To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Rubens’s cargo included two 6 cm ships’ guns, four machine-guns, 1,800 1898-model rifles, and quantities of medical equipment and other stores. Potentially most important to Lettow was its ammunition: 5,500 shells out of 7,500 (including 1,000 rounds for the 10.5 cm guns of the Königsberg), and 2 million out of 4.5 million small-arms rounds were salvaged. Bullets were carefully unloaded, the powder dried, and then reloaded, the entire process being performed without the proper tools.183 But in the process some rounds were double-loaded, and in any case up to 80 per cent of the rifle ammunition had been so long under water that 60 per cent misfired and was therefore fit only for training purposes. Small-arms ammunition consequently remained the outstanding need. Marie brought 4 million rounds for the 1898-model rifle and 1 million for the 1871-model. In addition, she delivered four 10.5 cm field howitzers, two 7.5 cm mountain guns, four machine-guns, 2,000 rifles, 3,500 grenades, and equipment and clothing for 12,000 soldiers.184 The shells which she delivered were spoilt by humidity and moisture; like the small-arms ammunition from the Rubens, they were unloaded and black powder used instead. This work was carried out by the naval artificers from the Königsberg, who also salvaged shells from their own ship, washing them with water and cleaning them with sand.185 Never, therefore, did German East Africa have to resort to producing its own munitions.186 Furthermore, the capture of enemy munition stocks, which at Tanga netted eight machine-guns, 455 rifles, and half-a-million rounds,187 did not thereafter play a major part in German calculations until 1917.

  Thanks to the voyages of Rubens and Marie, the direct military consequences of the blockade, on which the British were tempted to pin their hopes in 1915, were by and large negated. But naval efforts were not without their economic consequences for the colony. The two railway lines ran from east to west; north-south links followed the line of the lakes in the west and of the coast in the east. Britain added to its offshore control by overunning Mafia Island, opposite the Rufiji delta, in January 1915. Internal communications in the eastern half of the colony were restricted to the land routes, and became proportionately slower and more laborious. Most importantly, the loss of coastal navigation effectively excluded the exploitation of Portuguese neutrality for the import of supplies.

  German East Africa’s domestic and civilian economy therefore became largely self-sufficient. Its most spectacular achievements were the production of ersatz goods to replace the loss of European imports, of clothing and shoes, even of petrol and cigarettes. More fundamental was the shift in the cultivation and consumption of food.

  Schnee reckoned that the colony, provided it remained intact, could produce sufficient sustenance to feed itself. What was at issue was the marketing and distribution of surpluses. Low rainfall in the south in 1913/14 and 1914/15 resulted in famine around Lindi; the European population was accustomed to a diet heavy in meat, fats, and white bread, much of it imported; the expansion of the Schütztruppen created a new demand for food in their area of concentration in the north. Regional imbalances had therefore to be corrected, and fresh sources of supply brought on stream. In the north European planters were given guarantees to encourage them to switch from the cultivation of export goods to that of maize. Thus, full employment was maintained in the area, political stability buttressed, and the troops fed. German diets were sustained virtually unchanged until 1916, in large part owing to the growing of wheat, concentrated in the remote south-west around Neu Langenburg. A retired Saxon major-general, Kurt Wahle, who was visiting his son on the war’s outbreak, was given responsibility for Schütztruppen supply. Wahle established a network of purchasing points, designed to draw surplus native food production onto the market. Ninety per cent of the food brought for sale to points along the central railway was produced by Africans and only 10 per cent by Europeans. These measures tapped new sources of production but allowed patterns of consumption to remain unchanged. Not until late 1916, and the German evacuation of the major food-producing areas of the colony, did European diets follow African.188

  Schnee was able to spurn the tools of state intervention, of rationing and requisitioning, and instead to foster the invigoration of free enterprise. It was a position that squared well with liberal colonialism. Price controls for domestic products, fixed in June 1915 at 25 per cent above the peacetime level, were a belated and largely ineffectual response to what was being done in Germany. The big European commercial houses had been driven out of business by the loss of export markets and by Wahle’s direct dealing with the producers. Local trade was in the hands of small dealers and shopkeepers, and neither the market nor its prices could be adequately policed.

