To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Dobell’s decisions, however misguided in terms of the reality of Zimmerman’s movements, were justified by logistic realities. Aymérich’s force was advancing too fast for its lines of communications; already extended at Jaunde, which lay 700 kilometres from its intermediate base at Nola on the Sanga, they were increased by 200 kilometres in ten days in the advance on Ebolowa. Beyond Ebolowa supply could no longer be maintained. The Germans having just been through the area, the villages were empty, and few porters could be found; those that were recruited did not stay. Faucon reduced the supplies carried by his column from six days’ to four, and increased the load carried by each soldier from two days’ to three, so saving on porters. Switching the lines of communication from Jaunde and Nola to Eseka and Duala took time. Aymérich’s columns did not finally link with Le Meillour’s until 14 February.102

  The final act of the Germans’ defeat in the Cameroons was accomplished not on the Muni frontier but at the opposite extreme. The Schütztruppen at Mora, undefeated but apprised of the retreat into Spanish territory, surrendered on 18 February. The garrison of 155 soldiers still had 37,000 rounds of ammunition.103

  For all their abundance at Mora, the lack of munitions became the major German explanation as to why their defence of the Cameroons had not been more protracted. The companies facing Dobell and Aymérich had been unable to sustain combat since September 1915. And without ammunition the idea of continuing operations from the jungle fastnesses of the south, or of raiding across the French border into Gabon or Equatorial Africa became absurd.

  Yet, although real enough, the munitions’ deficiency gained importance only in the light of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign in East Africa. When, after 1918, it became apparent that von Lettow-Vorbeck had fought on after German territory had been all but overrun, and had kept his forces intact until the end of the war, the question—implicit but nonetheless real—arose as to why Zimmerman had not done the same. Thus, rather than celebrate the achievement of a defence far longer and far more successful, against considerably superior forces, than had ever been anticipated, the Germans tended to ask why it had not been even better sustained.

  The true answer lay less in the munitions supply than in the higher direction of the campaign. In East Africa the overall conduct of the defence was assumed by the Schütztruppen commander, and his objective became not the preservation of a German colony, but the use of that colony to distract the British from concentrating all their efforts in Europe. In West Africa the civilian governor, Ebermaier, became the inspiration of German defence. His objective was to maintain Germany as a colonial power in the Cameroons. At no stage was heavy fighting allowed to do damage to the principal settlements, in particular Duala and Jaunde. Moreover, despite their continuous retreat, and despite their belief that the local tribes would follow the power that exercised the greater strength, the Germans continued to have a lien on local loyalties. There were major exceptions. In the west older contacts with the British resurfaced, and the disruption of the commercial life of the coastal areas produced dissatisfaction with German rule. In the south-east the territory had been too recently French for Aymérich’s men not to have some leverage, even if at times they threatened to forfeit it by their own brutality. But in the central heartlands, and particularly of course among the Beti, loyalty to the Germans lasted even beyond defeat.

  The retreat into Spanish Muni, although it condemned the Schütztruppen to military inutility, was thus of a piece with their political purposes. A German enclave persisted in West Africa. The Spanish authorities, with only 180 militiamen, had neither the inclination nor the power to intern the Schütztruppen. In April 1916 the Germans moved to Fernando Po. Aymérich received reports that there ammunition was reaching Ebermaier’s men, that he had 500,000 rounds, and that his troops were drilling and training, awaiting the day of German victory in Europe before re-establishing themselves as a major West African power.104

  French fears were exaggerated; the British blockade made Muni and Fernando Po poor bases for the Germans. But it remains true that the final settlement of the Cameroons was the product more of affairs in Europe than of the outcome of the campaign in the Cameroons. If Germany had won the war in 1918 it might still have re-established its authority in the Cameroons. Neither Britain nor France managed adequately to fill the administrative vacuum created by Germany’s withdrawal.

