To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The plan, drawn up on 24 November 1913, and to provide the basis of German operations until mid–1915, chose as its focus not Duala but Ngaundere, in the centre of the northern highlands. The south, however impenetrable to the invader, was not considered because its climate was poor and it lacked the agricultural resources of the northern plateau. Four of the twelve companies of Schütztruppen were to be based on Ngaundere, three at Bertua to the east of Jaunde, two (plus the police training company) at Jaunde, and three at Bamenda in the north-west. Thus the central and northern plateau of the Cameroons, naturally defended by mountains to the north, by jungle and swamp to the south, was to become an inner bastion. The loss of the coastal strip or France’s reconquest of the territories forfeited in 1911 would not represent setbacks of strategic significance. The Germans in the Cameroons intended to conduct a defence sufficiently protracted to ensure that when the hostilities in Europe came to an end Germany’s claim to the colony would, at the peace talks, still be bolstered by possession. Thus, the stubborn resistance of the Cameroons was motivated not by any German desire to draw Entente troops from Europe, not by a wish to use a sideshow for a wider strategic purpose, but by the fact that colonization mattered as an end in itself.

  The major implication of the 1913 plan was that the Schütztruppen were to defend the Cameroons against an external enemy. This was not a task for which they were either equipped or trained. The stated role of the Schütztruppen was to protect the white settlers, to maintain order, and to suppress slavery. Their total establishment was 205 white officers and NCOs and 1,650 blacks. When first formed, they had recruited from outside the Cameroons and from the coastal areas; by 1914, although 13 per cent of the askaris were still drawn from outside, the major recruiting area had become the central Cameroons, and in particular the district of Jaunde. Enlistment was voluntary, and the minimum term of service fixed at three years. In reality, most served for an average of five years, and some for much longer; the Germans feared that if warriors trained in the arts of war returned to their tribes when they were still militarily effective, any insurrection would benefit from their skills. The consequence of this concern was a body of men that, by the standards of its potential foes, was homogeneous and well-trained. The askari was accustomed to fighting superior numbers and winning by virtue of his discipline and his firepower. But the Schütztruppen also suffered from the weaknesses of regular, professional armies. The families of the men became part of the military establishment and accompanied those of more than two years’ service on campaign. Morale was closely identified with the leadership of individual officers, bonds forged over time and not easy to replace in the event of casualties. And although the mobilization of reservists was allowed for in 1913, no reserve organization was in place in 1914.

  Indeed, little had been done by 1914 to follow through the implications of the 1913 plan. Quality sustained the Schütztruppen in their domestic tasks; quantity would be at issue when facing the comparable forces of their European neighbours. France had 20,000 black troops in its West African and Equatorial colonies in August 1914;51 Britain’s West African Frontier Force (which encompassed Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia) mustered 7,552 of all ranks.52 Many of these formations were, like the Germans’, committed to peacetime tasks, and would not be available for an expeditionary force to the Cameroons. Nonetheless, the most urgent need of the German government was to procure more men. The idea of the nation in arms became reality far sooner for the 2,000 white settlers than it did for their fellow-nationals at home; the incorporation of the police immediately doubled the Germans’ strength to 3,200 black troops; the reservists were under arms by January 1915; and the maximum force achieved at any one time was 1,460 whites and 6,550 blacks, a total of thirty-four companies.

  Two strains were generated by this quintupling of the armed forces. The first was persistent, but not ultimately decisive. Fully sixty-five of the Schutztruppe’s German officers and NCOs were at home on leave in August 1914. The deficit was never made good. The addition of the police worsened it; for a peacetime strength comparable with that of the Schütztruppen, they had only thirty Germans. The European reservists did little to improve it. On mobilization they were formed into separate companies. The supply problems of purely European units robbed these companies of mobility, and thus of any utility after the loss of the coastal areas, and they were disbanded in 1915. But the dispersion of their members to other formations did not ease the demand for trained German officers. Most field companies in 1915 had only one or two European officers each, plus a medical officer and a couple more Europeans for each of the machine-guns (of which each company had three to four). Combat experience suggested an optimum would have been twelve to fifteen Germans per company.53 In these circumstances the loss of a single German officer could have considerable repercussions.

  The second strain was both persistent and decisive. Some effort was made to increase the firepower of the Schütztruppen in the light of the 1913 plan. The number of machine-guns, forty-three initially, rising to sixty, was probably sufficient given the limited fields of fire available in the enclosed territory of the equatorial rain forests. The issue of the 1898-pattern rifle, to replace the 1871 Jäger carbine, was expedited. But the process was not complete in 1914. The colony possessed 3,861 1898–pattern rifles and carbines, and 2,920 of the older patterns; there were 2.25 million rounds available for the former and for the machine-guns, and 500,000 rounds for the latter.54 Therefore, only nine-tenths of the available men could be armed. By 1915 supplies of the 1898-pattern ammunition were having to be restricted to the use of machine-guns. The colony put in hand the manufacture of its own rifles and ammunition, but the performance of the latter served to undermine the askaris’ faith in the former. The munitions factories established at Jaunde and Ebolowa were a tribute to German ingenuity, not least in view of the fact that all but one of the five munitions artificers in the colony had been captured by the end of September 1914.55 Spent cases were collected from the battlefield; percussion caps were manufactured from the brass plates worn by the inhabitants of the grasslands; black powder was made from sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal, and when the saltpetre was exhausted nitroglycerine was extracted from stocks of dynamite: 800,000 rounds were produced in this way. But such ammunition could not be stored for long periods; frequently it would not enter the breech or got stuck in the barrel; when fired, the smoke identified the position of the firer, and the bullet itself rarely ranged more than twenty yards.56

