To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Aitken was relieved of his command. His successor, Major-General R. Wapshare, was ‘a kindly old gentleman, nervous, physically unfit and devoid of military knowledge’.169 Four months later he too had gone, replaced by Tighe, a much more pugnacious character, but given to drink. Overall responsibility for the East African theatre was shifted from India to the War Office. IEFs B and C were amalgamated, and distributed along the northern German frontier. Wapshare reckoned two further brigades were required to enable him to go over to the offensive, Tighe said one-and-a-half. Kitchener allowed them one British battalion. In addition he sent his brother to look into the expansion of the King’s African Rifles. Wapshare thought two new battalions could be raised; the Colonial Office approved an increase of only 600 men, to be absorbed within the existing battalion structure; and the secretary of war’s brother reported that it would require European units to do the job. Kitchener’s policy was adamantly defensive.

  Colonial Office concerns not only postponed the real growth of the King’s African Rifles, they also blocked the exploitation of other sources of manpower. In August 1914 Gaston Doumergue, first as France’s foreign minister and then as colonial minister, had suggested joint French and British operations in East Africa, hoping thereby to boost France’s claims in that quarter of the continent. The Colonial Office had no wish to excite French ambitions in an area where hitherto they had been non-existent. Thus, French troops in Madagascar remained unemployed.170

  More serious was the question of Belgian co-operation. At the very least, Belgian gains at the expense of German East Africa might be used as bargaining counters to ensure the restoration of Belgian territory in Europe. But Belgium too had its advocates of colonial expansion; ‘the country’, the colonial minister, Jules Renkin, was to tell a sceptical King Albert, ‘will never pardon its leaders for a peace without advantages and aggrandisements’.171 The poor reputation of Belgian rule and Anglo-German desires for détente in Africa after 1911 had both fuelled Belgium’s fears for its continued sovereignty in the Congo. The possibility that in any peace negotiations Britain and France would foster a German central African colony at Belgium’s expense persisted into 1916. Therefore the seizure of Ruanda and Urundi from Germany might be traded for a more secure recognition of Belgium’s status as an African power. More specifically, a slice of German East Africa might be given to the Portuguese in exchange for Portugal’s allocation of northern Angola to the Belgian Congo, so lengthening the colony’s exiguous 40-kilometre coastline.172

  On 24 September 1914 the Germans confirmed their control of Lake Kivu by taking Kwijwi Island. The Belgian garrison, somewhat implausibly by this stage, said that they had not realized there was a war on. Their uncaptured compatriots behaved rather as though they subscribed to the same belief. They claimed that they were confronted by 2,000 Germans, when by October Lettow’s concentration of his forces to the north had reduced the strength in the west to twenty-four Europeans and 152 askaris. The energy of the Germans’ commander, Wintgens, did much to mask their numerical weakness, and the line of the Russissi river to the south of Lake Kivu impeded the offensive efforts of both sides.173

  During 1915 the Belgians’ ambitions grew with their increasing awareness of the true balance of forces. In February Charles Tombeur was appointed commander-in-chief in the Congo. His role was in part to moderate the more exaggerated notions of the colonialists. However, Tombeur inherited a plan whose military ambitions now far exceeded any political illusions. In a sketch drawn up in January 1915 and intended for execution in April, the Belgians proposed an offensive in two converging thrusts, one Belgian from the area between lakes Kivu and Tanganyika into Ruanda and Urundi, and the other Anglo-Belgian from northern Rhodesia. The Germans still dominated the waters of Lake Tanganyika itself; the Belgian columns were widely separated and out of direct communication; the supply arrangements for such a large-scale advance were nowhere in place.174

  In London, Lewis Harcourt, the colonial secretary, was as unenthusiastic about Belgian co-operation as he was about French, and for similar reasons. British control of German East Africa would open the link from the Cape to Cairo, and would provide a focus for Indian emigration.175 In Nairobi, on the other hand, Wapshare was anxious to secure all the support he could get. Ignorant of the Belgian plan, he sent Brigadier-General W. Malleson to discuss with the local Belgian commander, Henry, the possibility of joint Anglo-Belgian operations between Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria. Malleson proposed an idea of his own making, an Anglo-Belgian concentration in Uganda, which would proceed to capture Mwanza and move south on Tabora. Such a scheme rested on a major British effort on the eastern side of Lake Victoria, and yet this was exactly what the War Office would not counsel, at least for the moment.

