Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  As early as 4 April Smuts, with optimism redolent of Belfield and Aitken, requested instructions from the War Office as to how conquered German East Africa was to be administered, although he rather cleverly expressed a concern that ‘the conquest of German East Africa with my present forces is going to be a most formidable undertaking’.23 Not all South Africans shared Smuts’s overarching confidence. Captain A.J. Molloy, of 5/SAI, wrote home on 7 April, highlighting the ‘points which struck [him] most forcibly’:

  1. That we have a lot to learn in the way of bush fighting from our black enemies, and that in spite of all talk to the contrary, we have found them an enemy to be fully reckoned with. He is resourceful, brave and well trained for this kind of fighting. I have heard he is a bad shot, but the casualties prove the opposite.

  2. That the Germans can teach us something in the art of concealment and defence.

  3. That this campaign has been an eye-opener to our German South-West warriors. They have seen more here in one day than occurred in the whole German South-West campaign.

  4. That India can produce soldiers worthy of that name, who have maintained the best traditions of the British Army in German East Africa.

  5. The KAR, a native regiment, have proved themselves to be excellent soldiers, and deserve every praise

  6. That with trained troops, we would not have suffered half the casualties we did.24

  Smuts may or may not have drawn similar conclusions at the end of March 1916. But even if he did he could not afford to dwell on what had gone, or might yet go, wrong: a rapid victory was vital not only for his own reputation but for the political stability of South Africa. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, on the other hand, had no such concerns. It was true that he had been forced to abandon the border with British East Africa but the casualties inflicted on his twenty-seven companies in the north-east were not unduly onerous and his force had executed a successful fighting withdrawal intact. Furthermore, he had long anticipated ‘the possibility of the country through which the Northern Railway passed . . . falling into the hands of the enemy’,25 and had already moved his major supply depots and hospitals southwards in readiness for Smuts’s next attempt to bring him to heel.

  SEVENTEEN

  Opsaal! Saddle-up!

  Smuts was impatient to press on with his offensive, despite the gathering clouds and sweltering daytime heat which accompanied the onset of the rains. He knew that it was vital not to let von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops settle in the corridor either side of the Northern Railway. If that happened any advance along the 220-mile line towards Tanga would be bloodier than he could afford as it would traverse terrain that his opponent had had eighteen months to prepare. One German company – 5/SchK – was even lurking around Lake Jipe, within striking distance of Taveta; and with German artillery skilfully deployed in the Usambara and Pare Mountains on his left, not to mention strategic positions like Baumann’s Hill on the plains to his right, the likelihood of sustaining huge casualties was so high as to be almost a certainty. It was not a prospect that Smuts relished, and he cast around for diversions that might improve his chances of clearing the Northern Railway with his forces relatively intact.

  Smuts recognised that it would be impossible for any force advancing down the Northern Railway to encircle von Lettow-Vorbeck’s units, or even to block their line of retreat towards the Central Railway. For the second time he briefly contemplated ordering landings in force from the sea – the strategy that von Lettow-Vorbeck most feared – but again dismissed this possibility, and that of dramatically speeding up the joint Anglo-Belgian advance in the west, as unfeasible at such short notice. The solution he chose instead was a very South African one – an outflanking manoeuvre to the west by van Deventer’s mounted troops, followed by an advance up the Northern Railway as soon as the rains abated. This dual strategy had several advantages. Not only would it come as a surprise to von Lettow-Vorbeck, but it would also force him to decide whether to ignore van Deventer (and risk having the Central Railway seized at its midpoint by the South African mounted troops) or to meet the threat (at the cost of a depletion of his forces along, and south of, the Northern Railway). In theory it was a sound plan, which would certainly jeopardise any retreat by the German troops in the north-east along the Central Railway towards Tabora. But its successful execution relied heavily on the intelligence gleaned from ‘loyal’ Boers living in Arusha district that the rains were never as plentiful to the south and west of Kilimanjaro as they were to the east; and it was also based on the premise that German troops would only be able to counter van Deventer’s move by using the Central Railway rather than crossing the wide and waterless tract of country known as the ‘Masai Steppe’.

