by Edward Paice
To Smuts’s intense and mounting frustration, Stewart’s progress to the west of Kilimanjaro was no longer proceeding quite so rapidly. His problems were threefold. Intelligence reports indicated that at least five German companies under Major Fischer were in front of him, but there was still little sign of them by the time he reached Geragua, in the wooded western foothills of Kilimanjaro, on 8 March. Secondly, he had crossed terrain infinitely more exacting than that over which the South African troops were advancing in the east, and his men were suffering badly from thirst and heat exhaustion. Thirdly, he had no railway line to support him and his lines of communication were completely exposed not only to opportunistic raids by the enemy but also to the daily deluges that now presaged the arrival of the rains. In these circumstances, Stewart began to exercise a degree of caution about his continued advance. He chose to press on through the foothills with his infantry leaving the guns and mounted troops, whose effectiveness in such country was limited, to follow. By dusk on 11 March Stewart’s vanguard had reached an intact bridge over the Sanya River near Boma Ngombe – an advance of just twenty miles in three days – and Smuts’s messages to him became increasingly irascible.
Stewart was in an unenviable position. On 10 March his mounted troops had ‘bumped’ two of Fischer’s companies and after a vicious fight had been forced to return, with the artillery, whence they had started their day’s trek. In the opinion of their commander this battle vindicated his decision to advance cautiously, but Smuts took the opposing view and was astonished that Stewart had allowed his infantry to become cut off from the cavalry and heavy guns. The situation was rectified when the 29th Punjabis were sent back to escort the latter forward, and the advance was able to resume. But once across the Sanya River the danger of ambush was even greater and the whereabouts of Fischer’s troops remained unknown. It was at this juncture that Smuts began to suspect that Kraut was retiring from the Taveta front due west towards Moshi – and Stewart – and not, as he had expected, straight down the Northern Railway.
At Taveta, Smuts was also confronted with having to clear the nek between the Latema and Reata Hills before he could press on towards Moshi. The terrain precluded a flanking movement such as had proved successful in prising the Germans off Salaita Hill, so a frontal assault was deemed the only option. This was an unusual decision for a man who was wont to declare that ‘British generals seem to take a fortified position as a personal affront and attack it head on. We believe in going round it.’6 If the objective had not been so important, Smuts’s choice of commander – General Malleson – would have seemed like a ploy almost guaranteed to get rid of the man once and for all. Kraut was known to be holding the nek in force and dislodging him meant taking the hills, which rose about 700 feet above the plain on either side and were densely covered in bush and boulders. Dark mutterings about Spion Kop and other Boer War battles in which British troops had failed to take elevated positions began to circulate in the ranks as Malleson ordered forward 1,500 men of the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment, the 130th Baluchis and Colonel Graham’s 3/KAR at noon on 11 March. But Graham, for one, was jovial and optimistic, having eluded a ‘conviction amounting to a certainty’7 that he would be killed in the earlier advance on Salaita.
At the foot of the hills the King’s African Rifles and the Baluchis soon found themselves pinned down by coruscating fire from above, and at 2.30 p.m. Malleson left the field, ostensibly suffering from ‘dysentery’. It was his final ‘contribution’ to the war in East Africa, and Tighe himself was forced to take over command of the attack. It took him some time to ascertain exactly what was happening on Latema and Reata, but it was clear that progress by his two battalions was minimal, prompting him to throw in his reserve – the 2nd Rhodesians – and immediately to request reinforcements from Smuts. Failure, after waiting seventeen months for the opportunity to eject German troops from British soil, was simply unimaginable to Tighe; and in tackling the hills he would, by his own admission, take ‘grave risks’.8 As Colonel Capell’s 2nd Rhodesians moved through their ‘chummy’ battalions, the latter had been pinned down for five hours in searing heat and 3/KAR had tragically lost their commanding officer, shot through the head by a pom-pom shell. Graham’s death was universally regarded as a ‘terrible loss’ as he was ‘not only a most accomplished and gallant soldier, but . . . regarded with an almost unique devotion by the KAR’.9 In no time the Rhodesians were also stopped in their tracks, then forced back by a determined counter-attack at 6 p.m. When darkness descended most of the battalion was back on the plain with the other British troops and 5/SAI and 7/SAI, the reinforcements sent from Chala by Smuts.