  Tombeur’s first response to this mixture of messages and confusion of intentions was to want to take the offensive everywhere at the same time. He argued that invasions from Uganda, British East Africa, the Indian Ocean, Portuguese East Africa, Nyasaland, Rhodesia, and the Congo would present the Germans with seven or eight attacks and leave them unable to decide which was the most important. But in due course Tombeur realized that, despite the contrary impression created by Malleson, the British did not propose an offensive for 1915. Most importantly, Northern Rhodesia, whose front was still under Colonial Office, not War Office, control, announced itself unwilling to co-operate in the Anglo-Belgian thrust adumbrated in the January 1915 Belgian plan. This, together with the situation on Lake Tanganyika itself, persuaded the Belgians to restrict their preparations to independent but limited operations against Ruanda and Urundi, renouncing all thought of converging on the axis of the central railway. Tombeur accordingly ordered the Belgian troops south of Lake Tanganyika to move to its northern end.

  It would not be totally just to say that planning confusion kept 7,000–8,000 Belgian troops idle. In reality logistic constraints made the Belgian plans unrealizable in 1915. Moreover, the Congo would not be free of its commitment to the Cameroon campaign until early 1916. Belgian inactivity nonetheless conformed to the sense of increasing weakness in the British camp. Tanga caused Aitken to inflate German strengths (he claimed that the Germans had had 4,000 troops deployed against him), and to write down his own effectives. Even Meinertzhagen fell prey to the prevailing depression, reckoning in March 1915 that of the British strength of 15,000 rifles 4,000 only were reliable.176 The Indian troops were the main source of concern, their officers proving as inefficient as their men were demoralized. Friction flourished between the Indian army and the King’s African Rifles. The former saw the latter as irregulars; the latter were accustomed to look down on Indians as the traders and artisans of East Africa. Tanga supported that judgement, and the vulnerability of the Indians to malaria confirmed it. Although the War Office had assumed direction of the campaign, the administrative responsibilities for the units fighting it remained divided over their parent ministries. Thus, the complications of supply, already profound with so many racial and religious dietary preferences, compounded to dampen morale yet further.

  Not only was the army divided within itself, it was also at odds with the civil administration of British East Africa. The Colonial Office’s role in the region had been marginalized when it forfeited its control of operations. Harcourt, its minister until May 1915, was weakened by a heart attack in early November; he was succeeded by Bonar Law, who as leader of the Conservative party had other priorities. The balance of power therefore swung to the periphery. Sir Charles Belfield, Kenya’s governor, disowned the war and its conduct, which he saw as an unwelcome intrusion on civilian priorities. He had a point: 64.6 per cent of his officials served in the army during the war, thus severely weakening his administration. He responded to the demands of headquarters with indifference or even passive resistance. To escape Tighe (and his own wife), Belfield preferred to reside in Mombasa rather than Nairobi. The deadlock was not broken until 11 August 1915, when the fear of a German thrust into Kenya prompted a joint meeting of
the War and Colonial Offices in London. On 14 August Belfield was instructed to support the army and to improve civil-military relations.

