by Edward Paice
Their task complete, the crew were given shore leave and their first taste of African life.
We particularly liked going to Ssudi village in the evening [Knudsen wrote], where the carriers and the soldiers of the Schutztruppe, the askari, were camped. It made a very romantic picture. The actual village was only very small – a few huts, which were grouped around the open square in which the village wells were to be found. But around the village there was a beautiful and relatively high palm tree forest. The women had built tents for their husbands and were preparing the food over the fire. The men do nothing. They are simply warriors. Even when marching he takes only his rifle and his rucksack. Everything else is woman’s work. She and the children carry the tent and the man’s tools as they follow behind him.
As news of the Marie spread Germans flocked to the village to inspect the cargo and ascertain if there was any news from Europe. The crew, now celebrities, distributed magazines and newspapers from home which were eagerly devoured. But then HMS Hyacinth appeared offshore.
The state of the tide was instrumental in saving the Marie. As it was low the ship lay on her side, but she ‘resembled a sieve’ all the same having sustained five major, and over 100 minor, hits during Hyacinth’s bombardment. The engine room and boiler room were untouched, however, and after ten days of non-stop repair work the crew was satisfied that although she ‘wouldn’t be the prettiest of ships, at least she could sail’. On 11 April six British warships returned and in a further, three-hour bombardment fired in excess of 300 shells. On shore the askari were on standby to repel a landing from the whalers Childers and Echo, but none was attempted and the latter in particular received a severe mauling, being holed by three 4.1-inch shells. The Navy reckoned to have put at least six 6-inch shells into the Marie, but to the amazement of her crew an inspection showed that she had not been hit once. Casualties among the crew amounted to four men killed and four wounded. On 23 April she was ready to sail and under cover of darkness slipped out of Sudi Bay, turned north and steamed as close to the shore as possible to avoid presenting the Royal Navy’s warships with a silhouette. Smoking was forbidden and when one African crew member lit up he was given ‘such a slap by one of the mates that the cigarette flew straight out of his mouth and was no longer able to give away our position’.10 Confronted by two very shallow areas, Hinrichs and Lieutenant Sprockhoff, formerly of the Königsberg, sailed ahead in a dhow and guided the Marie out into deeper water. By morning she was away, leaving the watching British ships behind and setting a course that after three weeks would bring her to safety in the neutral Dutch port of Batavia, in Java. Only Captain Roland von Kaltenborn-Stachau, an artillery expert sent by Berlin who had taken charge of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s artillery during the battle for Kondoa, was left behind. Meanwhile the Marie’s precious cargo was already on its way to Dar-es-Salaam and other destinations around the colony on the shoulders of more than 100,000 carriers.
The resounding success of the Marie’s mission was a disastrous setback for the Allies. Her supplies and armaments were the last to reach German East Africa from Europe; thereafter von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops were to be wholly dependent on what they could grow and manufacture locally, or capture from the enemy. After the war von Lettow-Vorbeck was ‘emphatic that [the Allies’) greatest defeat was [their] failure to destroy’11 the Marie and the Kronborg, the first blockade-runner; and as he first heard of the former’s arrival within days of establishing his new headquarters at New Steglitz Plantation, outside Kahe, the knowledge that her cargo would replenish his dwindling stocks of arms and materiel may well have been the catalyst for his ill-fated manoeuvre against Kondoa-Irangi. In addition, the Marie brought the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd Class, for von Lettow-Vorbeck – the most encouraging forty-sixth birthday present he could have imagined.
NINETEEN
The Crescent Flag
By the time the Marie’s cargo was deployed through German East Africa a further concern had begun to preoccupy British Intelligence officers in Whitehall and Egypt, and it was a concern which considerably increased the importance of the campaign against German East Africa. Early in the war Count Leon Ostrorog, a former Polish adviser to the Ottoman government who was said to have ‘a more intimate knowledge of Mahomedan law than any man living’, had warned the Foreign Office that he ‘did not think it would be an exaggeration to assert that for Great Britain the most important fact at issue in the present world war is this position of Great Britain towards Islam’;1 and by 1916 Germany appeared confident of finding ‘allies . . . in Abyssinia and in Mohammedan freedom movements’ who might not only bolster von Lettow-Vorbeck’s position but also ‘make the employment of black troops against our European frontiers impossible’. German East Africa had, in the eyes of many in Berlin, become the key to the ‘balance of power in the East and in Africa’.2
The first reports that German agents were actively preaching a Holy War, and ‘endeavouring to stir things up generally’ in Portuguese East Africa, reached Lisbon in October 1915. Five Africans, bearing a ‘Muslim flag’3 and a large quantity of dynamite, had been caught en route to blow up the Portuguese frontier post at M’tengula. At much the same time a strong rumour began to circulate in German East Africa to the effect that a Muslim Abyssinian army, led by Ernst von Mecklenburg, had invaded Uganda. Meanwhile all German forts in East Africa were under strict instructions from Schnee to fly the crescent flag, and concern about a possible Muslim uprising in British East Africa grew daily.
