by Edward Paice
Kraut – whom Wahle had instructed to forge as far south as he thought necessary – found few supplies around Songea; so he marched south to Tunduru and then crossed the Rovuma on 11 April to relieve the Portuguese garrison at Mitomoni of their provisions. From there he sent Willibald von Stuemer south and Heinrich Freiherr von Bock eastwards, while he remained near the Rovuma to secure the next harvest. The presence of at least seven German companies within striking distance of Lake Nyasa forced Northey to move his HQ to Zomba to cover the possibility that Kraut might try and invade Nyasaland; and 5/SAI, with their distinctive diamond-shaped flash of white and green halves worn on each side of their ‘Wolseley’ helmets, were converted into a mounted regiment patrolling the Nyasaland-Portuguese East Africa border on mules. Not until July was Kraut forced back over the Rovuma into German territory, after which he sent his three companies, under the command of Lieutenant Krüger, to Lindi district while he made his way to rejoin von Lettow-Vorbeck.
The first indication that Wintgens’s column, which was 500-strong and armed with no fewer than eleven machine-guns, was not following Kraut south was provided when one of his patrols attacked Milow Mission, thirty miles north of Wiedhafen, and another was encountered still further north. Their location made it clear that Wintgens was either creating a diversion while withdrawing back on to the Mahenge plateau, or that he meant to cross Northey’s lines between the lake and Northey’s HQ, which at the time was still at Njombe. If the latter, it was a threat which Northey could not afford to ignore, and he wasted no time in rushing 1/1KAR from Lupembe to Tandala, on the north-east corner of Lake Nyasa, and ordering Murray to lead two companies of his ‘ubiquitous Rhodesians’ in pursuit of Wintgens. Northey’s worst fears were confirmed at dawn on 18 February when Wintgens duly attacked Tandala in freezing rain. But after two days of heavy fighting Wintgens withdrew, and by 25 February his detachment had disappeared in a north-westerly direction.
Wintgens’s courage and unpredictability had earned him a considerable respect among Northey’s troops (and among the Belgians before them). ‘We all formed the opinion’, wrote one, ‘that he was a very fine officer, not only a good soldier with plenty of initiative.’1 Why he decided to fight his way straight across Northey’s lines, rather than retreat to the Mahenge plateau or follow Kraut southwards, remains a mystery. Post-war legends, perhaps founded on the desertion of twenty of his askari during the battle at Tandala, suggested that he had decided to take his men back to their homes in the northwest of the colony; a number of German sources would claim otherwise – that Wintgens initially intended only to forage for supplies on Northey’s lines of communication and along the border between German East Africa and Northern Rhodesia. In the absence of any comprehensive account penned by Wintgens himself neither explanation can be verified. His aims may well have changed, and his attacks in 1916 on Ngominyi and Lupembe demonstrate that he was a commander who liked to act spontaneously, unexpectedly, and often in defiance of orders from his superiors. Whatever his thought processes, their consequences were catastrophic for Northey: for three months after his break from Kraut, ‘Winkins’ was destined to lead ‘Murray’s Rhodesians’ a merry dance that took many of them, including their commander, to breaking point. The ‘Wintgens Raid’ had begun.
In the estimation of his fellow-officers Murray was considered to be ‘the only man in the field at the time who looked in the least likely to be able to deal with [Wintgens] if he could only come to grips with him’.2 It was something of a miracle, however, that Murray, who by now was himself almost constantly sick, still had a fighting force at all. At Christmas 1916 he had even witnessed a mutiny among the ranks of the men of ‘A’ Company of the British South Africa Police who had had enough of their commander ‘volunteering for everything’ – an occurrence which Murray handled in characteristically forthright fashion. He called the mutineers together and told them that he was ‘ashamed of [their] mutinous action’, adding that it would be a ‘terrible shock’ to No they as he had ‘such a high regard’ for the BSAP. He then told them that if any man refused to march he would have them shot by an askari. The mutiny ended as quickly as it had started, but for a long time afterwards the transgressors would offer inducements to the bearers of the machila in which Murray was often forced to travel to dump him every time they crossed a river. Murray was wise to this ploy and, ‘gripping his walking stick’, he always ‘girded up his loins and battled on up the next mountain without further assistance’.3 As had been true from the outset, he meant to lead from the front, but the longer he and his men remained in the field the more their numbers dwindled.