  The beneficiaries of the power vacuum in Kenya in 1914–15 had been the settlers. The Crown Lands ordinance of 1915 gave them effective control of all land hitherto occupied by Africans, even if that land had been reserved for native use. The value of Kenyan exports, which fell from 5.8 million rupees in 1913 to 3.35 million in 1914, recovered to 4.24 million rupees in 1915 and 5.9 million in 1916. These figures obscured the boom in exports of coffee and— above all—sisal: the value of the latter soared 2,400 per cent between 1912 and 1916. But neither was a crop produced by Africans. They grew cotton, whose price fell 25 per cent in early 1915, and a further 56 per cent in 1915–16. In 1913 settlers provided 14 per cent of Kenya’s exports, in 1915 42 per cent, and by 1919 it would be 70 per cent. In part they were reaping the benefits of pre-war plantings and investment; but they were also maximizing the opportunities which the war vouchsafed them.

  Belfield’s response to the Colonial Office’s instruction was to create a war council made up of four civil officials, two military representatives, and three Europeans who were not officials. He then accepted a demand that three ‘practical farmers’ be added. The balance of power in the committee swung from the government to the settlers. In September the settlers, prompted by the machinations of British military intelligence, staged a mass meeting suggestive of greater enthusiasm for the war than they had expressed hitherto. But underpinning their love for the army was the realization that it constituted a new and large domestic market. Furthermore, compulsion was applied to native labour more readily than to the settler population, which was protected by virtue of the War Office’s demand for sisal. Settler dominance of the war council was evident in the passage of the Native Followers Recruitment ordinance, which created powers to mobilize labour and to control wages. Porters’ pay was reduced from the prevailing 10-to-15 rupees per month to 5 rupees for the first three months of service and 6 rupees thereafter. The settlers thus brought carrier pay into line with the rates general in agriculture. In December the war council ruled that those who left employment without passes from their employers would be liable to conscription as carriers. But these powers were not utilized until 1917. Their immediate effect was the reverse—to exempt from portering those Africans working on alienated land. The war council’s action represented the desire of white settlers to maximize the available labour pool for farming more than it constituted a recognition of wartime exigencies.177

  The only apparent operational glimmer was a raid on the German town and wireless station of Bukoba on 21–3 June 1915. Launched from Kisumu across Lake Victoria (over which the British established control in March 1915), its main purpose was to counter apathy and deterioration by offensive action. Looting and rape were sanctioned—perhaps for this reason, perhaps themselves indications of the problems that the attack was designed to arrest. One German eyewitness said that not a house was untouched by the British troops’ barbarity. Although successful, the attack’s outcome was nonetheless disadvantageous. The destruction of the wireless deprived Tighe’s intelligence services of a valuable source of intercepts. Bukoba was abandoned.178

  British gloom, however, was in itself a good indication of how distracted and divided British strategy had become. In reality 1915 represented not setback, but the achievement of the CID subcommittee’s initial objectives. The threat of cruiser war in the Indian Ocean, the prime reason for grappling with German East Africa at all, was finally removed in July 1915.

  After her raid on Zanzibar Königsberg returned to the Rufiji delta, her operational capacities hamstrung by lack of coal and by engine problems. While her boilers were being lugged overland for repair in Dar es Salaam three British cruisers searched the East African coast. On 30 October 1914 they found her. But her berth was inaccessible except at high water, the delta being barred by mudbanks, and her position unidentifiable from the sea owing to a screen of mangrove swamps. Although blockaded, Königsberg’s value to the German naval effort was not exhausted. While she yet floated she consumed the attentions of twenty-five vessels, a significant drain when, first, von Spee remained at large, and then in the new year naval operations began in the Dardanelles. Furthermore, keeping track of the Königsberg was no easy matter, as she drew further up the river, her form shaded by overhanging trees. Efforts to bomb her with aircraft of the Royal Naval Air Service failed. Finally two shallow-draught monitors, their indirect fire corrected by airborne observers, sank the Königsberg on 11 July 1915.

  This was not the outcome that had been envisaged by the Admiralty Staff in Germany. Looff’s mooring was the antithesis of pre-war cruiser doctrine; it was exactly what the abandonment of Dar es Salaam had been designed to avoid.

