by Edward Paice
IEF ‘B’ appeared to be distinctly under-equipped for any major battle. It was issued with just fourteen machine-guns, and its small artillery capability consisted of just six guns of the 28th Mountain Battery. There were also countless anomalies in what had been provided: one transport, the Rheinfels, was laden with rolling-stock and two Railway Companies for the intended advance up the Usambara Railway, yet the expeditionary force lacked even a single regular company of sappers and miners.2 But whatever its shortcomings, the force was colossal by comparison with what was thought to oppose it. With the exception of the Boer War it was, in fact, the largest British military expedition to have landed in sub-Saharan Africa since the 30,000-strong Napier Expedition had been sent to ‘subdue’ the Abyssinian emperor Theodore at Magdala in 1868.
The two-week voyage had been little short of a nightmare. The transports were grossly overcrowded and the swell nauseating at the convoy’s cruising speed of seven knots. On the Homayun, carrying 1,000 men of the force’s ‘coolie corps’ although its capacity was 800, the medical officer was appalled that there ‘was barely room for the men to lie down side by side on the decks’;3 and as they had not been subjected to a medical inspection before leaving Karachi sickness, especially dysentery, spread through the ship in no time. On the Assouan, the 63rd Palamcottah Light Infantry had been on board and awaiting departure since 30 September, which meant that by the time the convoy was met by HMS Fox off Mombasa on 30 October the battalion had been at sea a full month. Even then their ordeal was not over. At a conference ashore with Belfield and recently promoted General Stewart, Aitken decided to proceed immediately against the port of Tanga on the north-east coast of German East Africa, without disembarking his force to recover from their voyage and reorganise, while Stewart prepared a diversion on the German border north-west of Mt Kilimanjaro. The intelligence gleaned from Norman King, the former British consul in Dar-es-Salaam (and designer of Tanga’s nine-hole golf course), and Colonel Mackay, the senior Intelligence officer of IEF ‘B’, indicated that there was no reason to suppose that their assessment of the position in August needed reappraisal: it was still assumed that Tanga would be undefended, and that any resistance would only be encountered during the advance up the Usambara Railway through the heartland of German settlement towards Mt Kilimanjaro.
During the conference at Mombasa Captain Caulfeild, commanding HMS Fox, suggested to Aitken the possibility of splitting his force, effecting landings at Tanga and Dar-es-Salaam simultaneously.* This strategy, as von Lettow-Vorbeck later admitted, was what the German commander feared most because he had opted to leave Dar-es-Salaam virtually undefended. But HMS Goliath was experiencing engine trouble and, with no other reliable warship available to accompany a second landing, Aitken dismissed the suggestion. So great was his sense of urgency, having discovered that his mission was ‘more or less public property’* in British East Africa, that he also refused an offer of the services of a company of King’s African Rifles and rejected a plan to blow up the Usambara Railway south of Moshi to stop German reinforcements being sent from Kilimanjaro to meet the landing at Tanga. Either might have served IEF ‘B’ well, but Aitken was set on following instructions from the Colonial and India Offices originally issued in August rather than displaying any great imagination or initiative; and he hoped that by executing them as rapidly as possible he might yet surprise his enemy.
A minor inconvenience was introduced when Caulfeild informed Aitken of his need to observe the ‘open port’ rules, which were being treated with rather greater respect by the Royal Navy than by Schnee. The Admiralty had never formally ratified the naval truce, but it had agreed unofficially that any warship in East African waters should always give notice to the German civilian authorities of any intention to bombard a port. The Royal Navy had no desire to stand accused of slaughtering innocent European civilians, and the likely effect of inflicting unnecessary casualties among the African population was an even greater concern: when German East Africa was invaded the Colonial Office wanted its African population loyal, not embittered. Aitken protested but agreed that Caulfeild could allow Dr Auracher, the senior administrator in Tanga, one hour in which he could decide whether he would surrender or face the consequences.† The British convoy would, after all, be out of sight of land when such a parley took place, and there would be no need to reveal to Auracher that a full-scale invasion was in the offing.
