British occupy Tanga

On 7 July 1916 British and Indian troops occupied Tanga without a fight. It was a port on the northern coast of German East Africa and the terminus of the Usambara Railway. This same Tanga had in November 1914 been the scene of one of the most painful British defeats of the whole war. This time the Germans did not defend the town. Indian infantry entered it from the west, and sailors from Royal Navy ships from the sea.

A port left to one side

After the defeat of 1914 the British long left Tanga alone. Warships made demonstrations off the port several times, and in August 1915 the monitor Severn destroyed a lighter there loaded with mines that the Germans had made on the spot. In March 1916, while General Jan Smuts’s troops were advancing on Kahe, the navy occupied the nearby islets of Yambe and Ulenge without a fight, and the battleship Vengeance fired 74 12-inch (305 mm) shells towards the railway station. The town did not reply. Later the ships sailed south and Tanga was forgotten for several months.

The situation changed in June. Smuts was advancing south along the Usambara Railway, had occupied Handeni and the station of Korogwe, and so the German detachments on the coast were cut off from the main force of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. According to the British official history (Hordern), the time had come to take Tanga. On 21 June two companies of Captain T. A. Dickson’s irregular scouts and 40 marines landed on Ulenge and waded across to the mainland. They met no resistance, which suggested that only weak German forces remained in the area. Over the following week the ships Talbot, Thistle and Severn shelled various points on the coast.

Landing in Manza Bay

During the night of 3/4 July some 500 soldiers under Lieutenant-Colonel C. U. Price, Deputy Inspector-General of Communications, embarked at Mombasa. They were the Indian 5th Light Infantry and a company of the 101st Grenadiers. Both units had particular reasons to return to Tanga with success. The Grenadiers had fought here in November 1914 and suffered heavy losses. The 5th Light Infantry, for its part, was the same regiment that had mutinied in Singapore in February 1915. Hordern writes that the loyal soldiers had asked to be sent to the front to restore the regiment’s good name, and that they succeeded.

On 5 July Price’s force, covered by the ships, landed unhindered on the southern shore of Manza Bay, north of Tanga, and moved inland. The next day, after overcoming weak resistance, it reached Amboni. At dawn on 7 July the soldiers crossed the Zigi river unopposed and entered the town from the west. At the same time Severn put a party of armed scouts ashore on the beach the British called “Beach A”. It was the same beach on which General Aitken’s force had landed in 1914. The two groups met in the town.

An empty town

The Germans had abandoned Tanga. The buildings were for the most part intact, but the pier and the railway had been thoroughly destroyed, and the hospital had been stripped of all its equipment. More than a thousand inhabitants of Indian origin and a few Africans remained in the town. The British found a plan of an elaborate coastal defence, with machine-gun nests cut into the cliffs in case of a landing. They also learned that two guns from the cruiser Königsberg, sunk in the Rufiji delta, had stood here on railway mountings but had been sent south. Abandoned home-made mines lay on the quays.

Contrary to expectations, the German detachments had not gone far. Hidden in the bush around the town, they fired on the British soldiers. According to Hordern, even the band of the battleship Vengeance came under sniper fire while playing in the main square. Patrols were halted by fire near the railway at Kange, so for the time being Price confined himself to patrolling and searching the town. He occupied Kange only on 17 July, almost without a fight.

Hordern wonders why Smuts, who had full command of the sea, did not take Tanga earlier and make it a supply base for the troops advancing along the railway. He answers that this would have required detaching considerable forces, because a repetition of the 1914 defeat had to be avoided at all costs, and that the port was useless without a repaired railway. Smuts himself considered Tanga unimportant once his troops had reached the railway further north. The historian adds, however, that earlier use of the port might have eased the hunger that afflicted the main British force in the summer of 1916. The first train left Tanga only on 17 August, and within a few weeks the British also took further ports on the coast: Pangani, Sadani and Bagamoyo.