Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  At dusk on 1 July three companies led by Captain Erich Müller, once a ‘staffer’ but now showing himself to be ‘possessed of a very sound tactical judgment and great initiative’,11 fell on the Portuguese-held ‘western sector’ of Nhamacurra, driving straight between its western flank and the river. At least a quarter of the Portuguese troops were caught asleep at their posts, and two artillery pieces and a Lewis gun were captured by Müller as he drove the enemy out of their poorly prepared positions. The following day saw ‘several hours of very severe hand-to-hand fighting’12 as Müller pressed his attack against the Portuguese central sector while von Lettow-Vorbeck brought up his main force in support. By nightfall most of the 400 Portuguese troops holding Nhamacurra’s sisal factory had surrendered, and two more field guns and four machine-guns fell into German hands. This collapse forced Gore-Browne, whose troops were positioned on the eastern fringes of the settlement, to fall back on Nhamacurra’s little railway station where he redeployed his men and rallied those Portuguese troops which had not surrendered. Under his command the 21st Companhia Indigena and the artillery of Lieutenant Lemonde Macedo distinguished themselves alongside the KAR askari, and numerous attacks were beaten off. But at 3 p.m. on 3 July, the third day of the battle, a ferocious assault led by Kempner and von Ruckteschell and backed by a bombardment by the captured guns broke through Gore-Browne’s defences to the north-west of the station; and, with that, von Lettow-Vorbeck threw his entire force into the fray.

  British and Portuguese troops fought on, side by side, until they found themselves trapped with their backs to an angle in the Nhamacurra River. At dusk, as they tried to swim the ninety yards to safety, Gore-Browne and more than 100 British and Portuguese askari drowned; and the number of Allied troops who managed to escape the German envelopment of Nhamacurra was negligible. Three Portuguese battalions and two British companies had been decimated. When news of the disaster reached van Deventer he expressed his disgust to the War Office in no uncertain terms: in his opinion the Portuguese, who had never been anything but ‘an incredible drawback’ ever since von Lettow-Vorbeck had crossed the Rovuma, had now ‘utterly failed’ him. The reply from the War Office cautioned him ‘to exercise care that no action be taken by you that could be construed as an insult to the Portuguese nation’.*

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck ‘at last obtained what he sought’13 at Nhamacurra: sugar galore from the Lugella Company plantation, 3.75kgs of quinine, ten machine-guns, 444 modern rifles and more than 300,000 rounds of ammunition were found in various storehouses or on the battlefield. Most important of all, a further 300,000kgs of foodstuffs were also seized, a haul considerably too large for the number of carriers that could be mustered by a despairing Quartermaster-Lieutenant Besch. As he beetled about organising as best he could the removal of the booty, his comrades’ attention was diverted elsewhere: champagne, wine and spirits aplenty had been unearthed – a discovery which led to ‘a wholesale jollification’.14 ‘Not a single man black or white [was left] sober’, wrote General Wahle, adding that it was ‘fortunate that there was no enemy about’.15 By the time British troops did converge on Nhamacurra the enemy had slipped away eastwards. The only consolation was that von Lettow-Vorbeck had baulked at making use of a river steamer whose skipper, knowing nothing of the recent battle, had inadvertently steered it into Nhamacurra within hours of its capture.

  On 4 July Sousa Rosa called a council of war in Quelimane to discuss how the port could be defended. Two companies of KAR were on their way from Lindi and three Portuguese companies had been ordered north from Lourenço Marques, but in the meantime Quelimane’s garrison, such as it was, consisted of thirty ratings from the Adamastor, a Portuguese light cruiser lying offshore; 112 ratings from Commander Victor Boyes’s gunboat Thistle; 100 local auxiliaries; and sixty civilian volunteers. Boyes and Major Cohen, the British Liaison Officer, were adamant that Quelimane must be defended to the last man. But they were only supported by a minority of Portuguese officers present; and Sousa Rosa and the Acting Governor of Quelimane district were visibly shaken by the prospect of an imminent attack. ‘It was obvious’, wrote Boyes in his official report of the conference, ‘that the Commander-in-Chief was panic-stricken and had every intention of leaving the town; in support of his policy of not defending the town, he read an excerpt from a book on military strategy wherein it was laid down that an enemy would not sack an undefended town’. The thought of resistance was ‘clearly very repugnant’ to Sousa Rosa, and his Chief of Staff was known to have placed all his kit on a launch and shifted his headquarters to the waterside ready to skedaddle on the Adamastor. In the end the British officers, fed up with the Portuguese propensity to present von Lettow-Vorbeck with ‘convenient Ordnance and Supply dumps’, carried the argument and Sousa Rosa, though angry at what he perceived as a challenge to his authority and ‘in such a nervous state as to be hardly responsible for his actions’,16 was forced to back down.

