Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  Schnee’s diary for this period reveals the extent of the hardships endured by the Schutztruppe during September. As a civilian, and somewhat superfluous, observer what preoccupied him more than the fighting were the sicknesses afflicting all the troops, askari wives going into labour, and the loss of individuals whom he counted as friends. When the bronchial virus abated, having killed one in ten of those it struck, he hoped that the suffering might diminish – but then there was an outbreak of smallpox which incapacitated more than fifty askari in one company. Schnee’s sympathy for the plight of Dr Müller and the staff of the mobile hospital was immense, all the more so when Müller himself succumbed to malaria and had to hand over to Dr Taute. As the askari marched on towards the Rovuma, Schnee noticed that even the ‘fit’ askari coughed incessantly, their lungs wracked by respiratory complaints brought on by the combination of freezing cold nights, rain and river-crossings, and searing daytime heat.

  When the fast-flowing Lujenda River was forded in mid September, and the mountains to the east of Lake Nyasa came into view, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops found themselves on the plains leading to the Rovuma – and German East Africa. The easier terrain was certainly welcomed by the askari, who had marched for an average of ten hours a day for thirty-five days, but the plight of the carriers worsened. Many had been impressed when the German troops entered Portuguese East Africa ten months earlier, and when a number of them attempted to escape to their homes von Lettow-Vorbeck had their comrades roped together and issued orders that any ‘deserters’ should be shot on sight. Every night rifle shots rang out through the darkness, but 300 of the 4,000 carriers gathered up since leaving Chalaúa district did manage to evade their guards and slip away southwards. Schnee recorded his rather belated concern that the only ‘crime’ of these ‘innocent people’ was ‘trying to escape from having been compelled to act as bearers’,5 but at no stage, even when criticising ‘the High Command’ for ‘sacrificing life’,6 does he appear to have considered that any responsibility for the increasing cruelty being meted out on the carriers or the inhabitants of an area that German troops were now raiding for the fourth time in two years, might lie with him. There were hardly any crops worth seizing this time, and most of the local population wisely fled before the advance of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘army’. Indeed so great was the problem of supplies that at an impromptu auction held among the German officers and NCOs a tin containing a few bits of mouldy chocolate fetched Rs130 – more than two years’ wages for a British carrier – and the scrawniest of fowls fetched Rs40–50.

  The predicament of van Deventer’s troops was no better. His columns had been called upon to perform yet more ‘remarkable feats of endurance’, often in bush so dense that large hostile patrols could pass within half a mile of each other in total ignorance of the presence of the other; and they too were on very short rations because ‘emulating the utterly ruthless German method’ of living off the country was deemed ‘impossible’7 by van Deventer. With Kartucol now a busted flush, and Shortcol unable to overhaul the retreating enemy, von Lettow-Vorbeck reached the Rovuma at the end of September. At Mitomoni, near the Rovuma’s confluence with the Messinge, he led 172 Germans, 1,260 askari and 3,000 carriers and camp-followers back into German East Africa. Van Deventer’s indignity could only have been greater if his opponent had, just for old times’ sake, sacked Negomano, some 250 miles downriver.*

  Less than a week after crossing the Rovuma the Schutztruppe were within striking distance of Songea. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s first thought was to head for Tabora, following in Wintgens’s footsteps across the desolate steppe northwest of the St Moritz Mission. But after brushing aside attempts by ‘Kartufor’ – 2/4KAR and the NRP – to block his route on the Songea–Wiedhafen road he decided that his freedom of movement appeared to be wholly unrestricted. By the time he reached Njombe, Northey’s former headquarters, in mid October only a single company of Kartufor remained in close pursuit – and it had far outrun its supply lines. It was abundantly clear that van Deventer was flummoxed by the situation confronting him. General Hawthorn’s troops were ordered to stay in close contact with the enemy; Kartucol was remobilised and instructed to advance against von Lettow-Vorbeck from Bismarckburg, on Lake Tanganyika, and from Northern Rhodesia; and a protective cordon was established to the south of the Central Railway between Morogoro and Dodoma. But in the meantime, von Lettow-Vorbeck altered his plans: so little pressure was being exerted on him that he decided that Northern Rhodesia presented an altogether more proximate and tempting target than Tabora – and it would not involve leading his troops across the steppe. One of his officers explained his thinking thus: ‘the fact that the inner part of Rhodesia had not been affected by the war and hence had enough provisions was one of the main reasons for this decision. What is more, the English would not have reckoned with the Germans heading to Rhodesia and hence would not have been prepared for it. Later from Rhodesia there were many options that opened up for the Germans . . . a whole range of possibilities, whose effects were not to be underestimated.’8 They included a trek right through to Portuguese West Africa – today’s Angola – and the Atlantic.