The trigger for these concerns occurred in November 1914 when, just as the landings at Tanga failed, Turkey entered the war and proclaimed jihad against the Entente Powers. In British East Africa, the Aga Khan’s instructions to his Ismaili followers were clear: ‘the Mohammedan religion commands its adherents to be loyal to their sovereign and by this is meant the British Raj’; and even the Somali of British East Africa’s province of Jubaland, on the border with Italian Somaliland, declared an end to their 1913 fitna against the British and asked ‘should not the Somali fight for the British also?’. A few months later, when some followers of the Mbaruk and el Mazrui slaving dynasties, in exile in German East Africa, were known to have joined the German ‘Arab Corps’, the Sultan of Zanzibar publicly denounced them for their hostility to ‘our Good Friend and Protector, His Majesty King George V’.4 Such signs of loyalty were reassuring, but they were local. General Wapshare, for one, was under no illusions that his orders to remain on the defensive in early 1915 were partly attributable to mounting unease about ‘Muslim hordes’, and that reinforcements would remain unavailable until ‘Turkey [was] done for’.5
Turkey’s support was central to Germany’s strategy of Drang nach Osten (‘the Drive to the East’), and as soon as the Ottoman Empire declared its allegiance German agents were sent eastwards to spread the word that the Kaiser had secretly become a Muslim, and to instigate a vigorous propaganda campaign publicising German victories on the Western Front. The result was just as intended – the ignition of a ‘new and more sinister version of the old “Great Game”’* that had not so long ago pitted Britain against Russia in a contest for control of Central Asia. This time the ‘Great Game’ rapidly became not only more sinister but considerably more deadly: beginning in 1915, an estimated one and a half million ‘infidel’ Armenians died at the hands of Turkish and Kurdish soldiers when they were expelled to Syria and Mesopotamia. Although this horrifying spectacle was not an intended consequence of German policy, it demonstrated emphatically just how powerful a tool the Kaiser’s Holy War, aimed at eclipsing British and Russian power in the Middle East, might become.
Tackling the Muslim threat in Central Asia was treated by the British as an absolute priority, of equal importance to holding the Western Front. If Britain lost its influence in a region considered to be ‘the natural connecting link between the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa’,6 then there could, quite simply, be no further resistance to Germany in Europe. By the middle of 1915 not only had the
Indian military refused Kitchener any further troops for Europe, thereby forcing the War Office to increase its reliance on untrained British civilians, but internal security had become as big a concern as the defence of India’s northern borders. Islamic militancy had grave implications for an army so dependent on Muslim recruits, and incidents like the desertion of Mahsuds and Mohmands of the 129th Punjabis and the mutiny in four companies of the 5th (Native) Light Infantry in Singapore – two regiments which were subsequently sent to East Africa – created a predicament that was regarded as truly ‘the stuff of nightmares’.7 Furthermore, a plot by Indian Nationalists and Sikh Ghadarites led by Ram Chandra to create an independent Punjabi state was only narrowly thwarted in February 1915, and demonstrated that the threat to India’s internal security was not confined to Islamic revolutionaries.
Having lit the fire under ‘the East’, German attention firmly alighted on the possibilities for deploying its new ‘weapon’ in Africa. There can be no doubting the deadly intent of what the British regarded as the combination of ‘Germany’s evil counsels’ and ‘Turkish despotism’.8 A Reichskolonialamt memo dated 29 December 1915 described it in the following terms:
It is clear that the necessary requirements to instigate an insurgence are to be found in Sudan and also in the areas of Somalia that belong to British East Africa and in British Somalia. Such an uprising could, after initial success, take on a greater magnitude in Sudan and in any case could force the English to mobilise disproportionately large masses of troops to enter the area in order to suppress it . . . If the insurgence of the Mohammedan tribes on the north, west and south borders of Abyssinia is successful the . . . English will be forced to deploy considerable numbers of troops, which would mean both that the Egyptian troops would be weakened and the pressure on the German East African troops would be relieved . . . The effect of these plans will become clearer if we begin acting them out immediately. We have the months of May or June 1916 in mind which would at the same time be when a comprehensive attack by the enemy on German East Africa would be most favourable for them.