  It was fortunate for Sousa Rosa, who after the disaster at Nhamacurra decided that he was ‘very unwell’,17 that von Lettow-Vorbeck had no way of knowing that Quelimane was to all intents and purposes undefended. Furthermore he was concerned that his troops were too near to the Zambezi, and that they might find themselves trapped between British troops and a river which they had no way of crossing. It was time ‘to turn about’, but first, rather than attack Quelimane, von Lettow-Vorbeck decided that he wanted ‘to cause the enemy anxiety’18 by moving east towards Moçambique. So he recrossed the Likungo River, with Köhl to the rear and Müller in advance of the main force, and made for Namirrue, a hill-top post held by just a single company of 2/3KAR. For two days in the fourth week of July the garrison succeeded in thwarting Müller’s attempts to overrun it, but when a British relief column inadvertently marched straight into von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force it was routed and Namirrue’s fate was sealed. This completed a disastrous month for 3/KAR. The one remaining company of 2/3KAR was sent to garrison Quelimane, and the half-company of 3/3KAR that survived the ill-fated attempt to relieve Namirrue was put on lines of communication duty at Lindi for the rest of the war. To van Deventer’s consternation, the battles at Nhamacurra and Namirrue had shown that not all KAR units were as seemingly indestructible as Giffard’s 2/KAR.

  By the beginning of August von Lettow-Vorbeck had moved on to Chalaúa, forty-five miles inland from António Enes at the centre of a ‘wide and exceptionally fertile district’. He had retreated the equivalent of the distance between Paris and Leningrad since March 1916 and now, ‘free from interference’,19 he was briefly able to rest his troops. While he planned his next move patrols were sent out raiding as far as they wished, and the proximity of German troops triggered yet another rebellion against the Portuguese administration in the coastal province of Angoche. The rebellion was something of a godsend for van Deventer because it forced Massano de Amorim to admit that while his troops tackled the insurrection he would be able to contribute no more to the campaign than defending Portuguese East Africa’s ports; equally welcome was the news that Nhamacurra and the Portuguese ‘mutiny’ at Quelimane had decided Massano de Amorim to sack Sousa Rosa. Portugal’s campaign in East Africa was over.

  ‘Was it worth the effort of having fought?’ was the question posed by many a Portuguese combatant, to which the answer was invariably: ‘It is sad to say, but I think not.’20 Official statistics show that 19,438 officers and soldiers were sent from Portugal to fight for the Pátria in East Africa with the various expeditionary forces, but the veracity of the records on which the statistics are based is at best questionable. The total number of European troops to have served in the campaign may be accurate enough, but in compiling the list of casualties Portuguese officials, in Lisbon and in East Africa, simply told the story they wanted the public to hear – and in so doing produced some startling anomalies. For example, just sixteen Portuguese officers, thirty-eight other ranks, and eighty-eight askari were said to have died in combat, whereas 2,145 were said to have died from
diseases of one sort or another. The message that Portugal wanted heard was clear: it was nature, not German troops, that had defeated its troops. As for the levies employed by Portugal in the campaign, a total of exactly 8,000 suggests that record-keeping was as non-existent as it was for the ‘60,000’ carriers recruited for service with the Portuguese troops and ‘30,000’ for service with the British troops. It seems that round numbers were good enough for enumerating the participation of the indigenous population, although four ‘token’ heroes were found among the askari and were awarded the Cruz de Guerra.

