than Britain initially did. The new Republic viewed their preservation as a matter of its own life and death, and central to the nation’s mundovisão. This explains why Portuguese rhetoric continued to defy their reputation as the cafres da Europa (‘the kaffirs of Europe’), and to concentrate firmly on the glories of centuries gone by. The European Powers seemed to have ceased to understand Portugal’s existence – except as a rather unimportant European offshoot of its colonies – reinforcing a nagging belief in Portugal itself which dated back at least as far as the loss of Brazil in 1825 that ‘Portugal’ was nothing but a ‘grande ilusão’, an ‘império teórico’.3 Africa offered a possible solution to this parlous state of affairs. In the sixteenth century African gold, slaves and ivory had vastly increased Portugal’s wealth, which flowed into Lisbon as fast as emigrants left for Brazil. The African colonies also provided a potential palliative to the deep-seated nostalgic yearning for the glories of the past – saudade – which permeated Portuguese society. But if the African colonies were to do so again, and replace the wealth that Brazil had once brought to Portugal, they had to be firmly in Portuguese hands.

  There was another reason why Portugal felt the need to affirm its attachment to its African colonies. Ever since its own interests in Africa had started to multiply Britain had continually thwarted Portugal’s expansion on the continent. In 1889–90, Britain aggressively blocked Portuguese ‘incursions’ in Mashonaland (Southern Rhodesia) and Shire (Nyasaland), regarding t
hem as part of an attempt to join Portuguese West Africa (Angola) and Portuguese East Africa; and by 1898 Britain and Germany began negotiating for the redistribution of the Portuguese colonies in the event that Portugal was no longer able to bear the financial burden of its overseas commitments. Portugal had succeeded in clinging on to her colonies, but in 1912–13 Britain and Germany had re-examined the possibility of carving up Portugal ultramar – Portugal’s colonies – and a new agreement had only been frustrated by the outbreak of war and Germany’s insistence on keeping the negotiations secret.

  The new negotiations between Britain and Germany were attended by a propaganda campaign which stiffened Portuguese resolve to enforce the ‘defence of [her] colonial rights’4 still further. Britain had grown increasingly condemnatory of Portuguese colonial rule, and by 1914 Portugal’s African colonies were depicted as ‘derelict’ and ‘sinks of iniquity’. The Portuguese government stood accused of condoning a thinly disguised slave trade, and of administering its colonies cruelly and inefficiently. Even the alleged ‘degeneracy’ of Portuguese colonial officials’ ‘domestic arrangements’* and their predilection for miscegenation came under fire as Portugal was painted as the inheritor of King Leopold’s mantle. Portuguese rule was appalling by any standards, but the pre-war call from Britain and Germany for Portugal to improve her administration or risk losing her colonies altogether only served to increase Portuguese paranoia. All in all, Anglo-German machinations and propaganda had ensured that the war in Africa was even more important to the Portuguese than the war in Europe; and the Republic fully intended to call upon the tradição de heroismo of as many troops as necessary in its attempt to safeguard the African colonies. But, as one historian put it, ‘the consequences of the attempts to ignore both the limitations of their resources and the lack of belligerence in the nation were to be discord, counterrevolution and impoverishment at home, and very strained relations with her ally abroad’.5

  The bulk of the First Expeditionary Force sent by Lisbon to Portuguese East Africa, some 1,500 troops, arrived in Porto Amelia on 1 November 1914* – just days before IEF ‘B’ attempted to take Tanga. The port was ostensibly the headquarters of the Companhia do Niassa, to whom the north of the colony was ‘subcontracted’; and as the company was controlled by German shareholders it was hardly surprising that not a single preparation had been made for receiving troops. Indeed little had even been done to repair the damage wrought by a cyclone earlier in the year: the main pier was still a ruin, all trees were stripped of their leaves, and the houses remained unroofed. The scene was not reassuring to a force which, by the admission of most of its own officers, was ‘badly trained, badly equipped, badly clothed and badly organized’,6 and which had endured an appalling sea voyage from Europe. Furthermore, Lieutenant-Colonel Massano de Amorim, the expedition’s commanding officer, was unsure how to conduct a mission the very existence of which seemed to have a lot more to do with politics at home than securing any meaningful military objectives, and his force simply languished. Proper health facilities did not exist, good food was unobtainable, and the men slept outside without using mosquito nets. When the rains came, and Porto Amelia was transformed into a swamp, the result was inevitable: sickness became rife.

  In the wake of the overthrow of General Pimenta de Castro’s government in May 1915, a campaign objective was finally suggested by Lisbon: the invasion of the German-held Quionga ‘triangle’ to the north of Porto Amelia. Amorim regarded this as a poor joke. His force had long since been robbed of any offensive capability: in six months they had suffered disease-related casualties in excess of twenty per cent without his troops even having left Porto Amelia or fired a shot in anger. Survival was Amorim’s principal concern, followed by the likelihood of a ‘native uprising’ directed against his static and crippled garrison. In his opinion a whole division of new troops would be required before any thrust into German territory could be considered.* In the meantime he was incapable even of obeying an order to reinforce the 600-mile northern border of the colony. Not only was there little in the way of a Portuguese presence along the Rovuma River to ‘reinforce’, but, in the absence of even the most rudimentary tracks, he had no way of moving any sizeable bodies of troops to the few isolated posts manned by indigenous troops. Amorim’s main achievement, no mean feat under the circumstances, was his attempt to rectify the latter. Before his force was recalled in late 1915, he had succeeded in opening a 200-mile ‘road’ and telegraph line running inland across the Makonde plateau to Mocímboa da Rovuma.

