Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  Flying, or the lack of it, was not the squadron’s only problem. When the one remaining serviceable plane took to the water its floats had an alarming tendency to peel off and the plane would start to sink; and with the onset of the monsoon from the north-east sharks appeared inshore, adding further excitement to the process of launching or beaching the Sopwith. Furthermore, none of the airmen appeared to be at all aware of the dangers of sunburn, and as clothing was largely dispensed with at their secret base many were destined to spend sweltering days and nights swaddled in bandages of picric acid. Yet for all their tribulations the airmen had the complete backing of King-Hall and his Flag Commander, the Hon. Richard Bridgeman. The enthusiasm, kindness and sheer pizzazz of the latter ‘was everything to us’, reported Cull, as were the services of intrepid Midshipman Gallehawk (who soon secured a transfer to the RNAS); and by the end of March help was on its way in the shape of three Short seaplanes from Britain. These were sent in response to the discovery that only ‘exceptionally powerful machines’17 would defy the exacting climatic conditions. But Cull was soon to discover that the planes brought out by the Cunarder Laconia were in fact well known to him from the RNAS base at the Isle of Grain: they were old Short Folders, and their lamentable condition seemingly put paid to any thoughts of destroying the Königsberg from the air.

  The ‘ugliest man in the British Navy’ had another trick up his sleeve, however, bringing from South Africa in his wake one Piet Pretorius. Pretorius was ‘thin, lithe, and coloured brown from continual bouts of malaria’.18 Descended from the Boer Voortrekker Andries Pretorius, he had achieved celebrity status in southern Africa as an elephant hunter and adventurer before finding himself on an island in the Rovuma River, the border between German and Portuguese East Africa, when news of the outbreak of war reached him. Three testing months had ensued, in which this intrepid ‘Africa hand’ had escaped from the infamous Dr Weck – the leader of the German patrol which had attacked the border post of Maziua in neutral Portuguese East Africa in August 1914 – despite his right leg being shattered by a bullet; been arrested by the Portuguese and escaped their clutches at Negomano; and trekked for a month to the safety of an English mission on Lake Nyasa. When he had finally recovered from his ordeals, Pretorius had then made his way to South Africa where he soon received a summons from King-Hall.

  King-Hall’s interest in Pretorius was prompted by the latter’s unrivalled knowledge of the Rufiji delta. Years earlier he had owned a cotton plantation there, but the German authorities had dispossessed him of this and his hunting licence in controversial circumstances. Pretorius’s response to his treatment had been stubborn and uncompromising: he had set about recouping all his losses by poaching ivory. But even when he had succeeded in exacting his revenge, he retained a very considerable grudge against the German colonial authorities (and remained on German East Africa’s ‘most wanted’ list). To Pretorius, all Germans were possessed of an ‘arrogant attitude’ that was ‘bred in the national character’;19 and, although the Rufiji was where he had lost everything, including a young bride, he agreed, to King-Hall’s huge satisfaction, to return to this place of sad memories and become his chief scout in the delta. Pretorius made his base on Mafia, selected six ‘of the biggest rogues on the entire coast’20 as his henchmen, and set about his task with relish. He sensed in King-Hall a man who ‘when he struck meant to kill’.21

  While Pretorius began to reconnoitre the defences of Schönfeld’s ‘Delta Force’, King-Hall and Churchill continued their jousting contest. Churchill wanted to land two battalions of ‘jollies’ – Royal Marines – with six 12-pdr guns in the delta, but was told by the Admiralty that there were no jollies to spare; while King-Hall proposed sending a small boat armed with torpedoes upriver, to which Churchill’s damning reply read: ‘I do not think the chance of a rowing boat with spar torpedo going 12 miles up a creek past a fortified port with numerous trenches and trying to attack a ship with searchlights and modern guns is likely to be very rosy’.22 King-Hall was not so easily rebuffed, however, and countered Churchill with the idea of a night attack to attach charges to Königsberg’s hull combined with an attempt to fire the ship with petrol. ‘Not approved’ came the reply, with a renewed suggestion to mine as many mouths to the delta as possible. ‘Not possible’ answered King-Hall, citing scarce resources and pointing out that German troops guarding the delta would most probably raise the mines and re-lay them in the hope of sinking one of the Royal Navy’s own vessels.