  There can be no doubting the magnitude of the trauma inflicted on Portugal by the Great War. The nation was already in ‘spasm’ on the eve of war; by 1918 it was on the verge of total collapse.* Some of their allies considered it ‘a shame to laugh at the Portuguese’, that they were ‘doing their best’;21 and van Deventer was prevailed upon to compliment the ‘brave and efficient Portuguese officers and men’ (and to decry their ‘native troops’ for being ‘such poor material’)22 in his final despatch on the subject of Anglo-Portuguese co-operation. Sousa Rosa was predictably exonerated of any misconduct by a Commission of Enquiry in Lisbon, and was even made a Companion of the Bath by Britain in the interests of harmonious relations with the velha aliada. But when Portugal sought a reward for its contribution to the war at Versailles, and lodged a claim for war reparations for the suffering inflicted on 153,000 Africans, her allies would decide that enough was enough.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Tipperary mbali sana sana!*

  Van Deventer could not afford to let von Lettow-Vorbeck settle indefinitely in Chalaúa district, raiding Portuguese outposts at will and stirring up the local population. During the first week in August, just as the short rains began, he started to redeploy his troops in an arc to the south of a new motor road connecting Moçambique with Nampula and Malema (a boma to the north of the Inagu Hills); and he ensured that the ports of Quelimane and Moçambique were reinforced and were supported by gunboats lying offshore. To the west, Hawthorn, who had succeeded Northey as commander-in-chief of the Nyasaland and Rhodesian units, ordered his troops to concentrate between Malokotera and Munevala; and the task of flushing von Lettow-Vorbeck out of Chalaúa district fell to the three battalions of Colonel Giffard’s Kartucol and the KAR Mounted Infantry. Van Deventer knew that the only chance of securing victory lay, as ever, in harrying von Lettow-Vorbeck ‘until his forces had been so reduced as to be innocuous’.1 But with fewer than 35,000 troops now available in the whole of East Africa (of whom one in five were sick at any one time) his strategy was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

  The conditions in which Kartucol advanced in the second week in August were execrable. Pouring rain turned the black cotton soil into a quagmire, and elephant grass taller than a man often restricted vision to a matter of yards. On 13 August, as Giffard’s troops finally approached Chalaúa, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force was thought to be still in the district and the chances of forcing him to fight looked good. But German scouts had warned of Kartucol’s imminent arrival and von Lettow-Vorbeck had slipped away south-west to cross the Ligonha and Molocué Rivers just a few miles from the sea. The direction of his withdrawal made the situation ‘extremely confused’, and briefly raised the possibility that Quelimane might after all be attacked. By the third week in August, however, von Lettow-Vorbeck was known to be heading due north. Kartucol was rushed by a series of forced marches, often covering more than twenty miles a day in spite of the poor weather, to the Inagu Hills to head him off and was joined there by one of General Hawthorn’s columns, comprising 3/1KAR and the NRP. On 24 August a patrol of 2/4KAR stumbled into the German advance guard near the Lugella River, a little south of Numarroe, and was pursued all the way back to the boma (whose Portuguese administrator ‘professed no knowledge of the approach of the enemy’).2 After a fierce baffle, during which the commanding officer of 2/4KAR was captured and four of his officers and forty-seven askari lost their lives, Numarroe was overrun. Twenty miles to the north, the garrison at Regone braced itself for an immediate attack, fortifying the boma to such an extent that only a prolonged siege would cause it to fall.

  After Numarroe it was clear to van Deventer and Hawthorn that von Lettow-Vorbeck had skilfully shifted his line of advance westwards so as to bypass the Inagu Hills and Kartucol, and with each day van Deventer grew more certain that the German commander-in-chief had finally set his sights on marching all the way back to German East Africa. But von Lettow-Vorbeck’s next move provided a reminder, if such were needed, that he was anything but predictable. After dark on 26 August he led his troops straight past Regone and made for Lioma, pursued by 3/4KAR and ‘Shortcol’ – 1/4KAR and the RNR. Scraps between opposing patrols now became increasingly frequent and increasingly ferocious. After one engagement the German askari were so charged that they simply shot all their prisoners, many of whom were former comrades who had swapped sides. Their conduct was motivated as much by fear as by a desire to exact retribution: the enemy’s use of German commands and German tactics when deploying former German askari in battle was calculated to induce panic, and after eight months of campaigning in Portuguese East Africa sheer exhaustion, hunger and the excessive heat of the time of year intensified the sense of desperation among von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops still further.

