by Edward Paice
The unusually high percentage of Allied soldiers killed during the attack was regarded with considerable suspicion in the immediate aftermath of the battle, as was Naumann’s message, replying to an enquiry by Drought, that he had never come across Lieutenant Sutherland. Officers captured by either side had seldom just disappeared in a campaign that had witnessed few atrocities, and as Naumann marched off in the direction of Lake Natron many of the Allied officers at Ikoma came to the conclusion that they were pursuing a psychopath rather than another Wintgens. As he left the scene of the battle, it was Drought who was the first to think the unthinkable – that Naumann might even be intending ‘to threaten Nairobi’.13 If that was indeed his plan when he left Ikoma, Naumann changed his mind when he neared the border with British East Africa and learnt the truth about the Somali ‘invasion’: the rumour had been started by nothing more than a Somali incursion on the Jubaland border, ‘sixteen to twenty days’ march north of Nairobi’.14 This put paid to any further thoughts of entering British East Africa, and Naumann decided that the time had come to turn south in the hope of breaking through the British troops on the Central Railway to rejoin Tafel or von Lettow-Vorbeck.
By the end of July 1917 Naumann had marched hundreds of miles through Ngorongoro and Ufiome districts to arrive within striking distance of Kondoa, the scene of van Deventer’s stand fourteen months earlier. British posts throughout the north-east were put on a state of high alert, but there was not much they could do in the event of attack: almost all fit and reliable troops had been moved south for the advance against von Lettow-Vorbeck, leaving little more than pocketfuls of long-suffering Indian Imperial Service Troops like the Kapurthalas and Rampurs in the rear. This placed van Deventer in a dilemma: Naumann could not be allowed to rampage across his lines of communication. He had to be caught, and the task of cornering him once and for all fell to Colonel Dyke and a detachment comprising the 1st Cape Corps, the KAR Mounted Infantry, the 4th Nigeria Battalion and 10/SAH (the only unit of South African mounted troops to have returned to the campaign). The prospect of success seemed remote; and as van Deventer prepared to advance in the south and from the coast he was frequently reminded, to his considerable annoyance, that if a greater number of South African mounted troops had returned to the campaign in early 1917 ‘this particular foe’ might not have been so successful in eluding ‘all attempts to round him up during the last six months’.15
To the great surprise – and relief – of the handful of troops garrisoning Kondoa, Naumann bypassed the town, choosing to trek across the Masai Steppe to the Nguru Mountains and Handeni instead. Then, rather, than marching towards the Central Railway, he suddenly turned north again and split his force into several detachments. Naumann had seemingly decided that the Central Railway would be too heavily defended, and that wreaking havoc in the former heartland of German settlement would constitute a more effective contribution to the German war effort. Not all his commanders appeared to agree with his decision: Lieutenant Zingel and the remnants of 26/FK, about 100 men, made little effort to escape encirclement by the Cape Corps at Kakera and the column surrendered on 2 September. On the other hand Walther Bockmann, the Königsberg’s Second Engineer, brazenly led a detachment of a similar size to Kahe, on the Northern Railway, where he captured the British Administrator and destroyed two trains laden with supplies for the Allied build-up further south.