  As the conquest of the Cameroons proceeded, its de facto occupation developed three separate enclaves—to the west, to the north, and to the south-east. Confronted by what seemed to be the total absence of state administration, the column commanders had to assume civil, financial, and technical responsibilities, as well as military. Dobell enjoyed a staff of British colonial officers specifically trained for such functions; moreover, he had the medical equipment and logistical support to sustain at least some of them. As early as December 1914 it seemed likely that a partition which followed the lines of spheres of influence as well as the preferences of the population would divide the Cameroons centrally, along the line of the Sanaga. This was much further south than the growth of Doumergue’s territorial ambitions could now countenance.105 The French therefore proposed that the south-east, the territory that had belonged to them until 1911 and which they had conquered by dint of their own efforts, should be administered by them; the remainder, including Duala, should be a condominium pending a final partition at the end of the war.

  Britain’s responses to condominium were divided. The Foreign Office, anxious to concede to the French where it could in order to gain elsewhere, was happy to accommodate France’s wishes. By early 1916 the Cabinets’s war committee too saw France’s immersion in West Africa as a way of keeping it out of East Africa. But other departments were more annexationist. The Admiralty wanted Duala, and if Britain had Duala, then it held the economic key to all of the Cameroons except the south. The Colonial Office, whose campaign this was in terms both of finance and direction, came under pressure from its local officials. In Nigeria Lugard’s policy of ‘indirect rule’ had been deepened by the outbreak of war. The withdrawal of district officers and their supporting troops increased Britain’s reliance on the loyalty of the emirs. In Bussa, where administrative reorganization failed to respect traditional authority, rebellion flared in June 1915. Elsewhere the authority of the chiefs often lacked deep roots and was vitiated by corruption; the manpower and fiscal demands of the war cast them in the roles of British agents. On the Gold Coast resistance to chiefly direction was evident as soon as the troops departed for Togoland in August 1914, and in 1916 fuelled the Bongo riots.106 Lugard therefore wanted to bolster the chiefs of northern Nigeria by the restoration of what he deemed to be their traditional lands. In doing so, he simplified the fluidities of the political relationships within the emirates, and tended to define them in terms of geographical boundaries rather than of more subtle influences. His determination to ensure the integrity of the emirates of Bornu and Yola extended to Ngaundere, Tibati, and Banyo.

  At a meeting on 23 February 1916 Georges Picot for France, ‘who knew nothing of the lands and peoples he was dividing’, drew a line ‘with a heavy pencil’ which Sir Charles Strachey, the representative of the Colonial Office, was constrained to accept. As one of Strachey’s colleagues later observed: ‘If only you had not had a pencil in your hand at the time.’107 The provisional partition followed the main north-south road, not the distribution of tribal affiliations. It gave the northern Cameroons to the line Garua-Ngaundere-Tibati-Joko-Nachtigal to the British and the rest to France. The Foreign Office had prevailed. The Admiralty did not get Duala. The traditional territories of the major British loyalist on the northern Nigerian frontier, the Emir of Yola, remained split. The zones of occupation created in 1916 ran across the boundaries formed by right of conquest, especially in the west.

  Administratively, neither power was up to the task of resettlement and reconstruction. The British zone was incorporated as part of Nigeria, but the Nigerian administration wa
s already weakened by the departure of its staff for military service, and was therefore not equal to an extension of its territorial responsibilities. In the French zone, the territories originally ceded in 1911 were reincorporated with French Equatorial Africa, and the remainder was governed by the army and answerable directly to Paris.108

  The casualties were the tribes of the Cameroons. Where there had been fifty Germans there were now five or six Frenchmen. Education fell victim to the internment and evacuation of German Catholic pastors. German doctors left with the Schütztruppen. In their stead witchcraft and magic regained dominance. Feuds and thefts multiplied, evidence of the loss of order and of the violence already legitimized by the war.109 Ultimately, the post-war settlement did confirm the French hold on three-quarters of the Cameroons, but it was a grip that reflected the realities of diplomacy more than the realities of French rule in the period 1916–18.