  One additional factor that almost certainly influenced von Lettow-Vorbeck’s decision was the constant stream of deserters from the German ranks, including his own gun-bearer and many of the veteran Angoni carriers who were now within striking distance of their homelands. The gravity of the situation finally seemed to dawn on von Lettow-Vorbeck: in marked contrast to his utter ruthlessness during the last few weeks in Portuguese East Africa he remarked that ‘it would after all have been asking too much of human nature to expect that these men, who had not seen their people for years, should now march straight through their native district’.9 The askari were also given a pay rise by the ‘High Command’, a measure which Schnee regarded as ‘obviously hopeless’10 since the troops had been forced to accept credit for their services for nearly two years. Deserting carriers and askari were not the only ones for whom the war ended soon after the crossing of the Rovuma. General Wahle, who had survived being shot through his bush hat at Namirrue, and was now suffering from a double ruptured hernia, was finally forced to request that he be left behind at the mission station at Njombe. He was treated by his captors with huge respect and whisked away to hospital in Iringa by car, so weak that he could barely dress himself. For Wahle, a holiday to visit his son, who was now languishing in a POW camp in Egypt, had turned into four years’ active service; during that time he had been awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, the Pour le Mérite, and gained the distinction of being the oldest combatant of the war on either side.

  Schnee’s pride and fanatical devotion to duty did not allow him to relinquish his post in similar fashion, although he too was an ‘utter wreck’.11 On 9October the sole remaining German wireless, which could receive but not transmit, was able to pick up fragments of news from Europe for the first time in almost a year and Schnee was greatly encouraged to learn that German troops still held the ‘good old Hindenburg Line’.12 In the following week, however, snippets of news found at abandoned British posts – a telegram here, a Reuter transcript there – were less positive; and at Njombe Schnee came across ‘very unfavourable news relating to the Western Front, the Bulgarian armistice, and the capture of Damascus’. All in all Germany’s position was ‘not conducive to good cheer’,13 and the death of colonial pioneer Carl Peters in September was even interpreted by some German officers as heralding the end of Germany’s status as a colonial power in Africa.

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s reaction to the news from other fronts was that it all sounded ‘very improbable’,14 and he ordered his troops to push on without giving it a second thought. At one point on the march towards Neu Utengule they had to battle for miles through a bush fire with flames several metres high, but the mission was reached by the end of October. There was still no resistance en route, although the German force was now right in the heart of the territory through which Northey, Hawthorn and Mur
ray had advanced two years previously; and, having outflanked any British troops which might have been guarding the northern tip of Lake Nyasa, von Lettow-Vorbeck was able to turn south and set a course straight for the Northern Rhodesia border. On 1 November 1918 Spangenburg was ordered to attack Fife while Köhl’s rearguard turned to face any British troops in close pursuit. Köhl need not have worried, as 1/4KAR was more than thirty miles behind the German force, but Spangenburg’s attack showed just how weak the Schutztruppe’s offensive capability had become. By mid-afternoon on 1 November the boma at Fife was strongly held by the dogged Northern Rhodesian Police Service Battalion, which had been rushed up Lake Nyasa from Fort Johnston with only hours to spare; and as von Lettow-Vorbeck’s artillery now comprised nothing more than an old Portuguese gun and a trench mortar which blew up, he was unable to make any impression on Fife’s defences. Worse still, von Lettow-Vorbeck came within a whisker of being killed and after a few hours he called off the attack and decided to push on in search of easier pickings. Hawthorn expected him to make for Abercorn, and deployed one of the remobilised battalions of Kartucol and troops who had been garrisoning Kasama to block his path. But once again von Lettow-Vorbeck confounded all expectations and made straight for defenceless Kasama. A state of near panic ensued in Northern Rhodesia. The two other remobilised battalions of Kartucol had received their orders to proceed to Northern Rhodesia, but had not even left Lindi; and in their absence only Colonel Hawkins’s 1/4KAR, which had marched 1,830 miles in the previous six months and only possessed a map from a schoolboy atlas to guide them in Northern Rhodesia, was in any position to stay in touch with the enemy.

