Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  The only disappointment was that the appalling weather conditions had enabled Wintgens’s force of fifty-five Germans and 600 askari to slip the Belgian noose. In June the same happened in Urundi where Major von Langenn-Steinkeller with thirty-six Germans and 250 askari evaded capture by Muller. Kitega, Urundi’s capital, was occupied on 17 June. But Muller then had to halt for three weeks in order to resupply and recruit sufficient porters for a resumption of his advance. His regiment had only 600 regular porters – fewer than one per askari – and three-quarters of them were already sick by the time he had crossed the Rusisi.

  When the Belgians were ready to move again, their next objective was to roll up the Germans between Ruanda and Bukoba, on Lake Victoria. Smuts failed to understand why the Belgians had to halt at all after their capture of Ruanda and Urundi, and was frustrated that they had not reached the southwest corner of Lake Victoria a month earlier. If they had set out before the rains, as Smuts had requested, this would have been achievable – but in the absence of transport Smuts’s expectations were unrealistic. A week-long naval operation at the end of April had, however, kept Captain Eberhard Gudowius’s troops in Bukoba occupied. On the 28th a feint landing was carried out by the 98th Infantry on board Winifred and Nyanza, followed by a similar feint at Namirembe Bay and the intermittent bombardment of German positions on the western shore of Lake Victoria. These certainly prevented Gudowius from moving troops to assist Wintgens and von Langenn-Steinkeller, but it was not until 9 June that Colonel Adye, commanding the British ‘Lake Force’, was able to order troops to cross the Kagera line in an attempt to capture Bukoba and drive the German garrison onto the advancing Belgians.

  It is doubtful that Gudowius ever even contemplated sending troops towards Ruanda and Urundi. After a disastrous foray across the Kagera line in February which had resulted in the deaths of four Germans and fifty-three askari, the Bukoba garrison was very much on the defensive. Furthermore, as Belgian and British troops edged closer to Lake Victoria, the more it became apparent that the enemy had no intention of trying to maintain a foothold in the north-west corner of their colony. Their aim was to retire first on Mwanza and then on Tabora, causing as much discomfort to their pursuers as they could. In the second week of June the Lake Victoria fleet landed Colonel Adye on Ukerewe Island, off Mwanza, at the head of a combined force of 4/KAR, Baganda Rifles, 98th Infantry and Major Drought’s ‘Skin Corps’ (Nandi Scouts who wore little clothing), and met with scant resistance. Eight Germans, two guns and an extraordinary home-crafted torpedo canoe were captured. Then, on 23 June, Gudowius abandoned Bukoba and led his troops southwards. The only real ‘prize’ from these operations was the capture of the huge rice crop, the staple diet of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Wasukuma askari, on Ukerewe Island.

  Smuts’s principal concern about Anglo-Belgian co-operation remained more political than military. In his opinion, and that of many in Whitehall, it was no coincidence that the Belgian advance had begun in the very week that France followed Britain’s lead, given in January, and agreed that ‘Belgian colonial rule of the Congo would not be sacrificed in a peace settlement [with Germany]’.1 Belgium was boxing clever, and much though Smuts needed the Belgians to converge on the Central Railway from the west, he remained wary of their ambitions and did not want them to gain so much as a toehold on Lake Victoria. Belgium already occupied fertile Ruanda and Urundi, the most populous districts of German East Africa, and if they reached the southern shore of the lake before British troops he suspected they might also lay claim to the 6,000 square miles of Karagwe district, to the west of Bukoba, in any post-war settlement. The thought of Belgium straddling a British ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ corridor was anathema to Smuts, and on 18 June he appointed Charles Crewe, an old political confidant who was the proprietor of South Africa’s Daily Despatch, to take command of the lake operations and protect British (and South African) strategic interests.*