  SOUTH–WEST AFRICA

  The replacement of domestic discord by renewed national purpose, a sense of union that conquered class and even ethnic divisions—these are the themes seen as characteristic of the early months of the war for most of its belligerents. South Africa was an exception. Furthermore, the splits which sundered the newly formed Union were a direct reflection of pre-war tensions. South Africa is therefore the exception that proves the rule—not the rule that powers went to war as a flight from domestic crisis, a creation of hindsight, but the rule that the fear that war would provoke revolution inhibited the move to war while not in the end preventing it. Admittedly, the pressures to which South Africa was exposed were unusually severe. Its internal conflicts were at once social, racial, and national; it was only on the third that the Union foundered.110

  In August 1913, and again in January 1914, troops were deployed on the Rand to suppress strikes among white miners. The effect of martial law was to boost the status and membership of the South African Labour party, to fuse the English skilled worker and the landless Afrikaner in joint action. In 1911 the party affiliated with the International. But when war broke out this link proved brittle. The party’s executive committee remained loyal to its principles, and resolutions opposing war were passed at conferences in December 1914 and January 1915. However, many of the party’s branches supported the war, and so did its principal organ The Worker, edited by F.H.R. Creswell, a major in the Rand Rifle Corps. In parliament the Labour party backed the Unionist party, while outside it the pacifists began to break away, setting up the War on War League in September. The popular responses to the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 made this split overt: in August the English members ensured that the party declared its loyal support for the war, while in September the leaders of the left formed the International Socialist League. The Marxists found that their fellow-travellers included at least some Afrikaners, driven by nationalism to reject a war undertaken by the British empire.111

  One of the principal planks around which the pre-war Labour party had coalesced was its advocacy of the industrial colour bar. The dependence of the mines on the skills of white workers became a means to protect the employment of all whites against black competition. Socialism stood cheek-by-jowl with racism. Civil rights discrimination against coloureds, and particularly against Indian immigration, countered by Gandhi’s tactics of passive resistance, provoked a strike by 130,000 Indians in Natal in 1913. Some amelioration of the Indians’ plight was effected in June 1914, and when war broke out the colour bar was eased by shortages of skilled white labour. Both coloureds and blacks used the opportunity to stress their loyalty, at least to the British empire if not to South Africa. Persuaded by London’s propaganda that this was a war for liberalism and self-determination, the less radical and more middle-class elements argued that co-operation could be the path to full citizenship. The South African Native National Congress, the future African National Congress, declared its support for Louis Botha, the prime minister, and Walter Rubusana, its leader in the Cape, offered to raise 5,000 infantry. The coloureds’ association, the Africa Peoples’ Organization, issued its own attestation forms in a bid to form a Cape Coloured Corps in August: by September it had mustered 10,000 volunteers, and in 1915 the unit was approved by the government.

  Thus the war quietened agitation in two of the major areas of domestic division. But for Afrikaner nationalism war provided fuel to flames only recently rekindled. In 1907 the Treaty of Vereeniging had promised unity for Boer and Briton within South Africa, and in 1910 the creation of the Union gave Afrikaners an effective measure of self-government. But the Boers themselves were divided. In 1902 some had left South Africa for German South-West Africa or for Portuguese Mozambique rather than be subject to British rule. Many more, then or later, effected a compromise—to live within the empire for the time being while still harbouring as ultimate goals both independence and republicanism. Thus, the collaboration of Louis Botha, the Boer general and the Union’s prime minister, could be deemed temporarily expedient. But Botha’s policy of conciliation was shattered by the speeches and actions of J.B.M. Hertzog of the Orange Free State. Hertzog accepted English and Dutch equality within South Africa, but argued that equality should be expressed through separation, both linguistic and cultural; fusion would be a cloak for Anglicization. Botha’s first efforts to meet Hertzog’s challenges included his incorporation within the Union cabinet. But in 1912 Hertzog’s criticisms were too overt for any fiction of unity to be sustainable. Following his exclusion from the cabinet, Hertzog seceded from Botha’s South Africa party, and in January 1914 formed the Nationalist party. Thus Botha had already lost a large section of Afrikaner support when war broke out.

  In August 1914 Hertzog did not disagree with Botha’s assumption that British entry to the war automatically involved South Africa. Botha’s immediate release of imperial troops from South Africa for Europe was therefore uncontroversial. It was the move from passive participation to active involvement that made specific the doubts of Afrikaner nationalists.