  Limited in men and munitions, restricted in objective to protracted defence, the Germans were constrained to adopt manners of fighting very different from those used either by the Schütztruppen in the past or by the armies of Europe on the western front. In essence, the askari now had to wage war as his tribal opponents had done. Before 1914 his task had been to bring a reluctant foe to battle; after 1914 his main endeavours were to avoid intense fighting, to limit his own casualties while inflicting losses on the enemy, and to give up ground rather than hold it. Close-order tactics based on the 1906 German infantry regulations were replaced by open order, frontal attack by all-round defence. Munitions shortages put a heavy emphasis on fire discipline and short-range combat, on surprise rather than fire-effect. The terrain, the force-to-space ratio, and the extended lines of communication of the British and French forces all suited the tactics of guerrilla warfare. The opportunities for outflanking the enemy or for threatening his rear were abundant, and envelopment was the normal mode of attack. Thus the defence was active, not static. But though the style of small wars became the means of fighting, position war remained at its core. The Schütztruppen were still committed to the protection of specific areas and their points of entry; river crossings, jungle clearings, and—in the north—the forts guarding the highland plateau were the scenes chosen by the Germans for their encounters with the enemy.

  Ebermaier, however reluctant he may in origin have been to embrace this form of operations, became
the heart and soul of its effective execution. The split between purely military exploitation of the colony’s resources for the purposes of war, and the civilian defence of its peacetime advances and infrastructure, evident in East Africa and implicit in Togoland, never surfaced in the Cameroons. The overall strategy, to hold as much of the Cameroons for as long as possible, was one that harnessed military priorities to the objectives of German colonialism. Ebermaier’s powers were enhanced, after the destruction of Kamina, by his isolation from Berlin. He was able to impose a centralized and interventionist control of the economy virtually from the outset, and far earlier than was deemed necessary in Germany itself. Its battlefield manifestations were in the mobilization of manpower and the manufacture of munitions. Their achievement was the product of a total revision in the attitude of the German authorities, albeit one consonant with the shift in operational focus from coast to interior. White settlers had regarded themselves in particular and the Cameroons in general as dependent on imports from Germany. It required the war, the loss of Duala, and the removal of those imports to break their dependence, and to demonstrate the fertility and self-sufficiency of the colony. On 7 August 1914 Ebermaier assumed power over all supplies and property in the Cameroons. In the subsequent week all food in the hands of commercial firms was collected, rationing was introduced, and prices were controlled. On 14 August it was reckoned that stocks were sufficient to last four months. In reality, starvation never became an issue. Cultivation was intensified, and the Cameroons proved itself able to supply a reasonably sized force for an indefinite period. Ebermaier ensured that markets remained open by paying the white population primarily in bank drafts and the askaris in silver. Circulation was maintained by taxing the askaris in cash, and thus the supply of silver—the only currency acceptable to the native population, but limited in quantity as it was delivered from Germany—remained sufficient to keep the economy active.57

  MAP 19. THE CAMEROONS

  Ebermaier’s authority was further enhanced by the relative weakness of the centralized military command. The grouping of companies proposed in the plan of 1913 had not been implemented during peace for fear of provoking the British and the French. Instead, the companies were strengthened individually in order to enable them to operate independently. There were good military arguments in favour of dispersion rather than concentration—the supply problems of a force larger than a company was one, and the extent of the territory to be covered was another. But most pressing were the difficulties of communication and of intelligence-collection, both powerful inducements in favour of delegating command.

  The main internal links in the Cameroons radiated from Duala and followed the railway lines. In peace, communications with the outposts in the north were relayed via Lagos and Yola, and those in the east via Libreville and Fort Lamy. Both were cut on the outbreak of war, and Duala’s capture disrupted the western network. The Schütztruppen had no integral signals organization to replace what was lost. The equipment available, heliographs and field telephones, was not even sufficient for full unit contact at the local level; improvised links using chicken wire or barbed wire were disrupted by the weather or by wild animals. By January 1916 a total of 2,435 kilometres of line had been created, and the equipment was salvaged and re-erected as the Germans withdrew.58 But the main signals system was a series of posts communicating by flag. Messages travelled slowly—about 50 kilometres a day—and without security.

