To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  In aggregate, the fitness of the soldiers in Africa bore a direct relationship to the efficiency of the supply system and to the provision of satisfactory medical arrangements. The French were negligent in both respects, and paid the penalty. In the Cameroons expeditionary force, the French contingent had four medical officers; the comparably sized British contingent had twenty-seven. The French sickness rate was just over double that of the British.40 The Germans were not slow to attribute their relatively good health in the West African campaign to their having sufficient doctors, allowing them to allocate one per company. To do less was false economy. A sick soldier undermined the efforts of the porters to supply that soldier; a sick porter starved the soldier and rendered him less robust; casualty evacuation consumed more labour; and manpower losses through preventable causes increased the demands on a fast-diminishing pool of available men.

  The difficulties of supply, rather than the experiences of battle, did most to disseminate the impact of the Great War throughout the African continent. The numbers who experienced combat were few. The war in Africa was an affair not of ‘big battalions’ but of individual companies. A unit any larger than 100 to 120 men could not be readily supplied. Moreover, a company with its attendant porters mustered about 300 men and on the tracks of the equatorial rain forests of Central Africa constituted a column 1,500 to 2,000 yards long; a formation any bigger was, too large for effective, tactical control. The force-to-space ratio was, therefore, totally different from that of the western front. Small-scale actions in Africa settled the balance of power in territories as big as a whole theatre of operations in Europe.

  One of the most striking differences was the almost total absence of artillery. Individually, heavy guns proved of value in the open grasslands of the northern Cameroons or northern Tanganyika. But collectively, guns had little opportunity. Even where draught animals were more readily available, in South-West Africa, the Germans were not able to turn a relative strength to advantage. Oxen moved slowly, and not at all in the midday heat. Mules were used for the transport of pack guns, but the lack of clear paths through the bush meant that they could take twice as long to cover the same distance as did the foot-soldier. Thus, the guns tended to arrive too late. In theatres where the tsetse fly ruled out animal draught, 300 porters could be required for a single field gun,41 without considering its likely shell consumption. In the jungle, even a smallcalibre mountain gun firing at a high trajectory needed a clearing of 100 yards, as well as good telephone communications with forward observers, for indirect fire.42 Because none of the European powers had planned to fight each other, the guns possessed by each colony tended to be of varying calibres, obsolescent, and short of ammunition. In the Cameroons the Germans had fourteen guns of different types and 3,000 rounds.43 When used, their moral impact, particularly on black troops unaccustomed to artillery fire however light, outstripped their destructive effect. Fighting in Africa was therefore predominantly an infantry affair, the machine-gun being the heaviest and most significant weapon regularly deployed.

  Thus, the individual was not tyrannized, as he was on the western front, by the industrialization of warfare. The division between war and exploration, between the dangers of the bullet and the snakebite, was unclear in many of the pre–1914 imaginings of the war: both were antidotes to bourgeois decadence. In Africa, unlike Europe, the distinction could remain obscure. A single cruiser, SMS Königsberg, whose contribution to the balance of forces in the North Sea would have been negligible, acquired in East Africa a significance out of all proportion to her firepower. Her lair in the Rufiji delta was discovered by Pieter Pretorius, a big-game hunter whose skills and courage would have been, relatively speaking, nugatory in the trenches of Ypres or the Somme. Another big-game hunter, F. C. Selous, joined the 25th battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, the so-called Legion of Frontiersmen. His reputation as a naturalist and explorer was embroidered with stories that extended back to his schooldays at Rugby. His death in action in East Africa on 4 January 1917, at the age of 65, was of a piece with his entire life, not at odds with it; few other subalterns were as lucky.

