To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  It was a brilliant move. Relations between the administrations of Rhodesia, the British South Africa Company, and the War Office, deteriorating from autumn 1916, had finally collapsed in September. The Company was alarmed by its increasing deficit, forced up by the costs of the war, and above all by the requisitioning of carriers for Northey’s columns. The Makombe rising, just across the border from Northern Rhodesia, had been a salutary reminder of the need to reward and compensate, not to terrorize and compel, the local population into war service. The strain of sustaining Northey’s operations had rebounded. Colonial authority was itself being undermined by their side-effects: crime, illegal repression, and famine. The Colonial Office backed the company; the War Office and the Treasury did not. In September 1918 the Colonial Office acted unilaterally and banned compulsory war recruitment in Northern Rhodesia. When Lettow entered Northern Rhodesia, Northey’s forces could not move for lack of porters. In two weeks the Germans advanced 160 kilometres.293

  On 9 November 1918 Lettow’s advance guard entered Kasama. The position of Major E. B.B. Hawkins and his 750 King’s African Rifles was unenviable. Lettow was in unknown country but so, effectively, was Hawkins; his only map was a world atlas on a scale of 200 miles to the inch. Lettow’s invasion had smashed British prestige, fomenting panic and looting. British askaris were deserting; the Northern Rhodesia Police was mutinous.294 On 12 November the two sides clashed in the last engagement of the Great War.

  The following day Lettow received the news of the armistice. The formal surrender at Abercorn on 25 November revealed a fighting force that, given the chaos in Northern Rhodesia, could easily have sustained itself well into 1919. Lettow’s strength was 155 Europeans and 1,156 blacks, armed with thirty-seven machine-guns, 1,071 British and Portuguese rifles, and 208,000 rounds. They had captured sufficient quinine to last until June.

  The real restraint on what Lettow might have achieved in November 1918 lay not in the possible efforts of his enemies—he had, after all, successfully struck at their weakest point—but in his own reluctance to embrace a revolutionary strategy. Lettow was an officer of resource and determination, ruthless in war and honourable in peace. He was not a guerrilla. He had proved reluctant to exploit the collapse of Portuguese authority for the purposes of the war. There is no reason to assume he would have behaved any differently in the case of Britain.

  Lettow justified his entire campaign in terms of the number of Entente soldiers committed to the East African theatre. About 160,000 British and Belgian troops, including naval forces, were engaged during the course of the war against the Schütztruppen; Smuts had 55,000 men in the field in 1916.295 However, very few of these, if any, would have been available for the western front. The only point where the British consciously weighed Europe against Africa was over the deployment of the South Africans in 1916; but at that stage, given the political divisions within the Union, the existence of the East African theatre was a convenience rather than an embarrassment. Thereafter the Africans themselves took the burden. Total British losses in East Africa were 3,443 killed in action and 6,558 died of disease.296 It is only with the inclusion of porters, a local resource not readily employable elsewhere, that casualty figures reach levels commensurate with the length and breadth of the campaign: British losses then rise to over 100,000 dead.297 Africans, and to a lesser extent Indians, were Lettow’s major foe, at least in numerical terms. Their only likely alternative area of operations was the Middle East, not Europe. In practice, Lettow’s real diversionary achievement was to be measured in its maritime, not military, effects. In 1917–18, with U–boat warfare at its height, the length of the voyage around the Cape to Dar es Salaam engaged merchant vessels on long-haul voyages when they were badly needed elsewhere. The need for ships, not the need to defeat Lettow per se, underpinned the British war cabinet’s impatience with Hoskins’s lack of movement in February to May 1917.

  During and after the war the Entente powers tried to appropriate the war in Africa as a war for liberalism, a crusade for civilization and enlightenment against repression and brutality. There is little evidence that those who did the fighting, and on behalf of whom these grand claims were advanced, thought in such terms. Many askaris had, by the end of the war, fought for the Germans and the British, and had done their duty to both. Their loyalty was that of the professional or the mercenary—the soldier who takes pride in doing his job well and who fights because that is his vocation. Similarly, the attractions of portering, if there were any, were pecuniary: the pay was better than in other comparable occupations. The causes so vehemently espoused in Europe relied on a well-developed sense of nationalism; in Africa no such nationalism yet existed, and if it had it would have undermined, not supported, the war efforts of both sides.

