by Giles Foden
Great difficulty was experienced in finding a suitable route over which to make our road, owing to the hilly nature of the country, as well as to the long stretches of marshland, the breeding ground of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But at last a route was selected and thousands of natives were recruited from the adjacent villages and set to work under white supervision literally to carve a passage through the bush.
Spicer refused to accept any of this as true, even though Lee had been sending back reports of his own. He had to investigate, so on Tuesday 6 July Spicer left Cape Town by train for Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe) to meet the British authorities there.
That same day the saga of the Königsberg came to a head in the east, on Tanganyika’s Indian Ocean coast. Since October 1914 the German ship had been skulking in one of the Rufiji’s channels and guns and troops had been put ashore for further protection. The British knew where she was: an officer had noticed that some coconut palms were moving above the tree level near the river mouth. They were tied to the Königsberg’s masthead as a primitive camouflage. But it was only with the arrival of shallow-bottomed boats like HMS Severn and HMS Mersey that she could be successfully attacked.
At about 5.30 AM one of the Königsberg’s officers saw two shadowy ships appear through the morning mist. They looked ungainly craft, but they were armed and clearly meant business. The German inshore guns began to fire—47 mm field guns and small arms—but the Severn and the Mersey returned the compliment in heavier kind. A torpedo was launched against them from a tube on the shore, but it was blown up in the water by a shell from the Severn. Shortly afterwards, a British seaplane dropped bombs on the Königsberg—but missed, hitting some nearby mangrove trees. German troops were still firing on the Severn and the Mersey from the banks—a continuous hail of rifle and machine-gun fire—but the steel boxes made it through, the plates on their hulls rattling with a deafening din.
On board the Königsberg was Job Rosenthal, an Ober-leutnant zur See. Along with other members of the crew he was eating breakfast on deck when the British attacked at 6.40 AM The alarm went up with the shout: ‘Clear ship for action!’ Severn and Mersey’s guns began pounding them, their fire directed by spotter aircraft overhead. Smoke drifted across the water as the British fired shell after shell into the mangroves. They fell just short of the Königsberg, hitting a bank and throwing up a fountain of mud and bushes; or hitting the river and creating waterspouts. One of Rosenthal’s colleagues shot himself out of fear, but the others fought back fiercely, dodging the moaning shells as they came. The suicide, a former merchant navy officer called Jaeger, took some time to die.
In the first hour of the battle, four men from a British gun-crew on the Mersey were killed when a German shell hit their casement. However, at about 7.50 AM a British shell hit the Königsberg, killing a sailor. Shortly afterwards another projectile tore off the foot of one of Rosenthal’s colleagues, Richard Wenig. The Königsberg fired back, its shells landing perilously close to the British ships.
The day grew hotter, as did the fighting, which continued for hours. By about 3.30 PM the Severn and the Mersey had together fired 635 shells. The Germans kept returning fire, despite being hit four times. If a single German shell had struck one of the ungainly barges below the waterline they would have been done for. But none of the German salvos found its mark, except for the one which had killed the four men on the Mersey. At 3.45 PM the British commander, seeing that his men were tiring and the guns overheating, decided to withdraw from the delta to the relative safety of the open sea. The Königsberg had been damaged and wasn’t going anywhere. Refuelled and rearmed, the Severn and the Mersey could return again soon enough.
Rosenthal and the other Germans on the ship knew this. After burying their four dead and sending away 35 wounded by paddle boat, they spent the next few days trying to repair the damaged ship, whose bunkers were beginning to fill with water. All combustible material was removed, along with any secret documents. Extra spotters were put up in the palm trees to watch for the return of the British. A telephone line was run from the lookouts to the ship. But the truth was that after eight hours of incessant firing, not to mention months of fever in the sweltering delta, German morale had been shot to pieces.
