Tip & Run

by Edward Paice

  The catastrophic defeat at Newala had put an end to Gil’s shenanigans and, even at home, he was fiercely criticised in Lisbon’s political inferno for his leadership of an expedition which had been ‘disastrous for the country and shameful for the Portuguese Army’.28 Had Gil’s offensive succeeded, however, it would have had a very marked effect on German morale. As long as enough territory was held to dump supplies further south, von Lettow-Vorbeck could continue to believe that a fighting withdrawal was possible – even eluding Hannyngton and O’Grady’s troops inland from Kilwa; but if the Portuguese had successfully established a cordon stretching from the Makonde plateau to Liwale his supply situation, already precarious, might have been severely compromised.

  Smuts’s response to the Portuguese failure was an attempt to cut off von Lettow-Vorbeck’s rearguard in the north – Otto’s five companies on the Mgeta River – before the February rains, and to force the surrender of the nine companies led by von Lettow-Vorbeck and Schulz which faced Kibata. In the north, he decided to send Beves’s South African infantry from the west to attempt to get behind Otto’s positions, while the rest of the force launched a ‘holding attack’ from the Mgeta River. In the view of many a British commander such a strategy had by now been shown to be seriously flawed. ‘In bush country,’ wrote one, ‘where it is easy for bodies of troops to slip away, it is necessary for success that the centre of an attacking force should press the enemy’s front vigorously while the wings should press in the enemy’s flanks, rather than that the outflanking columns should move wide round and hope for the enemy to be driven back on them. To commit a central column as at the Mgeta to a “holding attack” is to achieve nothing.’29

  On New Year’s Day half of General Cunliffe’s Nigerian Brigade, whose four infantry battalions and battery of artillery had arrived in East Africa in December, duly began their advance from the Mgeta in concert with the 2nd Nigeria Battalion and the 2nd Kashmiris under Colonel Lyall and Colonel Dyke’s 130th Baluchis. Smuts had assumed that Otto would stand and fight, perhaps near Beho-Beho, twenty miles south of the Mgeta. But he had no intention of so doing and, having fought a number of rearguard actions, withdrew at speed to the Rufiji, which he crossed at Kibambawe on 5 January, destroying the bridge behind him. The ‘holding attack’ thus ‘achieved nothing’, and the 1st and 4th Nigeria Battalions were even withdrawn after just four days’ fighting.

  To the west Smuts had ordered Beves’s South African infantry to make a wide detour, screened by Sheppard’s column, and cross the Rufiji at Kipenio, fifteen miles upstream of Kibambawe. Once across the river they were so exhausted and so far ahead of their supply lines that they could not press against Otto from the south. Their state of paralysis ‘wrecked Smuts’s hopes’,30 but their advance did at least cause von Lettow-Vorbeck some inconvenience. Six companies were hurriedly despatched from the Kibata front to Lake Utungi to cover Otto’s withdrawal (leaving Schulz with just three companies at Kibata); Tafel’s three companies, guarding supply dumps south of the Rufiji, were recalled to the Rufiji under the command of von Chappuis; and two companies at Kissangire, towards the coast, were also ordered to march inland. Some fifteen companies were therefore concentrating near Otto’s 1,000 troops armed with fourteen machine-guns.

  As Colonel Sheppard’s column crossed the Rufiji at Kibambawe Colonel O’Grady marched north from Kibata, pushing back Schulz’s weakened detachment, to occupy Mohoro and Utete downstream of Otto, and the 1st and 3rd Nigerians reinforced Beves at Kipenio. On 20 January, as the eightsome reel of British columns about the Rufiji reached some semblance of an orderly conclusion, an encirclement of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force seemed a possibility, albeit a remote one. Four days later the 3rd Nigeria Battalion and one company of the 4th advanced with artillery against Otto’s rearguard at Ngwembe. Fierce fighting raged all day, three British officers being awarded the Military Cross, and Otto was wounded. But for some inexplicable reason the attack was broken off. One officer with the Nigerian Brigade wrote ‘at this crisis of the campaign it is quite possible that if the British had got through [Ngwembe] the whole campaign might have taken very different lines, and possibly been greatly curtailed’.31 The Nigerian battalions had certainly been ‘blooded’ by Otto, sustaining almost 100 casualties, but their officers were in no doubt that a further attack could have been pressed if adequate reinforcements had been sent forward. In fact no thought had been given to providing the Nigerians with a reserve. Intelligence reports had indicated that Ngwembe was held by just two German companies, whereas there were three, with two in reserve; and behind them lay von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force. On 25 January the rains began, precluding a resumption of the offensive. Once again Smuts had gambled – both with the weather and the size of the force deployed to ‘clear out’ Otto – and lost as his final final offensive ground to halt.

