To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Pretoria nonetheless assumed that Botha’s advance would follow the pace and direction set by the railway line. Troops left the Cape assured that their transport needs would be met at Swakopmund. On arrival they found nothing. The brackish water on the coast rendered horses ill for the first few days. Inland, the Germans had poisoned the wells with sheep-dip. Fresh wells were dug, but their capacity was limited to a maximum of 8,000 gallons a day. Water was therefore shipped from the Cape. The remount position remained desperate. Wagons had teams of ten mules, when they needed twelve to cross the sandy terrain. A round trip of 95 kilometres, to the front and back, rendered the beasts unserviceable for a week. In theory each regiment’s transport carried sufficient supplies for two days, and each brigade’s for a further three; in practice the regiment’s bore half a day’s, and the brigade’s one. Thus, the loss of weapons and mules under McKenzie and Smuts whittled away Botha’s striking power. Eight thousand mounted troops were deployed in the south, but only 5,000 in the north.

  Friction between Pretoria and Swakopmund and between Swakopmund and Lüderitz flared. Within the northern force, the engineers building the line and the remount officers allocating the mules and horses were predominantly English; the frustrations they engendered exacerbated Boer animosity. For British staff officers, Boer independence—manifested tactically by a failure to report back progress or to co-ordinate actions—proved equally infuriating.137

  Botha’s advance on Windhoek was therefore a staccato affair. Unusually heavy rain flooded the bed of the Swakop river, and reports of sufficient grazing inland decided Botha to abandon the railway route to Usakos in favour of the more direct approach along the Swakop. On 19 March he struck out from Husab towards Riet and Jakalswater. The Germans had rested their defences on an arc of hills west of Jakalswater and Riet and curving round to the south. The whole position extended over 48 kilometres and was held by four under-strength companies, with minimal artillery support and only thirty rifles in reserve at Jakalswater. On 20 March the South Africans enveloped the Germans with mounted brigades to north and south. The infantry in the centre engaged the Germans frontally at a range of 1,000 yards. The Germans on the right were pulled northwards towards the Swakopmund-Jakalswater light railway, opening the gaps in the centre; their retreat to the east lay across open ground now flanked by enemy cavalry. Virtually the entire German command on the central heights, about 200 men, was captured. But Botha’s hopes of sufficient grass for his horses proved misplaced. On 24 March he had no choice but to pull them back to Swakopmund. Riet was established as a forward base for the accumulation of supplies. Deprived of transport, Botha could not move on either Usakos or Windhoek. Thus, during late March and early April, as the southern offensives developed, the Germans’ line of retreat to the north lay open.

  Jakalswater-Riet proved to be the only major defensive action fought by the Germans in the entire campaign; it finally convinced Franke of the seriousness of the threat from Swakopmund. Furthermore, an intercepted message from Botha to McKenzie revealed that a major advance from Lüderitz was also in hand. Aus was directly threatened from the west, but also increasingly from the south and east. All the river crossings on the Orange were in South African hands by the end of March, and with the capture of Kalkfontein on 5 April Jacob van Deventer’s southern force gained a foothold on the German railway: the South Africans’ own railhead was pushed forward from Prieska with the aim of linking the two networks. On 31 March 3,000 men under Berrangé breached South-West Africa’s eastern frontier near Rietfontein. By pushing motor vehicles carrying water ahead of the main column, they had traversed 400 kilometres of the Kalahari desert in two weeks. With Deventer’s and Berrange’s columns converging on Keetmanshoop from south and east, the potentially strong defensive postion of the Karas mountains was enveloped from both sides.

  McKenzie had halted at Garub to muster sufficient supplies to sustain the large forces which he calculated would be required to take Aus. But when he entered the town on 30 March he was unopposed. Despite its strong defences, Aus was evacuated on 27 March and most of its garrison directed north.