Away to the south-west, at a dinner table in Salisbury, skullduggery was afoot. Over the weekend of 10–11 July, Spicer stayed with General Edwards, the senior British officer in Rhodesia. Spicer persuaded the General that if the reports about Lee’s drunkenness and loose talk were true, the Belgians should be asked to arrest him. If this sounds like an over-reaction to what was, after all, an unconfirmed report, the answer may lie in the fact that the report came from Sub-Lieutenant Douglas Hope, the Spicer appointee sent to the Congo in Lee’s wake. Hope never even met with the big-game hunter and it seems likely that Spicer had planned all along to get Lee out of the picture. It was to be his expedition, not Lee’s.
At about noon that Sunday, 11 July, the Severn and the Mersey returned to the delta to finish the job. There could be no surprise this time. Two British spotter planes flew above the ship with impunity: it was the first time in the War that planes were used to pass back messages about the accuracy of shooting, though the practice of range-finding by other means was well established.
Alerted by her own spotters in trees and on hills, the Königsberg fired salvo after salvo as the two barges approached—and fired with great accuracy. But the seamen on board the barges had learned how to control their flat-bottomed craft. They kept slipping moorings and edging out of range of the German guns.
At about 12.30 a shell from the Severn hit one of the Königsberg’s three funnels. It made a fearsome sound as it was shot away, the shell piercing the funnel casing and exploding. Up above, a British spotter biplane piloted by Flight Lieutenant John Cull swooped over, taking considerable small-arms fire. Cull’s observer, Flight Sub-Lieutenant Arnold, radioed the Severn and told her the shot was on target. The British fired more rounds and seven hits were recorded in the next ten minutes.
At 12.45 the inevitable happened. The biplane was hit. As it stuttered down Arnold broadcast one last elevation correction to the gunners on the Severn before the plane somersaulted on the crocodile-thick water (this final correction was later revealed to have been of vital importance). Arnold fell out of the cockpit, over Cull’s head, but Cull, who had not undone his belt, went down with the plane. He was only able to free himself by ripping his trousers and tearing offhis boots. Bobbing to the surface, he was found by Arnold amid the wreckage and both men were picked up by a motor boat from the Mersey.
Half an hour later, the coup de grâce was administered to the Königsberg. Rosenthal and the crew felt the shock of a series of explosions and a huge cloud of smoke billowed above the coconut palms as the ship burst into flames. The cry went up: ‘All hands abandon ship!’ The men panicked as they clambered over each other through the flames, pushing aside anyone who got in their way, and swam for the shore. Many were seriously wounded.
The ship’s first officer George Koch detonated three torpedoes and blew up the hull, to prevent the British from using her. However, it is thought there were still some wounded on board. It was about 3 PM when the British ships withdrew. Coming back down the three-mile channel to the sea, they were showered by shells all the way. The Germans might have been beaten, but they weren’t giving up.
Rosenthal and his colleagues spent that night on the banks of the Rufiji in a terrible state. Injured and half-naked, they were bitten into paroxysms by the fat mosquitoes that make their home in African swamps. There was not enough food to go round, but more importantly, not enough morphine. Wenig, Rosenthal’s fellow officer who had lost his foot in the first attack, came down with malaria that night. They slept rough on the river bank, lighting campfires in a vain attempt to ward off the insects.
From malaria or gangrene or both, Wenig was delirious by the time the ship’s doctor amputated his leg near the knee a few day
s later. By that stage Rosenthal and the other survivors had begun salvaging the ship. The Königsberg was beyond repair, but her guns were still functional. Unbolted from the hull, they were brought ashore. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German commander, ordered that they be dragged back to Dar es Salaam, to which task 400 Africans were promptly put. The loss of the Königsberg was a blow to von Lettow, but at least he now had some serious artillery to distribute round the colony. He sent two of the Königsberg s 4.1 mm guns down the railway to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika—which is where Mimi and Toutou were heading.
Back in Cape Town, a week after the Königsberg was destroyed, the motor boats were ready for the off.
Wrapped in tarpaulins (each emblazoned with S. A. R.: South African Railways), Mimi and Toutou had been brought out of their siding and their crews were itching for action. On 16 July a telegram from Spicer to Wainwright told them to get going. Having informed the Admiralty that he was going up into the Congo alone to look for Lee, Spicer instead headed for Bulawayo, which was on the railway from Cape Town to Elizabethville.
