by Edward Paice
Although ‘Old Wappy’, as he was affectionately known among the troops, lamented how ‘very sickening’ it was to have been ‘mixed up in an affair of this sort’16 he vetoed a suggestion by the commanding officer of the 98th Infantry that an independent account of Tanga should be submitted to the War Office by the senior officers of IEF ‘B’; and he left it entirely to the War Office to decide what to do next to preserve Britain’s status as ‘the paramount country in central and southern Africa’.17 The repercussions throughout the Empire of failing to prevent a German invasion of British East Africa, an event the War Office now considered ‘not improbable’,18 were certainly unthinkable; and providing two divisions to finish the job properly – as Aitken suggested – was equally unthinkable given the requirements elsewhere. The only possible solution seemed to lie in persuading South Africa to help. But as South Africa was already embroiled in trying to defeat German troops in South-West Africa while simultaneously tackling a rebellion among the Boer population, it was with some trepidation that a telegram was despatched to Lord Buxton, the Governor-General, in Cape Town.
Tanga was not the only military setback in East Africa in the first week of November. At the conference in Mombasa prior to Aitken’s departure for Tanga, General Stewart had agreed to launch a simultaneous ‘demonstration’ across the border some 250 miles to the north-west. The aim was to create a diversion which would prevent German troops from being rushed down the Usambara Railway to Tanga. Stewart had personally reconnoitred the borderlands in October with Colonel Drew of the 29th Punjabis, and Masai and settler scouts had kept watch on German comings and goings in the area for weeks – even spotting the huge wagons of Boer ox-trains bringing supplies up to the front in the last week of October. He was therefore confident that only 200 Germans and 200–300 askari held his chosen objective, the isolated volcano of Longido. Had the telephone line connecting Major Kraut, commanding Longido, with von Lettow-Vorbeck’s HQ at Moshi been in working order, this would probably have proved to be an exaggeration as many, if not all, of the troops would have been summoned to Tanga. But the telephone line was out of order, and Kraut’s force was not only much stronger than expected but also entrenched in positions which fully exploited Longido’s natural defensive advantages.*
The ‘decisive attack column’ led by Colonel Drew and Major Haslehurst of the 29th Punjabis left camp on the Namanga River in the afternoon of 2 November with a mounted escort from the volunteer East African Mounted Rifles. Their objective was to seize the main German camp high up on Longido while Major Laverton, who set out three hours later with the main body of EAMR and the Kapurthalas of IEF ‘C’, launched a simultaneous frontal attack on the mountain. The combined strength of the ‘invasion force’ was 1,500 rifles, and it was accompanied by four guns of the 27th Mountain Battery.†
At 1.30 a.m. that night, just as Tighe’s troops were landing at Tanga, Drew’s column arrived at the south-east spur of Longido under the full moon. Up close the thickly wooded volcano looked a good deal more imposing, and defensible, than from twenty miles away at Namanga. Its perimeter measured twenty-five to thirty miles and the main German camp was thought to be in the heart of the crater, 2,000 feet above the plains. But Drew had surprise on his side, his force was large and mostly reliable, and if he could reach his objective – Sandbach kopje – he would be in a commanding position well above the camp. By dawn Drew’s 29th Punjabis had covered five miles in their ascent towards Sandbach kopje. A dense mist hung all about Longido’s heights, making signalling to the plains impossible, and the mass of ravines and gullies, covered in dense undergrowth, made for tough going. But with sunrise the damp air slowly began to clear and the gunners of the 27th Mountain Battery could finally see enough to open fire on the German camp and an entrenched ridge between the opposing forces. In less than an hour the main spur overlooking the camp was taken by a double company of the 29th Punjabis advancing along it by rushes and the enemy were cleared from their trenches on the ridge.