  Intelligence was hard to gather, and when obtained tended to be of immediate relevance only. The terrain was too enclosed to make reconnaissance easy. The problems in assessing information provided by the local population—that they saw all bodies of troops as enemies, that they often could not count, and that they tended to say what they thought the hearer wanted them to say— applied also to reports from the askaris themselves. Therefore Europeans were used to reconnoitre, but their inability to move as discreetly as the natives meant that fighting patrols were the norm. Thus, the Germans knew if the British and French planned to attack; what they could not so easily do was form an overall idea of their purposes or of the distribution of their forces.

  Without adequate communications or sufficient up-to-date intelligence command from the centre was impossible. Furthermore, the maps were poor and on too small a scale (1:300,000) to enable detailed orders to be based upon them alone. Zimmerman, who had succeeded to the command of the Schütztruppen in April 1914, was condemned to being a frustrated spectator. He had no chief of staff, and therefore he could not abandon his headquarters for a visit to one of the fronts. The problems diminished as the Germans were pushed inwards and their front contracted. But even then Zimmerman could not direct the operations in the north, the defence of the forts of Mora, Garua, and Banyo, which screened Ngaundere. And so a tension arose between the pivot of his strategy and the fact that his own effectiveness was greater in the centre and the east. The only easement open to him was to create an intermediate level of command, as had been intended in 1913. Six battalion-sized formations (Abteilungsverbande) were established—one each in the north, the west (covering the southern Nigerian frontier), the south, the south-east, and the east, and one placed centrally at Jaunde. Significantly, this distribution put the weight in the east and not in the west. However, for all his problems, Zimmerman had two major advantages over his opponents. First, he was operating on interior lines, and thus could switch companies between each Abteilung and, as became necessary in 1915, merge those in the north and west and those in the south and south-east. Secondly, his command structure was nationally homogeneous.

  The key to understanding the course of the Cameroons campaign is to appreciate how imperfectly the British and French understood these intentions of the Germans. Neither power had anticipated offensive operations in West Africa, neither power had formed a plan for the conquest of the Cameroons, and thus neither power had set about building up the intelligence necessary to the conduct of a campaign there. A major windfall for the British was the capture of a large stock of German maps of the Cameroons from a liner in the Atlantic.59 The French in the south-east had to wait until the fall of Molundu on 22 December 1914 for a similar stroke of luck.60 But in general the problems of acquiring intelligence during the campaign were as great as, if not greater than, they were for the Germans. The ignorance of the German strengths, dispositions, and strategy was still virtually complete when the official histories came to be written.61 Moreover, the strategy of each of the Entente powers was determined by its own national considerations. Thus, particularly for the first year of the war, the three major belligerents in the Cameroons provided an extraordinary spectacle, the French and British pursuing divergent objectives, and neither of them striking the Germans sufficiently hard at the points where they could be hurt.

  The priorities of Joseph Aymérich, the military commander of French Equatorial Africa, were defensive. But French plans had been thrown into confusion in the south-east Cameroons, where additional territory had been ceded to Germany in settlement of the second Moroccan crisis in 1911. The two prongs of the German New Cameroons, extending to Singa and Bonga, split the French colony in three, and sat on the main means of internal communication, the Ubangi and Congo rivers. At Singa the French telegraph line between Brazzaville and Bangui passed over German territory for 12 kilometres. The length of the frontier (3,000 kilometres), and the dispersed and isolated nature of the French posts put a premium on efficient communications in order to enable French concentration and an Effective defence. On 6 August, therefore, the French seized Singa and Bonga. Simultaneously Aymérich set about the formation of four columns designed to take the war into German territory. From the east, Morisson’s column was to follow the course of the Lobaye river from its confluence with the Ubangi at Singa; the second, Hutin’s, was to move from the south-east along the Sanga; the third, Le Meillour’s, with its base in Gabon, was to push up from the south; and the fourth, Miquelard’s, was to do the same, cutting the Cameroons from Muni.
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  War, therefore, arrived in the Cameroons as a result of local French initiatives. No orders to attack had been received from Paris; the Germans, their signals intercepted by the French, had heard from neither Duala nor Berlin, and frequently had no forewarning that hostilities had begun.

  The confusion was prolonged by the desire of Belgium, master of all the eastern bank of the Congo and of its estuary with the sea, to preserve the neutrality of the Congo act. The British had no intention of observing the act,62 the Germans had no expectation that it would be. The Belgian initiative did not reflect the local interests of colonial government but was prompted from Europe, based on a desire to enforce Belgian neutrality there rather than in the Congo.63 The effect was to hamstring French movements, and in particular to isolate Gabon from the rest of Equatorial Africa. The French noted that the Belgian governor had a German name, Fuchs. His replacement by a ‘veritable Belge’, Henry, coincided with a German attack on the Belgian Congo from East Africa.64 On 28 August the reliance of Belgium on France in Europe was at last reciprocated by France’s ability to rely on Belgium in Africa. Thereafter France’s use of Belgian railways, rivers, and telegraph lines, as well as 600 Belgian troops with Hutin’s column, proved vital to Aymérich’s movements.