Before dawn on 2 November, the convoy carrying IEF ‘B’ reached a point fifteen miles off Tanga and Caulfeild ordered it to heave to while he took HMS Fox inshore. By the time Dr Auracher came on board under the white flag it was light. To the west the peaks of the Usambara Mountains were clearly visible, rising to heights of more than 7,500 feet above the coastal plain; the luxuriant vegetation of this humid stretch of coast extended as far as the eye could see to the north and south; and directly before Caulfeild lay the low coral cliffs on which stood the little port of Tanga, set in the midst of ‘a mighty grove of coconuts’.4 Auracher was informed that if he did not surrender the port it would be bombarded. He was also asked if the harbour was mined, a question he refused to answer. At 8.30 a.m. he left HMS Fox, saying that he had to confer with his seniors before making a formal response, and returned to his office. There he donned his reservist’s uniform, and telegraphed von Lettow-Vorbeck and Schnee to inform them not only of HMS Fox’s demands but also that, despite Caulfeild’s precautions, a substantial convoy had been spotted proceeding down the coast at dawn and was known to be lurking offshore.
Auracher’s change of clothing was evidence of the considerable extent to which von Lettow-Vorbeck had proved successful in subordinating the civilian authorities to the military. All over the colony a majority of Schnee’s government officials now viewed von Lettow-Vorbeck as ‘the supreme commander’: the Postmaster-General, Wilhelm Rothe, and Government Secretary Franz Krüger had built the trolley-line connecting Handeni to Mombo (which was intended to facilitate a speedy retreat of the forces in the north-east to the area favoured by von Lettow-Vorbeck for the decisive battle); Schnee’s personal secretary, Lieutenant Eckhard von Heyden-Linden, had abandoned him to rejoin the Schutztruppe; his former adjutant, Captain Alexander Freiherr von Hammerstein-Gesmold, had done likewise. It was therefore von Lettow-Vorbeck, not Schnee, who was going to decide the response to Caulfeild’s ultimatum and, during his reconnaissance of Tanga in October, he had assured Auracher that he would ‘assume the responsibility for any consequences that might ensue’5 from defending the port. By 9.30 a.m. Auracher had given no answer to Caulfeild, and HMS Fox departed without bombarding Tanga: Aitken had no wish to see his base for the invasion of German East Africa razed to the ground.
However ‘leaky’ Aitken had discovered British East Africa to be, von Lettow-Vorbeck did not know beforehand that 2 November would be the day that HMS Fox and fourteen transports appeared off Tanga; and when, at 6 a.m., the convoy was first sighted by coastal lookouts attached to 17/FK the company’s Standing Orders for the day stipulated that two of its platoons were to march to Mvumoni, near the border with British East Africa, leaving only a single platoon under reservist Lieutenant Kempner in the immediate vicinity of Tanga. After the appearance of HMS Fox, however, the orders were quickly altered by Captain Baumstark, commanding the German troops on the northeast coast. 17/FK marched straight to Tanga’s police headquarters instead of Mvumoni while Kempner’s platoon made its way to Ras Kasone, the spit at the eastern end of Tanga Bay, the better to observe the convoy from near the red-roofed house of Herr Böhm, the manager of a contiguous rubber plantation. When HMS Fox anchored half a mile offshore for its parley with Auracher, Kempner, ‘more and more certain that the enemy was contemplating a landing’,6 withdrew almost a mile to the south-west and then took up defensive position in the railway cutting east of the town. Fellow reservist Hans Baldamus, a road engineer, was sent forward on Kempner’s left, from where he could keep a watch on the Fox. After the British warship departed the rest of the day was
spent barricading the three bridges over the railway cutting, organising a firing line of two platoons in the cutting, and positioning the third platoon with two machine-guns behind its centre while some European volunteers from the town dug in behind the right wing. Kempner placed no troops in the town itself so, just as Aitken had been informed it would be, Tanga was to all intents and purposes undefended at dusk against any landing in its harbour. Just one German company of police led by Dr Auracher – now Lieutenant Auracher – and a handful of volunteers remained in the town to maintain public order, as they were allowed to under the terms of the naval ‘truce’. The atmosphere in the European quarter of town, where just a few weeks earlier ‘contented Germans’ had enjoyed sitting in the squares ‘placidly smoking and quaffing huge glasses of beer’,7 was tense.