  By the end of March Smuts had almost completed the concentration at Arusha of his new 2nd Division, the troops detailed for the flanking movement to the west.* He believed that he could rely implicitly on van Deventer, who had plenty of experience in executing the manoeuvre required of him, to carry the advance no matter what obstacles confronted him. Van Deventer was also lucky. Smuts knew that, van Deventer’s men knew that, and luck was going to be needed in great quantities. His plan made British Staff officers at GHQ extremely nervous.

  Van Deventer set off with his mounted troops and guns on 3 April,the infantry being ordered to follow as soon as it had completed mustering at Arusha. The first objective was Lol Kissale, a steep mountain with a six-mile circumference at its base which rose from the plains at a point some thirty-five miles south-west of Arusha. Captain Paul Rothert, a former officer of the 15th Infantry Regiment who had served with the Schutztruppe since 1907, held this isolated stronghold with 28/FK and sundry other troops – some 500 in all – and at dawn on 4 April he awoke to discover that one squadron of van Deventer’s mounted troops had ridden fifty miles overnight to cut off his line of retreat to the south. Soon afterwards the main body of South African troops arrived, dismounting 3,000 yards away from Lol Kissale, and by 9.30 a.m. their guns were brought into action. It was the signal for van Deventer’s men to begin their assault on the mountain, and in temperatures rising to as much as 120°F they scrapped their way upwards through the boulders and bush towards the German positions. The fighting lasted all day and by dawn on 5 April thirst had become a serious problem. The Germans, although Lol Kissale was now surrounded, held access to all water on the mountain and neither man nor beast among the attackers had watered since leaving Arusha. But van Deventer’s luck held. When Rothert was injured, and was spirited away through the enemy cordon, command of the mountain fell to government secretary Alexander Herrgott who surrendered at dawn on 6 April. Seventeen Germans, 414 askari and two machine-guns were captured. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was not impressed when he heard the news, and concluded that Herrgott had ‘not properly appreciated’1 how dire the enemy’s lack of water had become.

  Smuts regarded the speed with which van Deventer had advanced on, and taken, Lol Kissale as exactly what he had demanded – and failed to get – from Stewart; and he ordered him to press on immediately on Kondoa-Irangi, the strategic centre of the plateau rising to the west of the Masai Steppe. After Lol Kissale, however, von Lettow-Vorbeck knew exactly what Smuts was intending, and took rapid steps to ensure that van Deventer would neither take Kondoa-Irangi nor be able to proceed from there to cut the Central Railway. Three companies led by Captain Klinghardt were ordered to leave the Kivu front for Kondoa, a journey of almost 1,000 miles, while the ‘good and well-tried’2 13/FK, veterans of Tanga and Jasin, were despatched from the Northern Railway on a forced march straight across the Masai Steppe to the same destination. Kondoa was 13/FK’s peacetime garrison, and on 18 April Captain Peter Langen, the company commander, was able to report that his unit had successfully completed the 150-mile journey to Kondoa, across terrain thought by Smuts to be ‘practically impassable to troops’, in just ten days. While this remarkable feat was under way von Lettow-Vorbeck also began the withdrawal of fifteen full companies and two mounted companies from the Northern Ra
ilway to the Central Railway, whence they too would march on Kondoa to block van Deventer’s advance. Major Kraut, who had organised the dogged defence of Salaita in February and of Latema-Reata in March, was left in charge of just eight companies with which to oppose Smuts’s inevitable advance down the Northern Railway. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s redeployment was on a scale, and of an audacity, that Smuts had never contemplated. His hope, as it had been during the ‘first phase’ of Smuts’s advance, was that he might have the opportunity to attack both British thrusts in succession. It was a strategy that, as the German commander admitted, ‘involved some risk’; but it was a risk which he was convinced ‘had to be run’.3