  The fundamental difficulty confronting Schnee’s faith in a demand economy was therefore financial. The economic mobilization required by the war accelerated the penetration and establishment of the cash economy as a whole. But the loss of overseas imports negated the increased purchasing power of the native producer and trader; with nothing to buy and with prices rising, his inclination was to hoard. Cash disappeared. Furthermore, it could not be readily replaced. Both the silver rupees and the notes of German East Africa were imported from Germany itself. The Deutsch-Ostafrikanischen Bank increased its rate of interest from 4 to 5 per cent in a bid to draw in cash, and outflow was sustained by paying salaries monthly rather than quarterly. The effectiveness of civilian administration meant that the tax yield of 1915 exceeded that of 1913. Nonetheless, by the second half of 1915 real shortages of cash became evident. Without it, food could not be bought nor porters paid: the German war effort would grind to a halt. The obvious solution, for the colony to print its own notes, encountered a number of practical difficulties: the paper was of poor quality, the notes became damaged in the heavy rains, and the currency did not command the confidence of its African users. Furthermore, British military intelligence forged several million 20-rupee notes and thus contributed to the discrediting of German paper currency. Schnee’s riposte was to mint coins, using copper and brass for the lower denominations and gold for the 15-rupee piece. His efforts were sufficiently successful to ensure that where German rule pertained there German currency ensured exchange. Even in Portuguese East Africa in 1918 the local population was prepared to accept payment in German notes.189

  These, then, were the economic foundations which during the course of 1915 underpinned the expansion and training of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s command. Without the cargoes delivered by the Rubens and the Marie there would have been no weapons with which to equip or train an increased number of men; without a shift in food production and supply, and without the capacity to pay farmers and porters, an underdeveloped economy could not have sustained the formation and concentration of such a large force. By December 1915 the fighting power available to Lettow had grown to 2,712 Europeans, 11,367 black soldiers, and about 2,000 auxiliaries. In March 1916 the Schütztruppen’s strength embraced 3,007 Europeans and 12,100 askaris. The number of field companies rose to thirty, and the total number of all units to sixty.190 The European rifle associations were integrated with the African companies, so perpetuating the Schütztruppen’s relatively high ratio of whites to blacks. Furthermore, during the course of 1915 two preconditions were fulfilled which allowed Lettow to maximize his strength even when in 1916 and 1917 he no longer enjoyed numerical equivalence.

  Most significant, relative to their opponents, was the fitness of the Schütztruppen. The sickness rates of the askaris never escalated as did those of the British forces. The explanation for this that points to the German use of native troops and to the British of European and Indian is only partial. As significant was the scale and quality of German medical care. When war broke out, a research programme on sleeping-sickness meant that the colony possessed a relatively large medical establishment. The Schütztruppen’s complement of thirty-two medical officers immediately increased to sixty-three, without taking into account mission doctors, ships’ surgeons, and others. Each company, therefore, had its own doctor, and the most prevalent illness, malari
a, was treated in the field rather than in hospital. Vital to the management of malaria was the supply of quinine. The Germans used 1,000 kilograms of the drug during the war, and only half that supply represented pre-war stocks or wartime deliveries. Cultivation of the Peruvian bark from which quinine is derived had been begun in the north of the colony before the war, and from January 1915 the research stations at Amani and Mpwapwa were able to manufacture their own quinine. When the Germans were driven south of their laboratories on the central railway they could no longer take the medicine in pills, but had to boil the bark. The foul-tasting liquid which resulted became known as ‘Lettow-schnapps’. The German practice, of giving quinine at lower doses but over a longer period, proved more efficacious than the British of administering it in larger doses but only during hospitalization.191

