by Edward Paice
Stewart, James – commanding officer Indian Expeditionary Force ‘C’ (1914), commanding officer Namanga forces (1915), divisional commander (1916)
Stosch, Hans Freiherr von – Schutztruppe company commander
Stuemer, Willibald von – retired artillery officer, civil servant
Sykes, A.C. – Captain HMS Astraea
Tafel, Theodor – Schutztruppe staff officer in Dar-es-Salaam, company commander (1914), staff officer (1915–16), commander of Westtruppen (1917)
Taute, Max – Schutztruppe medical officer
Taylor, A.J. – commanding officer 8th South African Infantry
Thornley, G.S. – commander Lake Flotilla (Lake Victoria)
Tighe, Michael – brigade commander, Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’ (1914),
Commander-in-Chief British forces (1915–16), divisional commander (1916)
Tombeur, Charles-Henri – Commander-in-Chief Belgian forces (1916)
Tomlinson, A.J. – commanding officer Rhodesia Native Regiment
Vallings, H.A. – commanding officer 29th Punjabis
van Deventer, Jakobus – divisional commander, British/South African forces
(1916), Commander-in-Chief British/South African forces (1917–18)
van Nieuwenhuizen, Piet – von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Chief Scout
Wahle, Kurt – retired general visiting family (1914), Schutztruppe logistics officer and Commandant of Dar-es-Salaam (1915), commander Westtruppen (1915–17), detachment commander (1917–18)
Wapshare, Richard – brigade commander, Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’
(1914), Commander-in-Chief British forces (1914–15)
Watkins, O.F. – Director of British East Africa Military Labour Bureau (1916– 18)
Weck, Wolfgang – Schutztruppe medical officer
Wenig, Richard – officer on the Königsberg, Schutztruppe battery commander
Whittall, W. – RNAS armoured car commander (1916)
Wilson, R.A. – Captain HMS Mersey
Wintgens, Max – Administrator of Ruanda and commander of its Schutztruppe
Wolfram, Ernst – retired infantry officer, Schutztruppe company commander
Zimmer, Gustav – Captain of survey ship Möwe, commander of naval force on Lake Tanganyika
Zingel, Joseph – magistrate in Bismarckburg (1914), Schutztruppe company and detachment commander.
INTRODUCTION
Africa mattered to the European powers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The preceding two decades had witnessed a process of colonial expansion as rapid, unseemly, and fraught with rivalry as any that the world had ever known; and by the mid 1890s it was evident that ‘the stew pan of Africa was simmering and liable to froth over at any moment’.1 Bismarck had warned – long before Germany even joined the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ – that ‘the attempt to found colonies in regions claimed by other states, no matter whether with or without legitimacy’, would cause ‘manifold, undesired conflicts’;2 and when Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for Colonies, considered the very real possibility of an imperial war in Africa in May 1896 he warned the House of Commons that such a conflict would be ‘one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged . . . It would be a long war, a bitter war and a costly war . . . it would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish’.
Three years after Chamberlain’s warning war did break out in Africa, and although it pitted Britain against the Boer republics of South Africa rather than a rival European power, it was unmistakably imperial in character. Far from being the rapid and immediately profitable pushover envisaged by British imperialists, the conflict cost ‘the greatest show on earth’3 over £200m (c.£12bn in today’s money), involved the mobilisation of more than 400,000 British and colonial troops, and left South Africa in ruins. ‘In money and lives’, wrote Thomas Pakenham, ‘no British war since 1815 had been so prodigal.’4 The bill was fully ten times the value of the output of the Transvaal gold mines for 1899; British casualties exceeded even those of the Crimean War half a century earlier; and the toll wrought on Afrikaner and African alike was equally immense. Control of the Nile (and therefore the Suez Canal and the maritime route to India), control of South Africa’s vast reserves of gold and diamonds, Cecil Rhodes’s dream of linking the Cape with Cairo by railway and lake steamer – these were issues that preoccupied Whitehall rather more than the ‘self-centred, ethnocentric and frequently arrogant presuppositions’ of liberal imperialists’ ‘civilizing mission ideology’5 by the turn of the century.