  A South African motorcycle despatch rider, who had joined van Deventer at Lol Kissale, remembered the moment when his commander set his sights on the next objective. ‘Ry kerels ry’, van Deventer barked in Afrikaans – ‘ride, boys, ride’ – and ‘off moved [the mounted troops] with the General himself and a roar of hoof-beats following’.4 Four days later, on 12 April, they had reached the deserted German boma and mission station at Ufiome. From there they struggled on up to Pienaar’s Heights, liberating 100 Boer farmers and their families from a prison camp, and then skirmished their way along the old slaving route across the Irangi plateau. The column was often above the clouds, winding its way through a dense forest with the Masai Steppe far below to the left; while to the right lay range upon range of hills as far as the eye could see. Next came a rapid descent into what was usually a sandy desert but was now a swamp; then a further ascent; and on 17 April, the day before Langen’s arrival, van Deventer’s advance troops were camped just six miles north of Kondoa. By then it was already obvious that Smuts’s meteorological intelligence had let him down: rain was bucketing down intermittently and the whole district had been transformed into a quagmire. Had van Deventer started out a week – or even just days – later his troops would never have made it to Kondoa at all; as it was, he found himself almost completely cut off. All the way back down the line it was a similar story. In Voi, British East Africa’s main supply depot for the front, Captain Routh was staggered by the spectacle of ‘a storm of unprecedented violence’ in which nearly seven inches of rain fell in three hours, leaving ‘the Ordnance depot . . . submerged by a muddy stream from two to three feet deep’; while in Arusha the rain even ‘carried a box of axe heads weighing about one cwt some 60 yards’.5 Van Deventer’s luck had enabled him to reach his objective, but in such conditions the outlook for his stranded troops was decidedly bleak.

  As Kondoa was a lot harder to defend than the hills overlooking it to the south, Langen’s 400 troops evacuated the town the day after they arrived, having offered stern but only brief resistance to van Deventer’s final push. Van Deventer’s ‘victory’ was a combination of bravado and bluff: believing Kondoa to be defended by as many as 1,400 rifles, he ordered great fires lit along a broad front north of the town the night before the final advance. The aim was to deceive Langen as to the size of his force, but in the end the decisive factor, apart from the fifty casualties inflicted on 13/FK, was the presence of the eight guns of the 2nd and 4th South African Field Artillery, which had miraculously managed to keep up with the mounted troops despite regularly sinking up to their traces in the mud while crossing the Irangi plateau. Kondoa was exposed, as Langen well knew, and no place in which to be subjected to a bombardment; and to make it even less welcoming Langen torched the boma and huge quantities of supplies as his men streamed out of the town towards the Burungi Heights, five miles distant.

  When van Deventer cast his eyes over the sandy mica-strewn ground of Kondoa, the Bubu stream running through it, and the smouldering wrecks of its buildings, he had good reason to feel some satisfaction in spite of the rain. His flanks were secure, there was little chance of anyone repeating Langen’s feat of crossing the Masai Steppe now the rains had begun, and to the west 10/SAI and the 28th Mountain Battery had seen off an enemy detachment, 200-strong, holding Iraku Ridge and Fort Mbulu on the western scarp of the Rift Valley, eventually forcing it to retire all the way to Tabora. But in less than two weeks his mounted troops had been reduced in number from 1,200 to fewer than 600 as malaria and tsetse took its toll on man and beast; and, unable to advance any further, he now faced the unwelcome prospect of being subjected to an attack from the hills to the south. Among many senior British officers at GHQ the ‘nerves’ of early April turned to near-panic as the first ominous intelligence reports arrived indicating that fighting to the last on the Central Railway ‘was not [von Lettow-Vorbeck’s] idea and never had been’.6 Instead he had moved in force to oppose van Deventer, and it appeared as though Smuts had delivered van Deventer straight into von Lettow-Vorbeck’s hands.

  For ten days over Easter, which fell on 23 April, the supply situation facing van Deventer became increasingly desperate. Some cattle were captured outside the town and twenty pigs were discovered in a pen, only to be deemed inedible after they consumed forty donkeys that were billeted with them for the night. A few undamaged comestibles were also rooted out among the ruins of Kondoa, but breakfast never consisted of anything more substantial than a piece of sugar cane or half a cup of rice (and was universally referred to as ‘Broke Fast’). ‘There was no question of starvation’,7 wrote one artillery officer; and had he known the extent of the ordeal being suffered by the stragglers still making their way to Kondoa his words might not have sounded quite so hollow.

