by Edward Paice
Closer to the sea the Kashmiri and Rajput units, which had fulfilled their supporting role in a way that the 98th Infantry seemingly had not, were also retiring towards the Customs House. They had suffered considerably in the street fighting, and as they withdrew the Germans shifted their positions to Kaiser Street and Mascher’s house before opening fire on the Customs buildings and a boat conveying wounded Kashmiris to the nearest transport in the harbour. At 5.13 p.m., when all British troops had vacated the town, HMS Fox finally opened fire on Kaiser Street – but even then Caulfeild was instructed by the ever-optimistic Aitken ‘to avoid the railway’.25 Lieutenant Besch and most of the German defenders retreated hastily to the vicinity of the Bismarck Monument and the Miller & Company offices, taking up positions on the top floor to cover any attempted landing at the jetty by British troops (which might usefully have taken place earlier in the day). They fired at a heavily laden lighter, forcing it to retire, and no further attempt was made to use the jetty.
Aitken’s order to HMS Fox demonstrated that even with his invasion force in full retreat, and a mutiny taking place among Greek crewmen on the transport ship Laisang, he persisted in believing that he was going to need the railway to advance into German East Africa. But it was not the shelling of the town that emptied Tanga and saved the remaining Kashmiris and Rajputs clinging to the waterfront from being driven into the sea. A German askari bugler suddenly blew the Sammeln, the same command as had been used the previous day to order the German troops to withdraw when Fox had bombarded Tanga, and from all across the battlefield German troops began to make their way back to the assembly point at Muhesa. The command had not been ordered by von Lettow-Vorbeck, and its effect was to deprive him of any troops with which to pursue the retreating enemy.* Equally fortunate for Aitken was that Hering’s two guns had now arrived from Taveta and were just about to enter Tanga when the call for the German withdrawal was sounded. As darkness fell on what Wapshare described as ‘altogether a most terrible day’,26 this was a godsend for the five brightly lit transports in the harbour; and it was 3.30 a.m. on 5 November before von Lettow-Vorbeck managed to get the first German companies back into position in Tanga. A single ‘inexplicable’27 bugle call had seemingly caused his force to relinquish certain victory in a fashion reminiscent of the battle of Cannae.
Aitken’s bubble of optimism was finally burst in the early evening by the reports of his commanders. Wapshare’s 27th Brigade was no longer a cohesive force at all but widely dispersed pockets of stubborn 101st Grenadiers and a few Palamcottahs, the last of whom did not appear at Ras Kasone until 6 a.m. the following morning. Tighe, a man ‘without an atom of physical fear’,28 who had himself experienced being shot through his trousers, was adamant that his Imperial Service Brigade could not attack again without reliable reinforcements. There were none. Water and food were also scarce and before 8 p.m. Aitken considered that he had no choice but to re-embark IEF ‘B’. When news of his decision reached the front line the reaction among many was one of shock and disgust. The Loyal North Lancs, Kashmiris and Rajputs were all set to launch a new attack but were ordered instead to withdraw to a line covering the beaches on the seaward side of Ras Kasone. Huddled on those beaches was a rabble of wounded, frightened and exhausted soldiers, and some 2,000 terrified African porters and Indian Army followers. At 11 p.m. the final orders were issued for re-embarkation the following morning, and a very nerve-wracking night ensued. Two thousand yards away, Tanga lay empty of enemy troops.