  In late October and early November the news from Europe gleaned by Schnee and ‘the High Command’ from captured sources became ever worse. There was a rumour that Hindenburg was dead, and that peace and an armistice were about to be imposed on Germany. ‘It seems to me’, wrote Schnee, ‘that for the main part everyone hopes for peace in the near future, with the deliverance that it will bring us from our situation, which grows ever more unbearable and which consciously or unconsciously will leave its mark permanently on us.’ But he was utterly mystified as to ‘how our people [could] have deserved such an ending?’15 This sense of dismay, and of being cruelly wronged, was even more pronounced among the remnants of German East Africa’s officer corps than in Germany itself. When the Schutztruppe had crossed the Rovuma into Portuguese East Africa a year earlier the Fatherland still seemed to hold all the aces in Europe; now only the two of clubs seemingly remained in the Kaiser’s hand.

  During the night of 3–4 November hundreds more carriers deserted the Schutztruppe, including fifty from Schnee’s own column; and on 5 November, when Köhl’s rearguard successfully beat off an attack by 1/4 KAR near the White Fathers’ Mission at Kayambi, only 3/FK and 10/FK were still able to field more than 100 askari. So great was the shortage of officers that three of the eleven German companies were now commanded by a sergeant, an under-paymaster and an ‘acting-officer’. Yet von Lettow-Vorbeck, having ‘appropriated’ a herd of 400 cattle and six months’ stock of quinine from the mission station at Mwenzo, remained as stubborn and optimistic as ever, his courage ‘unquenchable’,16 and still believed that it would be possible ‘to reach the Zambesi-Congo watershed’.17 After Fife even Colonel Hawkins, commanding the closest British troops, was of the opinion that von Lettow-Vorbeck had broken clear away; and on 9 November Spangenburg’s advance column reached Kasama. Thanks to the foresight of District Officer Hector Croad, who had been warned of the imminent arrival of the Schutztruppe on his turf, Spangenburg found the town deserted and stripped of all stocks of desperately needed ammunition. Cigarettes and tobacco were the only comforts left behind, and without halting a moment longer than necessary Spangenburg sped off in pursuit of Croad, who had removed all supplies to a rubber factory on the south side of the Chambezi River.

  On 12 November, as Spangenburg reached the Chambezi and started to probe the defences of the rubber factory, von Lettow-Vorbeck arrived at Kasama. Köhl’s rearguard had had to fight a fierce four-hour battle with Hawkins’s 1/4KAR and been forced to disappear into the bush to the west, but as soon as Spangenburg took the rubber factory – defended only by invalids and convicts released by Croad from Kasama’s gaol – he sensed that his route south would be completely open. That day, however, Köhl captured a British despatch rider from whom he learnt of the Armistice in Europe, and von Lettow-Vorbeck set off on a bicycle to inform Spangenburg. Twenty-four hours later he reached the Chambezi just in time to forestall what would undoubtedly have been a decisive attack on the rubber factory. Croad crossed the river to meet the German commander-in-chief. The message that the war was over circulated rapidly among the German askari spread out between Kasama and the Chambezi.

  Despite all the news from Europe that had filtered through to him in recent weeks, von Lettow-Vorbeck remained ‘convinced that the conclusion of hostilities must have been favourable . . . to Germany’.18 Indeed his state of denial was so great that he immediately began preparations to move all his troops across the Chambezi in case the peace proved short-lived; and he refused to believe Croad when he told him that the Kaiser had fled to Holland and that Germany was now a republic. The ‘prevailing opinion’ among German officers and NCOs was that Germany must have ‘come off fairly well’.19 But Schnee’s reaction was more guarded: he experienced ‘no feeling of happiness’ at the cessation of hostilities and just hoped that ‘everything will end in a fair and honourable way’.20

  The terms of the Armistice came as a rude shock to von Lettow-Vorbeck and his officers, as did news conveyed by British officers confirming the state of turmoil in Germany, the mutiny of the German fleet, the Kaiser’s abdication and Ludendorff ’s flight to Sweden. Not a single one of them would ever accept the notion that Germany had been the prime aggressor in the war, and extreme bitterness set in when Schnee’s ‘worst anticipations’ were surpassed by the news that Alsace-Lorraine was being wrested from Germany, the Rhineland occupied, and the colonies seized. In Northern Rhodesia, as the rains began in earnest, Schnee, von Lettow-Vorbeck and 153 German colonials finally started to realise that ‘only the gods knew what the future holds for Germany’21 and her African empire.