By the time he was ordered to pursue Wintgens, the sickness rate among Murray’s troops was so high that nothing seemed able to counter it. At the Base hospital in Zomba even the diligence of ‘Calamity Kate’ and ‘Hellfire Jane’, the senior (and rather elderly) nursing sisters, was not sufficient to combat a ‘state of chaos’ which patients described as ‘unforgettable’. ‘The wards’, wrote one, ‘were overflowing and the beds were in no kind of order. They lay in haphazard positions like a gigantic unsolved jigsaw puzzle. The mosquito nets, so small they looked more like shrouds, were propped up off the beds by sticks and bits of string, and in the sweltering atmosphere many patients were nearly suffocated.’ In addition to those suffering from the ravages of malaria or dysentery, there were many with grisly wounds. One KAR officer, for example, had been ‘hit by a bullet in his left eye, [which] traversed the nasal cavity, emerged through the side of his face and re-entered the body to shatter his right shoulder and sever his arm’. Then there were the suicide cases, watched over by the ‘conscientious Afrikaner’ Foulkes; and the huge number of blackwater cases about which the medical staff were, by their own admission, ‘abysmally ignorant’, and whose victims were often discharged prematurely only to drop dead before they reached the railhead; and the German patients, including the ‘kindly elderly doctor with carcinoma of the liver [who] sent for his wife in Dar but died before she could get to Zomba’;4 and even a number of men who missed their loved ones to such an extent that they had ‘gone all peculiar’ (and found that being told to ‘do what a little boy does and do it twice a week’5 did little to alleviate their depression).
In the middle of March Wintgens’s force reappeared at Neu Utengule, thirty miles north of Lake Nyasa, and Murray closed in on him while the Northern Rhodesia border posts were reinforced in case Wintgens broke south. On 15 March, Murray drove Wintgens’s rearguard out of their positions and it soon became apparent that his next destination was not the Northern Rhodesia border but the mission station at St Moritz, below which was the only ford across the Songwe River that wasn’t covered by floodwater many feet deep. Once again Murray rushed to cut off his enemy, but on 20 March Colonel Tomlinson committed his Rhodesia Native Regiment and one company of the Northern Rhodesia Police, which had arrived before Murray, to a premature attack. As had happened before when Wintgens met Tomlinson it was the latter who came off second best. Tomlinson quickly found his troops surrounded by Wintgens, losing three machine-guns in the process, and then had to hang on grimly until Murray and Major Baxter’s 1/1KAR broke through to relieve him a week later. Even with the arrival of these reinforcements Wintgens did not immediately turn tail. Only on 31 March did he finally cross the river and make for the St Boniface Mission on the Saisi River. Tomlinson, who by then was suffering from blood poisoning, did not get another command and was heavily criticised for having dug in on the plain below the mission rather than in the hills further south, a decision which arguably cost the lives of more than sixty of his men.