None of Britain’s European rivals intervened to counter her aggression in South Africa. But it earned the opprobrium of Germany, France and Russia, and developments elsewhere on the African continent exacerbated an already tense and recriminatory atmosphere. A simultaneous war between Britain and France over an incursion by the latter into the upper reaches of the Nile, thousands of miles to the north of Kruger’s Transvaal, was only averted by the narrowest of margins. Germany’s Weltpolitik called for a doubling of the size of her Navy and the establishment of naval bases in all her African colonies (thereby posing a threat to the Royal Navy’s control of the high seas). Belgium and Portugal were suspicious to the point of paranoia that Britain, acting in concert with France and Germany, meant to dispossess them of their vast African empires. The message was clear: if rivalry in Africa was not checked it would soon constitute a threat to peace in Europe.
By 1914 the idea of a second ‘White Man’s War’ in sub-Saharan Africa had all but disappeared. Rivalries certainly persisted as the first phase of the Scramble for Africa drew to a close, but the spectacle of the Anglo-South African War, a common desire to develop (or exploit) rather than fight over (and devastate) their African colonies, and a common determination to safeguard racial ‘prestige’, had fostered increasing rapprochement among the colonial powers. Nowhere was this more evident than in relations between Britain and Germany. In 1884 The Times had declared that ‘Englishmen are too little enamoured of Africa to grudge Germans the privilege of seeking their fortunes on its vacant shores’,6 and this sentiment survived the jingoism and ‘colonial mania’ of the ensuing two decades sufficiently intact to provide some common ground between the two countries. At a time of escalating tensions between Britain and Germany in Europe this entente in Africa was doubly paradoxical. Both countries had established their vast African empires – a quarter of the map of Africa was painted red and German Africa encompassed an area five times the size of the Fatherland – in spite of the scepticism with which Gladstone and Bismarck had regarded colonial ventures in the 1880s; and even as war clouds gathered over Europe they were on the verge of increasing their respective domains still further by concluding an amicable agreement for a future redistribution of certain Portuguese and Belgian colonial possessions. In the opinion of the British Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Harcourt, Africa was where Germany might be ‘distracted’; and Dr Solf, his German counterpart, was willing to accept that Germany’s ambitions in Africa would be best served by assuming the role of ‘England’s junior partner’.7
In August 1914 Anglo-German entente in Africa, and the shared belief that a European war in Africa was a concept as risible as it was inadvisable, evaporated overnight. The first British shots of the Great War were fired not in Europe but by a regimental sergeant-major of the West African Frontier Force in (German) Togoland, as Britain moved to neutralise the threat to shipping lanes posed by the wireless stations and ports of Germany’s African colonies. Undisputed control of African waters was rapidly secured, but in addition to eliminating Germany’s ability to deploy commerce raiders against Allied shipping Britain’s strategy called for action against German troops on African soil, and as the Schutztruppe, the German colonial defence force, had no intention of surrendering without a fight, Britain and Germany began a land war which both sides were certain would be little more than a short, sharp affair conclude
d by Christmas 1914. In a manner reminiscent of the Anglo-South African War, the short war proved to be anything but short. Indeed Britain and Germany did not formally agree to cease hostilities in East Africa until two weeks after the Armistice was signed in Europe in November 1918; and in the intervening four years Britain, India, South Africa, Belgium, Portugal and Germany were sucked into a maelstrom which radically altered the lives of millions of Africans and would result in a complete redrawing of the map of colonial Africa.
The financial cost to the Allies of the Great War in sub-Saharan Africa was immense. The expense to the British Treasury of the East Africa campaign alone, the focus of this book and by far the largest of the African campaigns, was unofficially estimated at more than £70m (c. £2.8bn in today’s money). On the face of it this was ‘only’ one third of the cost of the Anglo-South African War; but it was a sum equivalent to Britain’s entire defence expenditure for 1913 or the cost of the eight million new items of clothing required by the British Army in 1918, and was one third greater than the value of the currency in circulation in Britain in 1914. Furthermore, when the contributions of India, South Africa and Britain’s African colonies were included the bill, in the words of one senior colonial official, ‘approached, if it did not actually exceed that of the Boer War’,8 and the Cape Times of 3 February 1919 commented that it was ‘said to exceed £300m’.