Heavy rain fell for an hour or so after dawn on 5 November as Aitken took a further momentous decision: that in order to retire with maximum speed and minimum risk to life, all heavy stores were to be left behind, the machine-guns disabled. In the harbour the final indignity was suffered by the Laisang, which was hit by a German field gun and forced to depart in flames as von Lettow-Vorbeck deployed his troops to meet the new attack he was certain would come. Captain Otto’s 9/FK had extricated itself from an engagement near Mzima, more than 200 miles away in British East Africa, and finally arrived from Kilimanjaro; and von Chappuis’s 15/FK had also marched 100 miles from Bagamoyo, to the south of Tanga, bringing the German strength to about 1,500 rifles. But von Lettow-Vorbeck had decided, after the return of strong patrols sent out towards the British defensive lines, that ‘it was not now advisable to advance’.29 It was, in hindsight, a curious decision to have made. German casualties did not exceed ten per cent of the total strength at von Lettow-Vorbeck’s disposal, a tally he regarded as ‘insignificant’.30 On the other hand nine officers had been killed, including his old friend Tom von Prince, the son of an English policeman whose prominent role in Germany’s conquest of its East African colony had made him a legendary figure, and if the Schutztruppe were ordered to advance through the plantations and bush to the east of Tanga they would be exposed to the possibility of a vigorous counter-attack by an enemy which was now hidden from the view of his patrols (and a bombardment from HMS Fox). The fact that von Lettow-Vorbeck chose not to risk an advance was a godsend for the British troops on the beaches south of Ras Kasone. In mid morning Hering’s pair of antiquated field guns briefly fired on HMS Fox near the jetty, but otherwise little happened while IEF ‘B’ and the Royal Navy waited for the tide on which to depart the battlefield.
Behind the natural protective screen, and the defensive line held by the Loyal North Lancs, the Royal Navy’s Commander Headlam ordered the reembarkation to commence at 1 p.m. The Indian Army followers and African carriers waded out to the waiting lighters first, followed by the troops who had suffered most in the battle of the day before. A volley of rifle fire from the defensive perimeter at a German patrol caused total panic at one point, with Headlam being required to restore order ‘not without difficulty and violence’.31 On the other hand the departure of the Loyal North Lancs and Kashmir Rifles was calm and orderly, and by 3.20 p.m. the evacuation was over without von Lettow-Vorbeck having gained an inkling that it was even under way. A disembarkation that had taken fifty-four hours to complete had been reversed in less than two and a half, a feat for which Headlam and Colonel Sheppard, Aitken’s senior Staff officer, were largely responsible. For Captain Evans of the Karmala the final indictment of Caulfeild’s ‘perfectly disgraceful and badly managed’ landings occurred when HMS Fox had ‘fairly bolted out of the harbour . . . leaving the troops uncovered’32 when she had come under fire in the morning.
On the evening of 5 November British Intelligence officer Captain Richard Meinertzhagen landed under a flag of truce to negotiate the removal of the wounded with von Hammerstein-Gesmold, von Lettow-Vorbeck’s senior Staff officer, and only then did the German commander realise that IEF ‘B’ had re-embarked. That night, the British officers charged with organising the evacuation of the wounded were the guests at a distinctly bizarre dinner with their German counterparts. ‘Of all the supper parties within my experience’, wrote Lieutenant Charlewood of the Helmuth, ‘this was the strangest . . . The food, which comprised soup, fish and steak, all out of tins, was well cooked, and the conversation astonishingly bright. The Germans’, he added, ‘said they thought the war [in Europe] would soon be over because they expected the French to give in, and then of course it would be useless for Britain to continue the struggle.’33
Forty-nine men too seriously wounded to be moved had to be left behind on shore, along with booty galore for von Lettow-Vorbeck: eight serviceable machine-guns, 455 rifles, half a million rounds of ammunition, telephone gear, coats, blankets and even uniforms. There is no record of whether the 30,000lbs of pickles which had been brought from India by the Loyal North Lancs were among the abandoned supplies. The official tally of British casualties would eventually list 817 men dead, wounded or missing – about fifteen per cent of the invasion force – of whom the Germans buried 159 on the edge of the rubber plantation. Most significant in the context of Aitken’s decision not to attack again were the losses among the 101st Grenadiers, Loyal North Lancs and Kashmiris.* The toll among British and India
n officers in the force – thirty-one dead and thirty wounded – was such that one survivor wrote home ruefully ‘the officer man gets so much individual attention that at times it becomes embarrassing not to say annoying’.34
As the British ships sailed away, leaving the appropriately named Toten (Dead) Island in their wake, the German troops gradually realised that at the cost of some 125 casualties they had inflicted ‘such a beating [on the British invasion] that they jolly well won’t try it again’.35 The askari were as jubilant as their German officers, pouring scorn on the ‘Indian she-goats’. All that was left on shore of Aitken’s effort, apart from the wounded and the booty, was the ‘terrible cadaverous smell [which] hung’ over the little town of Tanga.36 ‘So ended,’ wrote the intrepid Lieutenant Russell, who had escaped from Dares-Salaam and twice been sent to reconnoitre Tanga at night, ‘one of the most ignominious defeats ever inflicted on a British Army’.37
FOUR
The Aftermath
The description of the battle of Tanga in the British official history of the campaign as ‘one of the most notable failures in British military history’1 echoed the judgement of Lieutenant Russell, and even the Director of Military Operations at the War Office was forced to concede that the failure to invade German East Africa at the first attempt was ‘a setback on a small scale perhaps, but as decided a one as [the British Empire] met with during the war’.2 The battle was also much ‘celebrated’ in verse, and for decades after the Great War the sequence of events at Tanga would be analysed in minute detail in British Staff colleges.