Tighe, who had been greatly buoyed by the ease with which he had taken Salaita, was not about to admit defeat. Colonel Byron’s 5/SAI, anxious to lose its soubriquet ‘The Runaway Fifth’ earned in the February attack on Salaita, and Colonel Freeth’s 7/SAI were ordered to fix bayonets and assault the hills in the dark; and so great was the determination with which they advanced that they almost succeeded in carrying the attack. At least one third of Freeth’s battalion made it to the ridges, as did Byron with about forty of his battalion. But having seen half his men killed, when Byron was himself wounded he reluctantly instructed the remainder to withdraw. In the dark, confusion now reigned both on the hills and down below. At 1.30 a.m. Tighe ordered the 130th Baluchis to fix bayonets and advance, but on meeting Byron’s retreating troops they too pulled back, believing that the attack had been cancelled. Tighe judged it inadvisable to try again in the dark; and at 4.30 a.m. Smuts told him to withdraw his whole force by dawn, in the hope that an advance that day by van Deventer’s mounted troops to the north would force the Germans to evacuate Latema and Reata.
Soon after daylight the truth began to dawn. A large number of the troops listed as missing from the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment and 7/SAI, as well as a few askari of 3/KAR of whom Graham would have been proud, had never withdrawn off the hills. On Latema Colonel Freeth had hung on grimly with eighteen men from his battalion and a handful of Rhodesians and KAR; while Major Thompson and a party of 170 had spent the night on Reata in positions intermingled with those of the enemy. As soon as he learnt that these troops were still on the hills Tighe immediately ordered Colonel Taylor’s 8/SAI – the ‘Jammy Eighth’ – and an artillery battery to rush forward in cars from Taveta and by the time Taylor’s battalion reached the ridges the Germans were in full flight. Tighe wrote that ‘the behaviour of the 5th and 7th SA taken all round was very fine and the men who held on to the ridge all night and then turned the captured German machine-guns on to the demoralised Boches were men to be proud of. They saved the situation and turned the scale.’ Freeth and Thompson were immediately awarded the first DSOs to be won by South Africans in the campaign, and despite the severity of the fighting the toll was deemed ‘acceptable’. Casualties among the three British battalions amounted to 169, and among the South Africans to a further 100 or so. Kraut’s troops, estimated to number about 1,000, were thought to have suffered equally heavily. They were not pursued, and by dawn had disappeared into the dense forest between the hills and Kahe.
Had the attack on Latema-Reata failed, Tighe was certain that the ‘blood-some’ battle which had ‘cooked’10 all the men of the South African 2nd Division and most of the Force Reserve would have cost him his command. More importantly, it forced von Lettow-Vorbeck to cancel an attack by nine skilfully deployed and heavily armed companies on van Deventer’s ‘Flanking Force’ as it moved forward from Taveta towards Himo. The outcome of this contest would almost certainly have been disastrous for van Deventer’s mounted troops, who only outnumbered their opponents by one third and would have been advancing across unfamiliar terrain. As it was the German force, commanded by the experienced Schulz and Stemmermann, was ordered to withdraw south to join Kraut’s detachment at Kahe and Smuts’s route to Moshi, the railhead of the Northern Railway, lay open. On 14 March van Deventer’s advance guard entered the town unopposed and established contact with the
advance guard of Stewart’s 1st Division.
On 12 March Smuts, ever the politician, declared the ‘first phase’ of the campaign to be over. It was a half-truth only. German troops had been cleared from the border and pushed back into German East Africa, but they had not been brought to battle and were massing around Kahe and along the Ruwu River. If Smuts had ever entertained the notion that the first phase would be the only phase, it was abundantly clear that he had failed. For this, Stewart took most of the blame. Smuts had repeatedly lambasted him for not moving quickly enough to cut off the German retreat from Taveta at Moshi, but it was actually Smuts’s decision to send van Deventer’s mounted troops haring through to Moshi that had forced von Lettow-Vorbeck to order his troops to reconcentrate around Kahe, to the south of their former positions, and not at Moshi. Furthermore, Smuts also blamed Stewart for not reaching Kahe in time to cut that line of retreat. This was Smuts at his most arrogant: he was certain that Stewart had not pushed his men hard enough and made no allowance for the difficulties encountered during the advance from Longido. Even had he done so, Smuts simply would not accept that von Lettow-Vorbeck’s success in slipping the noose could only be attributed to the actions of his troops on the Taveta front.
