Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  Britain seized the high ground in the war of words rather more successfully than on the battlefields of East Africa. No slaughter on a remotely comparable scale to that perpetrated not once, but twice, by Germany had ever been committed in the name of the British Empire in Africa. But it was harder to draw such a clear-cut distinction between the two countries’ administrative methods. In more peaceful times many a British settler, and the overwhelming majority of South Africans, had always held the ‘efficiency’ and ‘discipline’ of German colonial rule in high esteem. Moreover, when British and South African administrators took over the government of captured territory in German East Africa, they found fewer differences between British and German rule than their political masters considered helpful; and they were hardly in a position to decry the severity of German labour practices, for example, when they were themselves being required to coerce Africans by the thousand to act as carriers for the military (even though a token wage was paid to ‘British’ carriers). It also became abundantly clear that German overlordship was as popular with many chiefs as was true in British colonies: in both cases alliances with colonial officials could be used to great advantage in securing privileges or settling old scores. Equivocation on the question of the respective merits of British and German rule abounded in official reports;18 and no less a figure than Edmund Morel, whose ‘Red Rubber’ campaign had exposed the appalling atrocities committed in the name of King Leopold in the Congo at the turn of the century, realised that ‘it would be quite impossible for a case to be presented to an international tribunal against the exercise of German sovereign rights in Africa, on the plea of German ill-treatment of natives’. The presentation of such a case, wrote Morel, ‘would invite not only a damaging and unanswerable tu quoque, but a citation of much British evidence in praise of German administration in Africa’.19

  Many British commentators who aired such views were quickly silenced. Morel himself was imprisoned in 1917 under the Defence of the Realm Act and other dissenters, such as Percy Molteno of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, who challenged the Under-Secretary of State for War to clarify ‘whether the system of recruiting carriers is voluntary or compulsory’ and confirm the veracity of rumours that casualties in the Carrier Corps were running at ‘an average of ten thousand carriers per month’,20 immediately found themselves branded ‘unpatriotic’. By the third year of the war the national mood in Britain was as uncompromising as that in Germany, and the stakes in Africa were, in the eyes of ‘old Africa hands’, as high as they were in Europe. The outcome of the war would, after all, decide the final phase of the colonial ‘Scramble for Africa’.

  In the field, even the more enlightened government officials who found that judging ‘the relative popularity among the natives of the Huns and ourselves’ was ‘by no means an easy question to answer’,21 and who disliked being instructed to enforce onerous increases in the taxes paid by their African charges during the war, or troopers who had witnessed a carrier rolling over during punishment and having his genitals accidentally whipped off by the next blow of the sjambok, sensed what was at stake; and in almost every case they subscribed to the view that although German rule may have been efficient, it was built on a degree of authoritarianism that they found unacceptable. Missionaries, who were competing for post-war access to millions of souls formerly administered to by German missions, also threw their weight wholeheartedly behind the British propaganda campaign: a war was being fought for the future of ‘civilisation’, and if the enemy was painted ‘blacker than he deserved’22 then so be it. As for the damage the conduct of the war might inflict on British ‘prestige’, that could be dealt with later: as one KAR officer wrote in an open letter to all Provincial Commissioners in British East Africa, there would be ‘a real necessity for the undertaking of propaganda work . . . which will help to obliterate the memory of the hardships incurred by the natives in the course of the war’.23

  PART FIVE

  1918

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s sketch of his route through Portuguese East Africa, 1918

  THIRTY-THREE

  The Hunt Begins

  In September 1917 van Deventer had offered Colonel Tómas de Sousa Rosa assistance with holding the 250-mile ‘Rovuma line’ should von Lettow-Vorbeck attempt to invade Portuguese East Africa. The offer had been declined, and MacDonell had advised that ‘the presence of a British force in Portuguese territory would be highly unwelcome as the Portuguese would take it as a serious reflection on their military efficiency’.1 The consequences were disastrous, and by the time van Deventer secured permission to send British troops over the Rovuma von Lettow-Vorbeck had already disappeared into the blue.