Hoskins, who was still commander-in-chief in East Africa when Wintgens set off on his raid, was seriously alarmed by the break-out and told Northey that ‘the rounding up of Wintgens is now of greater importance than anything else in the campaign’.6 But in the ensuing month, as Wintgens traversed the hilly, wooded country north-west of the St Moritz Mission and then set off across the desolate pori towards T
abora for the second time in six months, he evaded all attempts by Murray to outflank him. The toll on both forces was colossal. By the end of April one in ten of Murray’s 2,500 first-line carriers had died, one in seven had been sent back sick, and the troops had advanced far beyond the furthest point to which Northey’s supply lines would stretch; while Wintgens was only able to maintain his fighting strength by arming an increasing number of his carriers. By the third week in May Wintgens himself had contracted typhus and was finally forced to surrender to the Belgian Major Bataille at a village on the Ugala River, three days’ march from Tabora. Any euphoria in the Allied ranks was short-lived: although the Belgians had captured the man they considered to be their ‘most terrible enemy’,7 Wintgens’s surrender did not encompass the surrender of his force and his officers all decided to fight on.*
‘Murray’s Rhodesians’ had covered 350 miles in just fourteen weeks in their pursuit of Wintgens, an average of twenty-five miles a day in blistering heat on minimal rations, and could go no further. By 14 June 1917 they had made their way back to Northey, and then, almost without respite, they were despatched to Songea to prepare for an offensive against the German troops which had remained on the Mahenge plateau under the command of Tafel. The failure to catch the man who in many ways was their own commander’s Doppelgänger was a huge disappointment to Murray’s troops, and was only partly mitigated by Sergeant Booth of the British South Africa Police being awarded one of only four VCs of the campaign for his gallantry during an engagement at Johannesbruck, on the Songea–Wiedhafen road on 12 February. Worse still, Ronald Murray’s health, mental and physical, had been broken by the strain of twelve months in the field. He relinquished command of the NRP and the fifty-six BSAP troopers still fit for duty to Major Fair at the end of June, and although he would return to the field once again he was eventually invalided to South Africa, shipped back to England, and died soon after the war. Although Murray was undoubtedly a strict disciplinarian, and obsessively determined, his officers and men were unanimous in regarding him as ‘a gallant leader and a fine soldier’8 whose achievements were never fully recognised; and twelve months later, as the campaign entered its most desperate phase, theirs was not the only voice to lament the fact that there was no Murray to unleash on von Lettow-Vorbeck. In the meantime, Hoskins, far from being rid of the threat posed by Wintgens’s raid, was forced to deploy 3,000 troops to hunt for Wintgens’s detachment and to request the assistance of six Belgian battalions.* In stating that news of Wintgens’s break-out was received ‘too late for me to interfere’9 von Lettow-Vorbeck failed to do justice to the enormity of the inconvenience caused by his subordinate just at a time when Hoskins was battling to reorganise his troops for a major offensive after the rains.
Command of Wintgens’s troops, of whom about 500 had survived their second traverse of the pori south of Tabora, passed to Captain Heinrich Naumann. Six feet two inches tall, with jet-black hair and ‘stern, eagle-like eyes’,10 Naumann had – like Wintgens – been awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class in September 1916 and was considered to be every bit as dangerous an opponent. In contrast to Wintgens, however, Naumann’s initial instinct was to reunite his troops with Tafel on the Mahenge plateau. Quite how he might have intended to do this is uncertain: crossing the pori a third time would have been unthinkable given that he was desperately short of provisions and that Murray’s troops could have turned to face him instead of continuing on their way back to Northey. In any case, his first priority was to break loose from the British and Belgian units closing in on him – and that could only be done by heading further north rather than south. Within days of Wintgens’s surrender, Naumann had simply slipped through the Anglo-Belgian encirclement and led his troops across the Central Railway fifty miles to the east of Tabora – a feat which was the first of many indignities to be inflicted on ‘Edforce’, the troops of General W.F.S. Edwards now charged with capturing Naumann, and their Belgian allies.
By the end of the first week in June Naumann had traversed 100 miles of dense ‘elephant bush’ to Mkalama, north-east of Tabora. His rearguard was briefly ‘bumped’ during his escape by the Belgian 4th Bataillon and Colonel Sargent’s 4th Nigeria Battalion, but soon afterwards the opportunity of forcing him to stand and fight was lost and Naumann compounded the problem facing his pursuers by sending off small detachments in all directions like so many sparks from a Verey light. Sergeant Müller’s column overran Singida, to the west, another column captured a herd of 600 cattle from the British supply lines and Naumann’s main force simply disappeared. It was thought that Naumann’s principal options were to break north-west to Lake Victoria, or to head north-east towards the former heartland of German settlement around Kilimanjaro; and both potential destinations caused extreme disquiet to the Allies because they had been under British administration for a year, and the consequences of Naumann ‘stirring up the natives’ in districts providing immense quantities of foodstuffs and recruits to the war effort were likely to be calamitous. In the end Naumann chose the first option for an extraordinary reason: he had heard a local rumour that an invasion force of ‘Somalis’ were just three days’ march north of Nairobi, and by moving north-west he could, if he chose, enter British East Africa by a route that was unlikely to be guarded as closely as any running close to Mt Kilimanjaro. Naumann’s gullibility in attaching any credence to the rumour may seem extraordinary. But he had been in the wilds for months, and supporting a Somali ‘invasion’ by making as big a nuisance of himself as possible – and possibly even linking up with the invaders – was a more attractive course of action at the time than seeking to fight his way back through the British troops guarding the Central Railway.