  If a German officer died he could not be replaced. Therefore a bigger threat than malaria, whose effects were temporary rather than fatal, was dysentery. Much to their surprise, the Germans found that they were remarkably free of dysentery. Three things happened as they fell south of the central railway in late 1916. First, the shibboleths of European life in the tropics—with which in any case Lettow had little truck—were unsustainable. The idea of limited exertion in the midday heat was ditched along with pith helmets and mosquito nets. Long marches and sustained exercise made the Germans fitter. Secondly, their diet changed. It became set by local availability and local habit. Alcohol, fats, and salt became luxuries; vegetables and fruit, especially millet and mangoes, dominated; meat came in the form of game. Thirdly, even the doctors themselves—deprived of medicines and forced to create dressings from plants— came to see therapy rather than intervention as the best cure. A new system of tropical hygiene emerged, and because of it the Germans were able to sustain the high ratio of European officers and NCOs which was deemed so important to the fighting effectiveness of the Schütztruppen.192

  Again, Lettow used the lull in major operations to establish a more effective network of internal communications. To compensate for the loss of the south-north coastal route, the road from Kibambawe on the Rufiji river to Mombo on the northern railway was divided into stages, so that porters could be locally recruited, accommodated, and provisioned. From Mombo itself a light railway, using equipment from the plantations of the north, snaked its way south at a rate of 2 kilometres a day: by March 1916 it had reached Handeni. The telegraph line was extended to Mahenge and to Neu Langenburg, which before 1914 could only communicate with the rest of the colony via South Africa. The Möwe brought 500 kilometres of cable. Line was captured from the Belgians or improvised from barbed wire, and insulators formed from beer bottles with the bottoms broken out. By the beginning of 1916 the colony was linked by a telegraph network of 3,000 kilometres, and Lettow reckoned to have news from even the most distant of his fronts within one or two days. Although the Germans took the line with them as they fell back, and created a fresh system between the rivers Rufiji and Ruvuma, the combination of wear and tropical weather degraded its performance. Nonetheless, even in the last stages of the campaign, in Mozambique, the Germans plundered Portuguese cable and improvised insulators from bones and bamboo.193

  MAP 22. EAST AFRICA: NORTH EASTERN REGION

  The victory at Tanga made Lettow a hero. It gave him the authority to deal with Schnee, and it inclined Schnee to accept Lettow’s point of view. Moreover, the faith of the Schütztruppen, both in themselves and in their commander, was confirmed. But it also encouraged Lettow in his pursuit of the decisive battle. On 25 December 1914 the British occupied the coastal town of Jasin in order to stabilize the frontier tribes in the Umba valley. The area was unhealthy, and any further threat to Tanga, 64 kilometres to the south, remote. But Lettow could not resist the temptation to concentrate nine field companies for an attack on Jasin. On 19 January 1915 the four Indian companies holding Jasin surrendered before relief could arrive; British morale—and prestige—took a further blow. But in reality the defences were much stronger than Lettow had anticipated, and his losses—15 per cent of his total strength, thirteen out of twenty-two regular officers wounded, twenty-three out of 265 Europeans killed—un-acceptably high. In addition, 200,000 rounds of ammunition had been expended. Jasin was a gross error of strategic judgement, and a clear indication that guerrilla warfare was not Lettow’s first option.

  Recognizing, albeit reluctantly, the unwisdom of major actions in the north, Lettow adopted an operational style more appropriate to his means. In April 1915 the Germans inaugurated a series of raids against the Uganda railway and against the line under construction from Voi towards Taveta. By May 1916, the date of the last raid, they had executed forty-eight attacks, and claimed to have destroyed sixteen trucks and twenty-five locomotives.194 However, their initial successes, the product in part of inadequate British precautions, were not sustained. The waterless buffer between the frontier and the railway limited the German parties to a maximum of ten men. The British, operating close to their own bases, responded by organizing large fighting patrols of 100 men, able to defeat the Germans, or much smaller reconnaissance groups of three to four men, able to track and report the Germans’ movements. By placing vans loaded with sand in front of the engine, and by travelling at slower speeds, the locomotives of the Uganda railway increasingly escaped serious damage.

