Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  The reconcentration of the German detachments seemed to present van Deventer with an opportunity ‘to bring [the enemy] to bay’,19 and it was fortuitous that a new rebellion in Barue district on the border with Southern Rhodesia prevented Sousa Rosa from insisting that Portuguese troops be given a leading role in his plans. At the end of March the British troops were ordered to converge simultaneously on the enemy from the west and east, and a succession of scrappy – but fierce – encounters were fought in the next two months at places which invariably began with the letter ‘M’: Montepuez, Mahua, Medo, Mriti, Msalu, Matarica and Makoti. The appalling terrain, the vast area involved, and the small number of troops combined to turn the campaign into something akin to a deadly game of ring-a-roses. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was forty-eight years old on 20 March, was in buoyant mood when he heard news of Ludendorff ’s Kaiserschlacht Spring Offensive in Europe; and he even began to show signs of being punch-drunk with all the fighting, thinking that it might be possible to turn the tables on his pursuers by manoeuvring them into a trap. When a large British column was ‘roughly handled’ by ‘little more than two hundred’20 German troops at Mt Kireka, near Makoti, he was exuberant; but victory was only secured by incurring casualties in excess of forty per cent among the attacking force. Such high casualties could not be sustained indefinitely, and van Deventer knew it. The field reports of his commanders began to display an increasing obsession with the number of ‘GW’ – ‘German White’ – casualties, hoping that there was a point at which a shortage of officers and NCOs might force a surrender; a bell was rung for each one at the British HQ in Dar-es-Salaam.

  One eventuality that van Deventer – whose immense hands seemed to cover an entire map during briefings – had not seriously considered was the possibility that instead of attempting to break out of his encirclement by marching back to German East Africa (where Colonel Fitzgerald’s three battalions of 3/KAR awaited him on the Rovuma), von Lettow-Vorbeck might move further south. The logic behind this oversight was sound enough – that mass desertions would take place among the German askari if they were led still further from their homes and their route back was blocked – but it was to prove erroneous. Having received news from Otto von Scherbening’s detachment that the area around Malema, more than 300 miles to the south, was ‘very productive’,21 von Lettow-Vorbeck took the astonishing decision to proceed south towards the Lurio River. The askari were ‘squared’ by the simple expedient of reiterating that German East Africa would be returned to Germany after the war, and that any deserters found thereafter would be hanged. It was a threat which van Deventer, who could not secure permission from the War Office to ‘promise chiefs protection after the war’, was forced to concede ‘had great effect’.22

  Captain Franz Köhl’s seven companies, which were dislodged by Rosecol and Kartucol from Medo district in mid April, became the German rearguard for the move south, and his diary attests to the unceasing and severe nature of the fighting that ensued. In one engagement on 1 May at Mt Koronje, for example, the 22nd Mountain Battery was ambushed in a bamboo thicket by Spangenburg and lost five British officers and twenty-one Indian gunners in a matter of minutes; the battery’s two precious guns were only saved from falling into Spangenburg’s hands because there were no pack mules left alive. For the next three weeks Köhl clung tenaciously to positions to the north of Mt Koronje, but in the end he was very nearly trapped there. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, by his own admission, had ‘omitted to give [Köhl] definite orders to withdraw . . . immediately’ as the British simultaneously converged on the mountain and on Korema, twenty-four miles south of Mt Koronje; and on 22 May Köhl’s rearguard was ambushed in a narrow pass by Kartucol and Colonel Griffiths’s 3/1KAR. Köhl lost his baggage column, including all Schnee’s personal effects, all medical stores and 70,000 rounds of ammunition; Schnee came within a whisker of being captured. But Rosecol and the KAR Mounted Infantry, to their bitter disappointment, arrived just too late to prevent Köhl, the Bavarian gunner on whose pugnacity von Lettow-Vorbeck had become increasingly reliant, and Schnee, the Governor-in-exile of German East Africa, from escaping. As it was Köhl’s seven companies made their way south to rejoin von Lettow-Vorbeck, harried all the way by Kartucol, Rosecol and the KAR Mounted Infantry through the mountainous country inland from the port of Moçambique.

