Action at Kisaki

On 7 September 1916 the South African troops of General Coenraad Brits ran into strong German positions at Kisaki, south of the Uluguru Mountains, and were driven back. The next day, a few kilometres away, the mounted brigade of General Nussey fought the same German units all day, without even knowing where Brits’s troops were. The British chronology of the war records under 7 September that in this “affair at Kisaki” the pursuit of the retreating forces of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was checked. According to the British official history (Hordern), fighting took place on 7 and 8 September, and some studies extend the fighting for Kisaki to 11 September, linking it with the simultaneous clashes on the Dutumi river.

Pursuit through the mountains

When at the end of August Lettow-Vorbeck slipped away from Morogoro, General Jan Smuts sent several columns after him at once. From the east, along the road round the mountains, came General Hoskins’s 1st Division. From the west two columns were to converge on Kisaki, with its German boma, or fortified government post, on the road to the Rufiji river. Nussey’s 1st Mounted Brigade went straight across the mountains, and Brits’s 3rd Division, with General Enslin’s 2nd Mounted Brigade, in a wide arc to the west of them. Both were already very exhausted. At Mahalaka Brits had to send back all his artillery and transport, because the track to Kisaki was unfit for wagons, and his infantry marched without greatcoats or blankets, on half rations or less from the second day of the march. On 5 September his roughly 1,200 men assembled at Tyaduma, a dozen or so kilometres north-west of Kisaki.

Meanwhile Nussey’s brigade was struggling across the mountains. The map showed a road along the Mgeta river which did not in fact exist, and the mule carrying the wireless set fell over a precipice on the second day of the march. The porters, taken by force from the surrounding villages, fled during a storm at night, and Nussey had to bury 80 boxes of ammunition on a mountaintop. When on 7 September his roughly 500 men were approaching the Whigu hills, less than 10 kilometres from Kisaki, neither column knew where the other was. Hordern writes that in the dense bush they were as cut off from each other as if a week’s march separated them. The air service did not help: the airmen who reported on 6 September that “our mounted troops are in Kisaki” had mistaken cattle for the South Africans’ horses.

Two separate attacks

On 7 September Brits advanced on Kisaki. The infantry of Brigadier-General Beves struggled through tall elephant grass along the Mgeta river, while Enslin’s horsemen swung south to cut the road from Kisaki to Iringa. At about one in the afternoon Beves’s column was hit not only by enemy fire but also by a swarm of wild bees, which scattered the pack animals, as had happened earlier at Tanga and Kahe. Towards evening the infantry ran into strongly held trenches in front of the German boma and dug in for the night. Enslin’s horsemen in the south fought superior German forces. In the dense bush they could not make use of their horses’ speed; the Germans turned their right flank and took some of the horses, and in hand-to-hand fighting the brigade lost 16 killed and 24 wounded. Lettow-Vorbeck himself regarded a bayonet counter-attack by one of the askari companies as decisive. When the Germans attacked Beves’s infantry at about 10 p.m., Brits decided to withdraw, despite the protests of both battalion commanders. By 4.30 a.m. both columns were back at Whigu.

Nussey, only a few kilometres away, did not hear this fighting. At dawn on 8 September he occupied the eastern hill of Whigu and moved on the Kisaki boma, but was soon held up in a belt of bush and forest. All day the Germans tried to turn both his flanks. Between two and three in the afternoon, on the left flank, the reserve beat off at the last moment a bayonet attack by the same unit that had routed Enslin the day before. At about five the Germans withdrew. The brigade, which had had no food or water all day, lost 4 officers and 19 other ranks killed and about 20 wounded. German losses are not known. In the evening Nussey at last learned where Brits was, and on 9 September he joined him.

Causes and consequences

Smuts admitted in his report that if Brits and Nussey had been in communication, a combined attack would certainly have given them Kisaki, and that “two separate efforts led to a double retirement and a regrettable revival of the enemy’s spirit”. Hordern adds that Lettow-Vorbeck, operating on interior lines, threw the same companies first against Brits and then against Nussey, and that Brits could have helped Nussey. He also considers it fortunate that the Germans did not use the following days to destroy the exhausted columns. Lettow-Vorbeck judged the ground at Kisaki too difficult and moved his main forces east, against Hoskins’s division, which he fought on the Dutumi river on 10–12 September.

The British took Kisaki only on 14 September, when the Germans had already left it, leaving behind many sick and wounded. Lettow-Vorbeck dug in on the southern bank of the Mgeta river. Smuts’s troops, worn out, underfed and decimated by malaria and other diseases, were no longer capable of further advance. At the end of September torrential rains again made the roads impassable, and Smuts ordered the troops on the Mgeta to go over to the defensive. The great pursuit that had begun in March at Kilimanjaro came to a halt for several months.