Battle of Mahiwa ends

The British official chronology of the war gives 19 October 1917 as the last day of the “action of Nyangao” in German East Africa. In fact the last heavy fighting at Mahiwa took place a day earlier. On the evening of 18 October the columns from Lindi fell back to the hills at Nyangao, and the exhausted Nigerian Brigade, which had held out encircled for three days, broke out with its wounded and guns. On 19 October the British staged no more than an artillery demonstration, and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck moved off in another direction with part of his force. The battle, which participants on both sides regarded as the biggest of the whole campaign, ended in a British defeat, but for the Germans too it was the beginning of the end of the fighting in their colony.

An order called off

On the night of 18–19 October General Percival Beves, commander of the Lindi force, ordered the Nigerian Brigade to attack the German positions at dawn. The brigade, whose three battalions had lost more than 500 men at Mahiwa and had eaten almost nothing for several days, was in no condition to do so. The order was called off. Captain W. D. Downes of the 4th Nigerian Battalion wrote after the war that had the attack gone ahead, his book would probably never have been written. That same day the commander of the Nigerian Brigade, General Frederick Cunliffe, known from the fighting in Kamerun, returned to Nyangao after an illness and took over command of the whole Lindi force from Beves. The brigade received reinforcements: 16 officers, 8 British NCOs and 512 men, who brought it back up to strength. The artillery and a King’s African Rifles battalion staged a demonstration in front of the German positions, which Downes described as very noisy and achieving little. Until the end of October there were only patrol clashes on this sector.

Victory without pursuit

Lettow-Vorbeck believed that on the evening of 18 October, with about 1,500 men, he had defeated an enemy numbering at least 4,000 and probably 6,000 soldiers. He wrote that, apart from Tanga, the British never suffered such a serious defeat in this war. He could not, however, exploit the victory. Behind him, the columns from Kilwa, which had already taken Ruponda, were advancing on Lukuledi, where the German supplies lay, and on 18 October they attacked Major Kraut’s three companies there. Had the British cut the German supply lines and taken the depots at Chigugu, Chiwata and Ndanda, the Schutztruppe would have lost the ability to fight on. Early on the morning of 19 October, instead of pursuing the beaten enemy, Lettow-Vorbeck set off west with six companies and two guns. Two days later he struck at Lukuledi. Kraut’s column overran the camp of the 25th Indian Cavalry, which lost about 350 horses, but the Germans failed to defeat the entrenched enemy. General Kurt Wahle’s units remained at Mahiwa.

The toll

According to Downes, the British lost 2,700 killed and wounded at Mahiwa out of the 4,900 infantrymen who took part in the fighting, more than half. A Royal Fusiliers battalion went into action on 17 October 120 strong and came out with fifty. German losses were five times smaller in absolute numbers. Lettow-Vorbeck gave 95 killed, 422 wounded and two missing, including about 70 Europeans. For his small army, however, this was roughly a third of the men engaged in the battle, and, as he himself admitted, the losses were all the more painful because they could not be made good. The booty, a gun, nine machine guns and 200,000 rounds, improved the situation only briefly. The British, as Downes observed, could afford losses; the Germans could not.

Five days later, on 24 October, Lettow-Vorbeck met Governor Heinrich Schnee in his camp. The food supplies would last about six weeks, and no new harvest could be expected before March. Lettow-Vorbeck declared that the war could and must be continued, even at the cost of leaving the colony and entering Portuguese East Africa. When the British resumed their advance on 6 November, Wahle gave up Mahiwa after brief resistance, and at the end of November the main German force crossed the border river Rovuma and left German East Africa.