Britain was not jumping at shadows.
Even at the height of the Anglo-South African war in 1900, many had warned that the rise of ‘the Moslem menace’ in the north of the continent was a far greater threat to the British Empire in the medium term than war in the south. By mid 1915 this Cassandra prophecy was proving correct: the greatest threat of all was to British security in Egypt and control of the Suez Canal. Just to the west of Egypt the Sanusi, an order of Sufis founded in 1837 whose adherents had waged guerrilla warfare against the Italians since the latters’ defeat of the Turks in Cyrenaica in 1912, found themselves in an increasingly parlous position after the outbreak of war. Famine was rife, and after Italy’s entry into the war the Allied blockade of the North African coast to safeguard Italian Cyrenaica prevented vital supplies from Turkey from reaching the Sanusi. Relations between the British and the Sanusi were initially ‘cordial’: Sayyid Ahmad, the Grand Sanusi, could not afford for them to be otherwise until he could be certain that his German and Turkish allies found the means with which to supply him. He did not have to wait long. Both Enver Pasha, the Turkish Minister of War, and Kemal Atatürk had served with the Sanusi during their war with the Italians; and the continuing importance attached to the Sanusi by the Ottoman Empire was demonstrated when Enver Pasha sent his own brother, Nuri Bey, to assist Sayyid Ahmad. By mid September 1915 Nuri Bey and his fellow military adviser Jafar Pasha Al-Askari had ensured the despatch of a submarine bearing significant quantities of arms and ammunition to Port Sulaiman, and more successful blockade-breaking was to follow.*
It was obvious even to their twenty or so Ottoman advisers that the ‘religious zeal’ with which the Sanusi pursued the ensuing jihad against the British was rooted in their resolutely secular desire to mount a ‘justifiable defence of their homelands, and to prevent themselves being treated like cattle by foreign invaders and having their lands and property expropriated’.9 The Sanusi had refused to join the jihad of the Sudanese Mahdists against the British twenty-five years earlier; and their brand of Islam was very different from that of an Iraqi like Jafar or that of the other Ottomans in their camp. For their part, the Ottomans’ aims were identical to those of von Lettow-Vorbeck further south: they sought ‘to engage as many British troops as possible along a front extending all the way from the Mediterranean to the south of Darfur’,10 and, as was true of von Lettow-Vorbeck before Tanga, were ‘only too conscious of the fragility of our situation, and pessimistic about our chances of achieving anything by our military operations’.11
The different and sometimes divergent views of the Sanusi and their Ottoman allies were reflected in vacillation on the part of Sayyid Ahmad. But finally he was ‘persuaded’ by his Ottoman advisers that offence was the only course of action open to him. In early 1916, 5,000 Sanusi tribesmen, the Ottoman military advisers, and the odd stranded German officer invaded Egypt from the west, and shockwaves spread throughout British north-east Africa. On the coast, the Egyptian border was some 300 miles from Alexandria; but the Sanusi stronghold around the oasis of Siwa, 160 miles inland, was just 100 miles west of the Nile. If that were threatened then British control of Egypt, and of the Suez Canal, was in jeopardy. Furthermore, Jafar Pasha’s hope that other tribes living adjacent to, or in, British administered territories ‘would join our forces [and] stage internal revolts’12 was almost immediately fulfilled when Ali Dinar, the Sultan of Darfur in western Sudan, staged a simultaneous rebellion.