Wainwright marshalled the rag-tag band of sailors—there was no parade this time—for the 2,500-mile journey. This strange band of misfits and naval reservists assembled, their days of leisure over: Dr Hanschell had been studying maps in Cape Town museum; Cross had been visiting friends and showing off his Spicer-Simson uniform; Tyrer had picked up his Piccadilly habits as best one could in a colonial city, strutting about with his monocle and cutlass.
Shankland records the mood of excitement among the more junior members of the Naval Africa Expedition as they embarked on this second leg of their journey:
‘The ratings had been generously entertained by the people of Cape Town and when their special train started on the long journey north, morale was good. They already felt like heroes!’
Many of them had never left Britain before, so the African landscape in all its varied forms made quite an impression. Nevertheless, the names of some of the places they passed would have been familiar, made famous during the Anglo-Boer War. The Daily Mail, the first mass-circulation newspaper—with its brilliant correspondents such as George Steevens, an Oxford don who abandoned academia for a life of adventure—had been founded on news of the war. So as they rocked northwards and the steam-whistle blew at successive stations, the crew would have recognised place names from the most exciting event in their youth.
Mimi and Toutou ‘were carried on goods trucks astern of the passenger coach in which they travelled’, writes Shankland, and because of the fire risk ‘Wainwright posted seamen on the tarpaulins, which covered the boats, with instructions to brush off any sparks that might fall on them from the wood-burning engine.’
Bridging the Orange River, the special train went up through South Africa past the mining town of Kimberley, which had been made famous by the activities of Cecil Rhodes. Kruger’s Boers had besieged it during the War. Next came another river, the Vaal, another siege town—Mafeking—and the mining and financial centre, Johannesburg. The train proceeded to pass into the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana), going along the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert, before crossing the border into Southern Rhodesia and arriving at the junction town of Bulawayo. From there it would continue north-west up to the coal-mining area of Wankie and the border of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
By the time Mimi and Toutou were heading north to Bulawayo, en route to Lake Tanganyika, Lieutenant Job Rosenthal, formerly of the Königsberg, had already received his marching orders. He, too, was to travel by railway (though a diiferent one) to Lake Tanganyika (though to the opposite side), where he was to link up with Commander Zimmer, who was in charge of naval operations on the lake. Zimmer already had one Job in his fleet: the Captain of the Hedwig, Job Odebrecht. Now, in Job Rosenthal, he had another. So, with a feeling for symmetry, he made him captain of the Kingani, the Hedwig’s sister ship.
The Königsberg’s guns were to follow Rosenthal by rail down the Mittellandbahn and would be mounted on a new German warship called the Graf von Götzen, which Zimmer commanded in person. The Götzen was the jewel in the German fleet on Lake Tanganyika—and all the more remarkable for having been spirited there under the nose of the enemy. Spicer knew nothing at all about this ship and neither did the Admiralty. At 1,200 tons, she was roughly 20 times the tonnage of the one Spicer had been sent to sink (the Hedwig) and 150 times the tonnage of Mimi and Toutou.↓
≡ See Catalogue of Vessels, p. 313.
The disparity would certainly have given Spicer pause, had he known, as would the news of Rosenthal’s posting as captain of the Kingani. Rosenthal had, after all, seen serious action in the Rufiji. After what had happened to Wenig and the rest of the Königsberg’s crew, the Brits could not reasonably expect any mercy from Rosenthal. On arriving in Kigoma, he immediately took out the Kingani on raiding parties. According to Colonel L. B. Cane the Kingani, a small wooden steamer of fifty-five feet that had come by train from the Indian Ocean, later destroyed two ancient British steamers, possessing neither engines nor boilers, whose hulls were lying at the southern end of the lake. They also raided Bismarckburg (now Kasanga), and captured four machine-guns and over ninety miles of telegraph wire from a Belgian company there, and bombarded and attacked various other lake stations.↓
≡ Tanganyika Notes and Records (1947). In fact, the Kingani had a wooden deck and superstructure, but a steel hull.
§
If a tiny wooden steamer could have such an effect, what more could the Hedwig and the Götzen do?
