Louis Botha's War

by Adam Cruise

  Of the capture, Reitz notes with some sadness that the use of mechanised vehicles ‘spelt the end of the picturesque South African commando system’.17

  Beyers, in the meantime, was trapped in the northern Free State. Seven days after De Wet’s capture, and hemmed in on all sides, he tried to swim with his horse across the flooded Vaal River. It was the last time anyone saw him alive; both man and beast drowned in the attempt. This left only Kemp, with a small band of men and horses, in the field. With Botha’s men pursuing him relentlessly, he made a heroic dash across the Kalahari in order to link up with Maritz, who was waiting sedately in the German colony. The rebels, struggling over dunes and stony ground, fought a continuous rearguard for what must have seemed like an eternity. They finally staggered across the border near present-day Nakop with government forces snapping at their heels. The Germans welcomed the exhausted men with some trepidation. The rebellion, in spite of providing a short respite for the German forces, had not worked in their favour.

  By Christmas, Botha had cleaned up the Free State and Transvaal. Most of the rebel ringleaders were either dead or imprisoned, and the prime minister was happy enough with the state of affairs to take a well-earned holiday on his family farm in the eastern Transvaal. Just before Christmas, Maritz and a recuperated Kemp tried to launch a hare-brained surprise attack on Upington, where Brigadier General Jaap van Deventer had taken over from Brits earlier in the month.

  Jacob Louis van Deventer, or Jaap as he preferred to be called, was a colourful, tough-as-nails and larger-than-life Boer commander, both in character and physique. He was a giant of a man, standing almost two metres tall, and an expert practitioner of commando tactics. As with most of his contemporaries, Van Deventer had served in the Boer War, first under De la Rey, then Beyers, and finally with Smuts and Reitz in the northern Cape. It is said that he was present when the first and last shots were fired, but was seriously wounded towards the end of the war. Reitz found him ‘huddled on the ground before his horse … Blood was pouring from a bullet wound in his throat, and his tongue was so lacerated that he could not speak.’18 For the remainder of his life, Van Deventer spoke with a stifled rasp as a result of his injury, and he commanded the utmost respect from almost all who met him.

  Maritz and Kemp’s last-ditch effort to attack Upington failed dismally in the face of the increased numbers of Van Deventer’s government forces mustered along the river and a personality clash between the two rebel commanders. The calm Kemp refused to serve under the bellicose Maritz, who insisted on making himself supreme commander of the rebel forces. Nonetheless, they tried again a month later, on 24 January 1915. This time their forces were bolstered by German Schütztruppe and the Burenvreikorps, a group of irregular militia consisting exclusively of Boer War veterans who had fled South Africa to the German colony in 1902 and had settled on cattle farms along the Nossob and Auob rivers in the south-east.

  The Germans’ eventual entry to the rebellion is somewhat puzzling. It was against both the late von Heydebreck’s sound advice and Germany’s mandate. As Major von Rappard, von Heydebreck’s like-minded second in command, had been killed at Sandfontein and the next most experienced officer, Major Franke, was on a mission against the Portuguese in the far north (see Chapter 5), the local German command in the south was handed to the inexperienced Major Hermann Ritter. Ritter, for reasons known only to himself, decided to throw all caution to the wind and join with Maritz and Kemp to attack the Union.

  He supplied the rebels with four light field guns, a Pom-Pom gun and a company of mounted riflemen. The idea was to launch his own mounted column of 400 men with four artillery guns on Steinkopf. Taken in isolation this was not a bad move, since Steinkopf had been evacuated during the rebellion and only a small detachment of the Witwatersrand Rifles Regiment was left to guard it.19 However, in the bigger scheme of things it was of little value. Steinkopf by then had been jettisoned by the South African supreme command as a launch pad to invade the colony, and the railhead’s isolation would have little served the German cause. As it happened, Maritz and Kemp once again failed at Upington (they were successfully repelled by Van Deventer), prompting Ritter to redirect his attack in order to divert the South African forces away from the disorganised rebels. He turned his attention instead on the town nearest his position, Kakamas, more for want of something to attack than anything else.