As soon as Naumann’s approximate position was ascertained, the authorities in Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria, were told to expect an attack at any moment. On 15 June Major Warwick, the garrison’s commanding officer, ordered all specie removed to the Winifred and instructed the port’s many Indian traders to pack up their stock and prepare for a rapid departure. If this smacked of panic, it was justifiable under the circumstances: Warwick had absolutely no idea of the whereabouts of any of the British, let alone Belgian, columns pursuing Naumann, and intelligence reports indicated that the German force descending on him might be as strong as 1,500 rifles. Furthermore, any defence would have to rest principally on Major Drought’s ‘Skin Corps’, armed scouts who had played a prominent role in all fighting around the lake since the start of the war but could hardly be described as ‘regular’ troops in any sense of the word. Warwick issued orders for the corps to prepare its main defensive position near Mwanza’s gaol; but Drought, as was his wont, decided his own dispositions after concluding that there were ‘easier means of committing suicide than drawing up in main street’.11 Furthermore, Drought was convinced that the 4th Nigeria Battalion and the Belgian 4th Bataillon, which had been sent to relieve Mwanza from the west, could not be far away; and he was equally certain that there was ‘absolutely no object in the Hun going to Mwanza as they must reckon on forces being landed from our steamers to cut them off ’. Fortunately for the residents of Mwanza – and British prestige on the lakeshore – Drought’s reading of the situation proved correct. Only one German patrol reached Lake Victoria, at Guta, where it was immediately put to flight when the Belgian 6th Bataillon were landed there by steamers of the British lake flotilla.
Although Mwanza itself had escaped attack, Naumann’s main force appeared – yet again – to have disappeared into thin air. The task of finding him was entrusted to Drought, who immediately sent out famous elephant-hunter Lieutenant Sutherland with 100 levies and four local Boer farmers as guides to patrol towards Ikoma, closely followed by the ‘Skin Corps’ and the Belgian 6th Bataillon and 13th Bataillon. Their mission was a difficult one, given the vast area Naumann had at his disposal; and it needed to be executed with caution as ‘Edforce’, whose pursuit of Naumann had been labelled ‘a great failure’,12 was withdrawn from the fray at
this juncture so that its troops could be rested before taking part in van Deventer’s imminent advance against von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force.
After leaving Mkalama Naumann’s main force had in fact marched over 100 miles through Wasukuma territory – once a major recruiting ground for German askari and carriers – to Schanoa; and ten days after that, having recruited 100 former German askari, he’d covered a further 100 miles to arrive, as Major Drought suspected, at Ikoma. The small British garrison manning Ikoma’s fort, a pre-war outpost of 14/FK, proved no obstacle to Naumann, who then prepared to confront the Anglo-Belgian force from Mwanza. He did not have long to wait. On 29 June Major Larsen’s 13th Bataillon caught up with Sutherland’s patrol near Ikoma and, despite having been instructed to await the arrival of the 6th Bataillon and Drought’s ‘Skin Corps’, proceeded to launch an attack on the fort. In so doing Naumann’s carefully laid trap was sprung: the fort itself was only held by a handful of askari and the bulk of Naumann’s troops were deployed some distance away. No sooner had the attack begun than Naumann ordered them forward and in no time Larsen’s and Sutherland’s troops were surrounded. The consequences were horrific, and provided a graphic demonstration of Naumann’s ruthlessness. One quarter of the 450 Allied soldiers were killed, including a large proportion of the wounded and captured, and only half the force escaped the envelopment unscathed. German casualties, on the other hand, could be counted on one hand; and an entire machine-gun company, 138 rifles, and 25,000 rounds of ammunition fell into Naumann’s hands.* It was the worst defeat inflicted on Belgian troops in the entire campaign, and when Drought arrived to take command of the remnants of Belgian and British troops Larsen was led off to face a Belgian court-martial. Of Lieutenant Sutherland, last seen being led into the fort by two German askari, nothing was ever heard again.
