To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Not until November were the Gabon columns ready for forward movement once more. Now the weight was placed on Le Meillour, not on Miquelard, and the former was given overall command. His objective was Akoafim. Facing him were eight German companies, both regular and reservist. The obvious way to ease Le Meillour’s path, at least from the perspective of Merlin, now in Libreville, was to get Hutin’s column to act in conjunction with Le Meillour’s right flank. Zimmerman, in order to reinforce Eymael and bring the strength facing Morisson in the Bertua-Dume area to five companies, had reduced the troops holding the Molundu-Lomie-Yukaduma sector to 750 policemen and reservists.

  Aymérich’s orders of 1 December, therefore, reflected the movements of Le Meillour’s column and not those of Morisson’s. Ignoring the facts that Hutin was held up at Molundu, and that his column’s advance would be slowed once it left the line of the Sanga, Aymérich instructed Hutin to take Molundu, and then to move south-west to aid Le Meillour’s advance from Gabon. Hutin’s and Le Meillour’s columns were now to have the major role, with Lomie as a joint objective. Only when they had reached that point was Morisson to resume his advance. Morisson was indeed dealt severe blows by Eymael at Bertua on 25, 27, and 28 December 1914. But Eymael still abandoned Bertua, and soon thereafter he lost to the north the two additional companies with which he had been reinforced. Moreover, in late November Morisson’s supply problems were eased once more, as the route up the River Sanga became available to him.

  Hutin meanwhile had not one but two sets of orders. Those given him on 17 November told him to take Yukaduma, and clearly intended him to retain contact with his detached company at Nola; they had not been cancelled by those of 1 December. Molundu fell on 22 December; thereafter, part of Hutin’s column pushed north to Yukaduma and part west to aid Le Meillour.

  At the close of 1914 the Germans could be reasonably satisfied with their position. In the north and south German defences still rested, broadly speaking, on the frontiers. The losses of territory to Dobell’s force in the west and to Aymérich’s columns in the south-east had been anticipated; the defensive core in the northern highlands remained intact; to the south-west communications with Muni were secure. German casualties had been more than compensated for by new recruitment. Zimmerman had two major worries. The first was the rapid progress of Morisson’s column, which he feared would advance on Ngaundere from the south, converging with the French from Chad and the British from Nigeria. He was prepared to weaken his forces facing Le Meillour to check Morisson, thus illustrating how different from French strategy was the Germans’ sense of their own vulnerability.76 His second concern was Dobell’s next step. If Dobell elected to persevere beyond the head of the northern railway and Dschang, he would enter the northern plateau. Alternatively, he might choose to reinforce the French at Edea, on the midland railway, and push on to Jaunde between the Sanaga and Njong rivers, so threatening the link between Ngaundere and the south-west coast.

  The Germans mounted two attacks in January and February 1915 designed to bring relief from the threats to east and west. Zimmerman could not easily concentrate forces against the British column at Dschang, but he did have companies around Edea. On 5 January Mayer’s Senegalese held Edea against a determined German assault. Tactically, French fire superiority prevailed; strategically, Zimmerman achieved his objectives—the British became alarmed for their rear and fell back from Dschang, and talk of Mayer’s column co-operating with Miquelard’s advance from the south was quashed.77 In the east, von der Marwitz’s Südostabteilung—relieved on its southern flank by Hutin’s move to the west—co-operated with Eymael’s Ostabteilung to threaten the flank and rear of Morisson’s extended, and now unsupported, advance. On 24 February the Germans retook Bertua, and by the end of the month Morisson had fallen back 100 kilometres to the line of the Kadei.