  Amid the sparring, the merry-go-round of Royal Navy vessels blockading the delta continued unabated. During March 1915 Weymouth, Hyacinth, Childers and Echo patrolled off the main entrances while Pioneer, Duplex and Pickle covered the northern approaches and Pyramus and Fly the southern. Goliath, the largest of the fleet, and Kinfauns Castle, the mother ship to the RNAS seaplanes, operated further offshore. Fox had left for a refit in Bombay, Chatham had been recalled to the Mediterranean, Goliath was ordered to leave for the Dardanelles (where she would meet her doom), and Lord Kelburn’s Pyramus was soon forced to leave her station for her engines to be repaired in Cape Town. With each passing week, the conditions exacted a larger toll. Navigation in shallow waters strewn with sandbanks, mudbanks and reefs was extremely testing (one channel off Niororo that had to be frequently used was just 200 yards wide and Hyacinth only cleared the bottom by nine inches at low water), underwater fittings rapidly deteriorated, and condenser tubes and inlets became choked and corroded at a much quicker rate than was normal. Plates also became distorted in the heat, and keels were torn on reefs, but the worst job of all was the ghastly, messy, suffocating process of coaling every ten days or so.

  Many hoped that the arrival of Captain Thomas Biddlecombe’s HMAS Pioneer might be a favourable portent. The fledgling Royal Australian Navy had already indirectly played an important part in the East African campaign when HMAS Sydney had rid the Indian Ocean of the Emden in November; and Pioneer was, like the New Zealand Navy’s Pyramus, a sister ship of the ill-fated Pegasus. But the state of repair of this aged Pelorus-class light cruiser put paid to such optimism: her below-decks conditions were so appalling that in recent years ‘clinker-knockers’ – stokers – had deserted her in droves and they exacerbated the suffering of ratings required to maintain a heavy – and mind-numbingly dull – workload off the delta. Indeed sheer boredom was the greatest challenge confronting the officers and men on blockade duty. Many of their ships were destined to be under weigh for more than 250 days in 1915, and in Pioneer’s case the tally reached an astonishing 287 days, (during which she cruised almost 30,000 miles). Shore leave was seldom for long and, except in the case of a refit in one of South Africa’s ports, where all the womenfolk would turn out to give ships a traditional ‘colonial welcome’, unexciting. The diet was execrable: Pioneer and the older ships had no bakery or refrigerator and were seldom able to find adequate quantities of preserved meat, pickled pork, condensed milk, biscuits, tinned fish, eggs, bacon, or even dried fruit in the markets of Zanzibar and Mombasa. And to cap all the discomfort, cockroaches infested the decks (where temperatures seldom fell below 85°F) and even engine rooms (where the temperature frequently reached 125°F). Mails – the most vital source of succour to the crews – were at best infrequent.

  In such conditions cynicism abounded. In one edition of Pioneer’s shipboard magazine, The Observer, ‘Disappointed VC’ contributed the following stanza to the ‘Deaths Column’:

  Our enthusiasm has died since coming to this country.

  Glory we sought

  But won it not.

  Discomfort, not laurels

  Is all we got.

  And in April The Observer noted that ‘Once again we are back at the old Rufigi. On every hand one hears such ejaculations as “she’ll come out tonight”, “by Jove I wish something would happen”, “we hear that Königsberg has moved”.’ In the column ‘For Our Intellectual Readers’ a challenge was even posed: ‘If the Königsberg advances up the river at the rate of 3
yards a week, how long will it take the Pioneer to sink her firing at the rate of 5 rounds per hour (perhaps).’ Social highlights such as a cricket match against Hyacinth, or the first dismal performance of Pioneer’s brass band were rare. All in all, there was no disguising the fact that sinking the occasional unarmed dhow was not really the stuff that had made ‘England’s glorious name resound through the ages’.23

  Boredom and hardship were inevitably attended by sickness. The Fleet Surgeon on Hyacinth, Robley-Browne, recorded no fewer than 3,638 sick days from 603 cases among a crew of 625 in 1915. The vast majority of these were classified as ‘routine’ – influenza, ear infections, septicaemia associated with minor work injuries (everything turned septic in the sweaty heat); and most common of all were respiratory problems, which were treated in surprisingly progressive fashion, through the use of massage. Uncommon ‘incidents’ often posed a greater challenge. When Robley-Browne was confronted by a stoker with a sore on his genitals, he was unconvinced by his patient’s claim that ‘this was due to an accident with a match while lying in his hammock’ and assumed that the ‘obvious explanation’ lay in ‘some visits to Zanzibar’. Due to the lack of conventional combat, the only casualty in the year was the unfortunate crewman bin Ali who, while on duty on the tug Salamander, was ‘struck on the head by a shell’ from the delta’s shore battery, a misfortune which Robley-Browne noted had ‘immediately fatal results’.24

