East African campaign

The East African campaign was the longest campaign of the First World War. It lasted from the first days of August 1914 until two weeks after the armistice in Europe. It was fought over German East Africa, the largest and most populous German colony, and also spread to the border regions of the neighbouring British and Belgian possessions and to Portuguese Mozambique. The German colonial troops, the Schutztruppe, were commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel, later General, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. With an army made up overwhelmingly of African askaris and cut off from Germany by the British blockade, he defeated the British at Tanga and then for three years slipped out of trap after trap set by far larger British, South African, Indian, Belgian and Portuguese forces. The colony was lost by the end of 1917, but his force was never destroyed. The people of East Africa paid an enormous price for this war, above all the hundreds of thousands of carriers.

Name and dates

In Polish and English literature these operations are called the East African campaign or the war in East Africa. They include not only the fighting on the territory of the German colony but also the raids on the railway and outposts in British East Africa, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the fighting on the great lakes, and the last year of the war, which Lettow-Vorbeck spent in Portuguese East Africa.

We use the dates 8 August 1914 – 25 November 1918. On 8 August the British cruiser HMS Astraea shelled the wireless station at Dar es Salaam. The British official history of the campaign (Charles Hordern, 1941) writes that with this bombardment Astraea “opened the East African campaign” and calls it the first recorded act of war in the region. Some studies begin the campaign a few days earlier, with the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany or with the German cruiser Königsberg putting to sea on 31 July, but no fighting took place at that point. The campaign ended on 25 November 1918 at Abercorn, today’s Mbala in Zambia, where Lettow-Vorbeck’s force laid down its arms. The fighting had already stopped on 14 November, when the German commander learned of the armistice.

Background

German East Africa covered the area of today’s mainland Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Two railways ran inland from the coast: the northern line, from the port of Tanga to the foot of Kilimanjaro, and the central line, from Dar es Salaam through Tabora to Lake Tanganyika. To the north the colony bordered British East Africa, today’s Kenya, crossed by the British railway from Mombasa to Uganda; to the west the Belgian Congo; to the south Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Portuguese Mozambique.

According to Lettow-Vorbeck, at the outbreak of war the Schutztruppe numbered 216 Europeans, some of whom were on leave, and 2,540 askaris in fourteen or so field companies, and the police 45 Europeans and 2,154 askaris. The governor of the colony, Heinrich Schnee, wanted to avoid war and counted on the neutrality of the Congo basin provided for in the General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1885. Lettow-Vorbeck believed, on the contrary, that his task was to tie down as many British forces as possible in Africa, far from Europe. The British had only a few battalions of the King’s African Rifles on the spot, scattered across the protectorates. The first blows against the German colony were entrusted to troops from British India.

1914–1915: Tanga, Jasin and the war of raids

After the bombardment of Dar es Salaam, Astraea’s captain concluded a truce with the local authorities, which, however, neither London nor Berlin confirmed. The Germans scuttled a floating dock in the harbour entrance, so that Dar es Salaam could no longer serve as a base for the cruiser Königsberg. On 15 August a detachment under Tom von Prince took the border town of Taveta in British East Africa, and in September the Germans attacked outposts in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland and clashed with British troops on the Tsavo river while heading for the Uganda Railway. At sea, on 20 September, Königsberg sank the British cruiser Pegasus in Zanzibar harbour and then took refuge in the Rufiji delta.

At the beginning of November 1914 the British tried to take the colony with a single blow. Some 8,000 men of Indian Expeditionary Force “B” under Major-General Arthur Aitken landed at Tanga, while other troops simultaneously attacked the Germans at Longido, north of Kilimanjaro. Lettow-Vorbeck moved his companies by rail from Kilimanjaro to the coast and on 2–5 November, with roughly a thousand men, forced the force back to its ships. The British lost more than 800 killed and wounded and left weapons and ammunition on the shore, with which the Germans armed several companies. The attack at Longido also failed. Control of the campaign passed from the Government of India to the War Office in London, and Aitken was replaced by General Richard Wapshare.

