Kilimanjaro offensive

The Kilimanjaro offensive was Lieutenant-General Jan Smuts’s first major operation in East Africa and the first serious British advance into German East Africa since the start of the war. In less than three weeks of March 1916 British, South African and Indian troops drove the Germans from their positions at the foot of Kilimanjaro, recovered Taveta, occupied since August 1914, and took Moshi, the terminus of the railway running from the coast. Smuts hoped that a converging advance from two sides would encircle and destroy the main force of the commander of the German colonial troops, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. It did not succeed: after several hard-fought engagements the Germans withdrew to the south, and soon afterwards the rainy season began.

Name and dates

The British official history of the East African campaign (Charles Hordern, 1941) describes these operations in two chapters entitled “Kilimanjaro 1916”: the first phase lasted from 5 to 14 March, the second, the advance to the Ruvu River, from 15 to 23 March. The literature also uses the names “the Kilimanjaro operations” or “the battle of Kilimanjaro”, and the individual engagements have names of their own: the fighting at Latema Nek (11–12 March) and at Kahe (21 March).

We take the dates as 5–21 March 1916. On the morning of 5 March the 1st Division set off south from Longido, which opened the offensive. On 21 March the last large engagement of the operation was fought at Kahe, and on the night of 21/22 March the Germans abandoned their positions. Over the next two days the British reached the Ruvu line without fighting, which Hordern regards as the end of the first phase of the campaign.

Background

From the first weeks of the war the Kilimanjaro area was the most important point of the front in East Africa. In August 1914 the Germans occupied the border town of Taveta in British East Africa, and from the area around the mountain they launched raids on the British railway from Mombasa to Nairobi. On the fertile slopes of Kilimanjaro and the neighbouring Mount Meru lay German plantations and settlements that fed the army. The Usambara Railway ran to Moshi from the port of Tanga. The British attempts of November 1914, the landing at Tanga and the attack at Longido, ended in defeat, and throughout 1915 the British on this front were mostly on the defensive.

The situation changed in the winter of 1915–16, when, after the end of the campaign in German South West Africa, reinforcements from the Union of South Africa began to arrive in East Africa. On 12 February 1916 the troops of General Michael Tighe unsuccessfully attacked the German position on Salaita Hill, which covered the road to Taveta. A week later Smuts took command. He decided to strike before the rainy season, which in this area usually began at the end of March, and on 25 February he received the government’s approval in London.

Forces and plan

The British had a clear numerical superiority. According to a return sent by headquarters to London on 22 March, the main field army, with its auxiliary units, numbered about 25,700 officers and men: British, South Africans and Rhodesians, Indian soldiers and African riflemen of the King’s African Rifles. British headquarters estimated the German forces in the Kilimanjaro area at about 6,000 men, including 700 Germans, with 16 guns and 37 machine guns. According to Lettow-Vorbeck’s report of 1 January 1916 there were about 1,100 Europeans and 4,650 askaris on the ration strength in the area, not counting porters and auxiliaries. The Germans knew the ground and held all the hills, from which they had excellent observation.

An advance from the east had to go through the only convenient passage: a fifteen-kilometre gap between Kilimanjaro and the Pare Mountains, closed beyond Taveta by two hills, Latema and Reata. South of the road stretched bush, the swamps around Lake Jipe and the Ruvu River. Smuts’s plan provided for a converging advance from two sides. The 1st Division of Major-General James Marshall Stewart (the same man who had commanded in East Africa in 1914) was to set out two days earlier from Longido, go round Kilimanjaro from the west, cross the waterless belt between Longido and Ngaseni Hill and come out on the German line of communication near Boma Ngombe. From the east the South African Mounted Brigade of Brigadier-General Jacob van Deventer and the 3rd South African Infantry Brigade were to go round Salaita and Taveta from the north, while the 2nd Division of Major-General Michael Tighe attacked Salaita frontally. The reserve was the 2nd South African Infantry Brigade, with which Smuts himself rode. Orders were issued on 1 March, and the redeployments were complete by 4 March.

Course

5–11 March: the march of the 1st Division. On the morning of 5 March the 1st Division left Longido and, to avoid crossing the waterless country in the heat, marched mostly by night. On 6 March its units drove off a German post at Ngaserai and occupied Ngaseni Hill, and on 8 March the division reached Geraragua on the Sanya River. Stewart had so far met no resistance, but he was moving through unknown, unmapped bush, had no news of the enemy, and downpours, a foretaste of the rainy season, had washed out the supply roads. Smuts telegraphed several times urging him to hurry. Only on the evening of 11 March did the main column halt at the bridge over the Sanya, and its cavalry, with the guns and transport, turned back to Geraragua after a clash with Major Fischer’s German detachment and rejoined the division only on the evening of 12 March.

7–10 March: Salaita and Taveta. On the evening of 7 March the eastern columns set out from Mbuyuni and Serengeti. At dawn on 8 March they stood on the Lumi River, and van Deventer’s horsemen occupied the hills around Lake Chala in an extinct crater, from which a German detachment fell back on Taveta. This move against their rear made the Germans abandon Salaita. On the afternoon of 9 March the 2nd Division occupied it without a fight. On 10 March the 2nd South African Horse drove the Germans out of Taveta after a brief skirmish and pursued them as far as the Latema and Reata hills, which proved to be strongly held.