  Both more promising and more urgent as a theatre of operations in 1915 was the west of the colony. Lettow had three vital strategic interests vested in the defence of the west—the wheat production of the Neu Langenburg area, the head of the central railway at Kigoma, and the navigation of Lake Tanganyika. Reports reached him of the preparation of a Belgian flotilla at Lukugu, opposite Kigoma, and of Tombeur’s plan to invade Ruanda and Urundi. Both posed a long-term threat to the flank and rear of the Schütztruppen in the north. In May Lettow began the build-up of a German concentration around Bismarckburg, at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, its mission either to forestall the Belgian gunboats at Lukugu or to push south-east against the flank of any invasion of the Neu Langenburg area. On 29 May Wahle was given the command, his task—in Lettow’s words—’not border protection or the pushing back of the enemy, but a decisive success’195.

  In reality Wahle had neither the men nor the guns for such an objective. On 28 June he attacked the British post of Saisi (Jericho to the Germans), situated east-south-east of Abercorn and across the frontier in northern Rhodesia. The attack was repelled but then renewed on 25 July. Again Wahle was held, and on 2/3 August fell back on Bismarckburg. The slowness of Belgian preparations at Lukugu suggested that a switch to that quarter would be premature. Instead, a new German concentration was formed to the north, its task to thrust across the Russissi river, linking lakes Tanganyika and Kivu, with a view to capturing Belgian equipment stockpiled for the invasion of Ruanda. On 26 October Wahle was given command of the entire western area of operations, and by late November had ten companies grouped around Tabora, his headquarters. Nonetheless, on 12 December the Russissi project was abandoned, a recognition of increasing Belgian strength in the area as well as of more pressing realities in other sectors. Wahle had not achieved Lettow’s more grandiloquent objectives. Instead, both he and Tombeur had successfully negated each other’s offensive intentions. The attack on Saisi had been sufficient to upset the Belgians’ plan to concentrate their forces north of Lake Tanganyika for the invasion of Ruanda and Urundi. Equally, by leaving two battalions on the north Rhodesian frontier until late October, Tombeur successfully distracted the Germans from concentrating all their efforts on the Russissi sector.196

  Lettow’s strategy for 1914 and 1915 lacked coherence. In the pursuit of a major victory, the operations in the west augured well: the Germans had better communications to the rear, the British and Belgian forces were weaker, more isolated, and less well trained. But to have shifted its headquarters and even more of the Schütztruppen to Tabora or Bismarckburg would have left the north and east exposed. As it was, the fear of another amphibious attack
caused Wahle and three companies to be shifted from the west to Dar es Salaam from late August 1915 until October. The Kleinkrieg in the north can only be seen as the centrepiece of Lettow’s strategy in the retrospective context of guerrilla warfare. In practice, the attacks on the Uganda railway were a holding operation, engaging only small bodies of German troops while freeing others either for the west or for training in the more salubrious climate of Wilhelmstal. Formally, Lettow may have rebutted the premisses of the 1912 plan; in reality, its prescription, all-round defence with limited offensive thrusts, was exactly what he ended up doing.197

  However, in October 1915 Lettow began to plan a major offensive. The British adoption of the defensive, their concentration on Europe, and their beleaguered state at Gallipoli—all of these factors suggested that no major threat was imminent. The projected thrust across the Russissi, which drew in troops from Dar es Salaam on the coast and Mwanza on Lake Victoria, reflected that confidence. On 2 November Lettow received a message dispatched from Berlin in May reporting revolution in Sudan; simultaneously, the prospect of a Turkish victory at Gallipoli opened the door to an attack by the Central Powers on Egypt. With the British assailed in north-east Africa, and tied to their defence of the Suez Canal, Lettow could unleash his Schütztruppen—their strength now waxing, comparable in quantity and probably superior in quality to the British forces in East Africa. His immediate objective was Mazeras, a railway station on the Uganda line 25 kilometres from Mombasa itself. A road pushing north from Karogwe had been begun in late September, and in mid-December had reached Mwakijembe, with munitions dumps established on its route. On Christmas Eve Lettow ordered three companies forward to support the Germans holding the mountain at Kasigao, hitherto a forward base in the raids on the Uganda railway and now about to be the flank guard for the thrust on Mombasa.198 Lettow’s conception was Napoleonic—to place himself athwart his enemy’s main line of communications. The British would have no alternative but to turn and face him. Lettow was bent on achieving the decisive battle which had so far eluded him.