by Edward Paice
Half an hour after setting out through the rubber plantation and some African dwellings interspersed with patches of cultivation, a Rajput patrol led by Captain Seymour had advanced a distance of some 2,000 yards to emerge right in front of the right wing of Adler’s defences in the railway cutting. Their approach through ‘dead ground’* had gone undetected but as soon as they were in the open they came under fire from the German defences and the Rajputs were forced to take cover. A report sent back to Tighe that there were two machine-guns in the railway cutting was ‘received with scepticism’,12 and the order was given for the advance to resume.
Adler’s company was well protected by the embankment and had 200 yards of open ground in front of it, but when the Rajputs’ entire firing line began to emerge from the dead ground and the firing started in earnest he knew that he was outnumbered by a factor of at least four. To make matters worse rain set in, hampering his observation of the advancing enemy and causing the smoke of his men’s antiquated black powder rifles to hang in the damp morning air in front of his dispositions. But the askari of 17/FK maintained a rapid fire until their ammunition was almost exhausted, an hour and a half later, and in so doing they forced Tighe to deploy his reserve of four companies of Rajputs and three companies of 61st Pioneers so that his firing line extended all the way from Adler’s left on the sea to his right at the south end of the cutting. At this critical juncture a runner appeared to tell Adler that 16/FK had arrived from Amboni and were now engaged on his right, halting the flanking movement of the Rajputs; and, to his considerable relief, he was also informed that the first troops of Lieutenant Merensky’s Abteilung – comprising 1/FK, 6/FK and 6/SchK – had arrived on a train from Moshi.
The appearance of 16/FK in the German defensive lines had serious consequences for the Rajputs: when Colonel Codrington, the regiment’s commanding officer, and two other officers climbed a knoll in order to try and ascertain its exact disposition they were mown down by machine-gun fire. Worse still, a German counter-attack also robbed the 61st Pioneers of their commanding officer and the troops buckled. Although there were individual acts of great courage among their number during the retreat, the men had never faced machine-gun fire before, let alone trained properly with the machine-guns which had only recently been issued to them. Many fled back to the landing place near Ras Kasone just as rapidly as they had moved up an hour earlier and by 8 a.m. Tighe’s left wing had collapsed, the counterattacking force almost forming a right angle with Adler’s line in the railway cutting. While Tighe called for reinforcements, Adler, seeing the speed of the British collapse on his right and mindful of the danger of firing on his own advancing men by accident, ordered his askari to push forward out of the railway cutting. This move threatened to outflank Tighe’s centre and right and, at the sight of Adler’s men emerging from the cutting as if from the earth itself, the Rajputs hastily retired while a reserve double company of the 61st Pioneers which had only landed at 8.30 a.m. stubbornly checked the German advance on Tighe’s left. In the centre, Adler pressed on unhindered until he reached a position south of the two-storied Government Hospital and gave the order to halt.
During his advance Adler could quite clearly see HMS Fox in the harbour between the hospital and Ras Kasone. At 7.40 a.m. she had fired about a dozen shots into the rubber plantation, killing only retreating Rajputs and Pioneers, but now, two hours later, she began shelling Tanga itself. Adler was undeterred, and was just about to resume his offensive when two new orders arrived from Baumstark. They read: ‘when bombardment begins, disengage and retire’ and ‘Tanga Detachment. The Detachment will retire to Kange Station, I have taken up position there.’ At the same time he also received a report from the harbour that three ‘strongly manned’ lighters were landing further troops there – and with that Adler ‘gave the order to stop the fight and to begin the march to Kange as far away as possible from the town’. ‘By degrees,’ he later reported, ‘the noise of the fighting got fainter.’13
When Tighe’s troops were able to muster back at the ‘Red House’, above the beach whence they had started out at dawn, their number was depleted by casualties of almost fifteen per cent.* The last company of 61st Pioneers had not even landed until 10 a.m., by which time the folly of Aitken’s order to advance before Tighe had all three of his battalions at the ready was already obvious. In an increasingly recriminatory atmosphere, the setback was blamed on Captain Caulfeild’s insistence on sweeping the inner harbour for mines a second time before he would contemplate HMS Fox taking up a position there to cover the landing of troops on its two beaches. This exercise was not completed in time to respond to Tighe’s call for reinforcements: four double companies of the 2nd Loyal North Lancs – observed by Adler’s scouts – did not clear their transports until 9.30 a.m. Deemed the best troops in the expeditionary force, the Loyal North Lancs landed on Beach ‘B’, by the signal tower, and were immediately ordered to entrench a 900-yard line covering Beaches ‘B’ and ‘A’ (the landing point of the night before). Near their landing point a house was being hastily converted into a hospital to care for the morning’s casualties, a sight not calculated to boost morale, while out to sea on the Karmala Captain Evans judged that Caulfeild’s caution of the previous day had turned into a case of outright ‘cold feet’.14