  As usual for forces operating in this sector, Ritter’s most immediate hurdle was his stretched lines of communication, one of the reasons von Heydebreck had refrained from such a move. In diverting their attack from Steinkopf to Kakamas, Ritter and his men had to pass through country devoid of water and fodder, a problem made even worse by the fact that there had been no time to organise supplies before they left. Nakop, on the border, had a well, which they reached on 1 February, but since the rebels had passed through a week earlier there was not enough water left for all the horses to satiate their thirst. Ritter was forced to move on to another watering point on the Molopo River, about fifty kilometres into Union territory.20 It was the first and last time South Africa was invaded. Technically it was not an invasion – it was more of an incursion – but nonetheless Ritter holds the accolade of being the only enemy commander to take a regular force of soldiers into South Africa.

  Whatever it was, it was unsuccessful. The water situation at Molopo was the same as at Nakop, and the tired and thirsty mounts were pushed further south towards the Orange River. By this time all excess baggage had been sent back to lighten the load of the thirsty beasts, but it meant the soldiers were on severe rations, too.21

  Before reaching the river, Ritter and his men captured an oxwagon and its Baster driver. The Basters are the descendants of Cape Colony Dutch and indigenous African women, and live largely in and around the town of Rehoboth. The man told them there were two ferries on the river at Kakamas, a kilometre apart. He also maintained that there was an exposed enemy encampment on their side of the river. Based on this information, Ritter split his meagre force into two columns. First Lieutenant Friedrich von Hadeln was to take a division directly to Kakamas to attack the enemy contingent and secure the ferry downriver, while Ritter and the others encircled to the east as the left flank to take control of the ferry stationed upriver before attacking the enemy on its flank and rear.

  The columns eventually reached the Orange River on 4 February, having covered a staggering 175 kilometres from their base at Warmbad in a week, and realised they had been misinformed. As Lukin had previously discovered, the local man was more concerned with providing intelligence that would please his interlocutors than conveying actual facts. While there were indeed two ferries, they were in fact five kilometres apart. And the exposed enemy encampment was in reality well entrenched with artillery and on the other side of the river. Since the ferries were much further apart than expected, contact between the two columns was lost, and, as the enemy was on the far bank of the river, the element of surprise and encirclement was mitigated, rendering a coordinated attack impossible.22

  Kakamas itself lay on the south side of the river and consisted of isolated houses surrounded by gardens, spread along the riverbank for a number of kilometres. Ritter decided that crossing the river was pointless because any enemy reinforcements arriving from Upington along the north bank would cut off their retreat. Instead, he ordered his artillery to fire on the houses and the few enemy soldiers in the vicinity. Damage was limited, although there were a few South African casualties. Ritter then sent a company to find von Hadeln’s column, but they came under fire from some South Africans who had crossed the river, and were forced to retreat after losing an officer and three men.23

  Major Ritter’s abortive incursion into the Union. It was the first and last time South Africa as a nation was ‘invaded’

  By now Ritter had received a message that von Hadeln required artillery support. He had come under fire from a strong South African contingent occupying the heights across the river and had become pinned down. Von
Hadeln was well aware that his unit would be massacred if they tried to withdraw without artillery support to cover their retreat. Ritter, though, was now panicked by the prospect of the main South African force swooping down from Upington and refused to lend von Hadeln the support he requested. Instead, Ritter hastily retreated back from the river through a narrow pass, leaving his first lieutenant to his fate.

