British occupy Iringa

On 29 August 1916 the troops of Brigadier-General Edward Northey, who at the end of May had entered German East Africa from Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, occupied Iringa without a fight. According to the British official history (Hordern), at 11 a.m. the advanced guard of Lieutenant-Colonel R. E. Murray’s column, “C” Company of the Northern Rhodesia Police under Captain Dickinson, entered the town. So it was not van Deventer’s troops, who at that time stood on the Central Railway nearly 200 kilometres further north-east, but a column advancing from the south-west. The South African official history gives a date one day earlier, 28 August, while the British chronology of the war records the occupation of Iringa under 29 August, in line with Hordern.

Iringa lies on a high plateau, about 1,600 metres above sea level, above the valley of the Little Ruaha river. The Germans built a military station here in the 1890s, during their long war with the Hehe people and their chief Mkwawa, whose resistance they broke only in 1898. In 1916 the town was the main German centre in the south-west of the colony, and a telegraph line connected it with Kilosa and Neu Langenburg. Here Murray freed 16 Indians previously taken prisoner and 42 interned Indians and other British subjects. He took over a hospital with a German doctor and a few wounded, and found about 50 German women and children in the town. The supplies the Germans had been unable to remove had been destroyed, so the inhabitants were threatened with famine.

A halted march

Since June Northey’s columns had been advancing north-east from Lake Nyasa and from Bismarckburg towards Iringa. On 24 July Lieutenant-Colonel G. M. P. Hawthorn’s column attacked, at Malangali, a German detachment under Captain Braunschweig, sent from Dodoma via Iringa to halt the withdrawal of the frontier garrisons. After a day-long fight the Germans withdrew during the night, abandoning a 10.5 cm howitzer. According to Hordern the British lost 14 killed and 63 wounded. The Germans fell back to Wuasa, at the junction of the roads to Iringa, and the columns of Lieutenant-Colonels Rodger and Murray took up positions opposite them.

Then Northey had to stop. On 5 August General Jan Smuts advised him not to go any further for the time being. It was not clear where the main forces of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck would retreat, and a small column at Iringa might find itself in their path. Northey sent Hawthorn east, against the German detachments near Lupembe that were threatening his flank. The situation became clearer in the second half of the month. On 22 August Northey learned that van Deventer had taken Kilosa, and on 21–22 August the Germans abandoned Wuasa and began to fall back towards Iringa. On 23 August he instructed Murray to send a strong patrol to occupy Iringa “if possible”.

A pursuit that came too late

On 26 August Murray’s detachment came upon the Germans at Weru, about 24 kilometres short of Iringa. According to prisoners and captured documents there were about 120 Europeans, including a detachment of sailors from the cruiser Königsberg, and 640 askaris with 12 machine guns. On 27 August a telegram from Smuts, sent two days earlier, reached Northey with permission to march on Iringa. The main German forces had just abandoned Morogoro and were retreating south. On 28 August Northey ordered Murray and Rodger to march on Iringa, and Rodger in addition to send a fast detachment to cut the Germans’ line of retreat at the crossing of the Little Ruaha at Boma Himbu. Murray advanced unopposed and was in Iringa on the morning of 29 August. Rodger set off only on the evening of that day, when his patrols reported that the Germans were already across the river.

Hordern judges that the pursuit was too late in any case. Had Smuts’s telegram not taken two days, Rodger might have cut the Germans off, since on 25 August they were still at Weru, on the wrong side of Iringa. Northey believed that it was precisely the threat from Rodger’s column that induced the Germans to give up the town without a fight. The scanty German sources point rather to pressure from van Deventer from the north-east and a wish to join up with Major Kraut’s detachments, which were falling back from Kilosa.

The furthest point

Iringa was the northernmost point of Northey’s great march. His war diary recorded that the occupation of the town induced the Germans facing van Deventer to retreat straight to Mahenge rather than via Iringa, and that at the same time van Deventer’s pressure made the Germans from Iringa go east rather than north. Hordern sees in this full strategic justification for Northey’s bold march. The detachment from Weru did indeed withdraw to the south-east, through the mountains towards the Mahenge plateau, into healthier, higher-lying country. Northey sent Rodger’s column after it.