British occupy Dar es Salaam

On 4 September 1916 Dar es Salaam, the capital and main port of German East Africa, surrendered to the British without a single shot fired in its defence. In the morning the cruiser Challenger, under a white flag, approached Makatumbe island at the harbour entrance and sent the small vessel Echo into the town with a formal summons to surrender. At about eight o’clock the deputy mayor came out in her boat and accepted the terms, which guaranteed the inhabitants their lives and private property. Shortly afterwards the town was entered by soldiers of the Indian 129th Baluchis, who had marched in the advanced guard throughout.

Two years earlier, in August 1914, the bombardment of Dar es Salaam by the cruiser Astraea had begun the war in East Africa. Governor Heinrich Schnee had then wanted to spare the town and agreed to have it treated as open, while he himself moved inland, to Morogoro. When at the end of August 1916 General Jan Smuts’s troops took Morogoro and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck withdrew with his force southwards, beyond the Uluguru Mountains, the capital on the coast was left practically undefended.

The march from Bagamoyo

After the capture of Bagamoyo on 15 August, Brigadier-General W. F. S. Edwards, the Inspector-General of Communications, assembled there about 1,900 soldiers with 20 machine guns under the command of Colonel C. U. Price. According to the British official history (Hordern), the main force was to advance along the coast on Dar es Salaam, supported from the sea by the ships of Rear-Admiral Charlton, which for several days and nights shelled military targets around the German capital. At the same time two smaller columns were to cut the Central Railway west of the town: Major Tyndall’s 40th Pathans at the bridge over the Kingani river near Ruvu station, and infantry from the Indian princely state of Jind near Ngerengere station.

On 31 August the troops set off. Two columns of about 800 men each marched in parallel: one along the shore itself, accompanied by the monitors Mersey and Severn, the gunboat Thistle and the armed tug Helmuth, the other a few kilometres inland. The march across sandy, waterless country in the heat was very hard. Hordern cites Admiralty documents according to which the thirsty and hungry 2nd Battalion of the West India Regiment drank all 12,000 gallons of water and ate the three days’ rations landed at Msasani Bay for the whole force. On 2 September the columns reached Konduchi and Gunya hill. The next day the squadron, as a precaution, shelled the German fortifications north and south of the harbour. Smaller vessels, feigning a landing at Ras Upanga, came under shrapnel fire, but otherwise no one put up any defence. All available information indicated that the German troops had left the town. Hordern notes that it did not pay the Germans to shut troops up there or to expose the large German civilian population to a siege.

On the morning of 4 September the infantry stood on the hills at Mabibo, from where the town could be seen less than five kilometres away. It was then that the surrender came. Because the army could not testify with complete certainty that it had had the harbour in view at the moment the town surrendered, a British prize court later ruled Dar es Salaam a naval capture and awarded the Royal Navy £100,000 in prize money.

The town after the Germans

Only 80 hospital patients and about 370 German civilians remained in the town. The other Germans had gone, taking all the ammunition with them. Contrary to fears, the bombardments from the sea had done little damage, although the railway station lay in ruins. The shell of the governor’s palace recalled the bombardment by the battleships Goliath and Fox at the end of November 1914. Hordern quotes a British officer who wrote that after the town was taken this large building was “bitterly regretted” when there was a shortage of space for hospitals. The railway workshops and the power station that supplied them, which also lit the town, were in fairly good condition, but the electric harbour cranes had been destroyed, and a scuttled floating dock lay in the harbour entrance. The wrecks of the steamers Tabora, König and Möwe lay in the harbour. Only the Feldmarschall was fit for repair.

Meanwhile the columns sent inland did not manage to save the railway. On 1 September the Pathans reached Ruvu station and found the bridge blown up the day before. At Ngerengere the Jind infantry saw that the Germans had demolished the high piers of the bridge over the Kingani and then sent several trains over, which fell into the river. The Pathans turned onto the road from Morogoro and in several small clashes with German detachments and transport columns withdrawing from Dar es Salaam took prisoner 25 Germans and 20 askaris and destroyed about 2,000 loads of food that they had no means of carrying away. They entered the capital a few days later. Hordern gives 6 September, the regimental history 5 September.

Significance

The capture of the colony’s capital and main port gave Smuts what he had long needed most: a new base and a shorter supply line for the troops fighting in the interior. The Central Railway, whose western section the Belgians were just taking over, was soon to pass along its whole length into Allied hands. The benefits did not come at once, because the bridges and much of the rolling stock had been destroyed, but repairs quickly got under way. British General Headquarters opened in Dar es Salaam on 12 September (Smuts’s advanced headquarters remained at Morogoro), and as early as 6 September the navy and army were ordered to occupy the remaining ports south of the capital. In this way the Germans were to lose the rest of the coast, through which help could still reach them from the sea.