Tighe was considerably shaken, and somewhat embarrassed, by the failure of his troops to take Tanga and he sent ‘grave reports’15 to Aitken about the morning’s events. His natural instinct was to attack again immediately, but he thought better of it: a further rebuff might mean the end of the whole operation. As a result a second day passed without IEF ‘B’ securing its initial objective. In pouring rain that afternoon the landing of troops continued on the two beaches in Tanga’s inner harbour. Their combined frontage was no more than 400 yards, creating considerable congestion, but there was no resistance from the now-absent enemy. No attempt was made to land troops at Tanga’s main jetty under cover of HMS Fox’s guns, a huge oversight, nor even to send a patrol towards the town to try to ascertain if such a move would be opposed. At 5 p.m. on 3 November Aitken himself set foot on shore for the first time. He was still sure that real resistance would not be met until he began advancing up the Usambara Railway; and the last three battalions of IEF ‘B’ did not land until the following morning.
That night, under another brilliant moon, Lieutenant Russell, accompanied by three Indian soldiers, again found his local informant and was assured that no German troop concentration was under way ‘in the town’ (although it was rumoured that troops ‘were expected very soon’).16 Russell was not the only furtive visitor to Tanga in the hours of darkness. Von Lettow-Vorbeck had moved his headquarters forward from Moshi to Muhesa on 3 November and interviewed the German wounded in its hospital. The most senior among them, Lieutenant Albert Merensky of 1/FK, who sported an enormous red beard, was of the opinion that the British were defeated and would not attack again. Von Lettow-Vorbeck then took the train to Kange, arriving at 3 a.m. to consult Captain Baumstark, who took a rather more pessimistic view, believing that Tanga could not be held against another attack. It was these contradictory opinions that decided von Lettow-Vorbeck on taking a look at Tanga himself, cycling through its deserted streets to the harbour with his old friend Captain von Hammerstein-Gesmold and Dr Lessel, and pushing out small patrols towards Ras Kasone as he went. On the harbour front he saw the blaze of lights from the British transports and wished that Captain Hering’s two field guns had arrived from Kilimanjaro. Next they rode further towards Ras Kasone itself and, leaving the bicycles at the German hospital, climbed down to the waterside. It was a courageous, if foolhardy action: just before dawn an exchange of shots between opposing patrols was heard nearby.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck decided, as a result of his nocturnal foray, that he would ignore Schnee’s instruction ‘to avoid a bombardment of Tanga at all costs’ and would ‘meet the attack’. ‘To gain all we must risk all’17 was his maxim, despite the only too obvious numerical
advantage of IEF ‘B’, and he issued his orders accordingly. Lieutenant Max Poppe’s trusted 6/FK, whose peacetime garrison was at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, was detailed to defend the broad eastern front of the town (held by Captain Adler the day before). Behind it, and to its right, he positioned 16/FK under Lieutenant Ernst von Brandis, Adler’s 17/FK, and a composite company. To their right rear were Tom von Prince’s two companies of reservists, 7/SchK and 8/SchK with three machine-guns. Lieutenant Oppen’s crack 13/FK were deployed with four machine-guns on the Tanga–Pangani road, with a view to delivering a powerful ‘right hook’ counter-attack. The formation was reminiscent of that favoured by the Zulus in the previous century and was deemed ideal by von Lettow-Vorbeck for taking advantage of the propensity for British troops, as he had observed in China during the Boxer Rebellion, to be ‘moved and led [with] clumsiness’.18 There was more than a touch of irony in such a tactic: Aitken was modelling his assault on the methods used by the British Army in the Boxer Rebellion and von Lettow-Vorbeck meant to inflict on him just the sort of drubbing that the Zulus had on Lord Chelmsford at Isandhlwana in 1879. Von Lettow-Vorbeck rued the fact that 4/FK and 9/FK were, like his artillery, still to arrive. But eight and a half companies, a total of 935 rifles with fifteen machine-guns, were in carefully prepared positions by noon on 4 November. There was nothing else to do but wait. Drinks were brought out to the troops from the town and Master Butcher Grabow bustled about delivering hot sausages.