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck took some time to decide upon his course of action, and only Schnee’s intervention put paid to a plan to destroy twenty-five miles of the railway running from Tanga inland to Moshi. He was concerned that the appearance of HMS Fox might be a feint, and that the convoy might proceed down the coast to attack Dar-es-Salaam or even land at both ports at the same time. But his hunch that he would have to stand and fight near Handeni in the north-east rather than on the Central Railway persisted, and after hours of consideration he dismissed the idea of a feint. It was a colossal gamble, albeit a calculated one: had Aitken opted to split his force, as Caulfeild had suggested, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s name would probably have been soon forgotten. In mid afternoon, however, he issued orders for his troops in the north-east to converge on Tanga by forced march and rail. Not everything went as smoothly as he wanted. The telephone connection with Kraut’s HQ at Longido, far to the north-west, was broken, and the Usambara Railway could only move one company at a time along its 190-mile narrow-gauge track. Logistical constraints therefore determined that only one and a half companies stationed at Moshi and the companies on railway guard duty were in a position to reach Tanga in less than twenty-four hours. If the British landed and deployed rapidly, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s position was precarious. The best he could hope for was three or four companies, perhaps 700 rifles, to disrupt the landing of a force ten times the size.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck did not believe he had the slightest chance of actually preventing the landing of 8,000 British troops on German soil. But his lines of communication across the north-east were now in reasonable working order and, as a former commander of II Seebataillon at Wilhelmshaven, he was as familiar with landing exercises as he was experienced in colonial warfare. The opportunity clearly beckoned to disrupt the British landing as much as possible before withdrawing inland to fight where the terrain better suited him. Around Handeni one flank was protected by the Masai Steppe to the north-west, the other by the Usambara and Pare mountain ranges; and it took a substantial leap of the imagination to envisage General Stewart’s troops being able to advance from Longido as far as the railhead of the Usambara Railway at Moshi, let alone to Handeni district, in less than a week.
No manual existed for joint operations such as Aitken and Caulfeild were attempting to undertake on an unfamiliar shore. But an inordinate length of time elapsed before the landing commenced. The process of observing the truce was not in itself a major delaying factor, HMS Fox having returned to the convoy through the notoriously treacherous reefs off Tanga by noon; nor was the ensuing conference between Captain Caulfeild and Aitken, which was over by 2.30 p.m. (after which Aitken spent the rest of the afternoon reading a novel on deck); nor was the one and a half hours it took to begin transferring troops from the transports to lighters; nor was the time taken by Lieutenant Charlewood’s tug Helmuth, which had miraculously survived the Königsberg’s raid against Zanzibar, to sweep Tanga’s inner harbour for mines. Taken cumulatively, however, these gave the impression of there being no sense of urgency whatsoever (for which Aitken would later lay the blame squarely at the feet of Caulfeild). Certain precautions had to be taken by the Royal Navy, but in insisting on altering the formation of the convoy prior to commencing the disembarkation process and only allowing three transports to be brought in at a time, Caulfeild’s caution began to be viewed as excessive even by his own officers. Not until 10 p.m., six hours after leaving the anchorage out to sea, did the first troops board their lighters and make for the landing place on the seaward side of the promontory known as Ras Kasone (which had been chosen as an alternative landing place to the two beaches in the harbour itself until the Helmuth’s task was complete). Ras Kasone was well known to Lieutenant Ismail who, as a former manager of a rubber plantation outside Tanga, was the invasion force’s only Intelligence officer with intimate pre-war knowledge of the town, and it had the advantage of being out of sight of Tanga. On the other hand its distance from the town, and the nature of the intervening terrain, were soon to prove distinctly disadvantageous.