  On 7 August, in pursuit of the objectives laid down by the CID subcommittee, London asked Pretoria whether it could seize the harbours and wireless stations of German South-West Africa. In this case, however, the immediate naval priorities chimed with echoes of pre-war annexationism. The German presence in southern Africa had provided a haven for diehard Boer rebels; it had also, in its ruthless suppression of the Herero rebellion in 1904, triggered fears of a native uprising within the Union. Thus, for London, the conquest of South-West Africa would ease the long-term security considerations of South Africa, and would tie the Union more closely to the empire.112 For Botha himself it opened even grander visions—the incorporation of all southern Africa, including Bechuanaland, Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, within the Union.113 He was therefore anxious that South Africa itself, and specifically its troops and not those from elsewhere in the empire, should respond to London’s request.

  Botha’s cabinet was less convinced. At its meeting on 7 August four members supported him and four opposed. Much of the discussion focused on the practical difficulties of mounting the campaign. But the fundamental concern was Afrikaner reaction. The Boers of the Union could well end up fighting the Boers of South-West Africa. Principle was also at issue: Britain justified its engagement in the war by reference to the rights of small nations, and yet such scruples had not restrained it from crushing the Boer republics fourteen years earlier. For Boers to become the agents of British imperialism, particularly when the empire itself might be forfeit if Germany proved victorious in Europe, was to the Nationalists both morally unacceptable and politically inexpedient.

  Nonetheless, by 10 August the cabinet had convinced itself that, rather than become a source of increasing division among Afrikaners, the conquest of German South-West Africa could be a means for a newfound unity between English and Dutch. London had renewed its request on 9 August. The cabinet agreed to meet it on two conditions, both designed to ensure domestic unity. Parliament was to be asked to approve the campaign, and only volunteers were to
be called upon to serve. Botha mentioned neither condition in his reply to London.114 Nor was the prime minister alone in his underestimation of Boer opposition. J. C. Smuts, the minister of defence, reckoned that, ‘when all is over and German South-West Africa again forms a part of our Afrikaaner heritage, feeling will quickly swing round and our action be generally approved’.115 His inner conviction overrode his acceptance of mounting evidence to the contrary; it generated a mishandling of South Africa’s mobilization that fell only just short of disaster.

  A month elapsed before the South African parliament was called. On 10 September the assembly dutifully approved Botha’s policy by ninety-one votes to ten, and on the 12th the Senate followed suit by twenty-four votes to five. On 14 September parliament was prorogued, and did not reconvene until 26 February 1915. Formally, the decision to invade South-West Africa was hallowed by popular approval. In reality, the inauguration of military preparations had preceded their ratification; the commencement of operations was postponed until late September, not because of constitutional nicety but because of the problem of naval co-operation. Most telling of all, the public justification for the campaign was no longer conquest but defence. The theme on which Botha and Smuts harped in their parliamentary speeches was the possibility of a German takeover of South Africa. Such improbabilities were buttressed by reference to border incidents, duly dressed up as a German invasion. The annexation of German territory and the cabinet’s hope that this would fuel domestic conciliation were never mentioned.

  The parliamentary session was the first open acknowledgement of South Africa’s plan to invade South-West Africa. But speculation had begun on 11 August, when Smuts published the government’s intention to organize adequate forces ‘to provide for contingencies’.116 Smuts specifically mentioned four volunteer regiments, thus reflecting the cabinet’s condition of the previous day. But the 1912 Defence act, which created an army for South Africa, made all European males aged 17 to 60 liable for military service in time of war, and committed all those aged 17 to 25 to compulsory training. South Africa’s forces had four main elements: a small body of permanent troops, either mounted rifles or artillery; an ‘active citizen force’, largely English in composition, based on pre–1912 volunteer regiments, but completed to a strength of 25,000 if insufficient volunteers were forthcoming; rifle associations for older men, predominantly Boer burghers liable to be commandeered as they had been in the war with the British; and a cadet corps for those aged 13 to 17. The declared aim was Anglo-Boer integration but for many Boers the effects smacked of British imperialism. Khaki uniforms, clean-shaven faces and hierarchical rather than patriarchal and elective command structures were the military tools of the Boers’ enemies not of the former Boer republics. The establishment of a cadet corps confirmed that the ultimate objective was Anglicization.