11–12 March: Latema Nek. Smuts had to push the Germans off the pass between the hills before he could move on beyond Taveta. Outflanking was very difficult here, so at noon on 11 March the 1st East African Brigade of Brigadier-General Wilfrid Malleson, about 1,500 men of the 130th Baluchis, the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment and the 3rd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles, attacked frontally. The defenders, Major Georg Kraut’s detachment, at first numbered about 550 men with three guns, and during the fighting grew to about a thousand. The attack stalled at the foot of the slopes. Malleson, ill with dysentery, handed over command and Tighe directed the fighting. The Rhodesians, who went in to a second attack at five in the afternoon, partly reached the ridge, but a German counter-attack drove most of them back. Late in the evening Tighe sent the 5th and 7th South African Infantry battalions into a night bayonet attack. They were repulsed below the summit, but several groups of men of the 7th Battalion and Rhodesians held on in the darkness on the ridges on both sides of the pass. Unaware of this, Smuts ordered a withdrawal at 4.30 a.m. on 12 March. At dawn it turned out that the men on the hills were still there, and that the Germans had just left.

Lettow-Vorbeck, who on the evening of 11 March was preparing a blow against van Deventer, called it off after a report that the South Africans had broken into the Reata position, and ordered a withdrawal to Kahe. He later attributed the retreat to a mistaken report. The British official history credits it to the tenacity of a handful of men on the ridge, and also to the threat from van Deventer’s horsemen, who were already going round the German left flank.

12–14 March: Moshi. After the pass was taken, van Deventer crossed the Himo River on 12 March, and on the evening of 13 March he stood before Moshi. According to the British official history, early on the morning of 14 March his men entered the abandoned Moshi and New Moshi station, where there was no longer any rolling stock. The Germans withdrew south along the railway. That day a motorcyclist established the first direct contact with Stewart’s 1st Division, which had arrived from the west too late to close the encirclement. The British official history sees the cause of its delay mainly in the inexperience of its commander and men in bush warfare.

15–21 March: Kahe. The Germans took up a new defensive line between the Pare Mountains and Kahe railway station, behind the rivers flowing from Kilimanjaro into the Ruvu. Smuts wanted to drive them across the Ruvu before the rains came. On 18 March an advance along the Himo River stalled in dense thorn bush. Smuts changed his plan: the 1st Division, taken over after Stewart’s departure (he gave up command before returning to India) by Brigadier-General S. H. Sheppard, was to attack from the north along the road to Kahe, while van Deventer went round the German left flank. On the night of 20/21 March the Germans attacked Sheppard’s camp five times, and van Deventer’s horsemen, after an all-night march of 40 kilometres, reached the Pangani River in the morning. On 21 March his squadrons swam the river and took Kahe Hill and Kahe station, and beat off German counter-attacks. Sheppard’s main attack, which began before noon, was however halted by heavy fire from a German position hidden behind the Soko Nassai stream, which the British had not expected there. The Germans were supported by a gun taken from the sunken cruiser Königsberg. On the night of 21/22 March Lettow-Vorbeck, alarmed by a report that British cavalry was coming out in his rear at Kisangire, withdrew to the south. The report proved false.

Losses

There is no full return of losses for the whole operation. According to the British official history, in the fighting at Latema Nek the British lost about 270 men, including 81 in the 3rd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles, whose commander, Lieutenant-Colonel B. R. Graham, was killed. According to Governor Heinrich Schnee the Germans lost 123 men there, but the official history considers this figure too low, since at least 40 dead were found. On 21 March at Kahe British losses came to about 290 men, of whom 37 killed, 221 wounded and 3 missing in the 1st Division. Schnee gives German losses from 18 to 21 March as 30 killed, 90 wounded and 51 missing. To this must be added smaller losses in other skirmishes, for example 33 men in beating off the night attack on Sheppard’s camp, as well as many victims of disease and the death of horses from tsetse flies.

Significance

The offensive drove the Germans from the most valuable corner of their colony and removed for good the threat to British East Africa and its railway. Smuts gained Moshi and the Usambara Railway, and from 14 March his engineers extended the British railway line from Serengeti through Taveta. From then on, as Hordern wrote, it was the Germans and not the British who were on the defensive. Smuts’s main aim, the encirclement and destruction of Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces, was however not achieved. The Germans, skilfully led and still strong, withdrew in good order to Lembeni in the Pare Mountains.

The operation also showed the pattern of Smuts’s whole later campaign: wide outflanking movements instead of frontal attacks, forcing the enemy to retreat but letting him escape the trap. In this way Smuts spared his soldiers’ lives, but prolonged the war. The rainy season, which began at the end of March, halted operations for several weeks. Smuts used it to reorganise his troops, and as early as April van Deventer’s horsemen set out from Arusha into the interior of the colony.