  On 1 June von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force crossed the Lurio River, 300 yards wide and four feet deep, while Captain Erich Müller’s advance guard made hell-for-leather for Malema to search for supplies, inflicting severe casualties on a company of 2/4KAR which endeavoured to block his path. After narrowly avoiding disaster at Mt Koronje von Lettow-Vorbeck’s demeanour was that of a verrückte Helmut – a man who had nothing to lose and would fight to the bitter end – and he set his sights on ‘the small hostile garrisons’23 he expected to find south of the Lurio. The Portuguese boma at Malema was the first prize, but altogether more tempting was the large settlement at Alto Molocué and in his determination to sack it von Lettow-Vorbeck marched his troops south at a rate of twenty miles a day for two weeks. An occasional ‘holding action’24 and ‘a series of little collisions’25 enabled him to break clean away from his pursuers, and he evaded a battalion of 1/KAR sent to cut him off to the west of the Inagu Hills by the simple expedient of passing through the eastern rather than western foothills. Thereafter he was gratified to learn that he had reached an area in which his troops had even less reason to fear the reaction of the local African population than usual. As mission-educated Lewis Bandawe put it, his people were incensed at the ‘slave-dealing’ of Portuguese cipais, the wholesale imposition of taxes and forced labour, and the order to grow cotton that had been the salient features of Portuguese rule; and according to him, when Müller’s advance guard approached Alto Molocué on 16 June and ‘started firing a machine gun near the boma . . . all the Portuguese authorities and their men ran away leaving everything behind them, which the Germans took possession of ’.26

  Alto Molocué, with its many European houses set on a small rise surrounded by orange trees in full bloom and overlooking hundreds of miles of forest, was as beautiful a place as any that the German troops had come across in Portuguese East Africa. But it did not yield the vast booty that von Lettow-Vorbeck had hoped for, and its Administrator had removed all ammunition from the boma before fleeing. He did leave all his documents behind, however, and from these von Lettow-Vorbeck learnt that Ille, the headquarters of the Lugella Company, lay to the south at the confluence of the Lugella and Likungo Rivers. He ordered his troops to prepare to march on within days and by the time British troops entered Alto Molocué at the end of June they found the place deserted and burnt to the ground.

  By crossing the Lurio River and slipping past the British ‘cordon’ in the Inagu Mountains, von Lettow-Vorbeck had again outwitted van Deventer. What the Germans referred to as ‘the Opera War’ was beginning, with the Germans stalking isolated Portuguese bomas and the British always in hot pursuit. When Schnee asked one askari why he never stopped grinning, the reply was ‘Mtiti – “the enemy” – in front. Mtiti at the side. That is why I laugh!’27 There was nothing comical about the situation for van Deventer. Pamforce’s fighting advance had taken it more than 250 miles from its coastal base, which necessitated a hasty reorganisation of its lines of communication so that the troops could be supplied from Moçambique rather than Porto Amelia; 1,100 lorries shipped by the War Office to German East Africa were found to be ‘the wrong sort for convoy work’;28 and at this crucial juncture he lost the services of the indomitable Gold Coast troops. Their regiment had been more or less continually in combat in East Africa for almost two years, during which time it had incurred casualties equivalent to half its original strength, and it was in dire need of a rest. Leaving only its Mounted Infantry unit behind, the rest of the regiment began the long journey home to West Africa laden with decorations and accolades.*

  While making for Ille von Lettow-Vorbeck captured a British carrier column a
nd Spangenburg appropriated a herd of pigs at Nampepo – a rare treat. But the real prize was found at Ille itself after the Portuguese garrison bolted at the first sight of Müller’s advance guard. Huge booty fell into German hands, including several machine-guns and much-needed clothing; indeed it was so huge that over 300,000kgs of foodstuffs were burnt before von Lettow-Vorbeck ordered a resumption of the march south towards the Indian Ocean. What van Deventer referred to, through gritted teeth, as a ‘new stage of the campaign’29 had begun in earnest.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Nhamacurra