  The experience of Pretorius or of Selous was directly relevant. The major problems of the opposing sides were geographically determined. The Royal Navy knew that the Königsberg was at Salale from signals intercepts, but Salale was not marked on the navy’s charts; eleven days elapsed in late October 1914 before it was identified as being on the Rufiji.44 Cursed with inadequate maps, intelligence efforts were devoted as much to establishing the nature of the country and its resources as to learning the enemy’s whereabouts and strength. Both the climate, with its switch from dry to rainy seasons, and the insect life, with its impact on the health of livestock and humans, were strategically decisive. East Africa was home to the anopheles mosquito, the tsetse fly, the jigger flea, the spirillum tick, the white ant, the scorpion, the poisonous spider, the wild bee, and the warrior ant. The range of larger fauna provided more than an exotic backdrop to the fighting. Soldiers, if sick or sleeping, were liable to be eaten by lions or hyenas; both elephants and rhinoceroses were known to attack patrols, with fatal consequences. On the other hand, game provided an important supplement to the diet, hippopotamuses and elephants in particular being shot for their fat.

  Although fought between European powers for objectives that were also European, the African campaigns of the First World War bore more relationship to the nineteenth-century campaigns of colonial conquest than they did to the Great War itself. In relation to the outcome of the war they were, as is too often remarked, sideshows. But neither observation should be allowed to trivialize their importance. The first demonstrates the danger of characterizing the war in terms appropriate to only one theatre, even one not fitted to the entire geographical span of the war. The second judges Africa in terms of that one theatre, instead of recognizing that relatively the impact of the war on the dark continent was as great as that on Europe, that few black families were unaffected, and that at the end the transfer of territory completed the partition of Africa commenced four decades earlier.

  TOGOLAND

  The first Entente victory of the war was the fruit, not of central staff planning, but of improvised action at the local level. The seizure of German Togoland was in perfect consonance with the objectives set out by the subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence at its meeting in London on 5 August 1914—it employed only local forces, and it eliminated Germany’s single most important overseas wireless station, that at Kamina, linking Nauen with Germany’s other African colonies, with shipping in the South Atlantic, and with South America. However, both the initiation of the British attack and the rapidity of its execution were due primarily to Captain F.C. Bryant, temporarily commanding the Gold Coast Regiment in the absence on leave of both its senior officers.45

  The main focus of the defensive plan for the Gold Coast was the protection of its north-eastern frontier, and of the navigation of the Lower Volta. Its offensive options included the possibility of pushing across the Volta into Togoland, isolating the north, and then swinging south, meeting a second and subsidiary thrust moving eastwards along the coast from Ada to Lome. The plan had been last revised in May 1913. It made no provision for French cooperation from Dahomey, to the east of Togoland, and, more importantly, it antedated the completion in June 1914 of the Kamina wireless station. That its basic thrust, the defence of the Gold Coast, should be abandoned in 1914 in favour of an attack on Kamina was not in dispute. Brigadier-General C.M. Dobell, inspector-general of the West African Frontier Force, and fortuitously in London on leave, told the subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence that Lome and Kamina were the only worthwhile objectives in Togo-land. But Dobell was disposed to caution. Although Lome was just over a kilometre from Togoland’s frontier with the Gold Coast, Dobell regarded that as a sufficient advance for the time being, and even made it conditional on the presence of a naval escort.

  Events on the ground outstripped such calculations.
The Gold Coast Regiment mobilized on 31 July, three days ahead of Britain’s general mobilization. Bryant shifted the axis of its deployment from the north-eastern frontier to the south, concentrating three companies at Kumasi and two at Ada. On 4 August the French, on Togoland’s other flank, prepared to implement their plan, also drawn up in ignorance both of their ally’s intentions and of Kamina’s existence, for a westward advance along the coast to Lome, beginning in the evening of 6 August. Bryant’s energy was attributable as much to his desire to forestall any independent French initiatives as to a lust for battle.

  The prospects confronting the Germans in Togoland were not encouraging. Their colony, a thin strip stretching inland from a coastline only 51 kilometres long, was bounded on all its frontiers by enemy territory. No regular soldiers were available for its defence; the garrison consisted of 152 paramilitary police, supplemented by 416 local police and 125 border guards; they had four machine-guns, only fourteen of the 1898-pattern rifles, and otherwise relied on the 1871-pattern Jäger carbine.46 The governor was on leave. The first step, therefore, of his deputy, Major von Doering, was to propose neutrality to his British and French neighbours.