  By then, however, Smuts was already on a ship bound for England and a seat at the Imperial War Conference convened by David Lloyd George with a view to ensuring that representatives of the British Dominions were given a greater say in the conduct of the war and other ‘commonwealth’ matters. On the Rufiji he left his troops in what one gunner described as ‘the most deadly place we have yet struck. Mosquitoes, tsetse fly and all other crawling insects are here by the million. At night the yelping and howling of wild beasts keeps us awake. We are having a bad time with fever. The gun can only be fired with help of two cooks and a servant.’32

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE ‘Suicidal System of Supply’1

  In May 1916 Major Routh, the endlessly inventive British officer charged with organising British East Africa’s Ordnance Department, felt that most difficulties with which he had been confronted since 1914 were ‘on the point of being surmounted’.2 His task had been immense. In addition to dealing with the eight East African governments and five ministries in London, the heterogeneous force which the War Office had cobbled together for the invasion of German East Africa from the north had myriad differing requirements – and its troops were strung out along nearly 1,500 miles of ‘front’, nearly three times the distance from Calais to Nice. If the German troop dispositions were ‘like planets . . . ours were like the Milky Way’,3 lamented Routh.

  When Routh had arrived from India with IEF ‘B’ in November 1914 there had been no recognisable ordnance or supply system in place. Newly arrived regular soldiers had been appalled at having to buy things locally as required, and with the influx of thousands of under-equipped troops from India and elsewhere inflation had become rampant. Mr Jacobs at ‘The Dustpan’ in Nairobi sold 1,000 water bottles to the East African Mounted Rifles for Rs12 (rupees) each, more than double the usual price, and such profiteering was the norm as storekeepers sought to milk the government. Ensuring that such items were sourced and distributed on a more efficient, and less costly, basis was not Routh’s remit; but with a staff of just two fellow-officers and nine NCOs Routh had worked through prolonged bouts of insomnia and attacks of malaria to put his own department on a more regular footing.

  By early 1916 his establishment was handling an inventory comparable in size to that of the divisional arsenal at Allahabad – which had three times the number of staff for the task – and the challenges it confronted on a daily basis were considerably more complex. The four armed vessels on Lake Victoria all mounted different guns; Maxim guns had to be refitted with longer legs (for use in long grass) and shields (due to the close-quarter nature of much of the fighting); a consignment of.303 bullets were found to fall out of the muzzles of some of the rifles issued to the KAR if the rifles were aimed downwards; and so the list went on. Then, in late 1915, Routh’s ‘belt-and-braces’ operation suddenly had to cope with the impending arrival of the South African troops: ‘You can imagine my feelings,’ he wrote, ‘we knew first only of a Brigade and five batteries. Then a Cavalry Brigade. Then two more Brigades, eventually six. We’d no idea what rifles they were armed with . . . we didn’t know what their guns were, nor if there was any amm
unition with the batteries, or fire control instruments . . . we had no knowledge of the saddlery they were using . . . I put it to you, two unknown divisions arriving in an undeveloped country. What hope on earth had we of fixing them up?’4 For some of his staff the strain was simply too much: one NCO had to be sent back to India suffering from acute ‘melancholia’, or depression. ‘There’s a limit’, Routh noted, ‘and this poor devil has reached it.’5

  By the time Routh was transferred to Mesopotamia in mid 1916, and the Army Service Corps took over responsibility for all supplies, including ordnance, the situation was much improved; but transport had become a well-nigh insoluble problem. On arrival in East Africa, Major Hazleton, the new officer in charge of Supply and Transport, was told that Smuts’s main advance into German East Africa would not take place until after the rains; and even in that timeframe he knew that he would not be able to guarantee to support the advance while also converting Routh’s Indian Army organisation to his own British Army methods. Worse still, the distances covered by Smuts’s troops in the initial operations of March and April 1916 were far greater than he had envisaged, with the result that some units were operating in German East Africa without even first-line transport. To many it had seemed as though Smuts had forgotten his reputation for ‘halving the time allowed for a task but doubling or quadrupling the facilities’6 and had simply set off as if he were replicating his famous raid into the Cape during the Boer War.