  Under the circumstances it was little short of miraculous that the Royal Navy was able to stick with its thankless task, or that any Germans remained alive in the Rufiji delta. By the end of March, however, morale on both sides suddenly took a turn for the better when the real reason for the declaration of an official blockade became common knowledge: it wasn’t a belated formalisation of the blocking-in of all German vessels but a response to rumours of a ‘visitor’ from outside. Towards the end of February an impounded British steamer of almost 4,000 gross tons, formerly the SS Rubens of the Frederick Bolton Steamship Company, had slipped quietly out of Wilhelmshaven – von Lettow-Vorbeck’s base in his days with II Seebataillon – and into the North Sea. Sailing under the Danish flag as the Kronborg she passed north of the Shetland Islands, south of the Faroes and, one month later, Cape Verde. Eluding detection was a feat in itself. ‘True, Britannia ruled the waves,’ wrote Nis Kock, one of the predominantly South Jutland crew, ‘but here and there you can still find one or two not quite under control, and we sailed on those.’25 Her destination was East Africa, and she was laden with huge quantities of supplies and materiel – and 1,600 tons of prime coal to facilitate the Königsberg’s return to Germany. Her skipper, Karl Christiansen, told his crew that their mission might mean the difference between capitulation and survival for German East Africa. ‘One rifle in Africa’, he pointed out, was ‘worth as much as a big gun’26 on the Western Front.

  The Admiralty was on to the Kronborg quickly, having intercepted wireless signals from Nauen, Germany’s principal wireless station, to a mystery vessel with the call-sign ‘DH’; and as the blockade-runner neared the East African coast, the Royal Navy also began picking up signals from the Königsberg’s wireless. Looff was only able to send signals to Germany on the odd occasion when weather conditions were exceptionally clement, but he could receive them, and when he was informed of the Kronborg’s proximity he began trying to contact the blockade-runner. His intention was to attempt – rather too conspicuously for Christiansen’s liking – to confuse the Royal Navy as his first real chance for a break-out loomed, and in the second week in April contact was established with the Kronborg herself during a twoday stop at the Aldabra Islands. The final, most testing leg of her epic journey lay ahead. Looff rejected the possibility of effecting an offshore rendezvous between the Kronborg and the Königsberg but ordered Christiansen to make for Tanga, where he could pick up a pilot to guide him to Mansa Bay. There, it was hoped, he would be able to unload his cargo undetected by the Royal Navy; and when the precious coal reached the Königsberg Looff would be able to take advantage of the next favourable tide to make an escape attempt. It was a bold scheme, and unbeknownst to either German vessel, the details of its execution were all intercepted by the Royal Navy. Back in London, Churchill could barely contain his excitement: ‘this is your opportunity,’ he told King-Hall, adding a placatory ‘I am very glad you are on the spot at this critical moment’.27 So determined was he to nab the Kronborg’s cargo that King-Hall was even instructed to inform her crew at the first opportunity that ‘if they scuttle or damage the ship they will be left to drown’ (although Churchill was adamant that King-Hall should ‘on no account . . . carry out this threat’).28

  For five days in the second week of April Hyacinth combed the approaches to Tanga for her prey, her gun crews sleeping at their stations and flames ten feet wide spurting from her funnels as she reached speeds of up to 19 knots. At dawn on 14 April the patience of her crew was finally rewarded when the Kronborg was spotted close inshore, twelve miles north of the Tanga lighthouse. But disaster struck as King-Hall ordered the chase to begin. Hyacinth’s starboard engine gave out, and by the time she had reached the bluff protecting Mansa Bay the Kronborg had, as one midshipman put it, ‘disappeared up the creek’.29 A bombardment over the bluff began immediately, but as the guns were firing blind and the Kronborg was still over five miles distant the chances of sinking her seemed remote.