  The German withdrawal from the south was conducted by Hauptmann von Kleist, a strong-willed officer of fighting temperament and outdated tactical views. Franke was too distant or too confused to impose his will. Kleist’s principal task was to get his command and as much livestock as possible intact to the north. But, like many of the Germans whose only direct experience of Afrikaners had been Maritz’s rebels or the diehard Boer émigrés, he underestimated the military qualities—and above all the speed of manoeuvre—of his opponents. He concluded that McKenzie’s force would halt at Aus, and that the southern columns would aim to converge on Keetmanshoop, not encircle his own units. Kleist therefore allowed small fractions of his forces to become engaged in minor actions, and failed to press his retreat with sufficient expedition. He abandoned Keetmanshoop on 19 April, but then halted at Gibeon, concluding that he had sufficient distance between himself and his opponents. However, on 14 April McKenzie’s horsemen had quitted Aus and the line of the railway, striking north-east towards Gibeon. The South Africans covered 335 kilometres in eleven days, and on the night of 25/6 April hit the railway line just north of Gibeon. Kleist’s command, 800 men and two field guns, was completely unprepared. McKenzie’s men blew the line north of Gibeon during the night, but the enveloping force was deployed too close to the site of the explosion, in exposed positions, and the bright moonlight enabled the Germans to counter-attack and drive the South Africans back. When daylight came, McKenzie’s handling of the main assault from the south did much to recover the situation, but the Germans were able to escape to the north in the direction of Rehoboth, albeit at the cost of 241 casualties.

  So far, much to the Germans’ surprise and relief, the native population had remained quiet. But Kleist’s defeat at Gibeon, combined with the German evacuation of the south, spurred the Bastards to rise in revolt. The Germans felt aggrieved. The Bastards, or Basters, émigrés of mixed blood from the Cape, had been treated with relative generosity, granted their own lands and the formation of their own police company. But the company, intended for use within the Bastards’ own territory, was employed first on German lines of communications and then in guarding white prisoners of war. In performing these duties it released Germans for the front line. Furthermore, the Bastards did not escape the requisitioning of oxen and wagons. On 1 April Neels van Wyck, a Bastard chief, contacted Botha, offering to co-operate against the Germans. Although himself reliant on at least 30,000 blacks and coloureds as labourers and drivers, Botha remained keen that this should be a white man’s war and told van Wyck not to get involved. But ten days later the Bastards began seizing weapons and oxen from German settlers, killing three who opposed them. On 18 April Bastard police attacked Rehoboth. By 25 April three German companies were engaged in a punitive expedition into Bastard territory, west of the railway line and south of Rehoboth. But the collapse of the Germans’ hold on the south forced them to break off their action on 8 May, and to carve out a line of retreat to the north, skirting Windhoek to its east.

  The combination of Kleist’s slow withdrawal and then the Bastard rebellion prevented the rapid formation of a large German concentration to face Botha. On 25/6 April the Germans tried to use their control of the main Swakopmund-Usakos railway line to attack the South African infantry at Trekkopjes. The aim was to blow the railway to the South Africans’ rear so that the forward formations could be isolated and defeated in detail. German pilots had revealed that the South Africans had withdrawn their artillery but had mistaken a dozen armoured cars for water trucks. The Germans lost their way in the dark, failed to destroy the railway, and so allowed the South Africans to be reinforced.

  Until now Botha’s supply problems had prevented him taking advantage of the Germans’ dispersion; the chance of cutting off the forces to the south by mastering the railway line at Karibib evaporated, as his men slaughtered and ate the draught oxen
for his artillery and the goats intended to trigger the mines which the Germans had laid in his path. On 18 April he had only 125 of the 400 wagons he reckoned he needed to maintain two to three days’ supply with his troops. However, at the end of the month Pretoria promised 300 wagons and sufficient mules. Confident he would soon be able to sustain his advance, Botha now felt able to exploit the five days’ supplies which the light railway to Jakalswater had allowed him to accumulate. He concentrated four mounted brigades at Riet, and directed two under Brits northwards to Karibib and the other two under M.W. Myburgh eastwards up the Swakop to Okohandja, so cutting off Franke to the north and forcing Kleist to the east as he retreated on Waterberg. On 3 May the Germans abandoned Karibib and its wells. Two days later the South Africans, their horses desperate for water, and confronting disaster if they did not get it, entered the town. Despite the broken terrain, they had encountered no German resistance.