  Dobell was in a quandary. The ease of his initial operations, up until December 1914, had opened up the prospects of a more extensive advance than that so far authorized by the Colonial Office. He asked for more troops, and on 26 December 1914 justified his request by alluding to ‘the possibility, by constant activity of effecting the surrender of the whole of the Cameroons’.78 But the reinforcements approved, 400 men from Sierra Leone, did no more than make good his losses. On 5 March 1915 he reported that he had only two battalions fit, and demanded reliefs, deeming six months’ campaigning in the Cameroons sufficient for any man.79 But he had strained the resources of British West Africa to their limit. Lugard argued that the security of Nigeria was being undermined by the demands of the Cameroons campaign; a revolt in Warri province gave force to his resistance to Dobell’s needs.80 Dobell suggested that the Indian army contribute. The battalion which he was eventually given was of low quality, and in February 1915 had mutinied in Singapore. His other expedients, to recruit native levies, and to establish a local police force at Duala so as to release troops for the front, were no more than palliatives.81 The French component of Dobell’s command was in an equally poor state. Although Dobell was responsible for Mayer’s orders, Dakar was responsible for his supply. But Senegal had no stocks from which it could provision an expeditionary force. Mayer was left to find most of his porters within the Cameroons. At the end of October, despite Mayer’s proximity to the coast, the rice to which the Senegalese were accustomed was replaced by locally requisitioned root crops. Health declined, and the problems compounded themselves as the French had too few doctors. By mid-December only one officer and a maximum of three NCOs were fit to march in each company.82 On 10 March 1915 London signalled to Dobell that he was to make the best defensive arrangements possible and that no further offensive was anticipated. The basic CID strategy remained unchanged.

  But that strategy had never been in accord with the grand schemes, both political and operational, of Merlin. The French experience of 1914 showed that effective command was exercised by the column commanders, and that the orders issued from Brazzaville bore little relation to the situation pertaining on the ground. The consequence was a series of separate advances whose effects in combination were the result of chance rather than design. Aymerich’s direct influence was restricted principally to Hutin’s column, and then only by virtue of his abandoning Brazzaville for points further forward. Aymérich’s absences created Merlin’s opportunity. Merlin had failed to achieve the co-ordination in operations which he had anticipated in September 1914. Command was divided over three governments (including the Belgians), four governors-general, six independent commanders-in-chief, and eight column commanders.83 Dobell had the major responsibility, but liaison between him and the French was effected via London and Paris; Cunliffe in the north was not in direct contact with Dobell; the status of Brisset’s column from Chad, now acting with Cunliffe and outside Aymerich’s control, was unclear. By February 1915 Aymérich at least had begun to recognize that the solution was greater delegation. But Aymérich had lost the initiative to Merlin. Merlin’s ambition, despite all the practical difficulties, was to achieve the centralization of strategy which had so far eluded him.

  On 6 February 1915 Merlin convened a conference in Brazzaville to discuss the next moves. Its central idea was an advance from the south and south-east towards Lomie and Dume, with the object of cutting off Jaunde. Morisson would have to take Dume, or run the risk of being exposed and isolated. Miquelard’s column should advance to the Ntem in order to complete Jaunde’s separation from the south-west. To the north Brisset was to be placed under Cunliffe’s command, and the two should take Barua, and possibly then link up with Morisson.

  An advance on Jaunde was therefore the concept that would unite the advancing columns in reciprocating action. On 11 February Aymérich left Brazzaville in order to attend to the supply and communication problems of Hutin’s column, which were worsening as it extended to the west. Merlin set off for Duala, to convince Dobell that he too should adopt Jaunde as his objective.

  Dobell was in no state to fall in with Merlin’s schemes. His inclination
was to put the weight on attrition and on seapower. By tightening the blockade of the Spanish coast the Germans would be exhausted, and at the same time the limited Entente forces would not be overextended. Furthermore, on 4 February a captured message from Zimmerman to the Garua garrison revealed that Ngaundere, not Jaunde, was the centre of the German defensive scheme. This intelligence was relayed to the Entente commanders on 26 February, and was taken with particular seriousness by Largeau in Chad, who acquired further information to corroborate its thrust. Merlin dismissed it.84 Dobell was sufficiently won over by Merlin to abandon his own instincts, to accept that the attack on Garua—instead of being the major thrust demanded if Ngaundere was the hub of German resistance—should be supportive, and to agree that he himself could lead a direct advance on Jaunde. Merlin’s representation of the French advance in the south and east was what convinced Dobell. The line Dume-Lomie-Akoafim-the River Ntem, the objective set at Brazzaville on 6 February, would be reached, Merlin said, by the end of March. As he spoke to Dobell, Merlin—freed from the embarrassment of Aymerich’s presence or intervention—placed the French columns where he imagined or desired them to be, not where they were. Furthermore, in the plan finally agreed on 12 March Merlin committed the French to a timetable and an advance of which neither Aymérich nor his column commander had cognizance, and to a degree of co-ordination and lateral communication which experience had proved was impossible to achieve.85

