Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  As a Prussian of the old school von Lettow-Vorbeck believed implicitly that the military was the First Estate, the buttress upon which the future of an embattled Fatherland rested. ‘Military measures are exclusively military matters’ was von Lettow-Vorbeck’s dictum in dealing with Schnee, and from the outset he repeatedly reminded the Governor that he was ‘not the leader of the Schutztruppen’.16 A battle of wills that would even involve shouting matches had begun, as von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘lack of understanding for the administrative necessities of an overseas colony changed’, in the opinion of Dr Solf, the German Colonial Secretary, ‘into a blatant grudge against the Governor’.17 Both men were in complete agreement that it was their ‘duty . . . to do all in our power for our country’.18 But they disagreed vehemently about how this should best be done. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s opinion on ceding control of German East Africa’s ports to the Royal Navy was that such a strategy, and Berlin’s assertion that ‘their eventual seizure may be without influence on the defence of the rest of the Protectorate’,19 were absurd; and that the pre-war mobilisation plan, involving a retreat to the interior, was not an appropriate response to the advent of ‘universal war’.* He was also convinced that it was only a matter of time before Britain invaded the colony, and that its interpretation of ‘defence’ should therefore be rather more Machiavellian than that envisaged by Schnee.

  To begin with, von Lettow-Vorbeck, by his own admission, ‘did not succeed in interesting all authorities’20 in his plans, and the civilian population was distinctly non-belligerent. But he pressed on with preparations to defend the coast even if Schnee insisted that ports remain open. On 8 August a British internee, Mr Russell, watched as a trainload of concrete destined for coastal fortifications collided with one carrying cattle at Pugu station, just a dozen miles inland from Dar-es-Salaam; and later that day the naval bombardment of Dar-es-Salaam considerably strengthened von Lettow-Vorbeck’s hand. In the ensuing mêlée, Russell managed to escape in a canoe and reach safety aboard HMS Pegasus, where he was able to report the words of a German officer he had encountered at Pugu: ‘we take war just as serious[ly] as an Englishman takes his golf’.21 Bombardment or no bombardment, von Lettow-Vorbeck was endeavouring to imbue the colony with what he described as the ‘warlike spirit without which the fulfilment of our task was simply impossible’.22

  Schnee offered no objection to von Lettow-Vorbeck’s plan to move seven companies to Konduchi, a day’s march north of the port, in order to oppose any attempt by the Royal Navy to land British troops there; nor did he object to the opposition offered by Lieutenant von Chappuis’s 17th Feldkompanie (17/FK) to a Royal Navy inspection party when it tried to land at the ancient slaving port of Bagamoyo on 23 August; and he personally authorised the Somali to leave Dar-es-Salaam on 13 August with coal and provisions for the Königsberg. All in all there was seemingly no difference of opinion between the two men about the need to defend German East Africa – but the source of their mutual antagonism was von Lettow-Vorbeck’s obvious determination to ‘assume control of the [civilian] executive’23 and sole responsibility for conducting any ‘negotiations with the enemy’.24 A palace coup was under way, mounted by von Lettow-Vorbeck against the man he began sarcastically to refer to as ‘the holder of supreme power’.25

  On 15 August the German commander-in-chief decided to ‘open the ball’ on land by ordering reservists Captain Tom von Prince and former artillery officer Captain Albrecht Hering to capture Taveta, a ‘valuable sally-port’26 a dozen miles inside British East Africa, with a force of askari and European volunteers 300-strong.* In so doing, Herr Bröker, a government forester, became the first casualty of the war on enemy soil; but that was the only cost to von Lettow-Vorbeck in seeing off Mr La Fontaine, Taveta’s Acting District Commissioner, and securing control of the corridor between the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro and the North Pare Mountains into German East Africa. The operation was no ‘raid’. Once they were in Taveta, von Lettow-Vorbeck intended his troops to stay – ostensibly to ‘defend’ German settlements in the north-east of his colony and, in particular, the 278-mile Usambara Railway which ran from the port of Tanga to Moshi through the principal area of German settlement in the colony. By the end of the month, the deserted mission at Taveta was extensively fortified; a new bridge had been constructed over the Lumi River; and Salaita Hill, ten miles further into British territory and commanding the main approach to Taveta, had been seized and entrenched. As the topography of the area so favoured defence, von Lettow-Vorbeck knew that thenceforth he would require no more than a couple of hundred troops to prevent any attempted incursion by British troops from Voi, seventy miles to the east on the Uganda Railway, even by a force many times larger.