  In the frenzied half-hour breathing space that Hyacinth’s seizure gave Christiansen he had managed to put the crew ashore, open his vessel’s portholes and douse the decks in petrol. When Hyacinth hove to at the entrance of the almost enclosed bay Kronborg’s deck and coal bunkers were ablaze and she was listing badly to port. But the subterfuge did not spare the Kronborg from further attention: she was shelled from close range and the crew were subjected to shrapnel fire as they made their way on all fours away from the beach. Christiansen and a number of others were wounded as they struggled towards the high ground a mile inland, but when they at last had a view of the bay they were considerably heartened by the scene unfolding there. German machine-gun fire from the shore defences had forced three small craft from Hyacinth to abandon their inspection of the Kronborg and soon the British warship could be seen preparing to depart. But then a final salvo burst from the Hyacinth. One shell hit the Kronborg’s deck aft, sending flames halfway up the mainmast, another hit the waterline, and in minutes she began to sink. Young Nis Kock and the Kronborg’s crew ‘stared at the ship which had carried us so long and so well’ and, ‘seeing her whole superstructure gutted by fire’,30 knew at that moment that there would be no 12,000-mile homeward journey. As Hyacinth weighed anchor three huge explosions shook the Kronborg and a plume of smoke visible twenty miles away rose into the otherwise clear morning air.

  By 9.15 a.m. Hyacinth was at anchor in Zanzibar harbour, and King-Hall was certain that his job was done (despite the breakdown of his flagship’s starboard engine). He assumed that the final explosions on board the Kronborg were caused by ammunition below-decks and that, whatever his regrets at not being to salvage the cargo, nothing of any use to von Lettow-Vorbeck or Looff could possibly have survived intact. A thorough search of the blockade-runner had not been possible due to the heat, but he promised Churchill that he would return in a few days to carry out a further inspection. No such follow-up was to occur for ten weeks: intelligence reports indicated that mines had been laid at the entrance to Mansa Bay and that after two days’ work the Kronborg’s crew had given up trying to rescue any cargo.

  In the second half of April the Royal Navy’s attention reverted to the Königsberg. Looff’s suspicions that the Royal Navy must possess the ‘Reserve Key “A”’ cipher had mounted during the Kronborg’s dash for Tanga and he was determined to put those suspicions to the test by sending out messages declaring that he was about to leave the delta to rendezvous with another German blockade-runner. The result was exactly as he expected: Hyacinth and Pioneer spent weeks watching an area off Mikindani, far to the sou
th; and when that proved fruitless they moved to search the waters south of Lindi and Lindi harbour itself. Only when the Königsberg remained in the delta after the high tide of 28 April did the two ships return to the delta and by then news of an even more successful and productive ruse was starting to spread through German East Africa.

  For a single day in late April the Tanga harbourmaster’s log recorded the recovery of 239 rifles, 375,000 rounds of ammunition, one field gun, four machine-guns, 100 4.1-inch shells and 150 3.5-inch shells from the Kronborg.31 Much of her above-decks superstructure had indeed been blown to pieces, but Christiansen’s ploy of dousing his ship in petrol had made the damage to his vessel seem far worse than it really was – and below her thick timber decks much of the cargo was salvageable. Some ammunition was damaged, as was some coal. But within two months the Kronborg’s crew, working with divers from the Königsberg, had rescued 2,000 Mauser rifles, five million cartridges, a light battery, 1,000 shells for Königsberg’s guns, a vast quantity of high explosive, telephone equipment, foodstuffs and vital medical supplies. At the end of June the salvage camp was abandoned and the men of the Kronborg were distributed among the land forces. They had been told at the outset that their mission would ‘take six months or until the end of the war’.32 None among the thirty-strong band of South Jutlanders and Germans could have envisaged that that might entail fighting on African soil for up to three and a half years let alone, as would be the fate of most, dying there.

  When the Royal Navy finally inspected Mansa Bay on 22 July it reported that there was ‘no indication that any salvage had taken place’33 and King-Hall was to be considerably embarrassed when the truth became known – the more so as it coincided with the discovery that one of the small German steamers in the Rufiji delta had managed to slip the blockade and reach Dar-es-Salaam. But he remained as ebullient as ever, dismissing those who criticised his handling of the Kronborg ‘incident’ for possessing ‘a singular ignorance of the use of men-of-war’.34 It was a strangely rigid retort from a man commanding a naval station on which the changing nature of naval warfare was as evident as anywhere; and if they were to square the Königsberg, King-Hall would require still greater ingenuity on the part of his ‘men-of-war’.