  The surrender of numerous Portuguese garrisons placed van Deventer in a very awkward position. On the one hand Sousa Rosa was a political appointee, as opposed to a soldier, who had not only let him down in spades but was also, in MacDonell’s opinion, ‘most impulsive’, ‘unrestrained in his language’, and possessed of a ‘distressing peculiarity of changing his mind at least three times before arriving at a decision’.2 But on the other hand the Portuguese commander-in-chief had at least spent much of 1917 as the sole Democratic voice to decry the Portuguese conduct of the war in Lisbon’s Chamber of Deputies (at a time when criticism of the military was illegal); and since his arrival in Portuguese East Africa he had demonstrated an extremely authoritarian approach to lapses of discipline among his troops. In the aftermath of Negomano a variety of punishments for laziness – including beatings – were meted out to a major, eight captains, and dozens of lieutenants; while thirty-one officers captured by von Lettow-Vorbeck but released on parole were arrested and imprisoned indefinitely in the fortress at Mocímboa da Praia. Such conduct reinforced MacDonell’s belief that Sousa Rosa, whatever his personal shortcomings, would do as much to help ‘terminate the campaign’ as his ‘limited and indifferent forces [would] permit’;3 and Sousa Rosa was at least pro-British, whereas if he were replaced by Sidónio Pais’s new government in Lisbon his successor might prove fatally unco-operative.

  The threat posed to the future of Anglo-Portuguese co-operation in Africa by the revolution in Lisbon cannot be overstated. Republican politics had exacerbated the fractures between church and state, town and country, and within the trades unions in Portugal, and Pais’s government was confronted by an urgent need to restore public order and counter the mounting shame at the lamentable performance of Portuguese troops on the battlefields of Europe and East Africa. As the unpopularity of the war plumbed new depths in Portugal Sir Lancelot Carnegie, the British Minister in Lisbon, compounded Pais’s parlous situation by warning him of ‘the possibility of a grave disaster involving heavy losses of men and materiel’ in East Africa, one that would constitute an even more ‘serious risk to the prestige of Portugal in Africa’4 than Negomano.

  Britain’s strategy of appealing to Portuguese brio nacional was fraught with risk: it might have driven Pais to try to reassert Portuguese neutrality or, worse still, to enter into negotiations for a separate peace with Germany. But the response from Pais reassured those who had feared that his sympathies lay with Germany. He confirmed that the 50,000 Portuguese troops in Europe (who were paid by Britain) should remain under Anglo-French command; and he agreed that van Deventer should control operations in Portuguese East Africa. Sousa Rosa, at Carnegie’s behest, was promoted General as a vote of confidence, and Massano de Amorim, who had commanded the First Expeditionary Force in 1914–15, returned to Portuguese East Africa to replace Álvaro de Castro as Governor-General of the colony.

  MacDonell welcomed the appointment of a soldier, rather than a politician, as Governor-General but soon found himself engulfed by yet another political storm. The ‘War Aims’ of the British Labour Party, published in November 1917, appeared – to the Portuguese at least – to advocate the confiscation of their African colonies,* and no sooner had MacDonell dealt with Portuguese ire at that than a major scandal broke in the South African ne
wspapers. It was alleged that a ‘woman market’ was operated by many Portuguese officials in East Africa, who would – for a fee – rubber-stamp the purchase of (very) young concubines for Europeans. The Portuguese government threatened a libel action against this slur and, though there was a good deal of truth in the allegations, an official apology had to be issued by the South African government before the matter was allowed to drop. So raw was the atmosphere created between Britain and Portugal by these events that MacDonell had to insist on returning to his post as Consul in Lourenço Marques in January 1918.

  Van Deventer was fulsome in his praise for the resourcefulness shown by MacDonell during his prolonged stint in the field: ‘the Portuguese are by no means easy to deal with,’ he wrote, ‘and MacDonell’s task has been no sinecure’.5 His resumption of diplomatic duties left a gaping hole at the front, but van Deventer was fortunate in being able to call on Major ‘Sos’ Cohen, MacDonell’s very capable Intelligence officer, to fill his shoes as Liaison Officer with the Portuguese forces. In the coming months Cohen would be driven to the ‘verge of a nervous breakdown’.6 British carrier recruiters found their job impossible due to the non-co-operation of Portuguese officials, and van Deventer was soon forced to lodge an official complaint at the total lack of assistance given by the officials of the Companhia do Niassa (which was owned by a German consortium) to the British troops stationed at Porto Amelia.