  Schnee thought that his commander-in-chief must have taken leave of his senses before invading British East Africa. But within twenty-four hours von Lettow-Vorbeck’s belief that the British were not only preoccupied with squaring the Königsberg was seemingly vindicated. A thousand miles south of Taveta, Dr Stier, the administrator at Neu Langenburg, was still unaware that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany for the simple reason that his principal means of communication with the outside world was via Nyasaland’s telegraph – and the connection had been cut. But he had heard dark rumours and on 15 August sent a runner across the border to seek clarification from Mr Webb, his British counterpart at Karonga. His message read:

  Thanks to your extreme kindness in preventing the forwarding of despatches into our Colony, I am not clear whether England is at war with Germany or not. But I understand that you are mobilising your available forces . . . If you therefore wish to attack our province, I must most courteously remark that we are prepared to greet you in a somewhat unfriendly fashion. The position decidedly needs clearing up and therefore I beg you most politely and urgently to let me have a clear answer.27

  The next day the position was indeed clarified for Stier, though not by Mr Webb. On Lake Nyasa, the intense blue ‘steamer parish’28 of missionaries galore, a red-haired British skipper by the name of Captain Rhoades, who was renowned for his ‘Rabelaisian wit’ and ‘unprintable songs’, steered the 340-ton Guendolen into Sphinxhaven Bay, at the German end of the lake, and disabled the Hermann von Wissmann with a single shot from a range of 2,000 yards. His erstwhile drinking partner, the von Wissmann ’ s Captain Berndt, immediately rowed out to the Guendolen to remonstrate with Rhoades, bellowing ‘Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?’29 as he pulled alongside. Rhoades was not. His orders were to seize control of Lake Nyasa, and in so doing he scored what The Times hailed as the British Empire’s first naval victory of the Great War. Berndt and his crew were, somewhat apologetically, ‘put in the bag’.30

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s suspicions that British aggression would not be confined to offshore and onshore naval operations were in fact correct. If Sir Henry Conway Belfield, the fifty-seven-year-old Governor of British East Africa, seemed to share neither the enthusiasm for war displayed by the hundreds of settlers who had converged on Nairobi to enlist in the first week of August nor their bombastic reaction to the attack on Taveta, it was for good reason. He knew that the Committee of Imperial Defence in London had met on the first day of the war and approved a military expedition against Dar-es-Salaam as just one of five against German colonies around the globe.* Such a move, it was argued, would safeguard shipping lanes vital to the Allied war effort and provide colonial ‘hostages’ which would be of value when the war ended before Christmas. Belfield voiced his ‘strong support’ for these ‘offensive measures’31 and then sat back to await developments. It was true that his colony had been ‘in a measure caught napping’32 but, having only arrived in 1912, he did not consider that to be any fault of his; and as recently as July he had proposed a review of the colony’s official Defence Scheme only to have to defer it because of the absence on leave of the 3rd King’s African Rifles’ commanding officer. He wasn’t even sure that offensive measures would be necessary. Like many of his fe
llow officials, Belfield thought there was a good chance that the ‘native issue’ would soon prove the undoing of German East Africa if the country’s troops and police were moved from their peacetime garrisons. His Director of Public Works, an old Africa hand, said as much when writing home on 7 August: ‘the Germans have made such bloomers in the past that I guess they are now in the last stages of funk as to native uprisings in their country’; and ten days later he reported having heard rumours that ‘the Governor of German East Africa is likely to make overtures to [British East Africa] to take his country over on account of the fear of native risings – which must be a very acute nightmare just now’.33