Down in the foothills to the north Laverton’s column was not proving so successful in the frontal attack. The EAMR and Kapurthalas – the ‘Coppertails’ – met determined resistance as they tried to push through a nek formed by the lower sections of Longido’s two main watercourses, and Laverton reluctantly concluded that he had insufficient troops with which to assault the well-positioned German trenches and four Maxim gun posts which he was unable to locate. A stalemate ensued while, to the south, two squadrons of EAMR which had been sent round the base of Longido were faring even worse. Their mission was to find the enemy’s water supply, known to exist somewhere on Longido’s southern side, and to cut off any enemy troops attempting to retreat south towards Moshi or Arusha. But Captain Bingley could find no water supply in the dark – it was a well-concealed spring in the rocks – nor any sign of a German camp guarding it; so he rode off in search of a second, larger water source known to exist at ‘Longido West’. That proved equally elusive and, as the light started to improve, Bingley’s flying column retraced its steps to search again for the first spring. With dawn the danger of being detected increased markedly, the dust kicked up by the horses’ hooves being visible for miles around, and Bingley ordered one troop of his men to gallop south to watch the track leading from Meru to Longido for the approach of enemy reinforcements and to try and cut the telephone line.
It was from their distant vantage point on the Meru track that the detached troop, having cut the German telephone line, spotted enemy troops on horseback riding up Longido’s southern slope. It later transpired that they were a detachment of Captain Stemmermann’s 11/FK who were returning from repairing the telephone line which Bingley’s men had just disabled again; more importantly, their appearance revealed the exact location of the spring that Bingley had been told to capture. Bingley ordered an immediate attack, but in next to no time found his troopers pinned down by rifle fire from Longido’s southern slope; and when Stemmermann’s much larger force began to outflank the EAMR mounted troopers Bingley ordered a hasty retreat to a kopje beside the Meru track. Nine of his men had been killed in the sharp engagement with 11/FK, and six more were seriously wounded.
The failure by Laverton and Bingley to threaten the enemy in front or in the rear made Drew’s task of overrunning the main German camp all the more challenging, and at 2 p.m. German reinforcements – who had scaled the southern escarpment after seeing off the EAMR – suddenly appeared above his positions. Two hours later his predicament worsened still further when the rate of fire from the entrenchments of the main camp increased markedly and Drew noticed that in the distance Laverton had begun to retreat out of Longido’s northern foothills and across the plain to a kopje five miles to the north-east. The 29th Punjabis were seemingly being left high and, quite literally, dry: their water-carrying mules had bolted earlier in the day, and all watercourses on the mountain were enfiladed by the enemy.
As a small detachment worked its way unobserved into a position on the Punjabis’ left flank, enabling them to fire directly into his main positions, Drew took the decision to withdraw. The new threat was successfully countered by the machine-guns of his Volunteer Maxim Company and a single company of Punjabis, but as darkness began to fall the British troops found themselves under attack from almost every direction and the gunners of the 27th Mountain Battery were forced to set their fuses at zero. There was, in marked contrast to the scene simultaneously unfolding at Tanga, no panic, and Drew’s men fought their way back down the mountain with commendable composure. During the night all the British troops made their way back to Namanga, having sustained fifty or so casualties – a similar number to that inflicted on the enemy. One EAMR trooper wrote of the day’s fighting: ‘I have no ambition to repeat the experience again if it can be avoided . . . I failed to see anything funny about it nor am I likely to in the future’; and as his comrades straggled back to British East Africa it was as clear to them as it was to Aitken’s troops at Tanga that ‘the taking of German East [was] no
t going to be child’s play’.19
General Stewart’s ‘reconnaissance in force’, as the attempt to capture Longido was subsequently referred to, attracted criticism in some quarters for being a day late. But having only agreed to the attack on 30 October, at the conference with Aitken in Mombasa, such criticism was manifestly unfair. Furthermore, the combined effect of the broken German telephone line and the British attack was to prevent Kraut sending troops to join von Lettow-Vorbeck – Stewart’s prime objective – and his troops bore thirty-eight hours of continuous marching and fighting without food or water remarkably stoically. On 17 November Kraut abandoned Longido and a combined force of EAMR troopers and 29th Punjabis took over the former German positions. The mountain was ‘not apparently a point d’appui for anywhere, and covers nowhere’;* but on Christmas Day 1914 a company of the 2nd Loyal North Lancs which had been posted there held the dubious distinction of being ‘the only company of British regular infantry occupying German territory . . . in any part of the world’.20
Although it was clear, as one government official in Nairobi put it, that victory in ‘the first round [lay] completely with Mr Squarehead’21 there was an intriguing Intelligence coup in late November when an anonymous ‘British’ agent, probably a Boer living in German East Africa, managed to reconnoitre Tanga. His report revealed that von Lettow-Vorbeck had inspected new gun positions at Ras Kasone, that extensive new entrenchments had been dug, and that all the houses in the European quarter of the town now had loopholes for use by concealed marksmen. Mines had also been laid on the outskirts and the all streets barricaded. The agent sensed that the mood in Tanga was ‘anxious’22 – and that von Lettow-Vorbeck was undoubtedly expecting another visit.