  The Congo act, ratified by the Treaty of Berlin in 1885, allowed any power within the Congo basin to declare itself neutral. However, its provisions did not extend so far from the Congo itself. The basis for Doering’s suggestion was not international law, but the self-interest of the white colonial powers of West Africa. The economic interdependence of the three belligerents was obvious. For the British colonies, Germany was the major purchaser of their palm kernels, and was strongly represented in the trading houses and shipping arrangements of Nigeria and of the Gold Coast; for French West Africa, Germany had become between 1910 and 1914 its fastest-growing export market, and was particularly strong in Togoland’s neighbour, Dahomey.47 But von Doering’s bid rested less on common commercial grounds than on German worries about the loyalty of their black subjects. Thus, instead of playing to the Entente’s weakness, he highlighted its strength. Britain’s local reputation as a benevolent colonial administration was a powerful incentive to Entente belligerence, not to neutrality. Bryant, although restrained by W.C.F. Robertson, the acting governor of the Gold Coast (another whose superior was on leave), even wanted to arm the Ashanti and foment insurrection on the Gold Coast—Togoland border. Thus, appeals on the basis of white supremacy were not calculated to restrain the British or the French. Von Doering’s bid for neutrality was seen for what it was—a reflection of German weakness.

  MAP 18. TOGOLAND

  Bryant’s response to the French initiatives and to the German plea was unequivocal. Without consulting Robertson, let alone London, he sent an emissary to Lome on 6 August to demand the surrender of Togoland. Von Doering signalled to Berlin that he planned to abandon the defenceless Lome and the territory 110 kilometres to its north, and to fall back inland to Kamina. Dispatched by wireless in clear, the intercepted German message justified Bryant’s impetuosity. On 9 August the Colonial Office, assured of French cooperation, allowed Bryant to attack Kamina. On 12 August two companies of the Gold Coast Regiment took possession of Lome. It was the decisive step of the campaign. The harbour at Lome enabled Bryant to concentrate fourteen days sooner than if he had been confined to land routes.

  The railway and the road which linked Lome and Kamina were ‘parallel but not always adjacent’,48 and the Germans had made some rather half-hearted efforts to destroy the former. Advance off the road was impeded by swamp and bush. Furthermore, the Gold Coast Regiment, in meeting the requirements of Bryant’s revised concentration, had already marched considerable distances. Nonetheless, the British encountered no serious resistance until 22 August. The Germans withdrew across the Chra river, blowing the railway bridge and taking up strong positions on its northern bank. In the subsequent attack the British columns lost contact with each other in the bush, and the courage of the Gold Coast forces wilted under their first exposure to machine-gun fire: the British suffered 17 per-cent casualties. However, the Germans, although their losses were light, fell back once more under cover of dark. The action on the Chra marked the end of any serious resistance. On the night of 24/5 August the Germans destroyed the Kamina wireless station, smashing its nine huge masts and burning its switchboard and batteries with oil. On the following day von Doering surrendered. The war in the German colonies continued for over four years, but its principal strategic objective was accomplished in its first month.

  In the first three weeks of August Kamina had handled 229 messages, linking Nauen not only to German colonies elsewhere but also to German shipping. Every day gained in its defence, therefore, had wider operational effects. But, confronted with a choice between the needs of Germany at war and the narrowly defined interests of the colony itself, von Doering opted for the latter. No effort was made to protract resistance. Six out of the seven provinces of Togoland were abandoned without a fight. Bridges were not destroyed. The Chra was the only river line out of three which the Germans defended. Von Doering interpreted the instructions to protect Kamina in the most literal terms: he held its perimeter, not its outworks. And even then the British captured there three machine-guns, 1,000 rifles, and 320,000 rounds, enough for several days’ continued resistance.49