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s escape across the Lurio River had, by his own admission, involved a good deal of luck. Not only had he nearly lost Köhl’s rearguard companies in the process of withdrawing southwards, but the river was in spate until only ‘a short time before’1 he needed to cross it. Often his troops had been forced to pitch camp for the night with the fires of the enemy visible no more than 1,000 yards away. But his skill matched his luck in withstanding the extreme pressure exerted on him by his pursuers and, as one South African forces magazine put it, ‘German though [von Lettow-Vorbeck] is, we must admit that he has made the utmost of his opportunities’.2

  By the time the German advance guard reached Ille the strain began to show. Franz Köhl’s field diary reveals as much in starkest detail; and Dr Deppe, one of the six German doctors who saw the campaign in Portuguese East Africa through to its conclusion, meticulously recorded ninety-five engagements with the enemy in the second quarter of 1918. Captured documents showed that, far from being able to maraud entirely at will, German commanders were ‘just as much disturbed by flanking movements’ as the British, and routinely resorted to exaggerating the casualties inflicted in each scrap in the hope that it would boost morale. Furthermore, the German columns were so short of carriers that insufficient food could be carried to sustain the troops during the succession of forced marches which took them south; and caring for the sick and wounded became increasingly problematic. Dr Meixner’s field hospitals were often no sooner set up than they would have to be dismantled, making the recuperation of the sick more prolonged and the performance of complex surgery on the severely wounded well-nigh impossible. Stocks of precious quinine also dwindled to just a few kilograms, with the result that one in three of the 276 Europeans who had started the campaign in Portuguese East Africa were left by the wayside during 1918. Most were found by the British, and given appropriate medical attention, but twenty-seven Germans recorded as still ‘missing’ at the end of the war probably suffered a lonely death in the bush.3

  As the strain on his troops increased, von Lettow-Vorbeck became even more autocratic. To the mounting annoyance of his detachment commanders, who were given ‘the greatest possible freedom of action’,4 he seldom told them where he was heading from day to day and the result was what von Lettow-Vorbeck called a ‘lack of caution’ on their part which caused ‘many unnecessary losses’.5 He was quite prepared to admit his share of responsibility for this situation, but that did not stop him from continually criticising the actions of others. He blamed Schnee, without justification, for the disaster that had befallen Köhl’s baggage column; he was said to ‘stare silently’ at anyone who showed the slightest hesitation in carrying out his orders ‘until that man shrank into a mere fraction of himself and disappeared’;6 and even General Wahle, still struggling on at the head of a detachment despite his considerable age, complained that he ‘had a feeling that [von Lettow] just wanted to get rid of me’. When von Lettow-Vorbeck tried to order the ailing Wahle to stay behind, he was told by the latter that the order was ‘illegal’ because it was tantamount to an order to surrender. ‘It was’, wrote Wahle, with evident satisfaction, ‘the first time that anyone had answered back to him’,7 and for once von Lettow-Vorbeck was forced to back down.

  Wahle and Schnee were not alone in feeling that their commander-in-chief wanted rid of them. As van Deventer successfully completed the realignment of his lines of communication so that his troops could be supplied from Moçambique rather than Porto Amelia, Sousa Rosa began to think that it was time for his troops to resume a more active role in the campaign. For a while van Deventer fobbed him off with a variety of excuses, but when Sousa Rosa ‘begged’ him to give his men ‘a chance in the field’ the decision to expose his ally ‘to the least possible danger’8 had to be rescinded. Political, rather than military, considerations were still to the fore: Sousa Rosa’s renewed enthusiasm had little to do with any improvement in the capability or morale of his troops and everything to do with his political masters in Lisbon. Sidónio Pais’s new government had been greatly embarrassed by the lamentable performance of most of the Portuguese troops at the Battle of the Lys during Ludendorff ’s offensive on the Western Front in April, and that same month some of their comrades had mutinied at their barracks in Horsham. Good news was urgently needed from somewhere, and Lisbon instructed Sousa Rosa to provide it.