With the KAR Mounted Infantry, eighty de Jager’s Scouts, the Cape Corps, 500 KAR from Nairobi, and 10/SAH hard on his heels Naumann led his own column back into the Nguru Mountains, and at Loita Hill, seventy-five miles south-east of Kondoa, his luck – and ammunition – finally ran out. On 2 October he surrendered with fourteen European officers and NCOs, 159 askari and about 350 carriers; a week later Bockmann’s detachment of three officers and fifty-three askari surrendered to the KAR Mounted Infantry on the slopes of Mt Oldeani, a volcanic crater north of Lake Eyasu; and one German patrol was even captured halfway up the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro. The total haul amounted to about 400 troops, a further 170 having been killed, captured or wounded during their six-month rampage, and at last the ‘Naumann Stunt’ was at an end.*
If Wintgens really had intended to return his askari to their homes in the north, which is doubtful, Naumann did not carry out his wish; nor did he make any real attempt to rejoin von Lettow-Vorbeck or Tafel; and von Lettow-Vorbeck deemed it unfortunate that ‘this operation, carried out with so much initiative and determination, became separated so far from the main theatre of war as to be of little use’.16 He had, however, caused chaos right across the north-east, disrupting the efforts of British officials to create a wartime administration in occupied territory and raiding the British lines of communication just at a time when supplies and troops were being moved south for a new advance against von Lettow-Vorbeck; and he plausibly claimed that as many as 10,000 British and Belgian troops had leen diverted from their duties elsewhere to pursue him, and that the intrepid pilots of the seven serviceable British biplanes had spent countless flying hours searching for him. Furthermore, Hoskins’s inability to corner Naumann in May 1917 had been sharply criticised by Smuts and may have contributed to his dismissal.
Naumann’s achievement was, by any standards, considerable. But he did not earn the respect from his opponents that was accorded to Wintgens because he, and some of his officers, were deemed not to have ‘played the game’. In June 1917 two of the latter had raped villagers near Lake Victoria, and Naumann himself was regarded as the very personification of the ‘hydra-headed monster of Prussian militarism’, a man who ‘swaggered about with a look of indifference’17 as he committed atrocities against African and Allied soldier alike. In 1918 he earned the dubious distinction of being the only German participant in the campaign sent to stand trial in England for the murder of Lieutenant Sutherland at Ikoma and ‘cruelty to native women’. He was sentenced to death, commuted to seven years’ imprisonment, but was returned to Germany in November 1919.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Allies
The participation of Belgian troops in the pursuit of Wintgens and Naumann was symptomatic of a thaw in Anglo-Belgian relations. In September 1916 General Tombeur – or Baron Tombeur of Tabora, as he was newly styled by the Belgian government – had told Smuts that his initial offer to evacuate Tabora before the rainy season had lapsed; and, although he continued to refer to a gradual withdrawal, Belgian troops had remained in occupation ever since. This seeming intransigence greatly exacerbated Smuts’s – and Britain’s – fears that the Belgian government had decided to renege on the assurances given at the start of the war that it had no intention of pursuing territorial gains in East Africa, and that it was seeking to use its occupation of Ruanda, Urundi and western German East Africa as a bargaining counter in secret negotiations for a separate peace with Germany. The formal appointment of a civilian government for the occupied territories, led by Colonel Malfeyt, was also regarded with suspicion, and when Malfeyt refused to allow Smuts to recruit carriers from the west Anglo-Belgian relations sank to an all-time low.
The Belgian government was not wholly to blame for the worsening state of affairs. Smuts was wont to treat his ally in high-handed fashion, demanding rather than requesting further assistance, and was loath to give the Belgian commanders (and askari) the credit they were due for their advance to Tabora. Furthermore, Smuts was in no position to demand the immediate withdrawal of Belgian troops from German East Africa when he was unable to provide sufficient troops or civilian administrators to replace them. When Hoskins succeeded Smuts, the extent to which personal animosity between Smuts and Tombeur had undermined further co-operation was immediately apparent: no sooner had Smuts left East Africa for the Imperial War Conference in London than the first Belgian troops began to leave Tabora and make their way back to Lake Tanganyika and the Congo. At this juncture, however, Wintgens had set out on his raid towards Tabora, forcing Hoskins to appeal for Belgian assistance. Having done so, renewed co-operation was secur
ed without much difficulty and Hoskins soon developed a close rapport with Tombeur’s capable and respected successor, Colonel Huyghé. At a conference at Ujiji in the third week of April, at which the plan for the operations against Wintgens and Naumann was agreed, Huyghé even agreed that Hoskins should be in overall command; and at two further conferences, at Dodoma in mid June and Dar-es-Salaam in July, van Deventer and Huyghé were also able to agree on the basis for a Belgian advance from the Central Railway to Mahenge. This was a very significant development, facilitated in part by a £3m loan (£105m in today’s money) from Britain to Belgium for ‘colonial development’, and it greatly improved van Deventer’s chances of cornering von Lettow-Vorbeck.