  The Great War was the prelude to the final stage of the scramble for Africa, played out at Versailles. Despite all their misgivings at the outset, the European powers advanced rather than retarded the cause of colonialism between 1914 and 1918. The opposition which they encountered was tribal and traditional; glimmerings of modern resistance—the involvement of educated elites in the Chilembwe rebellion, inter-ethnic unity in the Makombe rising—remained short-lived. Instead, the marches of the armies, the wiles of the recruiting parties, the supply needs of their men, spread the colonial nexus through the agencies of the market, of cash, of cartography, and of communications. Because, by 1914, colonialism had begun to move from conquest to civilization, the armies’ contribution to its advancement was not apparent: what the European powers saw was the withdrawal of white administrators and the Africanization of missions. But the war reinvigorated territorial ambitions dormant since the turn of the century. Annexation or retention remained the dominant European motivation in the war in Africa, even if not so clearly elsewhere. Ebermaier’s and Schnee’s primary concern was to sustain Germany in Africa, not Germany in Europe. Similarly, Smuts’s emphasis on manoeuvre rather than on battle derived from his principal objective, the conquest of territory. Lettow-Vorbeck’s principal achievement was, perhaps, the thwarting of the full extent of South Africa’s annexationist ambitions.298 He himself appeared a guerrilla because his interpretation of colonialism was contrasting, not congruent; for Lettow, as for Zimmerman, in the last analysis Germany’s African claims resided not in the preservation of land but in the unity of the Schütztruppen themselves. In a war redolent with eighteenth-century parallels, it was perhaps appropriate that the heirs of Frederickian Prussia should still interpret the army as the embodiment of the state.

  8

  TURKEY’S

  ENTRY

  THE ESCAPE OF THE GOEBEN AND THE BRESLAU

  Shortly after 10.30 on the morning of 4 August 1914 Captain Francis Kennedy, commanding the British battle cruisers Indomitable and Indefatigable, sighted the two German cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau. Kennedy was sailing westwards, north of Bône and south of Sardinia, under orders to close the exit of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and so prevent the Goeben and the Breslau escaping into the Atlantic. However, the course being steered by the German ships was to the east. Earlier that day the Goeben had bombarded Philippeville and the Breslau Bône. Both were embarkation ports for the XIX French corps, en route from North Africa to metropolitan France. Although his ships had done little damage, Rear-Admiral Wilhelm Souchon had broken off the action and was now proceeding to the Straits of Messina. As the four cruisers converged, they kept their guns trained fore and aft. They passed each other at a distance of 8,000 yards without an exchange of either shots or courtesies. The British ultimatum to Germany was not due to expire until midnight.1

  Kennedy swung his ships round and set off to shadow the Germans. In her trials the Goeben had achieved a speed of 27 knots. But she had been sent out to the Mediterranean precipitately in 1912, during the first Balkan war, and her engines had created problems ever since. She had spent July in dry dock at Pola, Austria’s naval base at the head of the Adriatic, in order to change her boiler tubes. In
the ensuing chase three out of the Goeben’s twenty-four boilers failed, and, although she occasionally managed 24 knots, her average speed was 22. The battle cruisers should have been able to keep pace. But Kennedy, admittedly ignorant of the Goeben’s boiler problems, seems to have been more conscious of the Germans’ theoretical superiority than of his own potential. Indomitable was short of ninety stokers, and he was reluctant to redeploy gunners to the task in case there was action. Souchon, on the other hand, was determined to exploit his marginal advantage. His stokers fell unconscious in the effort to raise sufficient steam in the summer heat, and four died from scalding. By nightfall Kennedy had lost sight of the German cruisers.