By midnight Lieutenant Charlewood had finished his sweep for mines in Tanga’s inner harbours to the accompaniment of sporadic fire from a lone machine-gun onshore and increasing concern in some quarters about the slow pace of the operation. No enterprise was shown in attempting to land troops in the harbour that night, a task that would have been easy, whereas landing at Ras Kasone, designated Beach ‘A’, proved laborious even with the benefit of a bright moon: the 13th Rajputs and 61st Pioneers had to struggle on wobbly sea-legs through chest-high water and mangroves onto a beach only a couple of hundred yards wide, and then up a coral cliff face fifteen to twenty feet high. It was not until 4 a.m. that the 13th Rajputs, ably marshalled by Captain Seymour, were ready to advance on the town from Böhm’s ‘Red House’ while a patrol of the 61st Pioneers occupied the nearby signal tower.*
Although the landing had encountered no serious opposition, a single volley of rifle fire being quickly silenced by the Rajputs’ machine-guns and HMS Fox’s guns, further doubts about the conduct of the operation started to be felt. Captain Evans of the transport Karmala, for example, was not alone in speculating that ‘if the enemy had been at all enterprising they might have mounted their Maxims on the cliffs above the beach and wiped out the whole force’;8 and there was frustration among the troops that little seemed to have been achieved in the twenty-four hours since the convoy’s arrival off Tanga. But the situation could hardly be described as ominous. During the night Lieutenant Ismail and Lieutenant Russell, the former internee from German East Africa who had escaped from Dar-es-Salaam in August, had reconnoitred the ground between Ras Kasone and Tanga and although Ismail had been killed by a German patrol near the hospital, Russell had returned to his ship by 3 a.m. with the information that there was only one company of police in Tanga with three or four German officers or NCOs. As a result of his intelligence Aitken still regarded a bombardment of the town as unnecessary. Indeed he was so confident of snaffling the town without a fight that he took the decision for Tighe to advance when only one and a half of the three battalions allotted to take the town were ashore. They would, he was certain, be ‘sufficient for the time [being]’.9
Mickey Tighe was an Irishman and a ‘thruster’ who had earned a fine reputation as a field commander in his thirty-one years in the Indian Army (and was the only general with IEF ‘B’ to have campaigned in East Africa before). It was said that ‘the mere mention of a fight made his blue eyes sparkle with hope’.10 By dawn he had established his headquarters at the ‘Red House’, near the signal tower at Ras Kasone, and by 5 a.m. had ordered his troops to advance. The 13th Rajputs, half a battalion forward and the other half in reserve, were considered ‘fighters’ but the 61st Pioneers, also in reserve, were not. As pioneers, their task was the preparation of a base that would receive the main body of troops and their deployment in the initial advance was a further indication that Aitken expected no resistance (as was his failure to order the establishment of an ordnance field park at the landing place). Field Service Regulations ordered that such units should be used in combat ‘only in an emergency, as a last resource’. Furthermore all the troops, combat and technical
alike, had had a sleepless and exhausting night and were confronted by terrain of a type with which they were wholly unfamiliar. But ‘all’ they were required to do was establish themselves in Tanga and cover the landing of the main force in the harbour, after which the roll-up of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops in the north-east could begin in earnest.
During the night Captain Adler had arrived at Mvumoni to take command of 17/FK, and it was he who had sent forward a single platoon from Tanga’s railway cutting as the British landing commenced. The platoon was, as Captain Evans of the Karmala had feared, in possession of two machine-guns but after firing their volley of rifle shots and coming under fire from HMS Fox, it had retreated to its position above and behind the railway cutting. Only later did Adler realise his men had witnessed the first signs that British troops were ‘making serious endeavours to land’11 en masse, as opposed to merely reconnoitring, and when it dawned on him what might be occurring he immediately contacted Captain Baumstark, the district commander at Muhesa, twenty-five miles up the Usambara Railway, to say he would need immediate reinforcements. Adler was then told that 16/FK were at Amboni, just a few miles north-west of Tanga, and would be with him between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. – just as Tighe began his advance towards Tanga.