by Edward Paice
As was the case with all captured towns, the arrival of British troops on the Central Railway was not a boon for every inhabitant. The Greek and Indian traders were certainly keen to see the restoration of order, but for looters it was a different story. A gunner from Hull described the scene which confronted him on his entry to the town: ‘I found a big crowd there, so I went to see what was happening . . . [A looter] had been condemned to death and after having dug his own grave, he had been brought to be shot. The culprit stood against a wall. After the volley was fired, he stood long enough for me to think that the whole party had missed him. Then his knees crumpled and he slowly collapsed. I thought this rather peculiar. I had seen men hit but if it was serious they went down in a hurry. Apparently this is not so in all cases.’6
Local Africans were not the only ones keen on looting. It was an activity at which Boer troops also ‘excelled’. Tensions were mounting between Briton and Boer, and the thieving proclivities of many of the latter compounded a worsening reputation. ‘They have not the least discipline’ was a common judgement, and there was widespread disgust among British troops at their ‘filthy camp habits’. ‘No sanitary arrangements are made by them,’ the gunner from Hull wrote; ‘every night they will sing and pray for an hour or so, then they will gamble and blaspheme for hours. As soon as they are on active service, they never shave, very seldom wash or even think of putting a stitch in their clothing. It is easy to imagine,’ he concluded, ‘that in a very short time, a more ragged or more disreputable crowd would be very hard to find.’7 He would soon be proved correct, as Smuts set his sights on cornering von Lettow-Vorbeck in the Uluguru Mountains to the south of Morogoro.
For over a month, rumours of impending peace had circulated throughout the South African ranks. As Smuts’s and van Deventer’s forces approached the Central Railway these grew stronger, probably as a result of the visit to East Africa by Botha (travelling incognito as ‘Colonel Campbell’) and Smuts’s belief that the capture of the Central Railway ‘would be the end of the campaign’.8 Sergeant Lane of the South African Field Ambulance was so confident that he bet that ‘peace will be declared on August 8th’. ‘I don’t think I will be very far wrong,’9 he wrote confidently, and certain Boer commanders even began to confirm that ‘peace will shortly be declared’.10 It was wishful thinking. Smuts’s flanking manoeuvres had completely failed to inflict any meaningful damage on his opponent, and the performance of Enslin’s 2nd Mounted Brigade in the Nguru Mountains was singled out for particular criticism by British and German alike. In the words of one senior British Staff officer, ‘von Lettow-Vorbeck should have been brought to a standstill, and forced to fight it out, on more than one occasion’ during July and August; instead he managed to retire both from Kondoa and the Nguru Mountains. The bush, the black cotton soil, and the climate all favoured him but there was no denying that he had executed his withdrawal ‘with the greatest skill’.11 The German commander remained confident that, even if all his troops were pushed south of the railway, he could ‘continue the war for a long time to come’.12 By now ‘von Lettow Fallback’, as he was often referred to, had become an almost mythical figure; in the British ranks stories abounded of him personally carrying wounded askari from the battlefield, and even of training himself to go barefoot in readiness for the day when he would have no boots.
More than 100 miles to the south-west of Morogoro, a threat to Northey’s hard-pressed and thinly spread troops was emerging from a completely unexpected direction. In early August Crewe’s ‘Lake Force’, 2,250-strong with fifteen machine-guns, began their advance on Tabora from Mwanza. After much diplomatic wrangling, further Belgian co-operation had been secured, with the result that the joint advance turned into a race. Before the British and Belgian troops, Wahle’s companies were deployed along a fifty-mile defensive front to the north of Tabora and the lion’s share of the fighting required to dislodge them fell, once again, to the Belgians. At the end of the first week in September, all the Belgian commanders scored victories against Wahle’s forward positions; and for two weeks thereafter their columns fought daily battles of increasing intensity in stifling heat. Finally, at 10.30 a.m. on 19 September, three lieutenants hoisted the Belgian flag above Tabora, releasing some 200 POWs in the process. Crewe only learnt this humiliating news five days later.