  Two routes led from Edea in the direction of Jaunde. The southern was the railway line, but it was complete only as far as Eseka. The northern was a forest track passing through Wum Biagas. Dobell formed two columns, the British under Gorges to take the track, the French under Mayer the railway; when the French reached Eseka they were to join the British at Wum Biagas, and the two would then proceed together. Forest and swamp, until just short of Jaunde, made the ground ideally suited to defence. With 300 rifles on the track and 275 on the railway,86 the Germans forced Dobell’s troops into fighting for every day’s advance. The British took Wum Biagas on 4 May, and the French captured Eseka on 11 May. On 25 May Mayer’s troops led the way out of Wum Biagas towards Jaunde. His command, weakened by malnutrition and disease before he started, was now taking heavy casualties. When attacked, his men were slow to deploy off the track into the bush. Twenty-five per cent of those engaged in the advance were killed or wounded. The Germans harried the French flanks and rear. The carriers, mostly local men pressed into service, disappeared as soon as shots were exchanged. By 5 June Mayer had only progressed 19 kilometres beyond Wum Biagas, a rate of a 1.5 kilometres a day. At that speed Dobell could not reach Jaunde before the rainy season halted all movement. On 11 June he approved Mayer’s request for permission to retreat. The following day a German attack against Mayer’s rear, scattering his carriers, wreaked havoc with his lines of communication. By 28 June Dobell was back at Ngwe. Both his Nigerian battalions were reduced to half their strength;87 sickness and supply difficulties ruled out any immediate resumption of the offensive. The advent of the rains provided confirmation. Until October, therefore, action in the west was confined to a tightening of the blockade of Muni. Dobell used the respite to repair his shattered forces, to give leave, to let his sick recuperate.

  The degree to which Dobell’s first advance on Jaunde was a failure depends on the object which it was trying to fulfil. For Merlin, it was the major stroke to ensure total victory in the Cameroons. For Dobell, it was—at least initially—a supporting move to relieve pressure on Aymérich; not his own but the French advance from the south and east promised, particularly given the optimistic account of its progress from Merlin, to be the decisive blow against German resistance. Dobell had, after all, received no authorization from London to move beyond the coastal area, and France, not Britain, desired to complete the conquest of the German colony. But, whatever the views of the War Office (which on 3 April took over military responsibility for the campaign from the Colonial Office), Dobell himself began to be attracted by Merlin’s ambitions. On 12 April the setbacks to the progress of their columns led the French to ask Dobell for a postponement until 1 May. Dobell could have cancelled the offensive—justifying his decision by reference to his own instructions from London, to the state of his command, to his doubts about whether Jaunde was even the right objective, and to the proximity of the rainy season. Buoyed by his own initial good progress, he did not.

  Aymérich, absent from Duala in March, remained committed to the fulfilment, not of the programme conceived then but of that to which he had been privy in Brazzaville on 6 February. Like Merlin he saw Jaunde as the heart of the German defence; unlike Merlin he had few illusions about the pace of his columns’ advance. He anticipated their reaching the objectives set on 6 February not in late March or early April, but in June. Finding himself committed by the Duala conference to a plan in whose formulation he had had no share, his first response had been to seek its postponement.