  By June the vehicles Hazleton had ordered from the War Office had arrived from England, but by then the campaign was being fought in conditions which rendered them useless and Hazleton was forced to cobble together an ox transport system as best he could. But van Deventer’s advance to Kondoa-Irangi ‘knocked to smithereens’ his efforts: even when the rains eased in May the journey from the railhead at Taveta, which took fifteen days, was so arduous that almost all oxen died along the way; and after the rains disease spread rapidly along the route to Kondoa. As late as July only seven wagons arrived in Kondoa out of a convoy of twenty-eight carrying supplies from a depot just fifteen miles to the north of the town; and by then it was obvious that the combination of disease, overwork and enemy artillery fire had produced ‘heart-breaking results for the transport arrangements’.7 Livestock seemed to be as ineffective as vehicles and, having lost 30,000 oxen in the first months of the advance, Hazleton had to admit that his transport system ‘never quite caught up’* with the troops.

  Hazleton was sharply critical of what he perceived to be the unorthodox, or ‘gung-ho’, character of the South African thrust into German East Africa. In his opinion there were ‘too many troops for the transport available’; van Deventer’s lunge at Kondoa had caused a serious ‘leak’8 in the transport system; and the failure to launch a diversionary attack against Dar-es-Salaam was a serious oversight. His was the view of a British supply officer. On the other hand, Smuts was adamant that the tail should not wag the dog, that the transport and supply arrangements ‘should not be permitted to dominate’. He made it quite clear that he was aware that ‘efforts like these cannot be made without inflicting the greatest hardships on all’.9 But when von Lettow-Vorbeck was not brought to heel within weeks – which would have justified his tactics – Smuts found himself in a predicament with grave implications not only for the campaign but for his political career. When he arrived to inspect the situation at Kondoa in early May he was seen to be visibly shocked at the appearance of van Deventer’s mounted troops; and criticism began to spread even to the South African support units as the realisation dawned that campaigning conditions in East Africa were ‘far beyond the capabilities of a fledgling army’ and would have to be fought out in ‘one of the inner circles of a quartermaster’s hell’.10

  As Smuts confronted the possibility of the campaign degenerating into a repeat of the Boer War – in which his heavily outnumbered fellow-Boers had held out for two years longer than seemed even remotely possible in the spring of 1900 – with the roles reversed, only one means of transport existed which might prevent mass casualties among his troops due to starvation. Vehicles were no use, oxen were no use. The only beast of burden seemingly in plentiful supply was human, and if porterage had not become the bedrock of his transport system after the initial advance of March–May 1916 the campaign, in the words of its official history, ‘could never have been fought at all’.11

  The story of how almost every able-bodied African male civilian in the British territories neighbouring German East Africa, and in German East Africa itself, became involved in the conflict is one of the greatest tragedies of World War I. In the first months of the war African carriers were not employed in great numbers, and volunteers were easily found for specific projects. Fewer than 10,000 men, recruited from Uganda and British East Africa, were sent to Mombasa in September and October 1914 to work for the two Indian Expeditionary Forces; about 2,000 Wateita were recruited to work on the construction of the new military railway from Voi towards Taveta in early 1915; and 5,000 Africans from the coast supported Tighe’s Umba Valley operations in January 1915. In relative terms all these men were reasonably well paid, receiving Rs15 per month plus their food, a figure which was three times an individual’s annual hut tax payment (and compared to a wage of Rs25 for an askari in the King’s African Rifles, Rs30 for a good interpreter, or Rs50 for hard, seasonal agricultural work); moreover, the conditions under which they were employed were strictly monitored by government officials. It was realised that without proper sanitary measures and medical attention there would be a ‘great danger of epidemics of malaria and dysentery’, and that ‘if such should unfortunately occur apart from the decrease in the labour force the work will get a bad name’.12 The results of such vigilance varied. The inspection reports of the railway labour camps at Voi River and Mwatate in March 1915, for example, showed that only fourteen out of 1,690 Wateita were on the sick-list on the days of the inspections and that there were no deaths either through disease or accident.13 On the other hand, disease caused significant casualties among the carriers supporting the Umba Valley operations.