It was to South Africa – her ‘agent’ in Africa – that Britain turned for help in countering the Sanusi threat in the Western Desert, just as she had done in East Africa. As was also the case with East Africa, South African troops became available after the surrender of German South-West Africa. But the 1st South African Infantry Brigade, comprising 5,648 men and 160 officers under Brigadier-General Lukin, were already in England awaiting deployment on the Western Front and had to be hurriedly shipped back to Africa to face the Sanusi. Lukin’s troops began their campaign to reoccupy the territory overrun by the Sanusi just as Smuts was forging his way into German East Africa in March 1916. Both forces made use of new weaponry in the form of armoured cars and aircraft; both were operating in the most trying of conditions; and for both ‘victory’ hardly seemed an appropriate word to describe the capture of border posts as unprepossessing as Taveta and Solûm. Indeed, there were many in the South African ranks who considered that the deployment of over 30,000 of their countrymen in these two theatres of war, at a time when the need for trained men was as great as ever on the Western Front, was proof positive of the absurdity of war.
Lukin’s troops, unlike Smuts’s, were not detained for long. By the end of March 1916, having rapidly and efficiently secured Egypt’s borders, they were once again on their way to Europe (where their numbers would be decimated at Delville Wood).* The Sanusi were not completely defeated, and the campaign dragged on in desultory fashion until pro-British Sayyid Idris succeeded his cousin Sayyid Ahmad as Grand Sanusi in 1917 and concluded a truce with the British and Italians. Meanwhile, in Darfur, Ali Dinar was defeated by the British ‘Western Frontier Force’ at Beringia and was killed in November 1916 near Juba. With Jafar Pasha persuaded by his British captors (and the hanging of Arab nationalists by the Turks in Damascus in May 1916) to change sides, Sayyid Idris so pro-British that in the next world war he would raise five battalions of Sanusi for the Allies, and the flight of Sayyid Ahmad to Turkey in a submarine, the situation appeared rather more stable. Unrest continued to simmer beneath the surface but, mercifully for the War Office, it was not until after the war that a nationalist revolt in Egypt secured nominal independence and, as it had done in 1916, triggered revolt in Sudan. In eastern Africa, however, concerns in the Colonial Office about ‘the Mussulman problem’ had reached as near fever pitch as was possible for its august officials. Indeed it threatened to dwarf the challenges already faced by the Allies in trying to bring vo
n Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe to heel.
In British Somaliland, the Islamic threat came in Salihiyah rather than Sufi form (though the distinction was of secondary interest to those watching religious militancy spread like a virus towards British East Africa). Sayyid Mohammed Abdille Hassan, the ‘Mad Mullah’, was one of the longest-standing and most successful opponents of the British in Africa. A man described as possessing ‘immense charisma, a master of desert and guerrilla warfare . . . a man of cruel and merciless temperament indifferent to human suffering’, the Sayyid had resisted European (and Abyssinian) encroachment into his domain since the late 1890s. In March 1914 forty of his Dervishes had ridden 150 miles to shoot up Berbera, the capital of British Somaliland, at dawn and cause total panic. In November the Somaliland Field Force, comprising a Camel Corps of 600 Somalis and 650 Indian troops, dislodged a substantial force from three forts at Shimber Berris only to have to return to do the job again in February 1915. With that the British Commissioner had pragmatically decided, given the limited resources at his command, to cordon off the Sayyid’s 6,000 adherents in the east of the territory in the hope that most would either desert or be executed by their volatile leader. This is exactly what happened, but British prestige, indeed her very claims on Somaliland, were dependent on preventing further incursions into what was regarded as ‘friendly’ Somali territory and on containing ‘unrest’ in British East Africa’s borderlands among tribes inspired by the ‘Mad Mullah’s’ defiance.
The policy of containment was only partially successful. By 1916 it was not the ‘Mad Mullah’ who posed the greatest challenge to peace in north-eastern Africa, however, but events in Abyssinia. Seventeen-year-old Lij Iyasu had acceded to the imperial throne in 1913 following the death of his grandfather Menelik II and proceeded to drop a bombshell on his kingdom by allegedly announcing his conversion to Islam. There remains considerable uncertainty about whether this apostasy was genuine, and even if it took place. It was certainly a charge that clung to Lij Iyasu tenaciously as rivals sought to unseat him and, given the climate of general concern about Islamic-inspired threats, the charge itself was sufficient evidence of danger for British officials.* Lij Iyasu certainly had Muslim ancestry, and if he, as ruler of a population that was at least half Muslim, declared a jihad then the potential existed for the Horn of Africa and Sudan to be engulfed by a Muslim ‘horde’. If that happened, then what was to stop the ‘horde’ moving southwards in support of von Lettow-Vorbeck? Such suspicions on the part of the British, and indeed the Italians, may sound fanciful in hindsight; but they were to prove well grounded.