  In November the Second Expeditionary Force, of comparable size to its predecessor, arrived under the command of Major Moura Mendes.† His orders were to hold the Rovuma ‘front’ and create a network of posts along the river stretching from the Indian Ocean to its confluence with the River Lujenda. But Mendes was a political appointee with no experience of warfare in the colonies. He ignored Amorim’s dire warnings of the enormity of the task being asked of the Portuguese forces by Lisbon, and completely neglected to address the problem of the appalling conditions in Porto Amelia. Even had he known how to make progress, Mendes was also hampered by being one step removed from Lisbon: the colony’s new Governor-General, thirty-six-year-old Republican stalwart Álvaro de Castro, insisted on issuing the orders of the fifth government of the year in Lisbon from the relative comfort of Lourenço Marques, over 1,000 miles away to the south. But the South African victory in South-West Africa, and German incursions into Portuguese West Africa, had imbued the metropole with an increasingly belligerent spirit and Mendes was ordered to prepare to occupy Quionga and co-operate with British troops as soon as possible. Mendes protested that he was not capable of advancing anywhere, but was told by Castro that he simply hadn’t studied the military situation at the front properly: Lisbon was not interested in what was possible, only in glorious victories.

  Throughout 1915 the border between German and Portuguese East Africa scarcely attracted von Lettow-Vorbeck’s attention and only a single company of troops, the newly raised 20/FK, was based at Lindi to watch it.* Such, as one German combatant put it, was ‘the deep respect which one accorded to the Portuguese as a war power’.7 Von Lettow-Vorbeck was, of course, preoccupied with operations in the north of the colony, where he believed the fate of German East Africa would be determined; and he knew full well that no Portuguese force, no matter how sizeable, was likely to cause him any real problem. On the other hand, Britain grew increasingly aware that the situation south of the Rovuma was far from satisfactory. The reports emanating from Lisbon sounded convincing enough – successive governments asserted that Portugal would defend her borders against any German incursions and was building a semblance of an infrastructure to enable it so to do – but the evidence on the ground was far from convincing.

  The Foreign Office had good reason to be sceptical of Portuguese official communiqués. History seemed to be repeating itself: Portugal’s interest in her East African colony had twice waned because her vast northern territory had proved unconquerable, and it was blindly optimistic to assume that this time would be any different. The reasons for the previous failures, in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, remained as seemingly insoluble as ever: the hostile environment and the lack of even the most rudimentary natural lines of communication which could facilitate the rapid movement of troops and supplies. The skill and strength of indigenous resistance, during both the sixteenth-century attempts at conquest and four disastrous campaigns undertaken in 1865–8 in Zambezia, was a further factor which unnerved Whitehall. All in all, far from learning that in Africa, ‘the objectives to be achieved are of a different order from those in a conventional European war’ and that ‘warfare itself [therefore] assumes a wholly different character’,8 Portugal showed all the signs of committing the same mistakes as she had done before, obsessed by prestige and the need to ‘dignify’ the new Republic.

  The biggest irony underlying Portugal’s grandiose military aspirations, abundantly clear to all the troops lang
uishing in Porto Amelia, was that the government’s authority in the north – and much of the rest of her colony – was minimal. It was the Companhia do Niassa which ‘governed’ the 100,000 square miles between the Lurio and Rovuma Rivers, and the Companhia de Moçambique which ‘governed’ all territory between the Zambesi River and latitude 22 degrees south. Both did so in a fashion as predatory and cynical as could be imagined with the result that, at best, Lisbon’s claims to be implementing any sort of strategy were fanciful; and, at worst, they would be deliberately stymied by commercial companies whose loyalty was suspect. In fact the Portuguese East Africa controlled by Lisbon really only comprised the Ilha de Moçambique and the larger coastal towns between Beira and Lourenço Marques. The rest of the country was mostly the domain of private charter companies or labour recruiters from the mines of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

  During 1915 the Foreign Office also became unnerved by mounting evidence that Portuguese East Africa was ‘leaky’, and far from being neutral in the sense that Britain had envisaged. As late as August mail for German East Africa passed freely through the colony; the Deutsche Ostafrika-Linie was active in trans-shipping essential supplies across the border; and the infamous Dr Weck, who had ‘mistakenly’ overrun a Portuguese border post in August 1914, encountered few difficulties in visiting Palma to receive war news from the German Vice-Consul at Porto Amelia, and to revictual. Furthermore, the Empreza Nacional de Navegação continued to ferry German passengers travelling on false papers to sign up in German East Africa and, even as late as April 1916, it remained relatively easy for Schnee ‘to continue to communicate with the German government’9 via Portuguese East Africa. This was deemed a lamentable state of affairs by Sir Lancelot Carnegie. ‘So long as German officers and agents have a free hand in the northern part of the Portuguese colony, it renders the blockade of German East Africa practically a dead letter’,10 he wrote in August 1915 – and that very month Karl Christiansen, the captain of the blockade-runner Kronborg which had landed north of Tanga earlier in the year, was arrested in Johannesburg having trekked from the Rufiji delta to Portuguese East Africa and then boarded a steamer to Lourenço Marques.11