  Karibib was the railway junction which linked the north of the colony with the centre and the south. Its possession consolidated Botha’s hold on all the objectives set by London. On 13 May he was able formally to take possession of Windhoek. At the start of the war Windhoek’s wireless station had been out of commission, as it was undergoing repairs. But after Kamina’s fall it had become the new pivot of communication between Africa and Nauen. Its signals were liable to daily interruption because of atmospheric conditions, and were entirely suspended in November. But full links were restored by January. Without Windhoek, the Germans depended on the wireless at Tsumeb in the north. Constructed from materials taken from the station at Swakopmund, it had begun operation on 24 November 1914. It provided good links throughout the colony and into Angola, but it could not communicate with Mwanza and Bukoba in German East Africa, as had been hoped, nor could it signal Nauen.138 Thus the campaign’s principal strategic objectives, the wireless stations and the ports, had been secured. Smuts’s southern force was dispersed, most of it returning to South Africa and only part reinforcing Botha.

  Botha calculated that a field force of 8,000 mounted men, giving a total of four brigades would be enough for the final stage of the campaign. What dictated the size of his command was his wish to have sufficient supplies and transport to be able to sustain continuous marches for three to four weeks. Getting the ratio between men and wagons right imposed a halt of six weeks. Karibib was virtually without food when it was occupied. On 15 May the railway from Karibib to Usakos and Swakopmund was reopened, thus allowing Botha to shift his line of communications from the Swakop and to begin the accumulation of stocks. The process was slow: on one day seven out of twelve engines broke down. The railways gave priority to the needs of humans rather than of horses. There was little grazing around Windhoek, and in desperation animals were reduced to eating their own dung. When Botha resumed his advance, 10,000 horses and mules had to be left behind. But their fitness, given their privations, was more striking than their sickness. At the outbreak of the war the Union Defence Force had one veterinary officer, who was on the sick list, one veterinary NCO, and one civilian storeman. Its complement of veterinary officers and NCOs swelled to forty-seven and 450 respectively. Annual equine mortality on the campaign was only 9.09 per cent. Such disease as occurred was principally a product of starvation rather than other causes.139 By 11 June Botha had collected sufficient wagons to carry two to three weeks’ supplies, giving him a total of 100 for each mounted brigade. The fact that the north was more fertile than the territory he had so far traversed also enabled him to reckon on feeding off the land.

  German strategy remained unaltered: its objective was to retain sufficient territory to uphold Germany’s claim to South-West Africa at the final peace negotiations. Seitz therefore proposed, on 21 May, that the two sides agree an armistice on the basis of the territorial status quo, to be valid for the duration of the war. He gave his efforts bite by threatening the involvement of the black population in the campaign. But the negotiations failed. Botha’s aims were now patently South African rather than imperial—to complete the conquest of German South-West Africa with Union troops, so reinforcing Pretoria’s claim to the colony. Seitz and Franke therefore reworked their strategy in the light of an imminent renewal of Botha’s offensive. A German presence would be sustained by forces in being rather than by territorial possession: the Schütztruppen should give ground and should avoid battle, because in their size and cohesion rested the symbols of German authority.

  Both Botha and Smuts were worried that Franke would go over to guerrilla warfare, as they themselves had done in comparable circumstances. But the Schutztruppe’s commander discounted the possibility. Small bush patrols would represent no real threat to the South African forces, and would be easily outnumbered and crushed; the victims would be the German settlers, caught up in the plundering and looting which guerrilla operations would license. Instead, Franke proposed to fall back up the railway line from Omaruru to Kalkfeld, regrouping with Kleist’s forces retreating northwards on a more easterly line to Waterberg. The munitions dump, originally at Keetmanshoop, 1,200 kilometres distant, had been shifted to the railhead at Tsumeb, and a stiff defensive battle could be staged at Otavi. Beyond Tsumeb the battle could be continued no further than Namutoni. The Germans lacked the wagons to operate far from the railway. The famine in Ovambo territory ruled out a retreat into Angola. Botha considered that the Germans might even try to break through to East Africa, but Franke does not appear to have given the idea serious consideration.