How Spicer didn’t know about the Götzen is a mystery one can only attribute to the parlous state of communications in Africa and numerous misunderstandings between the Belgian and British governments. The German supership had been launched in Kigoma on 8 June—the day Spicer had made his practice run on the Thames in Mimi, with Engineer Lieutenant Cross at the wheel.
As it happens, Spicer met Cross the moment he arrived in Bulawayo. The rest of the Naval Africa Expedition had arrived before their Commander and were lunching at the railway hotel in the town. Finding a pony in the yard tethered to a post, Cross had mounted it and started riding round and round. The other men began to tease him, but unbeknown to them Spicer had arrived. Striding forward in his naval uniform, he loudly ordered Cross to dismount, adding that horse-stealing was a crime punishable by hanging in Rhodesia.
As Cross did so, the assembled and well-lunched company began to make comments about a new medal ribbon on Spicer’s chest: the Africa General Service Medal. He may well have heard their whispered remarks, but by chance an African messenger boy chose that moment to run into the station yard clutching a piece of paper and yelling ‘Captain Cross! Telegram for Captain Cross!’
Spicer froze. ‘I can readily understand that an Engineer Lieutenant RNR would want to be thought an army captain,’ he said, ‘but as he is now serving under an RN commander and in an RN expedition, I, Commander Spicer-Simson RN, must order in future that Engineer Lieutenant Cross, Royal Naval Reserve, will bear that in mind and keep his army preferences until he has left the Navy.’
It seems Cross’s friends in Cape Town had mistaken his peculiar uniform for that of an army officer, which is what the three pips on his shoulder suggested. However, Spicer’s outraged snobbery was entirely typical and his men must have hated the sight of his tall frame by now as he strode out of the yard. Cross could be a tricky customer—it was readily agreed he was hard to get on with—but Spicer’s posturing merely alienated him from the rest of the expedition.
It did not bode well for the future. They all had a very long way to go and, when they got to Lake Tanganyika, a very big job to do. Even for fast, manoeuvrable craft such as Mimi and Toutou, sinking the Hedwig would be no mean feat. But as they climbed back on to the train at Bulawayo, bound for Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo, via Northern Rhodesia, Spicer’s men had no inkling that the Hedwig was the least of their problems.
FIVE
The border between Southern and Nort
hern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) was at the town of Livingstone, the site of Victoria Falls. Like all travellers of the period, the crew of Mimi and Toutou would have disembarked to watch as Mosi-oa-Tunya—‘the Thundering Smoke’—plunged down into a gorge far below, dispensing 4,000 cubic feet of water a second. Even the most earthbound of souls, like the two hulking Scotsmen, Tait and Mollison, could not have failed to be moved by such a sight.
There was not yet a statue of David Livingstone gazing out from under a pith helmet over the water’s mile-wide expanse, nor a plaque referring to his ‘discovery’ of the Falls. But Wainwright and the others would have been alert to the explorer’s residual presence, which was (and still is) considerable in the Zambezi region. It would not have been lost on Dr Hanschell, after his careful study of maps in Cape Town, that Livingstone had arrived sick and tired in 1869 at Ujiji on what was now the German side of Lake Tanganyika.
Today Livingstone’s meeting at Ujiji with Sir Henry Morton Stanley in 1871 is often the only thing people know about him. In 1915 that story formed part of a wider picture, at the centre of which was Livingstone’s (then outspoken) opposition to slavery. ‘The strangest disease I have seen in this country,’ he wrote, ‘seems really to be broken-heartedness and it attacks free men who have been captured and turned into slaves.’ As Dr Hanschell and the Tanganyika party crossed over from Zambia into Congo, they were passing through an area that had been central to the supply of the slave system. It had only really stopped within the last 30 years, in spite of legislation and the hunting down of traffickers. Long after slavery had been outlawed internationally, it continued locally as an agricultural and domestic arrangement.
Travelling by rail through the thick scrubland of the Katanga Province, Spicer and his men reached the town of Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo on 26 July. They were now more than 2,000 miles from Cape Town—and more than 8,000 miles from London. In terms of distance, the greater part of Mimi and Touton’s trip was over. But the real journey was only just beginning.