British take Bagamoyo

On 15 August 1916 a British naval landing party took Bagamoyo, a port on the coast of German East Africa about 75 kilometres north of Dar es Salaam. Contrary to the army’s expectations, the Germans defended the town, but the fighting was short. By the afternoon Bagamoyo was quiet, and for the first time a gun from the cruiser Königsberg had fallen into British hands in open combat.

The old capital

Bagamoyo had once been the most important town on this coast. It was the end of the Arab and Swahili caravan route that led inland as far as Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. The trade in ivory and slaves passed through the port. In the 1880s the town became the seat of the German East Africa Company and then the first capital of the colony. In 1891 the administration moved to Dar es Salaam, and when from 1905 the railway into the interior began to be built from there, Bagamoyo’s importance declined rapidly.

By the beginning of August 1916 the whole strip between the sea and General Jan Smuts’s line of communications was already clear of Germans. After the capture of Tanga the navy had landed troops at the smaller ports of Mkwaja and Sadani. At Sadani they were relieved by the 2nd Battalion of the West India Regiment, brought from Sierra Leone round the Cape of Good Hope. The British official history (Hordern) records that the local Africans could not understand why these black, English-speaking soldiers were treated like white men, and called them “black Europeans”. Brigadier-General W. F. S. Edwards, the Inspector-General of Communications, prepared a plan to take Bagamoyo with two columns under Colonel C. U. Price. They were first to seize the crossings of the Wami river and then, together with the navy, to take the port and advance along the coast on Dar es Salaam. It turned out, however, that the German detachments meant to defend the crossings had withdrawn to the ferry on the Kingani river, a few kilometres from Bagamoyo. On 12 August Edwards, whose troops were busy marching to the Wami, suggested to the fleet commander, Rear-Admiral Charlton, that the navy take the town on its own, its garrison being estimated by intelligence at a mere 50 men. Charlton agreed at once.

The landing

The admiral did not share the army’s optimism. Seaplanes had spotted trenches at the northern end of the town, covering the best beach, and at the southern end two strongpoints: the solid governor’s house and the walled old boma, the fortified seat of the administration. A little over 300 men with four machine guns and six Lewis guns were assigned to the landing under Commander R. J. N. Watson: sailors from the ships, Royal Marines, African riflemen from Zanzibar and a party of scouts.

Before dawn on 15 August the battleship Vengeance, the cruiser Challenger, the monitors Mersey and Severn, the armed tug Helmuth and smaller vessels anchored off Bagamoyo. At 5.30 a.m. six towed lines of boats set off for the shore under covering fire from the monitors. Unexpectedly they were answered by a gun from the Königsberg, placed behind the southern end of the town, and from the northern beach by rifle, machine-gun and light artillery fire. Watson steered the boats in a zigzag straight at the heavy gun, which fell silent before they reached the shore. By six o’clock the troops were ashore. Captain R. H. Thomas’s Royal Marines ran across the undefended beach and made for the governor’s house, while a party under Sub-Lieutenant F. G. S. Manning of the reserve, with a machine gun, outflanked the German gun and captured it intact. One of the gunners still managed to remove the breech-block, which was later found in a nearby pit.

The governor’s house was taken without difficulty, but shots came from the trenches between it and the beach. The marines cleared them with the bayonet in a short hand-to-hand fight in which both Captain Thomas and the German commander on this sector, Captain Bock von Wülfingen, were killed. Meanwhile German reinforcements were coming up from the northern part of the town. The ships shelled them from a range of about six kilometres. According to Hordern, one of the shells probably killed the commander of the whole garrison, Captain von Boedecker, and his detachment scattered into the bush. The inhabitants took shelter by the mission church west of the town. Hordern writes that the German bishop kept up their spirits by saying Mass during the bombardment.

After the battle

According to Hordern the British lost 4 killed and 7 wounded. On the German side 2 officers and 10 other soldiers were killed, and 4 Germans and 15 askaris were taken prisoner. It turned out that the garrison numbered about 60 Germans and 350 askaris with two machine guns, a light gun and the Königsberg gun, which 500 porters had dragged from Dar es Salaam a few days earlier. Apart from a fire in the African quarter, the town suffered little, and the Europeans’ houses mostly stood untouched. Hordern notes that this operation is not described in the British official history of naval operations.

On 18 August the sailors were relieved by 100 men of the West India Regiment, and in the following days more troops arrived at Bagamoyo. The town became a base for the march on Dar es Salaam, which was now the next objective on the coast, and for several days and nights the ships shelled selected targets around the German capital.