  MAP 23. THE MEDITERRANEAN

  The combination of leaky boilers and great speeds had depleted the Goeben’s coal supplies. Souchon therefore bunkered at Messina but was only allowed twenty-four hours to do so by the Italians, who had affirmed their neutrality on 2 August. Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne, commanding the Mediterranean Fleet, knew of the Germans’ probable whereabouts by the afternoon of 5 August, but not of their intentions. Respectful of Italian neutrality, he deployed his major forces, including his three battle cruisers, west of Sicily on the assumption that Souchon might break out north from Messina to resume his task of disrupting the French convoys. The other option open to Souchon was to go south, past the Italian Cape, and then enter the Adriatic to join the Austro-Hungarian fleet. Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, with four armoured cruisers, was cruising west of Cephalonia to guard against this eventuality. On the evening of 6 August, the Goeben and the Breslau, the former still in need of more coal, left Messina and steered a course for the Adriatic. They were duly spotted by HMS Gloucester, a light cruiser stationed to observe the southern exits from the strait of Messina. Gloucester stuck close to the German cruisers, observed that the entry to the Adriatic was a feint, and reported that their course was now towards Cape Matapan and the Greek Peloponnese. Souchon was hoping to rendezvous with a collier in the Aegean. Gloucester’s task was to delay the Goeben and the Breslau sufficiently to allow Troubridge’s squadron, steaming south, to intercept them.

  Although grossly inferior in armament, Gloucester engaged the Goeben on the evening of 6 August. But Troubridge did not follow suit. On 30 July Churchill had instructed Milne and Milne had told Troubridge not to attack a ‘superior force’. Churchill meant the fleets of Austria-Hungary and Italy, and his orders made clear that the Goeben was Milne’s principal objective. But Troubridge was unusual in the Royal Navy: he had been an observer in the Russo-Japanese War, and had seen the effects of modern naval ordnance. He knew that the Goeben’s 11-inch guns outranged those of his squadron. An exercise in 1913 had demonstrated that armoured cruisers should remain concentrated if they were to have any chance against a battle cruiser. One option was to attack the Goeben at night, but the light cruiser Dublin, detailed for this duty, failed to make contact. Another was to catch the Goeben in narrow waters so as to lessen the range. However, such calculations were further complicated by Troubridge’s continuing uncertainty as to Souchon’s true course, whether he would continue to the south-east or double back to the north-west, and, if the latter, by the possibility that the Austro-Hungarian fleet might come out. Counselled by his flag captain, Troubridge allowed prudence to overcome his own offensive instincts. At 3.47 a.m. on the morning of 7 August he turned away. He was in tears as he did so. But he went further: shortly after 4 a.m. he signalled to Milne that he had abandoned the chase.2

  Troubridge’s grief, which would have been even greater had he anticipated the vituperation subsequently to be heaped upon him, could not at the time have seemed wholly warranted. The real threat to the Goeben lay with the French Mediterranean fleet under Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère and with Milne’s battle cruisers. However, the French fleet (in direct contradiction to its pre-war orders) had forsaken offensive operations for convoy duties. Milne was dilatory. His respect for Italian neutrality had prevented him from following Souchon south through the Straits of Messina on the evening of 6 August. He had therefore failed to support HMS Gloucester. By passing Sicily to the west, he had guarded against the the danger of Souchon doubling back towards the Algerian coast. During the night he learned that the French escorts were now sufficiently organized to counter such a threat. But instead of dispatching the almost fully coaled Indomitable east in hot pursuit, he bunkered in Malta. While there, at 1.45 a.m. on the 8th, he received a message which originated from the head of the British naval mission in Greece, Rear-Admiral Mark Kerr, to say that the Goeben was at Syra (now Siros) in the Aegean. But at noon the Admiralty signalled that hostilities had begun against the Austrians. They had not, and would not until 12 August. At 2.30 p.m., therefore, Milne abandoned the Aegean for a watch on the Adriatic. Although the Admiralty acknowledged its mistake eighty minutes later, it still said the situation was ‘critical’, and Milne concluded that keeping the Austrian navy under observation took priority over the pursuit of the Goeben. His signal to that effect was received in the Admiralty at 6.15 p.m., but not digested until 2 a.m. on the 9th, and was then reckoned to have predated his receipt of the cancellation of hostilities with Austria-Hungary. Not until 2.35 p.m. did Milne receive definite instructions to ‘continue to chase the Goeben which passed Cape Matapan early on the 7th steering north-east’.3

  Milne still expected Souchon to double back westwards, either to the Adriatic or to Gibraltar, or to extend his North African depredations to a raid on Alexandria and the Suez Canal; speed was not, therefore, of the essence.