  By the end of January 1918 the prospects for renewed military co-operation between British and Portuguese troops after the rainy season began to look decidedly bleak. On the diplomatic front MacDonell had once again rendered the Portuguese administration in Lourenço Marques ‘quite tame’,7 but the truculence of many Portuguese officials in the north and the state of the Portuguese troops were worrying. When MacDonell had inspected the troops at the main coastal base of Mocímboa da Praia in December 1917 he found the camp sanitation to be execrable, discipline non-existent, and the ‘crass ignorance and inexperience of campaigning in Africa’8 to be all-pervasive. In February 1918, when van Deventer went to make a further assessment, he found the situation unaltered and pronounced the Portuguese troops ‘totally unfit to take the field against the Germans’. Their health was ‘pitiable’, sanitation ‘did not exist’, sick Africans weren’t even treated, syphilis was (inevitably) as endemic as in Portugal, and few Portuguese officers spoke any local language.* All the troops were keen to return home, with many feigning sickness and resorting to self-harm to secure their passage; and in an almost risible twist, convict soldiers selected from those who supported the wrong side in the December revolution were starting to arrive as ‘reinforcements’ of the most useless kind. In effect their punishment amounted to a death sentence for many: in one unit of 340 mutineers from the Portuguese Navy eighty-five men were to die from disease in 1918. Meanwhile, the attitude of the senior Portuguese officers remained as dualistic and ‘curious’ as ever: ‘in public’, van Deventer noted, ‘they expressed much confidence in themselves and their troops, affected eagerness to take to the field, and appeared to resent being kept in the background. But I am certain that they really recognised that their troops were no match for even a tenth of the number of German askari. In short there was a good deal of high-flown talk, but very little practical keenness.’ The ‘real work must be done by British troops’ was his unsurprising conclusion.9

  Van Deventer’s options were limited. His Indian troops had almost all been ordered home or to other theatres; the Nigerian Brigade, having sustained casualties of one in three in the six weeks’ fighting which culminated in the battle at Mahiwa, returned to West Africa; and most of the British and colonial regiments had either departed or ceased to exist. This left the King’s African Rifles, the Gold Coast Regiment, Northey’s Rhodesian units and the 2nd Cape Corps with which to pursue his strategy of ‘virtual extinction’. As a Boer, van Deventer was as ambivalent as Smuts about the possible political consequences of militarising ‘natives’ and did not share the opinion of many a British officer that it was ‘a thousand pities that instead of three weak battalions [of KAR] we had not a quarter of a million of these splendid black warriors of East and Central Africa when war broke out’.10 But as the man charged with conducting a campaign over hundreds of thousands of square miles of bush in Portuguese East Africa, he had good reason to be grateful for the massive expansion of the KAR. Without the new battalions he could not possibly have garrisoned British and German East Africa while also fighting in Portuguese territory, and even with them the number of fit and experienced troops who could be deployed in the new campaign barely exceeded 11,000.*

  Van Deventer’s plan was to deploy two columns comprising three battalions of 2/KAR, 4/4KAR and the Gold Coast Regiment in harrying von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops from the east while Northey’s troops – two battalions of 4/KAR, three battalions of 1/KAR, the NRP, RNR and Cape Corps – pressed in from Nyasaland and the north. Their task, even at the outset, was formidable. For one thing, although reasonable maps of northern Portuguese East Africa existed in London, the War Office failed to forward them and the troops had to make do with ‘an enlargement of a schoolboy atlas’;11 and for another the likely centre of operations was about 1,000 miles from van Deventer’s and Northey’s headquarters at Dar-es-Salaam and Zomba (in Nyasaland) respectively. Finding sufficient carriers to support the troops also remained a problem, not only on account of the unco-operative attitude of Portuguese officials, but also because carrier work was universally unpopular among an indigenous population who had never been paid for such work by the Portuguese. When British recruiters insisted on paying for and adequately provisioning recruits the Portuguese authorities cried foul, objecting ‘on the grounds that [this was] putting ideas into the natives’ heads’.12 As for the enemy, even if von Lettow-Vorbeck’s detachments did concentrate in one area it was most unlikely that they could be surrounded by a force numbering only 5,000 rifles. They had, in the words of the historian of the Gold Coast Regiment’s campaign, ‘been transformed from an army in the field into a mobile band of fugitive marauders, whose only objects were to avoid capture, to cause their pursuers and to all connected with them the maximum amount of loss and trouble, and simultaneously to maintain themselves by seizing any supplies upon which, from time to time, they could contrive to lay their hands’.13 In the circumstances, rumours of the presence of a German raiding vessel prowling in East African waters in the hope of lifting von Lettow-Vorbeck and Schnee from the coast were the least of van Deventer’s worries.