The ‘butcher’s bill’ was equally colossal. The death toll among African soldiers and military carriers recruited from British East Africa alone exceeded 45,000 – or one in eight of the country’s adult male population; and among all British imperial combatant and support units who took to the field in the East Africa theatre of war the official death toll exceeded 100,000 men. This equated to the number of British soldiers killed in the carnage on the Somme between July and November 1916, or to America’s total war dead in the Great War; and the true figure may have been as much as double the official tally. Such was the astonishing cost in human life of a campaign which one official historian described as ‘a war of attrition and extermination which [was] without parallel in modern times’.9 At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 George Beer, Chief of the Colonial Division of the American delegation, remarked that he had ‘not seen the tale of native victims in any official publication’, and speculated that ‘it may be too long to give to the world and Africa’;10 while at the Pan-African Conference that same year William DuBois lamented that ‘twenty centuries after Christ, black Africa, prostrate, raped and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe’.11
Despite its cost in men and money the campaign in East Africa was, and is, often referred to as a mere ‘sideshow’. It is certainly true that there was never any question of the conflagration in Africa affecting the outcome of the ‘main show’ in Europe, but it is also true that there were many who regarded it as the very epitome of the ‘selfish imperialism’ which had caused the Great War in the first place. Jan Smuts, commander-in-chief of the British troops in East Africa during 1916, articulated this view when he declared that it was ‘not difficult to foresee that the East African campaign, while apparently a minor side-show in the great world war, may yet have important bearings on the future of the world’;12 DuBois went further still when he remarked that ‘in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see [because] in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow’;13 and Sir Harry Johnston, the famous African explorer and administrator, was convinced ‘that the Great War was more occasioned by conflicting colonial ambitions in Africa than by German and Austrian schemes in the Balkans and Asia Minor’.14 Their point was this: that the war in Africa put imperialism itself, and all the highfalutin talk of the European Powers’ ‘civilizing mission’, on trial; and in so doing it exposed the unremitting ambitions of the colonial powers to a degree of scrutiny unsurpassed since the very beginnings of the Scramble for Africa. Above all it was this that made the East Africa campaign, which spread as rapidly as a bush fire to engulf much more than just the ‘East’ of the continent, ‘a campaign of importance’.15
This fact may not have been appreciated by those in the British War Office for whom the campaign was never anything more than an extreme nuisance, a fiendish and remote war that drained British money, shipping tonnage and men from the ‘main shows’; and even among a majority of British government ministers the fate of the German colonies in Africa was ‘one of the lesser concerns’ during the first two years of the war. But the longer the war dragged on the more apparent it became that ‘the issue was inextricably bound up with the fundamental hopes, fears and changing expectations of the British Empire at war’;’16 and by 1916 British politicians and Whitehall officials recognised that the war in East Africa – though still referred to as a ‘sideshow’ in military circles – was a vital ‘part of the stakes for which the belligerents are now fighting’.17 Furthermore, Britain’s allies never sought to downplay the military significance of the campaign. The Belgian and Portuguese governments knew from the outset that they were fighting for the retention of their African colonies, South Africa harboured ambitions for territorial expansion and an ‘all red route’ to Cairo, and many India Office officials saw the possibility of securing part of German East Africa as an outlet for Indian emigration as a prize that justified considerable sacrifice. As for Germany, the military authorities in Berlin deemed the conflict sufficiently important to risk sending two supply ships and – incredibly – a zeppelin to its beleaguered forces in East Africa. One British newspaper editor even went as far as saying that ‘to the German, Africa is the key continent of the world. Its owners will possess the balance of power between the old world and the new.’18
There was, arguably, a hint of denial about the dismissive attitude among the British ‘top brass’ to what they were wont to refer to as the ‘bow-and-arrow fighting’, or game of ‘tip and run’, in Africa. Many a British general of the Great War had cut his teeth on the African continent – Kitchener, Haig, French, Roberts, Hamilton, Allenby, and Smith-Dorrien, to name but a few – and yet the collective experience of the British military establishment had not resulted in many lessons being learnt about African warfare (whether against ‘natives’ or another European power). It was as if the Anglo-South African War was an aberration, a ‘White Man’s War’ in Africa that could not possibly recur and therefore need not be exhaustively pored over for lessons for the future. But the German General Staff studied that same war closely, with the result that German Schutztruppe commanders and NCOs in Africa were instructed to become well versed in fighting ‘mobile’, as opposed to static, wars and dealing with the Sisyphean logistical and medical challenges inherent in such warfare.