As the Belgian troops closed in and Crewe looked set to cut the Central Railway to the east General Wahle had recognised that Tabora, ‘a long town like a hand towel’ and the largest in the colony, was quite impossible to defend. On three sides it was ringed with hills which gave a perfect field of fire for enemy artillery; and Wahle had to consider the presence of two sizeable hospitals – and the German women and children in the town – as well as the fact that the railway might not provide the means of a quick flight for much longer. Furthermore, his casualties in September amounted to fifty Germans dead, 150 taken prisoner and over 300 askari dead or wounded; and as Tombeur’s troops approached Tabora the intelligence that could be gleaned from the local population began to dry up and a distinct air of unease descended on the district. On 18 September he was forced to order the abandonment of the town, and sent a fifty-strong decoy force down the railway towards Kilimatinde while keeping the true direction of his withdrawal a closely guarded secret. Huge quantities of supplies were destroyed and four guns disabled as the German troops departed.
Wahle’s feint in the direction of Kilimatinde, 150 miles west of Tabora, was a complete success. Crewe ordered 4/KAR to converge on the railway at Igalula and to sweep westwards supported by an advance by 8/SAI and a squadron of 4/SAH from van Deventer’s force, but they were all too late to forestall Wahle. At the stations at Malongwe and Igalula he mustered his 2,000 battle-hardened troops in the first week of October and divided them into columns led by von Langenn-Steinkeller and Lieutenant Joseph Zingel, former Administrator of Bismarckburg. Zimmer’s Möwe company, for so long the masters of Lake Tanganyika, was disbanded and its men redistributed. A third column, Max Wintgens’s, was positioned south of Tabora, ready to oppose any further Belgian advance. At this juncture, Wahle revealed his plan to his commanders: he intended to march their eleven companies straight across the barren wasteland south-west of Tabora, judged by his opponents to be ‘no country for the movement of troops’,13 and recapture Iringa. His ‘venture into the unknown’ was, as he recognised, a ‘very high-risk strategy indeed’.14 But after ten days the crafty old general discovered that the Belgians had pursued him no further than Sikonge, and that Crewe’s Lake Force was a busted flush in the process of being disbanded.
Tabora was as far as Tombeur could, or would, go. His troops had marched some 1,300 miles since April, and of the 8,500 troops he had started out with from Lake Victoria only 5,850 were still fit for action. The guns of two of his three artillery batteries had been lost or destroyed, and with the expiry of the contracts of the Ugandan porters (among whom cerebro-spinal meningitis had broken out) he was desperately short of transport. Furthermore, the Germans had pursued a rigorous scorched earth strategy in their retreat to Tabora, stripping the whole area of foodstuffs. ‘There was no one who did not regret this forced stop,’ Tombeur wrote, ‘but there was also no one who, at this point, believed that we could recommence the offensive the day after our entry to Tabora.’15
This was not how Smuts interpreted Tombeur’s decision. His seeming intransigence was regarded as further evidence of escalating Belgian ambitions in Central Africa, and when Tombeur subsequently refused to budge from Tabora Smuts accused him of ‘[taking] advantage of our necessities to claim that their originaloffer of evacuation had lapsed’, despitealluding ‘in ambiguous terms to gradual withdrawal’.16 That politicking was afoot there was no doubt. Even when the rains were imminent, Tombeur could have withdrawn his troops on the Central Railway to Lake Tanganyika. But he was ordered not to by the Belgian government, and as Smuts had no troops with which to garrison Tabora his hand was weak. What most irked Smuts, however, was the failure
– as he saw it – of Tombeur and Crewe to round up Wahle’s West-truppen; and as Crewe was an old friend, it was Tombeur alone that he blamed.
Out on the barren steppe south-west of Tabora, marked on the map with nothing but a white blob, Wahle’s Westtruppen found the conditions even more arduous than he had imagined.* He finally ordered a day’s rest at Kiromo, in Itumba district, where von Langenn-Steinkeller’s and Zingel’s columns converged; and it was there that considerable friction arose between Wahle and one of Schnee’s officials when it emerged that the latter had failed to keep together all the porters recruited in Malongwe, and had consequently burnt huge quantities of precious supplies. He had also brought insufficient money to pay the askari, all of whom were now forced to accept the general’s ‘credit’. Equally perturbing was that there was no word of Wintgens’s detachment, accompanied by Colonel Hübener’s and one of the 10.5cm howitzers from the Marie. Unbeknownst to Wahle, Wintgens had in fact reached Isunuka, seventy miles south-west of Wahle, but the trek had exacted a heavy toll: forty-three Germans and forty-four askari had already been abandoned to an uncertain fate along the way.