  Against all odds, von Hadeln managed to safely extricate himself and his men, but he was unable to properly water his horses before moving away from the river. As a result, most of the mounts died on the return journey, during which the South Africans continually harassed their rear. Wrote one soldier of the pursuing commandos: ‘Their marksmanship, even at far distances, was good, resulting in heavy losses of horses and mules.’24

  Von Hadeln apparently won an Iron Cross for his leadership, yet the whole escapade had been fruitless. By the time they reached German territory, the Schütztruppe had lost seven men, with six wounded and sixteen captured. Another dejected trooper summed up the raid: ‘We had achieved … nothing.’25

  While the Germans retreated across the desert, Kemp, who was somewhere near Upington, was desperately ill, as well as dispirited. He had always known that without Beyers or De Wet the rebel cause was lost. On 4 February 1915, he meekly surrendered to his opposite number, Jaap van Deventer, as did most of the rank-and-file rebels. While the leaders were imprisoned, many of their men immediately switched sides and joined Van Deventer’s commandos. He welcomed them into the fold, but only after first getting permission from Botha.

  De Wet and Kemp were given relatively light sentences. They were imprisoned for the remainder of the war and then released. Maritz, however, scurried back across the border to evade capture, but the Germans wanted nothing more to do with him. He spent the remainder of the war in Portuguese West Africa and then lived in exile, first in Portugal and then in Spain.

  It is estimated that about 13 000 South African men took up arms in the rebellion.26 The uprising left Botha deeply shaken. His long preoccupation with reconciling English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans had led to an irreparable split in Afrikanerdom. He desperately tried to patch things up in the aftermath, but for most republicans his gestures were too little too late. The rebellion left a lasting bitterness among Afrikaners and was to have profound consequences for their collective psyche.

  5

  Interlude

  WHILE BOTHA WAS preoccupied with quashing the rebellion, von Heydebreck and Governor Seitz used the interlude to deal with the Portuguese forces massing on the northern border of German South-West Africa. On 19 October 1914, a garrison from the Portuguese border fort at Naulila had ambushed a German convoy, killing the German administrator for the northern region and two lieutenants.1 Von Heydebreck immediately dispatched Major Franke with five squadrons and six artillery guns by rail up to the Tsumeb terminus. From there they marched over the expansive bushveld, past the white castellated walls of the German fort of Namutoni on the eastern rim of the Etosha saltpan and through the land of the Ovambo to Naulila.

  At the same time, Seitz determined to remove Mucasso, the Portuguese fort on the Caprivi, once and for all. By 1914 the territorial dispute was still under review, but, given the outbreak of war, he thought it best to neutralise any potential threat. While Franke moved on Naulila, a small unit led by Sergeant Oswald Ostermann marched to the Caprivi. On 19 November, Ostermann’s men took the fort without a single shot being fired. In the process they captured sixteen Portuguese soldiers, two artillery pieces, some guns and plenty of livestock, and effectively erased the Portuguese presence in the sector.2 That left the matter of deciding whether or not to secure the remainder of the Caprivi. As the long tract of land was strategically impossible to patrol, and the imperial resident on the strip’s farthest end had already surrendered, the decision was made to abandon it.

  Meanwhile, for Franke and his men, progress was agonisingly slow. Besides his five squadrons of Schütztruppe, he was moving with some 2 000 oxen and various auxiliaries. By the time they arrived at Naulila on 18 December, he feared the Portuguese would be well ready for them. He need not have worried, for though he was slow in getting there, Franke was swift in demolishing the Portuguese.

  The fort, surrounded with mud walls designed to deal with the odd Ovambo insurrection, was no match for Franke’s field artillery, which rapidly obliterated the structure and killed over 180 defenders. A large number of those deaths resulted from a direct shell hit on the fort’s central ammunition depot. The rest of the Portuguese divisions in the vicinity, who, unlike Franke and his troops, had no prior experience of African warfare or its landscape, fled north in panic, leaving most of their weapons behind and abandoning the southern section of the colony entirely.

  The Portuguese rout at Naulila prompted the Ovambo tribes north of the Kunene River into full insurrection, and with the arms and ammunition left behind by their hated masters, they were able to keep the Portuguese troops occupied for the remainder of the war.3 For Major Franke, the timely Ovambo uprising provided an effective buffer between the German colony and the Portuguese forces. Satisfied that he had nullified the threat, Franke returned to Windhoek to discover that he was now commander-in-chief due to von Heydebreck’s untimely demise on 12 November.