It was ironic that German commanders sought to master the art of ‘African’ warfare so much more actively than their future enemies when it was a Briton, Colonel Charles Callwell, who had written the classic manual Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. Indeed in the first decade of the twentieth century, while the rest of the world turned a blind eye, German colonial troops honed scorched earth and bush warfare tactics against the indigenous inhabitants of German South-West Africa and German East Africa with a single-mindedness that Kitchener had been neither willing nor able to contemplate in the Anglo-South African War – with results that can only be termed genocidal. Such thoroughness also ensured that Germany’s larger African colonies, in marked contrast to Britain’s, had mobilisation procedures in place which in 1914 would prove every bit as effective at countering aggression from a colonial neighbour as they had for suppressing indigenous uprisings.
Among the German officers to have served in the campaign which virtually exterminated the Herero and Nama peoples of German South-West Africa in 1904–7 was one Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who by 1914 had risen to the rank of Colonel and commander-in-chief of the Schutztruppe in German East Africa. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s four-year defiance of
overwhelmingly superior forces – more than 150,000 Allied troops and one million military carriers were engaged during the campaign in trying to bring to heel a foe one tenth the size – earned him the reputation among friend and foe alike as ‘one of the greatest guerrilla leaders in history’19 and the embodiment of all that was deemed ‘admirable’ about Prussian militarism in the pre-war era. His obduracy and success in playing ‘a lone hand to the last card in a hopeless game’20 were certainly extraordinary. Von Lettow-Vorbeck exploited to the full the advantages that could, with appropriate weaponry and skill, be found in defence, and he had a much greater understanding than his opponents of the insignificance of conventional objectives in African warfare. The loss of individual towns, ports, mountain ranges, and railways – prized by Allied generals desperate to register tangible successes – were of little consequence to him: all that mattered was keeping the Imperial flag flying somewhere, and causing maximum inconvenience to the enemy. But after the war there were also many who believed, with the benefit of hindsight, that von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘extreme sense of duty . . . bordered on fanaticism’;21 and the appalling consequences of his strategy, however justifiable in his own eyes, were subjected to close examination at Versailles in 1919. Once again the future of Africa mattered, and although von Lettow-Vorbeck’s reputation as ‘one of the few German commanders . . . who have fought clean throughout’22 and who had ‘played the game’23 survived the Peace Conference largely intact, Germany’s reputation as a colonial power did not. Amid universal condemnation of the ‘frightfulness’ of German rule in Africa, Germany was summarily dispossessed of her colonies and the dreams of creating a vast second Fatherland in Africa – a fundamental war aim – lay in ruins.
Despite the great importance attached to ‘colonial questions’ at Versailles, very little was known in Europe about what exactly had happened in the East Africa campaign: when the editors of the Cape Times called (unsuccessfully) for the instigation of a Commission of Enquiry in 1919, they complained that it had been conducted behind ‘an almost impenetrable veil of secrecy’.24 No newspaper had published handy sets of maps and flags for children to follow the progress of this war, as they had done for the Anglo-South African War and the war in Europe. In some respects this was unsurprising. The war in Europe inevitably dominated the public consciousness. But one booklet boldly (and correctly) ventured the opinion that ‘if there had been no war in Europe the campaigns in the German colonies would have compelled the interest of the whole world’.25 Using any yardstick but the war in Europe, the scale and scope of the conflict was gargantuan; and it produced cameos of extraordinary courage and preposterous improvisation on land, on sea, and in the air, that rivalled anything witnessed in the ‘main shows’. Furthermore, the accounts of many a former combatant would attest to the fact that ‘there is no form of warfare that requires so much inherent pluck in the individual as bush fighting’; to the terrible loneliness which ‘tested the nerves of the bravest’;26 and to the horrors of fighting through the rainy season of early 1917, when the conditions made men question ‘if any of the millions who took up arms between 1914 and 1918 . . . endured much greater hardships’.27 This was a war which ‘involved having to fight nature in a mood that very few have experienced and will scarcely believe’.28 It was really only the ‘bush humour’ (a counterpart to the ‘trench humour’ of the Western Front), the absurdity of fighting a war in as hostile an environment as could be imagined, and the odd episode of high adventure that were destined to permeate the public imagination (and provide the inspiration for C.S. Forester’s The African Queen, Wilbur Smith’s Shout At The Devil, William Boyd’s Booker Prize-nominated An Ice-Cream War, and even The Young Indiana Jones and the River of Death, Tarzan The Untamed and Tarzan The Terrible).