On 15 March Smuts wrote to the War Office that Stewart should have been at Kahe by 11 March – within five days of his departure from Longido – and, had that been so, ‘there would have been a fair chance of concluding the whole campaign within the next few weeks’.11 It was an outrageous slur given the eighty miles of terrain across which he had to advance, and the fact that to reach Kahe Stewart needed not only to deal with Fischer’s companies but also to outflank von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force. Furthermore Smuts had not made it clear to Stewart at the outset that Kahe was even his objective. ‘It is not easy to say what would have happened had our Division been directed on Kahe’, wrote one officer in the East African Mounted Rifles; ‘in all probability we could have reached there before the main German force . . . but so important a point as Kahe must have been held in some strength . . . and our Division was not so strong a fighting force as it appeared on paper’.12
It was true that Stewart’s troops could have taken Moshi on 14 March (the day that van Deventer did so unopposed). But communications with Smuts’s HQ were poor, and Stewart was still expecting to face the retreat of the main German force from around Taveta – so opted to remain holding the bridge over the Sanya River in compliance with his original orders to hold the Moshi– Arusha road and block any German troops retreating westwards. He did, however, also detach a 1,500-strong column under Colonel Sheppard to try and fulfil his latest order to cut off the German troops at Kahe, ten miles to the south-east. This order was, at best, a disingenuous move calculated to make Stewart a scapegoat. Rain was now pouring down, and the vast majority of Kraut’s troops were gathered around Kahe before Stewart even received the order. In order to reach Kahe they had only had to withdraw ten miles, under no threat whatsoever, from the Latema-Reata nek ; and for Captain Stemmermann’s last troops withdrawing from Himo, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s former HQ, the distance was even less. The final indignity wrought on Stewart occurred when the bulk of his division did move the last few miles from the Sanya River to Moshi on 14 March: its advance guard was fired on by van Deventer’s mounted troops, who were unable to tell the difference between the uniforms of the King’s African Rifles and those of the German askari.
In the aftermath of the ‘first phase’ Smuts was unable to prevent Malleson from being promoted Major-General, as had been recommended by Tighe before his arrival, but he had no hesitation in dismissing him for ‘defective leadership in the field’.13 This caused no great surprise and, in time-honoured fashion, did not appear to impede Malleson’s subsequent career.*However his dismissal of Stewart, a highly respected officer with a long and distinguished career with the 5th Gurkha Rifles behind him, was an altogether more contentious move. Stewart may not have been the most brilliant soldier, but he was ‘safe’ and had done exactly what was expected of him since arriving in East Africa in 1914. Smuts, though himself a man who combined caution with sporadic recklessness, quite simply did not want cautious commanders; and in heaping vitriol on Stewart, he earned few friends among British officers. Malleson was a ‘viper’; Stewart was universally liked, trusted and admired. In the opinion of many, ‘hard things were spoken, and indeed written [about Stewart]’, and an ‘injustice was done.’14 in condemning him to command the garrison at Aden for most of the rest of the war. At least his fate was better than that of Major Fischer, who had found his task of holding up Stewart’s advance as testing as Stewart had found the presence of Fischer’s companies: Fischer was handed a revolver by von Lettow-Vorbeck on arrival at New Steglitz Plantation and shot himself.
Stewart’s principal mistake was to have argued with Smuts. When Smuts had first inspected the Longido front Stewart had highlighted all the factors which made an advance on Moshi at the speed required by Smuts unviable, and he had requested a two-day start over the force advancing from the east if he were to attain that objective. Smuts had interpreted this as tantamount to insubordination, and it was from that moment that suspicions arose among many British officers that none of the South African commanders appeared to have ‘the slightest idea of the climatic and health difficulties [that confronted them], [nor] had they any experience of fighting in thick bush’.* Furthermore Smuts refused to contemplate that he might be faced with a protracted campaign, despite the fact that Smith-Dorrien had warned him of such a possibility and even some of his own Staff officers were of the opinion that ‘campaigning in a country like this was going to be far more difficult than in German West’.15 ‘Cheer up boys, I’m going to work you hard for six weeks – and them’,16 was Smuts’s straightforward, and arguably naïve, message to his troops at the start of the offensive.