  Manpower was a problem. The wireless operators, newly arrived and quartered inland, constituted an enclave with which the settler population did not identify. Over the three weeks of hostilities von Doering’s strength had probably doubled from its peacetime establishment; he had 300 German residents available, including 200 who were reservists, and he had compulsorily recruited native levies during the course of his retreat from Lome. However, the Kamina position was still too extensive for the number of troops available. Furthermore, the Germans’ military commander, Captain Georg Pfähler, had been killed in action on 16 August. Von Doering took counsel of his fears. He almost certainly exaggerated the strength of Bryant’s force, whose only marked advantage in relation to his own lay in its possession of three 2.95-inch mountain guns. But, having failed to strike Bryant early, von Doering was confronted with converging forces of greater numbers. To the west a British force was moving on Kamina from Kete-Krachi, and to the east a French column from Cheti. Further Entente forces, mostly French irregulars, were pushing into northern Togoland. Thus, the defence of Kamina could only have been protracted for a matter of days. The maintenance of resistance in the bush, the primary objective having been lost, held no appeal for the deputy- governor; he could not be sure of native support, and its effects would be likely to set back the economic benefits of colonialism. Von Doering’s less-than-vigorous defence and his expeditious surrender were thus of a piece with initial hopes for neutrality.

  THE CAMEROONS

  Germany’s second West African colony, the Cameroons, was, like Togoland, bounded by the possessions of its enemies. Along the length of its northwestern border, from the Atlantic to Lake Chad, lay British Nigeria. From Chad southward to the Congo, and then back westwards to the ocean, stretched the expanses of French Equatorial Africa. Only the rectangular slab of Muni or Spanish Guinea, stuck like a postage stamp in the bottom left-hand corner of German territory, and the offshore island of Fernando Po, also a Spanish possession, broke the German sense of isolation. Spanish neutrality was to prove a major boon to German defences.

  The bulk of German development lay in the west, on the Atlantic littoral, with the hill-station of Buea, and the ports and wireless masts of Victoria and, above all, Duala. In 1914 two major railway lines were under construction; one to the north-east, destined for Lake Chad, had reached Nkongsamba, and the other south and east, bound for Jaunde, was complete as far as Eseka. But if the bulk of European infrastructure lay on the coast, the heart of the Cameroons itself was inland. In the north a line of mountains, parallel with the Nigerian frontier, formed a plateau, covered in tall elephant grass, free of the tsetse fly, and favourable to livestock; its major feature, Mount Cameroon, lay some 5,000 me
tres above sea level as a symbolic barrier to the west. To the south the highlands fell away to the central rivers, the Sanga and the Njong. Below them, and as far as the French border, lay jungle and swamp, an area whose rivers, notably the Sanaga, fed the Congo. In 1911 French concessions after the second Moroccan crisis had extended Germany’s frontiers to the south-east, at one point to the Ubangi, at Singa, and at another to the Congo itself, at Bonga. Thus, of the 480,000 square kilometres of German territory, the coastal strip was but a small fraction, and effectively as isolated from the interior to its east as it itself was by the sea to its west.

  Germany’s pre-war thinking about the defence of its colony had shifted focus in accordance with its own advance. The recent settlement of its inland frontiers—1911 with France, and (in matters of detail) 1913 with Britain—had been accompanied by the problems of pacification (barely completed in some areas) and incorporation (still under way in the Congo territory in 1914). The navy, although happy to have Duala as a base for cruiser operations in the South Atlantic, was prepared neither to produce the funds to fortify it nor provide the ships to protect it. The general view in the Colonial Office was that international agreement would provide no better defence. The Congo act embraced the eastern and south-eastern Cameroons, but for the French and British to remain neutral on one front, so allowing the Germans to concentrate on the north, seemed improbable. The logical conclusion, to rest the defence of the colony on its own forces, the Schütztruppen, and to conduct it from the interior of the country, was not, however, an easy step. The governor, Ebermaier, was averse to using black troops in a white man’s war; his military commander thought that, given the vulnerability of the Cameroons’ extended frontiers, sustained resistance would be impossible if the colony’s link with Germany through Duala was not kept open. Therefore, only reluctantly, with a renewal in 1913 of the decision not to spend money fortifying Duala, did the local authorities begin to reckon on defending the colony from the interior.50