  The prospects for renewed military co-operation between Sousa Rosa and van Deventer were bleak. A request from the War Office for permission to recruit 3,300 askari in Portuguese East Africa for service with a new King’s African Rifles brigade in the Middle East had failed to elicit a response; in the port of Beira street fights between British and Portuguese troops were a regular occurrence; in Niassa province the conduct of Colonel Cabrita, the new Acting Governor-General, was so anti-British (and anti-Sousa Rosa) that one of Sousa Rosa’s more loyal officers even challenged him to a duel; and most Europeans in the Portuguese ranks were as sick as ever. The only thing in favour of involving Portuguese troops once again was van Deventer’s critical shortage of manpower. The loss of the Gold Coast Regiment meant that he had just 7,500 British troops available for deployment against von Lettow-Vorbeck as he made his way towards the coastal ports of Moçambique province, and even sick Portuguese reinforcements might for once prove better than none at all.*

  On 1 June, as von Lettow-Vorbeck made his way across the Lurio River, Sousa Rosa was asked ‘to send a garrison and mobile column to Quelimane and to arrange to withdraw all stores and ammunition dumps from outlying posts and places on the coast or to destroy them’. The ‘necessity for immediate action’9 was made clear by van Deventer. But Sousa Rosa did not begin sending the first troops from Mocímboa da Praia south to Quelimane until two weeks later, and by then Alto Molocué had been ravaged and von Lettow-Vorbeck’s path to Quelimane lay open. The news of the fall of Alto Molocué completely unnerved Sousa Rosa, whose response was to request that three companies of 2/3KAR, which had recently been shipped to the port of Moçambique, should be rushed south to help him defend Quelimane immediately. Van Deventer was livid, and sent a scathing report to the War Office: ‘The Portuguese have failed me very badly’, he wrote on 25 June, ‘their advance troops did not reach Quelimane until June 20th. A company was then sent forward to Mocuba and yesterday scattered and ran away from 30 German native soldiers losing two machine-guns. Very little has been done in the way of securing the base; ammunition and supplies at Alto Molocué and Ille were allowed to fall into enemy hands, and no attempt has yet been made to bring into safety the large stocks of supplies which (I am now told) exist at various places on the coast north of Quelimane.’

  Within weeks of the renewal of Anglo-Portuguese ‘co-operation’, all van Deventer’s plans seemed to have been stymied by his allies; and the chaos was compounded when, at the exact same time as Sousa Rosa was requesting the assistance of the King’s African Rifles at Quelimane, the Governor of Moçambique province flatly refused to authorise the recruitment of carriers to support British troops stationed there. Van Deventer’s conclusion was forthright. Political considerations could not be allowed to undermine his conduct of the campaign any further: he informed the War Office that ‘the time has come when the Portuguese authorities must be told the truth, namely that their troops in Portuguese East Africa are totally unreliable and a source of grave danger to their Allies’, and suggested that ‘the Portuguese role be in f
uture definitely restricted to garrisoning sea bases or other places on coast and dealing with the Barue rebellion’.10 In the meantime van Deventer was left in the unenviable position of having to consider what might happen to the substantial settlement at Nhamacurra, between Ille and Quelimane. The only hope of preventing von Lettow-Vorbeck from overrunning the Portuguese garrison there appeared to rest on the presence of two companies of Colonel Gore-Browne’s 2/3KAR, which had completed a dash from Lindi, 600 miles north in German East Africa, in less time than it had taken Sousa Rosa just to move Portuguese troops from Mocímboa da Praia to Quelimane.