In January 1915 Lettow-Vorbeck forced the British and Indian garrison of Jasin, on the border south of Mombasa, to surrender, but lost several regular officers and used up 200,000 rounds in the process. He decided he could not afford such battles any more. Throughout 1915 both sides turned to a war of raids: German patrols blew up the British railway and bridges, while the British stood on the defensive and waited for reinforcements. Lord Kitchener forbade offensive operations in the meantime. On 1 March 1915 Britain declared a blockade of the whole coast of the German colony. Only two supply ships got through it, in 1915 and 1916. On 11 July 1915 the British monitors Severn and Mersey, directed from an aircraft, wrecked Königsberg in the Rufiji delta. Her sailors joined the Schutztruppe, and the ship’s guns, removed from the wreck, served from then on as heavy artillery.

Lettow-Vorbeck meanwhile expanded his army. According to his memoirs, at the end of 1915 the Schutztruppe numbered about 3,000 Europeans and 11,300 askaris, including sailors, services and hospitals. In the west there was a struggle for control of the lakes. On Lake Victoria a British force broke the German defence of Bukoba in June 1915 and destroyed its wireless station, and on Lake Tanganyika two British motor boats, brought halfway across Africa, captured the German gunboat Kingani on 26 December 1915 and sank the steamer Hedwig von Wissmann on 9 February 1916.

1916: Smuts’s offensive

At the turn of 1915 and 1916, after the end of the campaign in German South West Africa, troops from the Union of South Africa began to arrive in East Africa. The British general Horace Smith-Dorrien was to take command but fell ill, and on 19 February 1916 the South African general Jan Smuts, the closest associate of Prime Minister Louis Botha, became commander. Smuts struck at once, before the rainy season. In March his Kilimanjaro offensive, a converging advance from both sides of the mountain, drove the Germans out of Taveta and Moshi but failed to encircle them. After the fighting at Latema Nek and Kahe, Lettow-Vorbeck withdrew south in good order.

This operation set the pattern for Smuts’s whole campaign. He avoided costly frontal attacks and pushed the enemy back with wide outflanking movements, which spared his men but each time let the Germans escape. In April General Jacob van Deventer’s mounted troops struck deep into the colony and took Kondoa Irangi, where in May they repulsed Lettow-Vorbeck’s night assaults. Smuts’s main forces advanced south along the northern railway and the Usambara mountains towards the central railway. At the same time troops entered the colony from other directions. The Belgian colonial troops, the Force Publique, under General Charles Tombeur took Kigali in May and then all of Ruanda and Urundi. From Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia General Edward Northey’s columns crossed the border on 25 May, and from Lake Victoria a British force took the port of Mwanza in July.

In the summer of 1916 the German colony was falling apart under blows from several directions. On 7 July the British entered Tanga without a fight, on 26 August they took Morogoro on the central railway, and on 4 September Dar es Salaam, the capital of the colony, surrendered to them. Smuts hoped to force Lettow-Vorbeck into a decisive battle at Morogoro, but the German commander withdrew through the Uluguru mountains, and the pursuit stalled at Kisaki. In September the British took the ports on the southern coast, Kilwa and Lindi, and on 19 September the Belgians entered Tabora. According to Hordern, by the end of September Smuts had gained the central railway, the capital, the best lands and all the ports, but had not won a decisive victory. His operations amounted to a series of turning movements which, at little cost in battle casualties, forced the Germans to retreat but did not allow them to be defeated.