The immediate consequence of the failure to seize Tanga was to force the hard-pressed War Office to relieve the Colonial and India Offices of their responsibility for military affairs in eastern Africa. It was simply no longer possible for the British High Command to ignore what it had previously dismissed as a ‘local affair’. Across the border in German East Africa, on the other hand, Ada Schnee observed that after Tanga ‘the confidence of the colony . . . soared’.3 Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s astonishing victory was to earn him lasting fame, and there would be more German accounts of Die Schlacht bei Tanga than any other battle in the years ahead.
News of the rout spread through British East Africa within days. On 5 November, when the disaster was not even quite complete, The Leader revealed that ‘a telegram has been received to the effect than an attempt to land troops at Tanga met with strong opposition and that operations in that area have been temporarily deferred’. But the editors were then gagged; not until late December did any further detail appear in print, and then it was in the South African Pioneer Mail, rather than an East African or British newspaper. In Britain, Prime Minister Asquith did not inform King George V until 11 November, three days after the shattered remains of IEF ‘B’ landed at Mombasa, by which time his government had decided that such a ‘grave setback’4 was best covered up. Even as august a figure as Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, was swiftly rebuffed in the House of Lords when he asked for a clarification of rumours that had begun to circulate. Was Tanga ‘a big thing or a little thing,’ he enquired, ‘because we know nothing at all about it’.5 That was how it remained. ‘Keep secret for the present’6 had become government policy and, despite Curzon’s protestations, ‘not one word of information [was] vouchsafed to the British public’.7
Concern about Tanga’s depressing effect on British morale was not the only justification behind the cover-up: it took a considerable time for Whitehall to ascertain the details of what had happened. At the Colonial Office the first indication that all was not well in East Africa was contained in a telegram sent from Nairobi at 10.02 p.m. on 5 November, causing a state of alarm which mounted with the receipt of each subsequent missive from East Africa. ‘This makes very bad reading’, ‘a good bit of a muddle’, and ‘a sorry story’ were some of the remarks scrawled in red ink across Aitken’s ‘woolly’ despatches.8 The hapless commander of IEF ‘B’ appears to have been in a state of shock. Although one account credits him with ‘generously [placing] all the blame upon himself ’* as his force withdrew, his despatches soon became viciously defensive as the magnitude and implications of the ‘reverse’ dawned on him. He was not only vituperative on the subject of the ‘deplorable state of more than half my force’,9 demanding that the 63rd Palamcottahs and 98th Infantry be immediately sent home to India in disgrace, but imaginative. In one despatch he claimed that his defeat had been at the hands of a solely European force which included 1,000 Germans who were thought to have arrived from Australia and China on the Zieten in early August; and in another he grossly overestimated the manpower available to von Lettow-Vorbeck at the time of the battle, putting it at 5,000 Europeans and 9,000 askari. Aitken also roundly criticised the Royal Navy as he cast around for scapegoats, singling out the canard of Caulfeild’s observation of the naval truce as a critical factor in the defeat, as well as the inordinately long time it had taken to execute the landing of his troops; and he lambasted those responsible for the lack of up-to-date intelligence about German troops’ dispositions. Such intelligence would not have affected the outcome at Tanga – Aitken had been warned that von Lettow-Vorbeck might use the Usambara Railway to ferry troops to Tanga – but it was certainly true that Norman King, the former British Consul at Dar-es-Salaam who had been so intimately involved in the planning of the expedition, and Colonel Mackay and Captain Cadell of the Intelligence Departments of IEF ‘B’ and ‘C’ respectively, had not exactly distinguished themselves.