  By the time Crewe took command there was, in fact, nothing he could do to stop the Belgians reaching the south-west corner of Lake Victoria first. When they resumed their advance they did so at speed. Major Huyghé’s column of the Brigade Nord made the 120-mile trek from Kigali to Biaramulo in two weeks, effecting perilous crossings of both the Kagera and Ruvuvu Rivers, sidestepping Wintgens, and struggling through a bush fire on the utterly desolate plains of lower Karagwe en route. To the south Major Rouling pushed westwards equally quickly to converge with Huyghé. On 24 June Biaramulo was occupied by the Belgians and six days later their advance guard reached Namirembe Bay to hoist the Belgian flag on Lake Victoria. The first British troops only arrived there three days later but, to Crewe’s relief, the Belgians withdrew back to Biaramulo, a few miles inland, leaving Lake Victoria to the British. Considering all the criticism that Smuts had thrown at Tombeur for not advancing fast enough, it was a gesture of considerable goodwill.

  For a week after the Belgians reached Biaramulo it was unclear whether Gudowius’s 800 troops were still to the north or whether they had slipped round the lake to reinforce Mwanza. On 3 July, however, Major Rouling’s detachment at Kato, twenty miles from the south-western corner of Lake Victoria, discovered his whereabouts. During a vicious close-quarters engagement lasting over two hours Gudowius’s main force, 300-strong, inflicted substantial casualties on Rouling’s. Rouling himself was shot five times, once through the face. But his troops carried the day. Gudowius, thirteen Germans, and his field hospital were captured and most of his troops were rounded up in the next few days. It was an exemplary coup de filet. Rouling had achieved something that few other Allied commanders would in the campaign: he had succeeded in confronting and destroying his enemy before he could slip away. Even von Lettow-Vorbeck tacitly recognised this feat, by commenting that ‘the engagement went badly for us and cost us heavy losses’;2 and the Belgians scored another success by capturing a detachment led by Captain Zimmerman while it was endeavouring to collect his wife from Katoke Mission.

  On 7 July a Belgian patrol also ascertained the whereabouts of Wintgens and von Langenn-Steinkeller. They had taken up positions centred on the Mariahilf Mission, on high ground to the south, where they ignored an order from von Lettow-Vorbeck to attack Biaramulo as being no longer practicable but prepared to block any further Belgian or British advance in the direction of Tabora. On 14 July, Huyghé finally attacked them at Diobahika with five battalions, and a battle raged for thirty-six hours before both sides withdrew. That same day, 2,000 British troops converged cautiously on Mwanza.* It was deemed unwise to attempt a landing from the lake because of the presence in the port of a Königsberg gun and the likelihood of the harbour being mined. But the approach from the landward side was also fraught with problems: Mwanza was surrounded by hills whose passes were all perfect for setting ambushes. Fortunately, Captain Udo von Chappuis’s garrison, 600-strong, had overestimated the size of the approaching British force, and was unnerved by the possibility of a simultaneous attack by the Belgians. When the first British troops reached the outskirts of the port it was found to have been abandoned. Some had escaped down the Tabora road, others by small craft; the wireless transmitter had been blown up and the Königsberg gun disabled. Although Lake Victoria was now clear of Germans, a great opportunity had been lost partly through Crewe’s caution and partly through his failure to send sufficient troops south to block the road from Mwanza to Tabora.

  The Times wrote that ‘nothing in the East African campaign has been so encouraging as the triumphal advance of the Belgian columns before whom the Germans bowed their heads; it augurs well for future developments in Europe’.3 The South African press also conceded that ‘it was something like poetic justice that Belgium, which had been so cruelly treated by Germany in Europe, should have the opportunity of taking part in the conquest of the bully’s pet colony’; and King Albert personally congratulated Tombeur on his ‘brilliant feat of arms’.4 But the plaudits masked a deepening antipathy between the Belgian and South African High Commands. On the one hand, there could be
no denying that the Belgian askari had lived up to their reputation as exceptional soldiers who would be more than useful in clearing western German East Africa of enemy troops. On the other hand, even General Wahle, commanding the Westtruppen from Tabora, was under no illusions that Smuts ‘wanted to vanquish the colony [himself ] and have no accomplices’.5