Belgium’s return to the fray was eased by Hoskins’s focus on military, as opposed to political, matters; and van Deventer was equally pragmatic in his dealings with his Belgian counterparts. But in London and Le Havre the politicking which had characterised Smuts’s time in East Africa continued. There was a realisation that a new phase in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was under way, and that it might be the last phase. Belgian suspicions that Britain might seek to dispossess her ally of a colonial presence in Africa altogether remained acute; while in Britain criticism of Belgium’s record in Africa and her ‘colonial methods’ showed no sign of diminishing. The renewed involvement of Belgian troops was also regarded as a double-edged sword: no one denied their effectiveness or ability to advance more rapidly than most British troops, but their commanders’ insistence that the troops live off the land was scarcely conducive to good relations with the long-suffering inhabitants of any territory through which they advanced. So great were the fears on this score that van Deventer – at Whitehall’s behest – proposed creating a chain of supply dumps to support the Belgian advance to the Mahenge plateau, and as Huyghé knew that Tafel’s troops would pick the plateau clean before retreating he gladly accepted the offer.
Tombeur’s prolonged occupation of Tabora caused alarm in East Africa as well as in Europe, and the forthright views expressed by Ewart Grogan, for example, the former Liaison Officer with the Belgian troops and a member of British East Africa’s War Council, were more or less common currency by mid 1917. On the one hand, Grogan was deeply suspicious of Belgium’s motives; and as Lord Milner’s adviser on African boundary questions at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 he would roundly dismiss Belgian claims that Ruandans and Urundians expressly desired Belgian rule as absurd. ‘No natives in all Central Africa would on their own initiative do anything of the kind’, he told Milner, adding that ‘Billygee, the native name for the Belgians, is the synonym for “Bogeyman” – mothers use it to horrify their babes’.1 On the other hand, Grogan’s admiration of the Belgian askari knew no bounds, and having agreed to van Deventer’s request that he resume his duties as Liaison Officer he penned an emotional tribute to Huyghé’s troops as they massed on the shores of Lake Tanganyika prior to the advance on Mahenge. ‘It was a dark night,’ he wrote, ‘and we took our stand midway to take the salute. In the rising dust and smoky glare of the torches the impression was of some immense, half-seen submarine coming out of the depths. Except for an occasional word of command there was no other sound than . . . the soft pad, in perfect unison, of thousands of naked feet. The only clearly visible feature of this monster was the glaring white eyeballs and glistening white teeth as it passed the saluting point. I was stirred to the depths.’2 The Belgian Congo army, however mercenary the intentions of the Belgian government, was on the march again.
While Anglo-Belgian relations in the field were steadily improving, Anglo-Portuguese relations took another turn for the worse. In Europe, negotiations between Britain, France and Portugal regarding the possibility of Portuguese troops being sent to the Western Front only served to reaffirm Portuguese suspicions that ‘the lot of the smaller nation inexorably caught up at this crucial time in the concerns of the larger one was . . . not a happy one’;3 and soon after the first troops of a 55,000-strong Portuguese Brigade disembarked in France in February 1917 Lisbon was plunged into yet another political crisis. Opposition to the war, both in parliament and on the streets, reached fever pitch as strikes broke out all across the country, martial law was imposed, and General Pereira d’Eça was subjected to an enquiry into atrocities committed in the wake of a German incursion into Portuguese West Africa in 1915. In April, the Union Sagrada government fell.