  The Portuguese’s protracted dealings with the rebellious Ovambo had lasting consequences for modern Angola. In a desperate effort to break the Ovambo spirit, the colonials exacted a dreadful revenge on the local civilian population, crucifying suspected insurgents and hanging children as young as ten with barbed wire strung around their necks. Eventually, the Ovambo were forced to capitulate, but they never forgot the atrocities exacted upon them. In the 1960s, they rose up again, this time with other Angolan insurgents, in a war for liberation. The violent and drawn-out campaign finally saw the Portuguese abandon the place for good in 1975.

  6

  Central Force

  WHILE THE REBELLION raged across their home country, for an interminable five months Colonel Beves and C Force moved steadily into the desert from the rocky, windswept port of Lüderitz, doggedly sticking to their task. With the withdrawal of Forces A and B in the south and the subsequent rebellion, C was the only force now facing the Germans. Inch by inch they made their way into the hinterland following the railway embankment west towards Aus, re-laying the line destroyed by the Germans as they went.

  From November to January C Force’s progress was hampered by the three German airmen in their rickety flying machines taking off from a new base at Aus. They began by dropping pro-rebellion propaganda pamphlets onto the troops below, but when this proved inconsequential (the force consisted primarily of English-speaking South Africans from units of the former British colony of Natal), the pilots decided to drop something a little more persuasive.1

  It was the civilian pilot Willy Trück who designed the aircrafts’ crude but effective bombs. Made from refashioned ten-centimetre artillery shells, they each weighed about thirteen kilograms. Linen tails were attached to the bombs to enable them to fall nose down. To carry them, two metal tubes with lids fastened on the front end were fitted to the sides of the aircraft. As the pilots approached the target, they would nosedive and open the lids by pulling a string, whereupon the bombs would slide out and zigzag down to earth. The bombs, however, had one serious drawback for the pilots: they were always live. If the aircraft had to make an emergency or even a bumpy landing, the bombs could easily detonate. Every time the pilots climbed into the cockpits of their flimsy aeroplanes they were therefore risking their lives. It is a great wonder that all three managed to survive the campaign despite numerous crashes.

  Initially, the German airmen had only marginal success with their bombs. They did, however, manage to kill the odd soldier and horse in return for some bullet holes in their fuselages.

  C Force reached the station and water well at Tsaukaib, roughly halfway to their destination, in February 1915, as the rebellion was being brought to an end.
There they were joined by their new commander-in-chief, Prime Minister Botha, and Beves’s direct superior officer, Brigadier General Sir Duncan McKenzie. It was time to resume the invasion.

  Botha began by radically altering the strategy. He scrapped the three-prong approach in the south in favour of a broader four-prong attack on Windhoek, adding a main thrust from Walvis Bay/Swakopmund in the north, which Botha himself would lead. This new prong, called Northern Force, consisted of three mounted brigades, two artillery batteries, two infantry brigades, two unbrigaded battalions and one mounted regiment.

  To ensure Swakopmund was still unoccupied, Botha had sent up an advance force from Cape Town in December. The advance was led by the imperiously named Colonel Percy Cyriac Brunnel Skinner, who was on loan from the British Army and tasked with setting up the general staff for Botha’s Northern Force. Collyer describes him as ‘a keen soldier of considerable nervous energy’, who ‘was well versed in his profession’.2 Under Skinner’s command, the force had entered the unoccupied town without resistance in the first days of January 1915 and begun preparations for the arrival of the main body of troops scheduled for a month later.

  In Tsaukaib, McKenzie replaced Beves and C Force was renamed Central Force. McKenzie, with two mounted brigades and two batteries of field guns, was to abandon the ponderous process of rebuilding the railway line from Lüderitz and instead ride hard across the desert from Tsaukaib to attack the well-entrenched German positions at Aus.