  A heated propaganda battle ensued between Belgium and Britain – one that would last longer than the war itself. The Belgian askari were accused of ‘stealing everything, from women to cattle and poultry’, and of ‘cannibalism’; while their officers were charged with being ‘brutal in their treatment of [their] African soldiers’6 and the Ugandan porters provided by the British. Crewe maintained that the Belgian troops’ predilection for ‘wholesale ravage, theft and rape is so serious a matter that it is certain to become known in Europe with what effect I leave others to judge’.7 The Belgians vigorously denied all such allegations. ‘During the whole campaign, not a single woman was the object of outrages’, was the official line, coupled with assertions that although the troops had largely had to live off the land they had always paid for the food they needed. TheÉtoile du Congo trumpeted that ‘white and black, each outrivalled the other in spirit and endurance’.8

  So politically charged was the Anglo-Belgian operation in German East Africa that the truth would never be unearthed. British missionaries secured testimonies that suited their own expansionist ambitions, British politicians recalled Leopold’s colonial regime as proof of Belgium’s unfitness to be a colonial power, Belgians reacted indignantly to every accusation. Few sources were untarnished, but arguably the most plausible are the records of the ‘neutral’ White Fathers’ Missions in Ruanda, Urundi and north-west German East Africa. They attest to the widespread fear among local populations as the Belgians advanced, and to their askari’s propensity to appropriate all food and anything else not bolted down. At Marienthal, they took all Frau Hammerstein’s lingerie, part of her literie, and her vaisselle; and they behaved ‘very grossly’ towards Father Martin for protecting an African girl. But rumours that Frau Hammerstein’s children had been ‘hurled on the ground and cruelly killed’ were manifestly untrue, and the mission’s diary rejects the possibility that Belgian ‘discipline could be so lax’.9 in situ in Kigali within one week of the arrival of the Belgians; the telegraph line reached the Ruandan capital four days later and a new post office opened; the President of the Belgian War Council and journalists came to inspect; and Musinga’s sub-chiefs answered calls for provisions and porters in a seemingly orderly fashion. All in all the exactions wrought on both the civilian population and the missions by the Belgians seem to have been no harder (nor any easier) than those of the departing Germans.10 Both gave their askari a considerably freer rein than British officers thought appropriate, and Whitehall and Pretoria sought to capitalise on this to as great an extent as possible.

  The immediate consequence of the propaganda war between Britain and Belgium was a squabble about Belgian participation in the advance on Tabora, the administrative capital of German East Africa, 150 miles south of Mwanza. While that was being resolved, the final episode in Lake Tanganyika’s war was also being played out. As the Belgians progressed through Ruanda, the indomitable Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, who had left Lake Tanganyika in February, returned on 12 May and announced that he had succeeded in finding a suitable British steamer to tackle the Goetzen in the event that the Belgian Baron Dhanis was never to be completed. It was the George, the British Consul’s boat at Leopoldville, and it was at that very moment being shipped in pieces for reassembly on the lake complete with crew and torpedo-dropping gear. Although measuring 110 feet by 21 feet she could muster 15 knots, putting her speed in the same class as Mimi and Toutou. Once again Spicer-Simson had demonstrated extraordinary resourcefulness and patience. But at Lukuga, the Belgian lakeshore HQ, he too witnessed the increasingly sour atmosphere between Belgium and Britain.

  By the end of May Tombeur had ordered Moulaert, his local commander on the lake, to act independently. Spicer-Simson was certainly not going to tolerate subordinating his flotilla to a man who did not appreciate his having departed the lake in the first place and who might not have its best interests in mind. On 17 May he agreed to take a look at the German fortress at Kigoma and check on the Goetzen. But he refused to launch an attack on the port, and announced at the end of the month that he would be moving his command south to Kituta, in Northern Rhodesia. Commandant Goor, the Belgian naval commander and Spicer-Simson’s great ally in his ongoing battle against Belgian authority, was one of many who privately expressed regret at seeing his expedition leave and the manner in which this occurred.