  On 18 June Botha began his advance, with a total of 13,000 men and 20,000 animals. His command was divided into four columns, two hugging the railway and two far out on either flank, the left under Coen Brits and the right under Myburgh. He now had a far better picture of the enemy’s intentions; he knew from wireless intercepts that Namutoni was the terminus for the Germans’ withdrawal, and since the end of May six Henri Farman reconnaissance aircraft had given him the ability to track Franke’s movements over vast distances. Nonetheless, the key remained supply. The mounted brigades operated without a pause, using the open flanks to envelop the Germans and advancing with a speed that caught them unprepared. By the end of the campaign Brits’s brigade had advanced 735 kilometres from its base, and had covered the last 545 kilometres in twenty days. Myburgh’s moved 767 kilometres from its base. Even the infantry brigade following the railway sustained a marching rate of 22.5 kilometres a day for sixteen days.

  The Germans fell back to Otavi on 26/7 June, mistakenly imagining that they had created sufficient breathing space to organize their defences, and assuming that Botha would be slowed by his supply and water problems. Franke had a total of nine regular and eight reservist Schütztruppen companies, three infantry companies, and eight-and-a-half artillery batteries. He placed himself at Tsumeb, and entrusted the key position at Otavifontein to seven companies and ten machine-guns under Major Ritter. Ritter’s task was to buy eight to fourteen days while the Germans prepared further defences. The flank to the east and Grootfontein were protected by a line of mountains, its passes guarded by Kleist’s group.140

  On 1 July Botha’s two central mounted brigades, about 3,500 men, approached Otavi. The South Africans believed that they were about to encounter the main German body, and thought that, with their strength disposed to the flanks, they would be outnumbered. In fact Ritter had about 1,000 men, and had not had time to prepare his defences. He decided to deploy in depth, reflecting the fears that the South Africans’ penchant for envelopment had now generated. Thus, the low hills screening Otavi and Otavifontein, and giving fields of fire over both the railway and the road, were only thinly held, and the troops there so posted on either flank as not to give each other mutual support. Botha moved forward on his left, threatening the western flank of the hills and, further back, of Otavi. Ritter drew back to Otavifontein and to Otavi mountain behind it. But he had no artillery positions prepared, and the bush which covered the area broke up the co-ordination of his units as they retreated. By 1 p.m. Ritter was pull
ing back to Gaub. His total losses were three dead, eight wounded, and twenty captured. A defence of only two days would have compelled Botha to retreat for lack of water.

  On 3 July Seitz and Franke met to review their position. Kleist had been ordered to fall back on Gaub the previous night, Myburgh’s men having appeared before his front on the 2nd. Reports from Outjo suggested that Brits would be in Namutoni in a couple of days. An attack to retake Otavifontein was mooted, but the feebleness of its defence on the 1st suggested that the Schutztruppe’s morale had collapsed. Certainly there was little fight in Franke. Seitz the civilian was the most reluctant to surrender; Franke the soldier saw only needless casualties through continuing. Seitz was persuaded to ask for an armistice.

  The South-West African campaign was characterized by a maximum of movement and a minimum of casualties. Its heroes were the horses and mules which had enabled the deep envelopments favoured by Botha. On occasion they had covered 64 kilometres a day. More than half of Botha’s force was mounted, a ratio redolent of warfare in the sixteenth century and earlier. But it was a composition made possible by the internal combustion engine. Rapid advances across sandy wastes, the wells poisoned by the retreating Germans, relied on lorry-borne water; only in the final stages, north of Karibib, had the horses been able to draw to any great extent on local supplies.