The price was the condition of the troops. Supplies had to be carried hundreds of kilometres from railhead, and in September 1916 Smuts’s divisions were living on half rations. Malaria, dysentery and exhaustion decimated the soldiers from Europe, India and South Africa. Hordern gives the example of the 9th South African Infantry, which landed in February 1916 1,135 strong and by the end of October numbered 116. At the end of the year most of the South Africans were sent home to recuperate, and their place was taken by the expanding African battalions of the King’s African Rifles and by troops from Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Among Smuts’s last major actions was the battle of Beho-Beho in January 1917, in which the famous hunter and explorer Frederick Selous was killed. On 20 January 1917 Smuts, summoned to London for a conference of the empire’s leaders, handed over command to General Reginald Hoskins, convinced that the campaign was essentially over. The Germans, however, were holding on beyond the Rufiji and in the mountains near Mahenge.

In the autumn of 1916 Portugal, on which Germany had declared war in March, also joined the fighting. In April the Portuguese occupied the disputed Kionga triangle at the mouth of the Rovuma, and in September the troops of the third expedition from the mother country, under General Ferreira Gil, crossed the river and in October took Newala. At the end of November a German counter-attack, in which sailors from Königsberg took part, forced them back across the Rovuma.

1917: the war of attrition

At the end of May 1917 command passed to van Deventer, from whom London demanded a quick end to the campaign. He decided to attack the remnants of the German forces from the coast, from his bases at Kilwa and Lindi. The first advance from Kilwa was halted on 19 July at Narungombe, where the British lost more than 600 men. In September the offensive resumed, and in October Lettow-Vorbeck won his last great victory. In the battle of Mahiwa (15–19 October), with about 1,500 men by his own reckoning, he repulsed the attacks of the Lindi columns and the Nigerian Brigade. The British lost about 2,700 killed and wounded, but the Germans lost 519 men, roughly a third of those engaged, and most of their ammunition. Lettow-Vorbeck was soon promoted to major-general.

That victory could not be repeated. In the second half of November, at Newala, Lettow-Vorbeck left behind his sick and wounded and set off south with his best units, by his own figures about 300 Europeans, 1,700 askaris and roughly 3,000 carriers. Governor Schnee went with him. On 25 November he forded the Rovuma and routed a newly established Portuguese camp at Ngomano, capturing rifles, ammunition, food and medicines. Captain Tafel’s detachment, which had failed to join him, surrendered on 28 November on the Rovuma. In the same days the airship L 59 set off from Bulgaria with supplies for Lettow-Vorbeck but turned back over the Sudan. In a report written at the beginning of 1918 van Deventer stated that the campaign in German East Africa had come to an end and that the last German colony had been conquered.

1918: Mozambique and Northern Rhodesia

For the next ten months Lettow-Vorbeck lived in Mozambique on what he captured at Portuguese posts. Instead of turning back north, as van Deventer expected, he led his column far to the south, slipping away from the columns of the King’s African Rifles, which increasingly pursued him on their own, without the Portuguese. On 1–3 July 1918 at Nhamacurra, about 40 kilometres from the port of Quelimane, he routed a Portuguese and British garrison and captured huge stocks of weapons and food. He then turned north again. At the end of August and in September he fought several hard actions with British columns, and the Spanish flu reached his force. According to a German return of 1 September, the Schutztruppe now numbered only 176 Europeans and 1,487 askaris.

At the end of September the Germans recrossed the Rovuma and were once again on the territory of the former colony. Lettow-Vorbeck did not, however, turn towards Tabora, but led his force west, between Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika, into Northern Rhodesia. On 1 November he attacked the post at Fife, and on 9 November his advance guard occupied the abandoned town of Kasama. On 13 November, on the Chambeshi river, a British motorcyclist was captured carrying van Deventer’s message about the armistice, and on the morning of 14 November Lettow-Vorbeck met the British district commissioner and agreed to stop fighting. Van Deventer demanded that the Germans march to Abercorn and lay down their arms there.