By the early afternoon von Lettow-Vorbeck was beginning to doubt whether Aitken would attack at all that day. The 63rd Palamcottahs, 98th Infantry and 101st Grenadiers had finally made it ashore by 9.30 a.m., and the guns of the 28th Mounted Battery were at the ready on the deck of the Bharata in the harbour, but it was not until just before noon that Aitken ordered his troops to advance. It took some time before any evidence of the advance was discernible to Tanga’s defenders because it was conducted at a snail’s pace. The previous day it had taken the 13th Rajputs just half an hour to advance all the way to the open ground in front of Tanga’s railway cutting; but on 4 November it took fully two and a half hours before the first British troops even encountered German outposts just one mile inland. Some caution was understandable in the light of the setback of the previous day; but it was as if the whole of IEF ‘B’ were on a painstaking search for four-leaved clovers rather than seeking to overrun a town just 2,000 yards away which Aitken still believed to be undefended. All units had to negotiate various natural obstacles – the rubber plantation, tall bush grass, sisal – but this was only really problematic because of Aitken’s insistence that his seven battalions advance in one long line, ‘a formation which’, in the words of one Intelligence officer, ‘staggered me and reminded me of days long past’.19 Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s anticipation of his enemy’s methods had proved spot on. It was just fortunate for the British rank and file that not all of Aitken’s officers were to prove quite so inflexible that day.
On the British left, Wapshare’s orders were for his 27th Brigade to extend far enough south of the town to cut off that line of retreat to the Germans. The Loyal North Lancs on his right and 101st Grenadiers on his left, the latter veterans of the Somaliland campaign a decade earlier, had the ‘untrusted’ 63rd Palamcottahs sandwiched between them,* and the 98th Infantry followed the Loyal North Lancs. On Aitken’s right wing, extending to the sea, were Tighe’s one and a half battalions of Kashmiri troops, supported by the battered Rajputs; and behind them the equally battered 61st Pioneers, who had been working hard all night, formed the only reserve. Three companies of the 3rd Gwalior Infantry were detailed for guard duty at Ras Kasone. Four parallel tracks led through the various natural obstacles towards the town, but even with these for guidance gaps appeared in Wapshare’s line, inter-communications were poor, and German snipers ‘roosting in trees’20 greatly unnerved the troops. To make matters worse, pits had also been dug in the rubber plantation which were ‘skilfully covered over again so that there was nothing to show their existence’; when the odd inattentive soldier ‘stepped upon the top covering it gave way and [he] was precipitated onto sharp stakes several feet below’.21
At 2 p.m. a general halt was called to allow the Loyal North Lancs to fill a gap to their right caused by the Kashmiris inclining towards the sea. Half an hour after that both battalions were in action and the battle finally began in earnest. German outposts were successfully driven back by the Kashmiris, but at the first sound of unfamiliar machine-gun fire the 63rd Palamcottahs panicked and ‘as a fighting unit . . . ceased to exist’.22 The demoralising sight of many of the Palamcottahs fleeing past the 98th Infantry was not made any better by the equally alarming appearance of swarms of angry bees, disturbed in their tree hives by the gunfire. In the course of the afternoon they displayed no differentiation between British and German units and some men were to be stung more than a hundred times. The 98th Infantry, which had a fine reputation for musketry but had not been in action for decades, apparently scattered (although this is not the impression created by their War Diary); and by the time it had regrouped the battalion had lost touch with the rapidly advancing Loyal North Lancs in front.†
Despite these setbacks the Kashmiris (famed for being ‘as steady as any troops could be’),23 the Loyal North Lancs (who were also hit by bees), and some 13th Rajputs pressed forward determinedly and charged with fixed bayonets across the railway cutting into the town, capturing a machine-gun in the process. As they came on, naval reservist Lieutenant Werner Besch of 17/FK rushed with eight men from the railway workshops past the main position of his company to check whether it was being outflanked on the seaward side. After ten minutes observing the scene from the upstairs of a house on the north-east corner of the town, he caught sight of Max Poppe’s 6/FK retreating from the railway cutting, Poppe and Lieutenant Bergmann having been wounded, and received a message ordering his detachment to engage the troops entering the town. Although separated from the bulk of his company by two high fences which enclosed the railway station, he pressed back into the town, coming under a heavy crossfire from a side street which ran down to the harbour. He then hurried on to the offices of Miller & Company and there was able to join up with a detachment of Germans who were subjecting pockets of Kashmiri troops to a withering fire. Rallied by the Rajputs’ determined Captain Seymour, some Kashmiris succeeded in occupying the Kaiserhof Hotel and lowered the two German flags flying from its roof. But at street level their comrades around the Marine Monument and in the market-place were encountering heavy fire from von Prince’s two companies of European reservists positioned in the surrounding houses. At 3 p.m. they had been ordered into the town by von Lettow-Vorbeck, demonstrating that he was prepared to risk a street fight even if such a strategy invited shellfire from HMS Fox and the mountain guns aboard the Bharata.