Despite the mounting difficulties Wahle pressed on. Each night the porters would straggle into camp after midnight only to be up at dawn for the next day’s march. Many were simply abandoned, too weak to continue, others died from sheer exhaustion. The 500 cattle accompanying the columns dwindled to fewer than 100; and as rations began to run out the porters’ maize ration was cut by a third and they began to ‘visibly reduce in size’.17 Water was so scarce that they were even forbidden to cook. For men on the march for eight hours each day in unbearable heat, this was a drastic measure. ‘What it actually means not to cook and to subsist on raw or ground maize morning noon and night can only be appreciated by someone who has been forced to endure such a hardship,’ wrote Wahle; ‘many nights I prayed that we would find some provisions the next day . . . the deprivations suffered by us on that march were the most extreme I experienced in the whole campaign.’18
The further south Wahle’s columns progressed, the more vigilant they had to be. They were still some way from making contact with any of Northey’s troops but had entered an area in which Germans of any description were extremely unpopular. The Wahehe had been ‘pacified’ in 1898 following a four-year campaign by Tom von Prince (the colonial veteran who had been killed at Tanga in 1914); but more recently, embittered at the loss of control over their territory, the Wahehe had participated in the ill-fated Maji-Maji Rebellion and still retained large quantities of rifles. Seeing an opportunity to settle old scores, Wahehe warriors therefore harried Wahle’s columns every step of the way, and were undeterred by the hangings carried out on any of their number who fell into German hands.
With all three of Smuts’s divisions astride the Central Railway at the end of August, the fall of Dar-es-Salaam was only a matter of time. The Royal Navy had not rested on its laurels since capturing Tanga in July. Although the fleet was not quite as large as the one assembled to destroy the Königsberg a year earlier, it still constituted a significant naval presence. Admiral ‘Ned’ Charlton, who had succeeded King-Hall as commander-in-chief of the Cape Station in August 1915, flew his flag from HMS Vengeance (while Hyacinth underwent a refit), and he had the light cruisers Challenger, Talbot and Pioneer at his disposal. Alongside them remained many vessels whose functions were symptomatic of the versatility still required in maintaining a blockade. The monitors Mersey and Severn remained on station with their mother ship Trent, as did the gunboats Echo, Childers, Pickle, Fly, Thistle and Helmuth. HMS Manica, the Navy’s first kite-balloon ship which had seen action at the Dardanelles, provided an observation platform for the bombardment of onshore positions; and Himalaya supported the RNAS’s seaplanes. After Tanga had fallen, Pangani and Sadani to the south were also taken in joint operations without encountering much opposition, and Charlton was asked by Smuts to capture Bagamoyo, between Sadani and Dar-es-Salaam, without assistance from the land forces.
Although Charlton was told that the old slaving port of Bagamoyo was only held by ten Germans and about forty askari, and a bombardment by Vengeance’s 12-inch guns on 5 August failed to draw any response, he was determined not to take any chances and to use every single rating and bluejacket available. When his force began their landing before dawn on 15 August his caution proved justified: Bagamoyo was protected by a Königsberg gun, a five-barrelled pom-pom and a garrison over 400-strong – fully one third larger than the naval force – with at least two machine-guns. But Charlton’s plans were well laid. Mersey and Severn drew fire from the Königsberg gun while lighters put the naval force ashore and the Helmuth and a picket boat then closed to within 500 yards of the gun, peppering it with 3-pdr fire. With the naval ratings on the beach below it, this ‘seriously discomposed’ the German gunners, who abandoned their gun. A seaplane then began bombing the German trenches in concert with a full-scale bombardment from the ships offshore. By 6.30 a.m. Captain von Bodecker had ordered his men to retreat back towards the Holy Ghost Fathers’ Mission at the rear of the town and when he and Captain Bock von Wülfingen – who had commanded the attack on Kisii two years earlier – were both killed, ‘all initiative on the part of the enemy was lost’. The operation was altogether a ‘most remarkable piece of work’19 by the Navy, although it cost the life of Royal Marine Captain Thomas, a decorated veteran of Gallipoli who led the landings, and there was jubilation in the ranks at being the first to capture a Königsberg gun intact. So celebratory was the mood that an abandoned baby hippo found during the attack was sent as a gift to the Sultan of Zanzibar, whom the Navy considered their patron as well as host to the RNAS’s aerodrome. The Sultan wrote to Charlton thanking him ‘from the very bottom of my heart’ for his new pet, and for ‘freeing us from the barbarism of our common enemy’.20