  Thus Souchon enjoyed an uninterrupted sixty hours in the Greek archipelago, completing a leisurely coaling in the early hours of 10 August. With the intensity of British signals traffic revealing the proximity of his pursuers, Souchon moved northwards. At 5 p.m. on 10 August his two ships anchored at the entrance to the Dardanelles. Milne had received no information on the political situation in Turkey, and he believed that the Dardanelles were mined and barred to all warships. The subsequent news that the Turks were guiding the Goeben and Breslau into Constantinople came as a complete surprise to him. The Germans’ escape rendered the actions of every British naval commander, with the distinguished exception of Kelly of the Gloucester, not prudent but incompetent.

  Much indeed of the conduct of the operation did not reflect well on the Entente fleets, and specifically on the Royal Navy. Milne and Troubridge received the ire of the Admiralty, but the Admiralty itself had done no better. Its orders, transmitted by wireless, displayed an imprecision which suggested that London should have abandoned the attempt to direct operations at long range. Troubridge had interpreted the ‘superior enemy’ as the Goeben, when the reference was to Austria-Hungary; Milne was told that the dual monarchy was in the war when it was not. Most crucial of all, the Admiralty did nothing to correct the fundamental assumption that the Germans would be aiming for the western Mediterranean and not the eastern. Joint French and British planning for operations in the Mediterranean in the event of war was scanty. The rough division giving responsibility for the western end to France and the eastern to Britain reflected French concerns for the security of North African communications. The raids on Bône and Philippeville, along with subsequent but false reports of the Goeben and the Breslau moving west, combined to fix Boué de Lapeyrère’s attention in that quarter. Milne’s instructions from the Admiralty of 30 July had told him to aid the French in the transport of troops and only to attack superior forces in combination with the French. Despite his difficulties in establishing direct contact with Lapeyrère, Milne had therefore conformed with the French. In Britain the Foreign Office knew something of Germany’s contacts with Turkey by 6 August. In Athens, Kerr had been told by King Constantine that the Goeben and the Breslau were bound for Constantinople as early as 4 August. But Constantine knew because his cousin, the Kaiser, was trying to bludgeon him into a pro-German Balkan alliance. Kerr was sufficiently acquainted with the Kaiser to have appreciated the distinction between his impetuous corre
spondence and German policy. Furthermore, he could not compromise his source. He therefore routed the information via the British naval attaché at St Petersburg, and it was not received at the Admiralty until 1.15 a.m. on 9 August.4 It need not have been a surprise: the Admiralty was apparently decrypting most of the key signals between Berlin and Souchon.5 And yet London did not respond to the course adopted by the Goeben and the Breslau on 7 August to correct Milne’s assumption that Souchon’s move eastwards was a feint.

  Conspiracy theories as to Britain’s behaviour are easy to hatch. The Russians had repeatedly warned Britain of their fears for the naval balance in the Black Sea, either through an addition to the Turkish fleet or (more recently) through the presence of German or Austrian vessels. But Turkish naval strength could block a Russian presence in the straits and the eastern Mediterranean; thus the Goeben and Breslau served Britain’s longer-term, imperial needs.6 More immediate was the argument that the delivery of the two ships into Ottoman hands took them out of the Mediterranean. This not only served the interests of Britain and France but also those of Greece. By making sure that the Goeben and the Breslau went to Constantinople rather than to the Piraeus, the Greek prime minister, Venizelos, undermined the Germans’ pressure on the king to abandon his neutrality while making it more probable that Greece would eventually join the Entente in the furtherance of its ambitions in the Aegean.7