Despite his best efforts to deflect, or at least spread, the blame, Aitken’s leadership attracted universal condemnation in Whitehall. The War Office censured him for not conducting adequate reconnaissance of his own, and was certain that his decision to send Tighe towards Tanga with a force of only one and a half battalions on 3 November (and its resultant rebuff ) was instrumental in leading to the ‘reversal’ the following day. Above all, Aitken’s military superiors were amazed that he had not landed his troops for reorganisation and rest at Mombasa after their debilitating voyage from India. He could then have denounced the truce from a distance, not risked a ‘hasty and haphazard attack’, and left von Lettow-Vorbeck to worry about when – and where – the invasion would take place.
The Military Secretary at the India Office, Sir Edmund Barrow, was equally forthright about the execution of what he described as a ‘premature, haphazard and aimless’ operation. Barrow had been personally involved in the preparation of IEF ‘B’, but he was shocked at Aitken’s ‘entire inability to grasp the situation and to adapt his measures to fit it’ and ‘not surprised that some of [Aitken’sl regiments failed him’. In Barrow’s opinion, Aitken should have landed troops at Tanga’s jetty as soon as the harbour had been swept for mines and put the 28th Mountain Battery onshore where it could have made its presence felt. At the Admiralty, Sir Henry Jackson concurred with Barrow that it was sheer madness for IEF ‘B’ not to have recuperated in Mombasa while a feint across the border or against Dar-es-Salaam paved the way for the main attack. Jackson did admit that Caulfeild’s insistence on observing the naval truce may have caused confusion, but considered that his ‘honourable’10 conduct had had no significant bearing on the outcome of the invasion attempt. Churchill, on the other hand, disagreed with Jackson’s support for Caulfeild’s ‘unauthorised’ observation of a truce, considering it ‘incredible that Fox should not have supported the infantry’,11 and dismissed Caulfeild’s claim that he had undertaken a ‘heavy bombardment of the town’12 as risible.
In the inter-departmental stakes the Colonial Office was found to be ‘primarily responsible for the disaster’, closely followed by the India Office for providing ‘indifferent’ troops. The latter by and large accepted the charge levelled at it; the former was more equivocal, claiming in its defence that after the arrival of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’ it no longer had any responsibility for military matters and that its remit was the future administration of German East Africa (not the invasion). This was technically true, bu
t also disingenuous; and the India Office’s riposte was to accuse Belfield of being almost as culpable as Aitken for devoting ‘more attention to dividing the lion’s kin than slaying the lion’.13 Amid all the recriminations there were two points on which civil servants and military top brass were able to agree unanimously: namely that Aitken’s despatches read like ‘a crushing indictment of himself ’, and that what was now required in East Africa was ‘not so much reinforcements as a new general’.14 On 4 December Aitken, who was suffering from malaria after neglecting to sleep under a mosquito net, was informed that he was being relieved of his command. The Colonial Office noted on the despatch ‘Good’, and the sentiment of most of the officers and men of IEF ‘B’ was that their departing general bore with him ‘the blessings of nobody’.
Aitken was to spend the best part of a decade trying to clear his name, a campaign which met with only partial success.* He was neither the first nor the last British general to be found lacking by an unfamiliar challenge during the Great War and, as one of his officers later remarked, he was ‘a good soul, honest and well meaning. It was only tragic ignorance of his profession that had made him so woefully incompetent for waging war’.15 His failure was all the more tragic because, whatever his shortcomings and those of some of his troops, victory had only just eluded him. The realisation that this was the case greatly disturbed some of his commanders. In January 1915 General Wapshare wrote in his diary: ‘the more I think of the Tanga battle the more disquieted I am. We ought to have got in even with the troops we had. But for bad generalship there were of course other excuses but nothing can excuse what we did.’