  If the labour requirements during the first six months of the war appeared relatively undemanding, as they subsequently would, the situation changed markedly during 1915. Although the campaign was, with the exception of ‘affairs’ such as Bukoba, a stalemate the arrival of more and more troops was accompanied by the need to create a suitable military infrastructure with which to support them – a task which was dependent upon increasing numbers of carriers and other labourers. The Military Labour Bureau, later renamed the Carrier Corps, was formed to oversee this development. Commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Oscar Watkins, a well-respected government official, its approach was paternalistic; but by the autumn of 1915 Watkins’s porterage system, devised in the belief that the war would only last a few months, began to creak at the seams. So great was the need for manpower that the Carrier Corps had expanded from 25,000 to 45,000 men and, with only a small staff and a rank that precluded him from dealing with generals on equal terms, Watkins became less able to ensure the proper treatment of his men; and at the same time legislative measures were passed which were to have very unfavourable consequences for those employed by the Carrier Corps.

  By mid 1915 the expense of the war was a matter of grave concern to Belfield’s government, and to Whitehall, and as labour was increasingly drained by the Carrier Corps and the docks in Mombasa the prospects for recruiting sufficient manpower at an acceptable cost looked bleaker by the month. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that although the Carrier Corps’s wages were fixed, those of the dock workers in Mombasa were not; and the latter took advantage of the scarcity of semi-skilled labour to demand an increase in wages from Rs25 to Rs30 per month and the abolition of the existing monthly contract system (which left dock labourers free, if they so desired, to take advantage of the rising wages secured by casual day labourers). All wartime attempts to formalise dock labour were thwarted; and only by tolerating high rates of pay and a
low degree of control could Belfield’s government ensure that Mombasa continued to meet the escalating demands of the military at the same time as handling booming exports of cotton from Uganda, and coffee and sisal from British East Africa.

  But if the dockers and other skilled workers offered no prospect of cost-savings to the government, the Carrier Corps was a different matter. It only required unskilled labour, and as its recruitment ‘pool’ was the whole of British East Africa rather than one town the bargaining power of carriers and casual labourers was precarious. The result was the 1915 Native Followers Recruitment Ordinance, which sought to exploit this weakness to the full. It stipulated that service in the Carrier Corps could now be enforced through conscription, and that wages were to be fixed at one third of the prevailing level – Rs5 per month plus food, rising to Rs6 after three months’ service. This was a derisory level of remuneration, barely exceeding the daily wage of the settler volunteers in 1914; the metal identification tags with which each carrier was issued cost Rs2, and a blanket typically cost Rs3/50. Furthermore the ration scale for carriers’ rations did not reach parity with those of askari in the KAR until 1917, despite the extremely onerous nature of carrier work. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that payment might have been waived altogether were it not for a universal fear of accusations of slavery; and although ‘specialists’ like machine-gun porters would continue to be paid higher rates, the Carrier Corps had, despite all Watkins’s good intentions, become little more than a press gang justified by ‘the exigencies of war’.

  It was ironic that just as the carriers’ terms of employment were undergoing this radical revision, facilitated by a supposedly unlimited supply of unskilled labour, there were already signs that certain communities had been squeezed dry of recruits, and that no amount of coercion was likely to produce more carriers. In early 1915 one third of the 1,500 Wakamba men working outside their home district of Machakos were being employed by the military in Nairobi; one year later a further 2,000 had been called up by the Carrier Corps, quadrupling the number of men employed by the military and increasing to one in ten the number of adult males working away from home. The repercussions of such extensive labour migration were considerable, the more so as it was accompanied by an increasing demand for foodstuffs. As one enlightened official put it, ‘astounded villagers saw their menfolk taken from them in thousands . . . their grain-bins emptied, [and] their cattle driven away’. Cash was always paid by the authorities for supplies, but cash was of little use in many districts; and before long many tribes found that not even ‘their own exertions [could] replace what the troops consumed, for with the departure of the able-bodied men hardly any but old people and women remained in the villages, so that there was never enough labour to till the fields’.14 In the case of many tribes the deleterious consequences of their involvement in the war were also compounded by recent history. The Wateita, for example, had experienced terrible droughts and famines in the 1880s and 1890s which had wrecked the land and decimated the population; the misguided excision of large tracts of their best land for European sisal plantations; and the establishment on their land of a European coffee plantation and a mission for the Holy Ghost Fathers.