  Schnee was not entertaining any thoughts of asking Belfield ‘to take his country over’, but when von Lettow-Vorbeck ordered Schutztruppe veteran Major Georg Kraut to begin concentrating troops in the north-east of the colony he did become extremely concerned about the possible consequences for internal security. Schnee’s reaction to this potential threat, given the hostilities that had already occurred, was both surprising and audacious: citing ‘native interests’ as his chief concern, he secretly appealed to Walter Page, America’s Ambassador in London, to broker a restoration of neutrality in all East African colonies in accordance with the 1885 Berlin Act. This was not the initiative of a pacifist liberal, but a shrewd lawyer and diplomat. It is inconceivable that Schnee expected any action by Page, but he knew that publication of his appeal could be extremely advantageous to Germany after the war. If there was a ‘native uprising’, it could be blamed on British intransigence; if there was an escalation in the hostilities, it could be blamed on British aggression against ‘peace-loving’ Germany’s presence in Africa; and if, by some extraordinary turn of events, a restoration of peace was brokered it would enable Schnee to reassert his authority over his commander-in-chief.

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck was not informed of Schnee’s neutrality initiative, although he was aware that ‘many people believed that . . . we were bound to remain neutral’.* As far as he was concerned neutrality would be to his enemies’ advantage and he continued with his plans to ‘threaten the enemy in his own territory’,34 thereby drawing off as many Allied troops as possible from other theatres of war and inflicting on them as much damage as possible. It was a strategy that Schnee considered grossly over-ambitious as the colony was cut off from any source of military and other vital supplies. But von Lettow-Vorbeck remained determined, stubborn and completely unperturbed about the possibility of insurrection.

  One week after the ‘Taveta Affair’ and Captain Rhoades’s attack on the Hermann von Wissmann von Lettow-Vorbeck turned his attention to German East Africa’s still-neutral neighbours. He had rushed part of the crew of the scuttled Möwe 800 miles across the colony by rail to Lake Tanganyika in order to arm the 60-ton Hedwig von Wissmann with their ship’s four pom-pom guns, and on 22 August the Hedwig attacked Lukuga, the principal lake port of Belgian Congo. Lieutenant Horn’s orders were to destroy the only Belgian steamer on the lake, the Alexandre Delcommune, a mission he finally accomplished after two further raids. With that, German mastery over the 400-mile-long stretch of water on German East Africa’s western border was secured. The neutral stance of the Belgian colonial authorities began to waiver, and by the end of the month their embattled government-in-exile in Le Havre had not only ordered the Congo’s 15,000-strong paramilitary police force, the Force Publique, to assist British troops in their defence of Northern Rhodesia but also to undertake whatever offensive measures were deemed necessary for the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Congo.

  On 24 August it was the turn of Portuguese East Africa (today’s Mozambique) to have its neutrality violated when German askari led by Staff surgeon Dr Weck attacked Maziua, a remote post 250 miles inland of Porto Amelia on the Rovuma River. Its commanding officer, Sergeant Costa of the military medical service, and a dozen Portuguese askari were killed in the attack, a ‘horroroso espectáculo35 which caused immediate outrage in Portugal and was cited as definitive proof ‘that war was the national industry of the Prussian’.36 Dr Weck, who claimed to have found himself at Maziua while conducting a sleeping-sickness survey from nearby Sassawala, maintained that he had no idea that a war had broken out between the European Powers and had attacked because he thought Maziua had been overrun by ‘rebels’.37 The Portuguese government received an official apology from Berlin, but von Lettow-Vorbeck ordered 3/FK and 800 ruga-ruga, Angoni levies, to move south from the port of Lindi to the border with Portuguese East Africa just in case Portugal entertained any thoughts of exacting reprisals. Continuing nervousness on the part of the Portuguese was justifiable. Despite remaining neutral, on the other side of the continent in Portuguese West Africa (today’s Angola) a frontier post was also attacked by a force from German South-West Africa in late October, and in December a full-scale battle was fought inside Portuguese territory at Naulila.

  In the last week of August a German patrol was caught trying to blow up British East Africa’s railway, which ran for a distance of almost 600 miles from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, at Mile 78; and other raids were launched towards Vanga (south of Mombasa), to the Ingito Hills (south-west of Lake Magadi), and forward to Bura from Taveta. However improbable it had seemed a month earlier, it was obvious that a war between the tiny European populations of East and Central Africa was under way.