FIVE
Marking Time
One piece of good news emanated from British East Africa in early November. The sinking of the HMS Pegasus in Zanzibar harbour had caused such a furore that finding the Königsberg had rapidly scaled the British Admiralty’s priority list. Churchill now deemed her destruction to be ‘a matter of the highest importance’ and swiftly despatched the cruisers Chatham, Dartmouth and Weymouth to East Africa. Their captains were told ‘Do not miss your opportunity on any account’.1
At the end of September, soon after Looff’s return to the Rufiji from destroying Pegasus, the crew of HMS Chatham spotted a German shore party on the islet of Komu, but despite capturing documents indicating that the Königsberg might be hiding at Salale, no immediate investigation of the delta was undertaken. In the third week of October, Chatham was still in pursuit of clues along an unfamiliar coast when she mistook the wireless masts of one of the German merchant vessels in Dar-es-Salaam harbour for those of Königsberg and shelled her until the mistake was realised. By then the Königsberg’s whereabouts had remained a perplexing mystery for over a month. But a few days later Weymouth intercepted the German steamer Adjutant making a break for Beira, in neutral Portuguese East Africa, and papers found on board connected her with the port of Lindi, some 250 miles south of Dar-es-Salaam. Chatham steamed there post-haste and during a search of the German liner Präsident, which appeared to have been converted into a hospital ship and was flying the Red Cross flag, evidence was found of her lighters having taken coal to the Rufiji delta. The net was closing on the Königsberg, and valuable intelligence received from the skipper of a Zanzibari dhow also pointed the Royal Navy in the direction of the Rufiji delta.
At the start of the war Captain Sydney Drury-Lowe and HMS Chatham had been part of the ‘watchdog fleet’ charged with preventing the German warships Goeben and Breslau from finding a safe haven with Turkey. They had failed, and Drury-Lowe was keen to avoid a second ‘mishap’. On 30 October he put a landing party ashore at the mouth of the Rufiji and local inhabitants confirmed that there was indeed a manoari ya bomba tatu – a warship with three funnels – at Salale, about six miles inland up the Simba Uranga channel. Later that day Chatham’s masthead also reported sighting two masts inland. Chatham was not a moment too soon: the Königsberg’s faulty engine had been repaired and Looff was preparing to leave his lair for the high seas. ‘The first visit was different, the second as we thought,’ noted Signalman Ritter on board the Königsberg; ‘this time the Englishman is coming to pay us a visit’.2 Immediate congratulations were wired to Chatham from Churchill – ‘Well done! Hold her and fight her without fail’3 – and HMS Fox was ordered to join Chatham off the delta.
Finding the Königsberg was one thing, destroying her quite another. The mouth of the delta was about forty miles wide, with a number of channels extending up to a dozen miles inland to the Rufiji and Mohoro Rivers, and the Royal Navy knew very little about it as much had changed since a survey conducted in the 1880s.* Drury-Lowe was initially loath to take the Chatham within five miles of the delta, assuming that its mouths would be mined and that the inshore waters were too shallow for his warship. But Churchill reiterated an earlier command to destroy the German light cruiser ‘without fail’ and, as his obsession with the Königsberg grew, he even began suggesting that troops should be landed in a plethora of small craft and attack the German trenches protecting the delta. At the time all troops, and HMS Fox, were on their way to Tanga and any vessel approaching the shore would be a potential target for a torpedo attack by one of the small German craft known to be lurking in the delta.† But Churchill was undeterred, and on 2 November Weymouth and Dartmouth joined Chatham off the delta.