Amid the recriminations there was still the question of what to do about von Lettow-Vorbeck’s concentration around Kahe. If he was not evicted from his positions before the rains began in earnest his troops would be in a position to harry the British lines of communication and frustrate Smuts’s preparations for a new offensive when the rains abated. It was therefore of ‘vital importance . . . for the enemy to be driven south of the [Ruwu] river’,17 and on 18 March Smuts ordered a further advance. He was warned by Pretorius, who after his service in the Rufiji delta was now Smuts’s Chief Scout, that von Lettow-Vorbeck was prepared to make a stand at Kahe and had a Königsberg gun in his defences. Five days of heavy fighting ensued at places identifiable only by their most proximate feature – ‘Masai Kraal’, ‘Store’, ‘Euphorbien Hill’ and so forth – as the advance encountered stern resistance. Casualties ran as high as 300 men among the 29th Punjabis, 129th Baluchis and the 2nd South African Infantry Brigade, but on 21 March von Lettow-Vorbeck withdrew from his positions around Kahe; and the following night German troops abandoned the entire Ruwu line and began to retreat south-east through the dense bush flanking the Northern Railway.
Smuts was not sure how far south von Lettow-Vorbeck would retire, but correctly guessed that he would have to turn south from the Northern Railway at Mombo if he wanted to reach the Central Railway. On 23 March he reported to the War Office that his subsidiary operation had been ‘a complete success’,18 despite the fierce resistance it had met, and the onset of the rains precluded any further advance for the time being. The pause in hostilities enabled Smuts to turn his attention to consolidating his lines of communication and to reorganising his forces. A new 1st Division included all the non-South African troops and 4/SAH, the sole ‘British’ unit among the South African mounted troops, and was placed under Tighe’s command; while van Deventer and Oom – ‘Uncle’ – Coen Brits were promoted Major-General and were given the 2nd and 3rd Divisions respectively. (See Appendix Four.) Smuts did not tinker with Smith-Dorrien’s headquarters appointees but rather circumvented them by appointing his own parallel staff. This included Brigadier-General Collyer as his Chief of Staff a
nd, lower down the ranks, men like ‘Tottie’ Krige (his brother-in-law), Manie Botha (the Premier’s son), and old comrades Piet van der Byl and Deneys Reitz (son of the former President of the Free State). Piet Pretorius was confirmed in his post as Chief Scout, having been recognised by Smuts as being ‘completely fearless’ and ‘utterly ruthless’,19 and was destined to spend most of the rest of his war operating far behind German lines, engaging in his own ‘Great Game’ against a fellow Boer, Piet Nieuwenhuizen, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Chief Scout.
Just as Smuts began his sweeping reorganisation he was informed by the War Office that Tighe’s services were required back in India (where he became Inspector of Infantry).* As Stewart and Malleson were departing at the same time, Smuts was keen to ensure that he was not tarred with the same brush. For almost a year Tighe had done all that could realistically have been expected of him under the most frustrating circumstances, and Smuts was fulsome in his praise of ‘all the preliminary work done by General Tighe in the direction of organization and preparation for offensive measures’.20 Tighe’s command passed to the capable and highly respected pre-war Inspector-General of the King’s African Rifles, Reginald Hoskins, rather than a South African, but there was no disguising the fact that Smuts’s new command structure was more South African in character than the overall composition of the troops in East Africa. In addition to the 18,000 combat troops which had taken part in the March offensive, there were a further 9,000 Indian troops manning the lines of communication, and the total ration strength of Smuts’s force at the end of the month amounted to 45,000. The message was clear: Smuts was intent on turning the handling of the campaign into a South African ‘family affair’ and expected South Africa to gain the lion’s share of the credit for the victory which he was certain would soon be his. It was symptomatic of this development that the East African Mounted Rifles, the settler regiment which had proved so indispensable during the early months of the war, found so many of its men being removed for ‘subsidiary duties connected with supply and transport’21 that its strength was reduced to a single squadron; and after its horses had been requisitioned by South African mounted units it was an unmounted squadron. In time, as one of its officers put it, the regiment would ‘like an old soldier’ simply ‘fade away’.22