General Gil’s simultaneous return from Portuguese East Africa after the disaster at Newala in December 1916 only served to strengthen the hand of the anti-war and anti-British lobbies. But no Portuguese government was willing to abandon the fight, either in Europe or Africa, because to do so would be an admission of failure that would further damage Portugal’s brio nacional – its national pride – as well as its chances of retaining its colonies when the war was over. Errol MacDonell, who was appointed to the unenviable position of Liaison Officer with the Portuguese forces in March 1917, explained the Portuguese dilemma in the following words: ‘though many [Portuguese] know that at present they have made a hopeless fiasco of the German East campaign, if anyone says so in public he would incur the obloquy of the military, the press and the public’. Such obfuscation on the part of the Portuguese did not bode well for the future of Anglo-Portuguese co-operation on the Western Front or in East Africa; nor did MacDonell’s despatch to the War Office which reiterated an opinion prevalent in Whitehall that ‘the Portuguese hate and suspect all foreigners, and . . . they hate the British most of all because they fear them’.4
Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s officers were well aware of this antagonism. After his victory at Newala one of them wrote that ‘morale was positive’ among the German troops, whereas the same ‘could not be said of the Allies’;5 and, according to Looff, the victor at Newala, British officers in Lindi ‘could not stop themselves from expressing their delight that their less-than-esteemed allies, the “Pork-and-Beans”, had been comprehensively walloped’.* At the end of the rainy season German troops immediately began to take advantage of the breakdown of Anglo-Portuguese co-operation on the Rovuma front. In February 1917, repeated raids were launched against Negomano and Portuguese frontier posts; and, further west, Kraut marched into Portuguese East Africa in April, sending von Stuemer towards Lake Nyasa while von Bock foraged so far to the east that it was feared he might attack Porto Amelia on the coast.
Such brazenness was hardly reassuring for van Deventer as he prepared to push von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force towards the border with Portuguese East Africa, and by July 1917 it was estimated that more than 40,000 square miles of the colony was devoid of any Portuguese presence, civilian or military. Meanwhile, von Stuemer and von Bock promised local Yao and Makua chiefs that taxation and forced labour would not be imposed when Germany gained control of the Portuguese colony, and as a result their officers were able to crow that ‘the natives of the whole area were almost without exception on our side. Although we came to demand food and porter services, and could no longer pay real money, they abandoned the Portuguese nonetheless and offered every assistance’.6 When one of von Stuemer’s patrols was spotted in July near Fort Johnston, on the shores of Lake Nyasa, Northey sent Colonel Shorthose’s 1/4KAR to attack his base at Mwembe, and by the end of August von Stuemer had retired back across the Rovuma with his 700 troops. Two months later there were no German troops remaining in Portuguese East Africa. But by then von Lettow-Vorbeck had been informed by von Stuemer that the area around Mwembe was exceptionally fertile, that the local population ‘had no real fear’7 of Germans, and that he had even been able to buy quinine and other medical supplies from a number of Portuguese officials whose sympathies lay with Germany. In time this information would prove invaluable.
The activities of von Stuemer and von Bock were a severe embarrassment to the Portuguese government, and ‘German intrigues’ in Portuguese East Africa were blamed for yet another disaster to befall their colony in what was without doubt ‘an evil year for the Portuguese’.8 The truth lay much
closer to home. The war had greatly increased the harshness of Portuguese colonial rule, which Britain had criticised for years as being characterised by ‘revolting practices’. ‘No regard whatsoever was paid to native rights,’ wrote one former British Consul, ‘the chief reason being that natives were not considered as possessing any.’9 Since 1914 forced labour had become increasingly widespread, local populations being coerced en masse by undisciplined and ruthless press gangs without even being offered the derisory remuneration paid to British carriers and labourers. The sick and old were not exempt, young women were ‘ravished’ at will, and by the end of 1916 increasing numbers of young men fled to the mines of Southern Rhodesia and the Transvaal to escape the Portuguese cipais and earn a wage. Meanwhile, the predicament of those left behind was so bad that when the cipais set about the task of levying 5,000 additional carriers in Barue, a centuries-old kingdom that had been incorporated into Tete district and only ‘pacified’ as recently as 1902, a full-scale rebellion ensued.