British retake Taveta

On the morning of 10 March 1916 the 2nd South African Horse, after a short, sharp skirmish, drove the Germans out of Taveta at the foot of Kilimanjaro. The border settlement in British East Africa had been in German hands since 15 August 1914. For a year and a half it had served the forces of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck as a forward base, from which detachments set out against the British railway running inland from Mombasa. Now, on the fifth day of Lieutenant-General Jan Smuts’s offensive, it was British again.

Outflanking instead of assault

Smuts did not take Taveta by a frontal attack, but by manoeuvre. Taveta lay in the gap between Kilimanjaro and the Pare Mountains, and the road to it from the east was barred by Salaita Hill, where General Michael Tighe’s troops had suffered a defeat on 12 February. On the evening of 7 March Brigadier-General Jacob van Deventer’s South African Mounted Brigade left Mbuyuni and by a night march outflanked Salaita from the north. On the morning of 8 March it crossed the Lumi River and occupied the hills around Lake Chala, in the crater of an extinct volcano, nearly 200 metres above Taveta. The German detachment from the crater fell back to Taveta, and the Salaita garrison, threatened with being cut off, abandoned its position. Lettow-Vorbeck later admitted in his memoirs that this move made the position at Salaita (in German, Oldorobo) untenable. On the afternoon of 9 March Tighe’s 2nd Division occupied Salaita without a fight, and van Deventer’s mounted troops came out on the hills north of the road, beyond Taveta.

The skirmish for Taveta

On the morning of 10 March the South African horsemen rode into Taveta and after a brief fight chased off its defenders. They pursued them as far as two bush-covered hills, Latema and Reata, west of the settlement, and were then recalled to the settlement. According to the British official history, in the fighting from 8 to 10 March the mounted brigade lost 2 killed, 19 wounded and 8 wounded who were taken prisoner. According to some accounts, the soldiers who entered Taveta looted the settlement. The South African official history of 1924 describes these days briefly and states that as early as 8 March the mounted troops had pushed the Germans through Taveta onto the Latema and Reata hills. The detailed British official history by Charles Hordern of 1941, on which we rely, dates the expulsion of the Germans from Taveta to 10 March.

That same day the infantry of the 2nd Division marched to Taveta. The artillery and lorries had to wait until the engineers built a wooden bridge over the Lumi, because the old one would not have stood up to heavy traffic, and they arrived only the following evening. In the afternoon airmen reported that the Latema and Reata hills were strongly held and that there was heavy movement between them and the German camps further west. Smuts concluded that before going further he had to push the Germans off the nek between the hills. After a personal reconnaissance he decided to attack the next day.

Significance

The recovery of Taveta closed an eighteen-month chapter in which German troops had stood on British soil and threatened the Uganda Railway, the colony’s main artery. The gap between Kilimanjaro and the Pare Mountains lay open, and Taveta became the base for the further advance. From 14 March the engineers extended the British railway line from Serengeti to the settlement, and on 23 March the railway reached it. Lettow-Vorbeck’s main forces, however, had not been destroyed, but had fallen back to prepared positions at Latema Nek and further towards Moshi.