On a spring tide on which Looff had intended to make good his exit, Chatham did manage to navigate through the treacherous approaches to within just over a mile of the delta. The last three miles were in only three to four fathoms of water, but she was then able to give Königsberg ‘a good pounding’4 at a range of just over 14,500 yards. This time it was Looff’s turn to ‘sit idle and watch’ as his guns were outranged by Chatham’s, and when the bombardment ceased Signalman Ritter declared it ‘an absolute wonder’ that his ship had not been hit as ‘the shells fell close in front and behind us the whole time’.5 The 2,600-ton German collier Somali was also shelled, but as the tide ebbed Chatham was forced to make for deeper waters. On each of the next five days Drury-Lowe shelled the delta mouth, and the Somali was finally sunk at her berth near Salale. But insufficient damage was inflicted on the German shore defences to prevent them from beating back a flotilla of small craft endeavouring to launch a torpedo attack on the Königsberg, so Drury-Lowe altered his tactics. Churchill had decided that if the Königsberg would not come out then he ‘must block her in’,6 and on 10 November the British collier Newbridge was sunk across the Suninga entrance to the delta by Commander Fitzmaurice – a dangerous venture which cost the lives of five naval ratings from HMS Chatham.
That very day news reached the British ships that HMAS Sydney had registered the nascent Royal Australian Navy’s first victory at sea, and it was a very significant one indeed: she had caught Captain von Müller’s Emden by surprise off Direction Island and, after a short action carried out at full speed, the Emden was destroyed on the reef off North Keeling Island. Sydney had rid the Indian Ocean of a menace that had bombarded Madras in September, had sunk twenty-two ships in three months, and had been one of the causes of both the delayed departure of IEF ‘B’ from India and the elevation of its task of invading German East Africa to one of ‘high priority’. But von Spee’s South Atlantic squadron, having sunk Good Hope and Monmouth at Coronel on 1 November, was still on the loose and it would take another month for it to be hunted down and destroyed off the Falkland Islands. The Royal Navy was being stretched to the limit in the southern hemisphere, with the result that no sooner had Weymouth and Dartmouth arrived off East Africa than they were ordered to the Cape to face the potential threat from von Spee. Chatham was also ordered to leave for Gibraltar and it was only after Drury-Lowe pointed out to the Admiralty that Churchill – the First Lord of the Admiralty – was daily cajoling him to eliminate the threat posed by the Königsberg that his ship was allowed to remain in East Africa. Meanwhile Looff cr
aftily took the opportunity presented by Chatham’s concentration on the delta’s shore defences to shift his berth even further upriver. This made Chatham’s task well-nigh impossible and the only compensation for the radical reduction in the strength of the blockading fleet was that the tides rendered a break-out by Looff equally impossible.
The Admiralty’s most protracted and, in its way, complicated task of the Great War had begun, and within six months more than twenty British ships of varying tonnages and types would be employed in assaulting Looff’s Rufiji delta fortress. With hindsight Churchill might have been better off leaving Looff and the crew of Königsberg to stew in the appallingly debilitating tropical conditions of the Rufiji. But inaction was not in his nature, and a plethora of documents attest to the extent of Churchill’s obsession with his prey: soon he was even professing to have ‘gone further into the question of destroying Königsberg by fire’ – by flooding the Rufiji with burning pitch, oil and other combustibles.*
Looff made two determined attempts in late November to evade the blockade by reaching Kikale, whence he might escape to the open sea through the delta’s southernmost mouth. On both occasions Königsberg’s draught proved too great, as did a sally in the direction of the northern Kikunya mouth, but it was clear by then that Churchill’s hunch that something unusual would need to be deployed to harm the winkle in its shell was correct. Just such a thing now presented itself. An aeroplane had never before been used in operations against a naval vessel but this was the ingenious solution proposed by Drury-Lowe and Rear-Admiral King-Hall, commander-in-chief of the Cape Station. What’s more they knew where to find one, and in no time Herbert Dennis Cutler was commissioned in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and left Durban on the newly armed 15,000-ton Union Castle liner Kinfauns Castle with his demonstration 90hp Curtiss seaplane and jerry-built bombs of blasting gelatine.