  Captain Looff had had a lean time of his foray in the Indian Ocean since capturing the City of Winchester. Reuters credited him with having sunk a dozen merchant ships off the coast of Arabia, and even with shelling the railway line running from French Somaliland to the highlands of Abyssinia. The truth was more prosaic: the Königsberg had found no further prey and the question of where to coal had become a recurring nightmare for Looff, eventually driving him south as far as Madagascar in the hope of finding a German collier or a coal-laden British merchant vessel. By the end of August his supplies of coal, and even meat and beer, were almost exhausted – despite having reprovisioned at sea from four German merchant vessels. He also urgently needed to undertake repairs somewhere onshore. But Dar-es-Salaam was no longer an option, and since the Emden, the sole German cruiser loose in the eastern Indian Ocean, had bombarded Madras earlier in the month the Royal Navy was likely to be more vigilant than ever. What was required, Looff concluded, was not so much a port as a hiding place.

  On 3 September Ulrich Dankwarth, director of the forestry service at Salale in German East Africa’s Rufiji delta, was considerably alarmed when his young African workers warned him of an imminent intrusion by a British cruiser into his otherwise peaceful existence. As a lieutenant in the colony’s reserve, he grabbed his two hunting rifles and revolver and rushed to ascertain the nature of the intrusion. His alarm was unfounded: the ‘British’ warship soon identified itself as the Königsberg and Looff assured Dankwarth that he had no desire to disturb (or be disturbed). The timing of his arrival was fortuitous. Although the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had ordered that the Königsberg be attacked wherever she was found, ‘without regard to neutral waters’,38 HMS Pegasus had been left as the sole vessel patrolling the German East African coast and her skipper had his hands full simply policing the dhow traffic between Zanzibar and the mainland.

  Two days later, by authorising that every assistance be given to Looff during his stay in the Rufiji delta, Schnee demonstrated the insincerity of his neutrality initiative. His letter had just reached Walter Page in London, but Page found that his initial soundings on its contents met with little enthusiasm. Attention in Britain was firmly focused on the German advance on Paris, only stopped at the River Marne in the second week of September, and Whitehall was convinced that neutrality in Africa would simply let Germany ‘off the hook’. The Belgian government-in-exile was equally dismissive, having just had its country overrun and witnessed extensive atrocities committed against its civilians; so too was France. All in all ‘colonial issues’ were very low down European governments’ lists of war priorities, and
it was not until three months later that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, wrote to Page saying that, in the light of the fighting that had already taken place, Schnee’s proposal was no longer practicable. It was recognised for what it was – a canard (at best) or a cynical ruse – as Grey knew only too well: in early September his own brother Charles was severely wounded during a German assault on Kisii, on the British side of Lake Victoria, and before the campaign was over a second brother was killed by a lion while on active service.

  Schnee’s invocation of ‘native interests’ did, as he knew it would, attract some humanitarian interest in London and the prominent Fabian barrister R.C. Hawkin was still pressing for an end to the fighting in East Africa as late as the summer of 1915. On 30 June he wrote to The Times calling on the colonial powers to ‘stop this suicidal policy of introducing our quarrels into Central Africa, and beware how we deal with a country which Nature has marked out as the home of the African’. But a note on the relevant Colonial Office file dismissed ‘the idea that all warlike operations in Central Africa could be stopped at this stage’ as being ‘so manifestly ridiculous that it does not require much argument’.39 More bizarrely, in answering a question on the subject in the House of Lords, Lord Cecil stated that ‘the Berlin Act remains in force, except [in] so far as it has been abrogated’.40

  It would later transpire that humanitarian interests could never have prevailed. Even as Schnee framed his proposal, his political masters at the Reichskolonialamt in Berlin were pursuing a very different tack to that of their representative in German East Africa. By 28 August 1914 Dr Solf, the Colonial Secretary, had drawn up a list of substantial annexations to be sought by Germany after winning the war. German intentions were clear: further colonial expansion, through the creation of a ‘second Fatherland’ in Mittelafrika, had become a fundamental war aim of Germany before Walter Page received Schnee’s missive.