  As a prelude to the operations planned for the dry season the 2nd Cape Corps advanced from Lake Nyasa in early January towards von Lettow-Vorbeck’s position at Matarica while Colonel Hawthorn’s KAR battalions moved against Göring and Otto in Luambala district. By the end of February all German troops had been cleared from the area west of the Lujenda and the enemy pushed back as far as Mtende. In the east, Colonel Rose simultaneously pushed Gold Coast troops inland from Porto Amelia as fast as they arrived (and sufficient carriers could be found); and by the end of the rains the Porto Amelia Force (‘Pamforce’) had established a bridgehead around Ankuabe and Meza which would oppose any German advance towards the Indian Ocean. These 2,000 troops were then placed under the direction of General W.F.S. Edwards, formerly Commandant-General of the Uganda Police and Inspector-General of the lines of communication in German East Africa, and divided into two columns: Colonel Rose’s ‘Rosecol’, comprising the Gold Coast Regiment and 4/4KAR; and Colonel Giffard’s ‘Kartucol’, comprising 1/2KAR and 2/2KAR. (See Appendix Eight.) There were no major engagements on this front during the rains, but Pamforce’s men were introduced to some alarming characteristics of campaigning in Portuguese territory: due to the effects of Portuguese rule the local population invariably ‘witnessed the wholesale destruction of Portuguese bomas with ecstatic delight’ and regarded British troops as little more than ‘hired bravados engaged by the Portuguese to capture their deliverers’.14 As a result ‘deadly boobytraps’ caused ‘a
great deal of trouble’ and ‘quite a number’ of motorcycle despatch riders, in particular, were killed.15 Despite such hindrances and constant torrential downpours Pamforce’s and Northey’s manoeuvres did, however, achieve the important objective of securing Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia and the coastal ports from the indignity that had befallen the Portuguese south of the Rovuma.

  In the vast space between Pamforce and Northey’s troops von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘band of marauders’ proved ‘exceptionally resourceful’16 during the rains. As one of his men succinctly put it, ‘necessity . . . is the mother of invention, and we grabbed whatever we could to fulfil our requirements’.17 The German position was advantageous in that von Lettow-Vorbeck had no lines of communication or major supply dumps to defend. But many of the askari were becoming ‘war weary’ and uncertain ‘as to where the campaign was going to lead them’. He had been able to count on their loyalty thusfar by the simple expedient of allowing them to bring their women with them across the Rovuma, but knew that to take them too far from their homes and relations might have adverse consequences. ‘Small annoyances’, he wrote, ‘such as. . . the persuasion of women and so on’, contributed to an increasing number of desertions, but he dismissed these as being ‘only a passing phase’ after which ‘the old lust of battle and the old loyalty returned, even among those who had begun to hang their heads’.18 In fact the German commander, who just a month earlier used to punish ‘misbehaviour’ in the ranks with measures as innocuous as making offenders stand on boxes with pumpkins on their heads, had ended the ‘passing phase’ by shooting or hanging deserters; and part of the justification for splitting up his troops was to counter the possibility of a large-scale mutiny in the ranks (something the British sought to encourage by dropping seditious leaflets from planes). Concentration of his forces had to occur sometime, however, because the captured supplies started to run out. By the end of February von Lettow-Vorbeck, Wahle, Otto and Göring had all moved eastwards, dislodged in torrential rain by Hawthorn’s advance from Nyasaland, to the Medo-Msalu-Nanungu area, where Köhl had supervised the planting of crops. At a new HQ at Nanungu, from where von Lettow-Vorbeck ordered a period of rest while patrols were sent out in all directions to reconnoitre enemy troop dispositions, supplies were soon plentiful and the reception of the local inhabitants friendly.