  In April none of the French columns was in a position to give effective support to each other, let alone to Dobell. Morisson was not yet fit to move after his retreat to the Kadei. The effect of his falling back was to force Hutin to reorientate himself to the north, and thus away from Le Meillour and the lines of advance fixed at Brazzaville and Duala. Moreover, Hutin’s movements remained ponderous and painful. His supply problems, although ameliorated by local resources, were still not fully resolved. On 16 April he calculated he would need 1,512 porters; Aymérich thought a figure double that would be nearer the mark. The supply officers at Brazzaville and Molundu reckoned 12,000 porters were needed to transport three months’ supplies to both Morisson’s and Hutin’s columns. But they were uncertain how many porters were actually present with Hutin’s column, given the rate at which they were deserting and falling sick. They therefore did not know how many effectives they were trying to feed. Overestimating the number of porters in line with their own expectations, they created loads that were beyond the capacity of the porterage available. Moreover, the further Hutin advanced the more reliant he became on land rather than on riverine communications, and the more porters were carrying food to feed other porters, not to feed fighting men.88

  More serious than Hutin’s problems were those of the southern offensive, adumbrated at Brazzaville and at Duala as the principal French offensive, but which had collapsed into a series of uncoordinated and feeble sallies. Le Meillour had planned to begin his advance on 1 March, but had brought it forward to late January in order to aid Hutin. He therefore set off before his supply arrangements were complete. Like Hutin, he was naively optimistic about his needs. In December 1914 he reckoned that both his and Miquelard’s columns would require 400 porters; in March 1915 he announced he would need more than double that number for his column alone; in fact he had only forty. On 13 February he learnt that Miquelard, whose line of march had been fixed as Ojem and then Akoafim in order to support Le Meillour’s own advance, had encountered strong German forces. Miquelard therefore called on Le Meillour to support him by attacking Akoafim. The latter did so, but his efforts were half-hearted, publicly because of his supply problems, privately because of his own lack of drive. On 17 March Le Meillour received the results of the conference at Brazzaville on 6 February, but he was now back at Minkebe, not advancing on Lomie. Furthermore, the Brazzaville conclusions did not make clear whether his task was to act in conjunction with Miquelard on his left or Hutin on his right. Communications with either took at least twenty days. Le Meillour decided to support neither, but to push between Ojem and Akoafim. The German forces, up to 75 per cent of them at any one time racked with dysentery or blackwater fever, were able to check an attack that lacked either administrative coherence or strategic direction. Thus Aymérich, whose communications with the Gabon columns were further lengthened by his leaving Molundu on 25 April for Yukaduma, learnt on 14 May that Le Meillour was neither attacking Akoafim nor conforming to the February programme.89

  In June the failure of the French offensive in the south b
egan to be offset by the recovery of that in the east. On 7 May Aymérich, succumbing to Merlin’s pressure for progress, instructed his columns to take such offensive opportunities as presented themselves. Their objectives were still limited, their tasks to fix the enemy, not to pursue him aufond. On 22 May he brought coherence to Hutin’s movements by directing his column and Morisson’s to aim at their eventual convergence. The pause on the Kadei, the support of the local population, and the fact that he was on the edge of more fertile territory enabled Morisson’s column to rebuild. Morisson resumed his advance, reaching Moopa on 23 May, Bertua a month later, and finally entering Dume on 25 July. Hutin’s supply problems were countered by weakening German resistance. Only those Schütztruppen companies still issued with peacetime ammunition could be used in major operations. In mid-June all but ninety men in Südostabteilung mutinied, a reflection of the inadequate ammunition supply, of the death of their respected commanding officer von der Marwitz, and of the fear of capture.90 Although Hutin was not in a state to exploit the opportunity—most of the mutineers returned to the ranks in late June—he finally entered Lomie on 24 June; Hutin was now able to recruit locally, even drawing in former askaris.91 In August the two columns were united under Morisson’s command, and together formed a joint front facing west and running from Bertua and Dume to Abong-Bang and Lomie. At last, therefore, the French were beginning to meet the commitments entered into by Merlin. But by now Dobell’s advance and retreat were done.