On 25 November 1918 at Abercorn Lettow-Vorbeck’s force laid down its arms before the British Brigadier-General W. F. S. Edwards. According to the South African official account it numbered 155 Europeans and 1,168 askaris, accompanied by some 1,500–1,600 carriers and several hundred other Africans, including women. The Germans handed over 37 machine guns, 1,071 rifles and 208,000 rounds, almost exclusively weapons captured from the enemy. Lettow-Vorbeck argued with the British over whether Article 17 of the armistice, which spoke of the “unconditional evacuation” of German forces from East Africa, meant surrender, but in the end he complied. The Europeans kept their personal weapons, and in March 1919 the veterans marched in a ceremonial parade through Berlin.

Losses

There are no complete figures for the losses, and the numbers given by different sources vary widely. According to Lettow-Vorbeck, about 3,000 Europeans and 11,000 askaris passed through the Schutztruppe during the war. Citing British officers and the press, he wrote that some 300,000 men under more than 130 generals had been deployed against him in all, and that 20,000 Europeans and Indians had been killed or had died, though he himself considered these figures exaggerated. More recent studies, based on post-war British statistics, speak of roughly 10,000–11,000 soldiers of the British Empire killed or dead, most of whom died of disease rather than fell in battle. The Belgian and Portuguese forces also suffered heavy losses. Portuguese studies write that the Rovuma became the grave of thousands of soldiers from the successive expeditions sent from the mother country to Mozambique. German losses are the least certain, because Lettow-Vorbeck did not keep his records. It is known that thousands of askaris were killed, deserted or were taken prisoner.

The carriers paid the highest price. In a country without roads, where horses and oxen died from tsetse flies, almost all the supplies of both armies were carried on men’s heads. The British recruited carriers, often by force, in British East Africa, Uganda, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and later also in the occupied German territories. In June 1919 Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, told the House of Commons that the largest number of carriers on strength at any one time had been about 137,000, and that up to the end of October 1917, 28,830 of them from East Africa alone had died of disease or accident. The ministry had no figures for the later period or for the total number recruited. Historians now estimate that about a hundred thousand carriers or more died on the British side; Edward Paice gives 105,000. Thousands of carriers also died on the German and Belgian sides.

To this must be added the civilian victims. Both sides requisitioned food and cattle, burned villages and took men away to carry loads, and the German column in Mozambique literally lived by plunder. In the last years of the war famine reigned in many areas of the former German colony and of Mozambique, and at the end of the war East Africa was swept by the influenza pandemic. Civilian death tolls are only estimates. The figures most often given range from several hundred thousand to as many as a million dead across the whole region.

Significance

The East African campaign ended with Germany losing its last colony. Under the Treaty of Versailles most of German East Africa went to Britain as the mandated territory of Tanganyika, Ruanda and Urundi passed under Belgian administration as Ruanda-Urundi, and Portugal kept the Kionga triangle.

Lettow-Vorbeck had nevertheless achieved the aim he set himself in 1914. For more than four years an army of a few thousand men, and in the end of fewer than one and a half thousand, tied down much larger enemy forces and enormous resources in Africa. Lettow-Vorbeck himself became a legend in Germany as the general “undefeated in the field”, which the right made eager use of after the war. Some historians point out, however, that the strategic value of the campaign was limited. Most of the Allied forces in East Africa were African and Indian soldiers who would not have been sent to the Western Front anyway, and the colony itself was lost. For the Union of South Africa, Smuts’s campaign, alongside the fighting in France, was proof of its new standing within the British Empire. For the British colonial forces it was a lesson that in tropical Africa African soldiers performed better than European ones. The King’s African Rifles grew from a few battalions in 1914 into a large army by the end of the war, which bore the brunt of the fighting in 1917–1918.

For the Africans who fought, carried loads and starved for other people’s aims, the campaign was a catastrophe. Lettow-Vorbeck’s askaris received their arrears of pay only decades later, from the authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany. A memorial at Mbala commemorates the carriers from Northern Rhodesia alone who were killed or died in this war, while of tens of thousands of others only the figures in official returns remain.