  Communications between German East Africa and its mother country remained effective—if sometimes intermittent—until at least September 1916. Despite the loss of first Kamina and then Windhoek, Nauen could be heard with reasonable regularity provided the atmospheric conditions were right. Transmission was more of a problem: all three of the existing stations in 1914, Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, and Bukoba, had only limited ranges, and the construction of a station of greater capacity at Tabora had been postponed in favour of those in West Africa. But the Dar es Salaam wireless was rebuilt after its destruction in August 1914, and this—together with Königsberg’s own wireless and the possibility (until autumn 1915) of communication through Portuguese East Africa—ensured sufficient two-way communication.179 On this basis plans were laid to convey coal and ammunition from Germany so as to enable Königsberg to break out and make for home.

  Rubens, disguised as a Danish merchantman bound for the River Plate, left Wilhelmshaven on 18 February 1915. On 3 March Looff received a signal via Windhoek telling him to communicate directly with Rubens on 1 April in order to arrange a rendezvous. Looff was well aware that these messages would not pass unnoticed by the British; he also came to realize that the Admiralty was reading German naval codes. To distract attention from Rubens he filled the air with wireless traffic designed to obscure the signals that were important and to create the impression that a second (but apocryphal) blockade-runner was imminent. Most importantly, he realized that Königsberg had no chances of breaking the blockade and effecting a junction with Rubens. By endeavouring to confirm the impression that Königsberg would be coming out, he drew British attention onto the Königsberg and away from Rubens. Looff therefore put the needs of the East African campaign ahead of those of cruiser warfare, his efforts being bent on saving Rubens’s cargo for the benefit of Lettow’s troops. Rubens was instructed not to make for the Rufiji but for Mansa Bay, north of Tanga and adjacent to the front for land operations. Hotly pursued by the British light cruiser Hyacinth, Rubens went aground in Mansa Bay. Hyacinth drew off, her captain made fearful of mines by further false signals from Looff, and a boarding party having been persuaded that Rubens was sinking. In reality the Rubens had executed a further deception on the British by setting fire to the wood battened across her hatches. The bulk of her cargo, preserved from total loss by being below the water-line, was brought ashore over the next five weeks. The principal losses were the coal for the Königsberg and the medical supplies and wireless equipment for the Schütztruppen.180

  The voyage of the Rubens was of enormous significance for the course of the campaign in East Africa, first because of Looff’s acceptance of Germany’s decision that his priority was now to support Lettow’s operations. The Königsberg’s guns, wireless, and crew proved major additions to Lettow’s fighting power. Secondly, the Royal Navy’s shame at its inability to impose a blockade formally declared on 1 March led it to hide from the army what had happened. Not until the Germans were found using ammunition marked ‘1915’ were the implications of this lack of co-operation borne in on British military intelligence.181 The failure to develop amphibious operations as a British offensive option in 1916 may stem as much from the subsequ
ent lack of trust as from the Tanga debacle. Thirdly, the permeability of the British blockade suggested to the Germans that, provided they retained possession of the coastline, fresh munitions supplies from Germany could be forthcoming.

  Nonetheless, owing to the German colonial office’s exaggeration of the outcome of Rubens’s voyage, almost a year elapsed before a second blockade runner, Marie, reached East Africa. On Schnee’s instructions Marie observed strict wireless silence, and in March 1916 arrived unobserved in Sudi Bay, in the remote south of the colony. Marie’s cargo had been packed into 50,000 porter-loads, and in a sequence of carefully orchestrated marches was brought to the central railway within three weeks with only 1 per cent loss. Plans for two more ships to make the journey were postponed in September as Germany heard of the British advance. In 1917 the demand for U–boats in home waters blocked a proposal that they be used to supply the colony. The final attempt to resupply Lettow’s troops was made on 21 November 1917 by an airship from Jamboli in Bulgaria. This time, however, British use of wireless intelligence was more successful. Alerted by intercepts to the Zeppelin’s flight and intentions, the British sent a false signal, reporting Lettow’s surrender and recalling the airship when it had already passed over Khartoum.182