  At 11 a.m. on 25 November 1918, under a stormy rain-filled sky, Brigadier-General W.F.S. Edwards received von Lettow-Vorbeck’s surrender at Abercorn. Lieutenant Boell, the official historian of the German campaign, recorded that ‘a wrestling match that held the whole world in shock and disbelief, and which was probably unique in the history of the world, had finally drawn to a conclusion’.22 It was a year to the day since the German commander had invaded Portuguese East Africa, and exactly two weeks after the signing of the Armistice in Europe; 34,000 British troops, supported by 71,000 carriers, remained in the field in East Africa. The guard of honour was provided by askari of 1/4KAR and the Northern Rhodesia Police. Interest in the German survivors, who looked ‘hard as nails’ though they obviously ‘felt the surrender keenly’,23 was immense. Colonel Hawkins recorded his first impressions in the following words: ‘Von Lettow himself turned out to be a very different man from what we had expected. A little over medium height, and wearing a short pointed beard, with fair hair turning grey, he is a fine-looking man of forty-nine . . . instead of the haughty Prussian one had expected to meet, he turned out to be a most courteous and perfectly mannered man: his behaviour throughout his captivity was a model to anyone in such a position.’24 Von Lettow-Vorbeck was the first to admit, in conversation with Hawkins, that ‘the luck of war’ had run in his favour. He also revealed that his worst fear of the whole campaign was that Smuts would effect naval landings at Tanga and Dar-es-Salaam at the same time as his advance against Taveta in March 1916 – a strategy which, in his rush to end the campaign swiftly, Smuts had never seriously contemplated.

  The official surrender document was signed by Edwards, von Lettow-Vorbeck, Spangenburg and Captain Anderson, and Edwards politely declined von Le
ttow-Vorbeck’s offer of his sword. German officers were also permitted to retain their swords and revolvers. The fact that Schnee was not a signatory, when Dr Seitz had signed the capitulation of German South-West Africa three years earlier, was indicative of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s insistence that the surrender of his troops did not signify a surrender of Germany’s control of its East African colony. But it was anomalous: as Governor, Schnee was still technically the supreme commander in German East Africa, and his superior – Colonial Minister Dr Solf – was the supreme commander of all Schutztruppe. Whether this lapse in protocol was symptomatic of the pre-eminence over Schnee that von Lettow-Vorbeck had secured in the early months of the war, or merely of the collapse of Ordnung and Protokolle in Germany itself, is a moot point. The British inventory of men and arms recorded the presence at Abercorn of 155 Germans, and among them were the detachment commanders Otto, Köhl, Müller, Spangenburg, von Ruckteschell, Kempner* and von Scherbening and the two surviving artillery officers from the Königsberg, Apel and Wenig, who had been so instrumental to von Lettow-Vorbeck’s success during the ten months in Portuguese East Africa. These were the remnants of more than 3,000 Europeans who had taken to the field during the campaign, of whom about one in five had been killed in combat, or died from their wounds or disease.25 To ensure that their sacrifice had not been in vain, von Lettow-Vorbeck – the only German commander to have occupied British soil in the Great War – punctiliously insisted that the Schutztruppe’s one remaining field gun, thirty-seven (mostly British) machine-guns, and 1,071 (mostly Portuguese) rifles should count towards the total weaponry surrendered by Germany in Europe.

  Interest in the 1,168 German askari was equally keen. Only 261 of them had been recruited during the year in Portuguese East Africa, and a majority of the survivors had served in the Schutztruppe for periods in excess of fifteen years. Most were Wamanyema, but many Wasukuma carriers had also taken up arms along the way. Of their former comrades, 6,308 had been killed in combat, died from disease, or been listed as missing presumed dead.26 Three-quarters of the 2,000 remaining carriers, most of whom were Wasukuma, were discovered to have served right through the Portuguese East Africa campaign. For them, as for the askari and the 1,101 camp-followers (the wives, children and servants of the askari), a return home was finally possible.†