On the British left the disintegration of the 63rd Palamcottahs completely isolated the 101st Grenadiers on the south side of Aitken’s battlefront and, with the battalions to their right inclining towards the sea, they too were forced north in an attempt to gain touch with the Loyal North Lancs. Wapshare was still confident that he was on the brink of rolling up the German right, however, and that is what might have happened if the 101st Grenadiers had maintained the direction of their advance rather than wheel to the north. This would have brought them to a position which outflanked the troops gathering at the railway station and workshops to deliver von Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘right hook’. Instead the gentle arc being followed by the 101st Grenadiers as they pushed on through thick bush and scattered African huts brought them to a position directly in front of the workshops, where they encountered heavy fire from the entrenchments of von Brandis’s 16/FK. Major Tatum was killed in the advance, but his two senior Indian officers immediately ordered a charge by the battalion’s double company of Dekhani Mahrattas which was only halted twenty-five yards from the German trenches. The casualties inflicted by charging two machine-guns were appalling enough; but four more machine-guns were sud
denly brought to bear by 1/FK and 17/FK on the 101st Grenadiers’ left. This was the moment that von Lettow-Vorbeck had been waiting for. He ordered his ‘right hook’ counter-attack to commence, and Oppen’s 13/FK threw themselves on the Grenadiers’ open and battered left flank. In a matter of minutes all of the battalion’s British officers, five Indian officers and a third of the rank and file in the front line were dead. They contested every inch of ground, the two machine-guns on their left wing being supported by two machine-guns of the 63rd Palamcottahs whose crews had not joined in the flight of most of the rest of their battalion. But the survivors of the mauling received in front of the workshops were forced to pull back gradually and by 4 p.m. were scattered in isolated pockets in the bush. Any vestigial hope of reversing the German counter-attack was gone, and the remnants of Aitken’s left were in very real danger of annihilation.
In the vicious street-to-street fighting taking place in Tanga itself, the Loyal North Lancs were still without support from the 98th Infantry and had received no orders from HQ since the start of the advance. After the attack by bees the latter had regrouped and moved a little forward and to the right. But there they stayed, rigidly true to their initial orders to maintain a distance of 300 yards between themselves and the Loyal North Lancs, until Colonel Ward received the order from Wapshare to enter the town at 4.30 p.m. It came too late. A brief bombardment of the town by HMS Fox at 3.45 p.m. had failed to make the slightest dent in the German resistance.* From the decks of the Bharata, the six 10-pdr guns of the 28th Mountain Battery also fired 150 shells in the direction of the town but as their commanding officer, Major Forestier-Walker, was not permitted to send a man ashore to spot for the guns they were firing blind and by 4.30 p.m. the German defence had been stiffened by the arrival of 4/FK, led by Karl Göring and Maximilian Dransfeld. The Loyal North Lancs were pushed to the very edge of the town, forming a defensive line between the railway and the cemetery alongside a number of Kashmiris, Rajputs and the machine-gunners of 61st Pioneers who had advanced undaunted all the way from the rear, past retreating comrades, for the second time in two days. The first contact between the Loyal North Lancs and the belatedly advancing 98th Infantry finally occurred just as the first two companies of the former began to retire. Soldiers from all three battalions that had earlier gained a foothold in the town now began streaming past the 98th Infantry which, ‘finding [itself ] apparently isolated and a general retirement in progress’,24 also began to withdraw at 5.30 p.m.