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck may have confounded van Deventer’s well-laid plans by passing well to the west of the British troops in the vicinity of the Inagu Hills, but at Lioma, twenty miles to the north-west of Regone, he meant to fight. On 30 August he attacked Lioma’s well-entrenched camp from three sides, wiping out a platoon of 1/1KAR before the first troops of Giffard’s Kartucol could reach the embattled garrison. 3/2KAR was the first battalion to arrive, and it immediately launched a counter-attack, driving off the German troops and inflicting heavy casualties in the process. By dawn on 31 August 2/2KAR and 1/2KAR were also on the scene, having marched right through the night from the Inagu Hills, and a day of immensely confused fighting ensued. On the German side Captain Poppe was shot in the chest and Quartermaster-Lieutenant Besch’s thigh artery was severed; Lieutenant Boell and Dr Küdicke’s entire field hospital were captured; and Lieutenant von Schrötter, the Königsberg’s Lieutenant Freund and three senior NCOs were killed. The loss of these officers was serious, the more so after the recent capture of Major Schulz and Lieutenant Ott and the death of Lieutenant Selke; and when Karl Göring was wounded in mid afternoon von Lettow-Vorbeck was forced to reel in his and Müller’s detachments and break off the engagement. As the Schutztruppe were pursued north by Kartucol through dense bush and rugged hills towards the Lurio River, von Lettow-Vorbeck knew that the battle at Lioma had been a narrow escape. But unbeknownst to him only Shortcol stood between him and the Lurio River, and it was too weak to arrest his advance; while in his rear Kartucol was flagging after marching 435 miles in the previous month. On 4 and 5 September von Lettow-Vorbeck led his troops across the Lurio without encountering any opposition.

  Despite their recent travails two of Kartucol’s three battalions unexpectedly outran the enemy at Pere Hills at noon on 6 September; and as a result became cut off from 2/2KAR when it was set upon by Müller’s advance guard. Ten machine-guns were deployed against the battalion as it took cover in and around a dry riverbed, and German troops fought their way to within fifty yards of its transport and baggage column; but in the late afternoon Colonel Giffard outflanked Müller with 1/2KAR and 3/2KAR and forced him to withdraw. Throughout the day’s fighting the KAR NCOs, particularly those of 2/2KAR on whom the survival of the battalion depended after seven of its British officers were killed or wounded, displayed ‘courage, initiative and leadership . . . at their best’.3 Eight DCMs were awarded for the action to add to the sixteen won at Lioma, thereby confirming the reputation that Kartucol had earned for being as effective a unit as any deployed against von Lettow-Vorbeck in the war. It was also the most persistent column, having pursued von Lettow-Vorbeck for 1,600 miles thr
ough Portuguese East Africa, crossing twenty-nine large rivers and fighting thirty-two engagements along the way. At the end of September its askari were finally sent back to garrisons in German East Africa for a much-needed rest.

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck described the fighting at Pere Hills as ‘pretty violent’4 and his considerable respect for Giffard’s troops decided him against risking a counter-attack after dark. His casualties in the first week of September were already serious enough: in addition to the thirty-four Germans who had fallen at Lioma, about 200 askari had also been killed, wounded or captured there and at Pere Hills. In other words a single week had robbed him of about fifteen per cent of his combatant strength, and two companies, 14/FK and 4/SchK, were so depleted that they had to merge. Worse still, as he marched north towards Mahua, a bronchial virus of exceptional virulence rampaged through his dozen remaining companies (following hard on the heels of an outbreak of cerebro-spinal meningitis). In no time over half the men were affected and, as no more than 100 could be carried at any one time, many of the rest were abandoned to an uncertain fate in the bush.