With Bagamoyo in British hands, the Navy set its sights on Dar-es-Salaam. On 21 August HMS Challenger bombarded the railway station at night as a prelude to joint operations, and in the succeeding days planes joined in the bombing of the port. Tension mounted daily among the inhabitants. Nis Kock, from the blockade-runner Kronborg, was charged with spiriting away the munitions that could be moved and wrote: ‘the town was like a whole community in dissolution. Troops on the march passed through hardly making a pause. The white soldiers flung themselves on the hotels’ good food like starving beasts, and often they were utterly played out. Long columns of bearers [also] passed through, going north or south, and white women and children poured in from every point of the compass.’ Two years after the outbreak of war, it was clear that ‘the good days in Dar-es-Salaam were over’, and that ‘the country was finally up against it’.21
By 3 September Colonel Price’s coastal column of 1,900 men had advanced from Bagamoyo on three separate objectives: the Mabibo Heights overlooking Dar-es-Salaam, Ruvu station (forty miles inland) and Ngerengere station (eighty miles inland). At each the only sign of the enemy was a few stragglers. On the morning of 4 September, with Challenger, Vengeance, Mersey, Severn and various smaller craft lying inshore, Dar-es-Salaam finally surrendered. Recently promoted Commander Charlewood, a veteran of almost all the major naval actions since 1914, was given the honour of receiving the surrender. It was a Pyrrhic victory, although the capture of the port’s wireless station did mean that direct contact with Berlin finally ceased. The troops had rarely encountered the enemy during their advance, but the damage wrought on the Central Railway by the retreating Germans was immense. Rolling-stock had been driven off the line into ravines and all bridges had been blown. Nothing remained intact on the Central Railway, once the very symbol of German ambitions for its East Africa colony. In the capital itself only 380 civilians remained, and eighty sick and wounded in the hospital. A young ‘bluejacket’ observed that ‘many of the female citizens were in tears on our entry and the majority were sulky and sullen whereas most of the menfolk kept out of sight’. The indigenous population on the other hand, sensing that the arrival of the B
ritish might mean an end to bombardments and deprivation, ‘received [them] with delight’.22 Work began immediately to try and restore both the harbour and railway to some semblance of working order. It would prove to be a mammoth undertaking – sixty bridges had been destroyed between the coast and Dodoma – but by the first week in October the line was open for limited traffic.
On 31 August Smuts sent a message to the War Office which read: ‘I would submit that on occupation of Central Railway it will be advisable to make a serious effort to effect the surrender of the German forces without running the risk and expense of protracted guerrilla operations in the far south of their territory.’ With the short rains only weeks away, and von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops all dug in south of the railway, Smuts’s chances of saving ‘millions of expenditure’23 and convincing his opponent that further resistance was futile were slim. But he opted for one more push in the hope that ‘if [von Lettow-Vorbeck] were given no rest, he would give in’. This was not the news that most of his field commanders, and certainly not those endeavouring to keep them supplied, wanted to hear. As one of the latter wrote, ‘the country was bare of supplies . . . and the transport stretched to the furthest limit. The effects of the climate were being felt more and more [and] the camps along the railway were full of sick and worn-out men’.24
Smuts’s plan looked straightforward enough on paper. He was convinced that the enemy was ‘now worn out, having been pursued without intermission for hundreds of miles’, and that ‘his morale has gone, and his numbers are diminishing rapidly on account of sickness, captures and, most of all desertions’.25 With that in mind he ordered van Deventer to push south to Kidatu on the Ruaha River, thereby blocking von Lettow-Vorbeck’s route to the Mahenge plateau, while his own force encircled the German positions in the Uluguru Mountains, south of Morogoro. General Hoskins’s 1st Division, comprising Sheppard’s and Hannyngton’s brigades, was to advance along the eastern side of the Ulugurus while Coen Brits tackled the west with Beves’s 5/SAI and 6/SAI and Enslin’s 2nd Mounted Brigade, assisted by Nussey’s 1st Mounted Brigade which Smuts had detached from van Deventer. Execution of the plan was a different matter. One third of the 1st Division’s ration strength of 9,400 men were on the sick-list and Driscoll’s ‘Frontiersmen’, for example, could only put 100 men in the field. Similarly, when Nussey’s brigade completed a thirty-three-mile ride to its start point for the offensive, only 900 of its 1,413 men were fit enough to continue. Opposing the offensive were five German detachments – at least 3,500 troops with more than forty machine-guns – led by Otto, Schulz, Liebermann, Tafel and Stemmermann. They were among von Lettow-Vorbeck’s most experienced commanders, and they held the high ground.*