  In the early part of their ‘Great Trek’ from the Northern Railway the 2nd Division’s infantry were cajoled into twenty-mile overnight marches. After passing Ufiome, however, they were reduced to covering a few miles a day along tracks that were submerged in a giant swamp. Rations were limited to a quarter, and the rain was so unrelenting that at night the men were unable even to light fires. Some were only saved from drowning in their sleep or being taken by lions by the intervention of attentive comrades; and by day many lay by the wayside nursing feet too sore to continue or shivering in the grips of fever, unprotected by greatcoat or blanket. An unholy stench hung permanently in the air, emanating from the carcases of horses, mules and oxen on which lions and hyaenas grew increasingly fat. For the survivors of this nightmare, the last half-mile up to the heights amid which Kondoa nestled was the worst, often taking as much as six hours as oxen were outspanned from wagons and men struggled in their place. On 30 April, however, the first dribs and drabs of General Berrangé’s 3rd Infantry Brigade – 9/SAI, 11/SAI and 12/SAI – started to arrive, accompanied by a howitzer battery and the East African Volunteer Machine-gun Company. A private in 11/SAI described his comrades as a ‘a discrepit band of haggard faced men, their tattered clothing hanging loosely on skinny frames’. Fewer than half of his company had completed the ‘fearful’ 250-mile trek and for them Kondoa, for all its shortcomings, was truly a ‘cheerful sight’.8

  The withdrawal of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops from the Northern Railway did not run entirely smoothly either. There was only one track along which the fifteen infantry and two mounted companies could cover the 125 miles from Korogwe to Kimamba on the Central Railway and congestion was acute. Worse still, the Central Railway still seemed to be running to some sort of peacetime schedule, a deficiency for which Schnee was blamed by von Lettow-Vorbeck. But just as the South African infantry were arriving in desolate Kondoa the detachments led by von Kornatzki, Otto, Stemmermann and Colonel Heinrich Freiherr von Bock were finally completing their own arduous journey and, with supplies plentiful on the Central Railway, were in considerably better fighting condition than their opponents. Efficient lines of communication were set up by Major von Stuemer – the commander of Bukoba during its assault in 1915 – in spite of the teeming rain; and, greatly assisted by a brand new map of Kondoa-Irangi prepared by its administrator and left, when he departed the district, with a local chief for safekeeping, von Lettow-Vorbeck planned his attack in minutest detail. He began with daily bombardments from the Burungi Heights by two naval guns, one from the Königsberg and one lan
ded by the blockade-runner Kronborg, in an attempt to ‘soften up’ the South African defences; and with so many troops deployed against him, van Deventer was forced to curtail his daily patrols south of the town. It was clear that the South African troops were about to face an attack on a much larger scale than had been anticipated, and one for which they were singularly ill-prepared. By 9 May all van Deventer’s picquets had been pulled in and his men braced themselves as best they could around small hills along a five-mile defensive front.

  At 4 p.m. on 9 May the German guns again began their ‘Daily Hate’, the stupendous noise of each boom reverberating around the hills that enclosed Kondoa. Only this time, at dusk, von Lettow-Vorbeck ordered his infantry down from the Burungi Heights. Lieutenant Martin Faure of 12/SAI had been as surprised as anyone to discover German naval guns deployed against Kondoa, and was relieved that he was ‘not as scared as I thought I would be’. But as the full force of the German attack fell on the town he also thought ‘once or twice how nice it would be to be lying in my bed at home’. Under the circumstances he was as snug as could be expected in the din of the night attack: 11/SAI and 12/SAI were well entrenched, and time after time the German askari threw themselves at the South African lines only to be beaten back. At about 10.30 p.m. von Lettow-Vorbeck changed tack, attempting an assault on the left flank. For 12/SAI ‘everything was suddenly hustle and bustle’ as they moved along the trenches to counter it. Major Humphrey of 11/SAI, his unlit pipe upside down in his mouth, stood directing the defence while his men ‘shot it out’, and as midnight approached, he declared during a brief lull: ‘Boys, the moon is getting low, and they may want to charge again. I want you all to stand shoulder to shoulder and show that you are better than any soldiers born.’ Twenty seconds later he was shot by a sniper. ‘Dear old’ Lieutenant Perks then rose to his feet, but to any soldier who did likewise he muttered ‘Get down, you have no brains.’9