  British assistance on Lake Tanganyika did not cease completely. Four Short 827 seaplanes were provided for an ambitious Belgian plan to finish off German resistance in Kigoma from the air. Commandant de Bueger, the senior Belgian pilot, soon found – as had Spicer-Simson six months previously – that Belgian ambitions were not always matched by a realistic appraisal of the situation on the ground. De Bueger had envisaged that Tanganyika was a placid lake when he set out from Europe, not an inland sea covering 12,500 square miles, with an area of average depth of more than 1,500 feet. It was impossible to launch his aircraft from Lukuga, where conditions were either too rough or too calm for his seaplanes to ‘unstick’, so a base had to be constructed at nearby Lake Tungwe, from which a channel was built to the lake proper to facilitate supply from Lukuga. Undeterred by the colossal difficulties confronting him, de Bueger succeeded in putting a plane in the air before the end of May. It was a courageous, even miraculous, aviation record for Central Africa: the altitude at Lake Tungwe was more than 2,500 feet above sea level.

  ‘Unplanned’ landings and wreckages were commonplace occurrences, but on 10 June one plane managed to fly the eighty miles to Kigoma to drop two 65lb rifle grenades on the Goetzen from 500 feet. It was a hair-raising exploit: the German shore defences began firing when the plane was still two miles away and with a top speed of 61mph evasion depended on luck alone. A month later, Lieutenant Orta succeeded in taking excellent photographs of the shore defences at Kigoma and on 23 July the Belgian pilots launched another bombing raid. Unbeknownst to the pilots this was all wasted effort. Captain Zimmer had been ordered to remove the 4.1-inch Königsberg gun from the Goetzen and send it east to von Lettow-Vorbeck, together with the Möwe’s 22-pdr raft-mounted gun; and the guns had been replaced by wooden dummies to deceive the seaplane pilots and any other snoopers. The Goetzen was left with just a single pom-pom ‘for defence against aircraft’, and Zimmer took the decision that ‘an action with [Spicer-Simson’s] fast motor boats could not be thought of ’.11 In mid July, as Olsen’s Belgian troops threatened Gottorp, sixty miles from Kigoma, Zimmer and his men were ordered back to Tabora by General Wahle. With the Central Railway already straddled by Belgian troops the Wami took them south to the Malagarasi River and was then blown up. The Goetzen, the symbol of the Kaiser’s ambitions in Central Africa, was scuttled before departure.*

  The Baron Dhanis was finally launched by the Belgians in November 1916, a year too late to play any part in what had become known as the ‘The Battle of the Lake’. But her launch was not without significance. It enabled vital supplies to be ferried across the lake to Belgian troops in German East Africa, and it was of considerable symbolic importance. Four days earlier, to Spicer-Simson’s immense satisfaction, HMS George had also been launched, an event the Belgian government wished to trump. Anglo-Belgian relations were deteriorating still further, with Belgium suspecting Britain of being prepared to accept further German expansion in Africa – at Belgium’s and Portugal’s expense – as part of a peace plan, and Britain suspecting Belgium of being on the brink of concluding a separate peace with Germany.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The ‘Ubiquitous Rhodesians’

  The end of the rains came later on the southern front than in the west, but as soon as movement was possible, and all his drafts had arrived, General No
rthey issued the orders for the offensive from Nyasaland. On 25 May, as the Belgians overran Ruanda and van Deventer languished at Kondoa, Northey’s 2,600-strong force launched its bold thrust to meet the latter on the Central Railway.* The first objective was to capture the principal German border forts. Northey’s right wing, consisting of columns led by Colonel Hawthorn (1/KAR), and Colonel Rodger and Major Flindt of the 2nd South African Rifles were to attack Ipiana (twenty-five miles north of Karonga), Luwiwa (fifteen miles north-east of Fife), and Igamba (a dozen miles north-east of Fort Hill) respectively. His left wing, six companies of BSAP and NRP commanded by Colonel Murray and soon to be christened ‘the ubiquitous Rhodesians’, was ordered simultaneously to capture Namema, fifteen miles north of Saisi, and then to converge with the right wing at Neu Langenburg, the centre of the principal wheat-growing district of German East Africa. The German troops opposing Northey were thought to number no more than 1,500 and to include only one regular Schutztruppe company – Captain Falkenstein’s 5/FK at Ipiana.