British take Kilosa

On 22 August 1916 the South African 2nd Division of General Jacob van Deventer took without a fight Kilosa, a station on the Central Railway in German East Africa, lying at the mouth of a mountain gorge, almost 300 kilometres by rail from Dar es Salaam. According to the British official history (Hordern), at dawn the infantry of the 9th and 10th South African Infantry found the German trenches on the hills before the town empty and saw Kilosa below them. At 7 a.m. the first mounted troops entered it, and in the course of the day van Deventer quartered most of his division there. So ended one of the hardest marches of the whole campaign.

Twelve days in the mountains

At the end of July the division had reached the railway near Dodoma and taken Kilimatinde. It then stood for two weeks around Nyangalo station, because shortages of supplies and transport prevented it from moving further. Only on 8 August did General Jan Smuts demand by telegraph that van Deventer advance east “without the slightest delay”, along the line, to meet his main force, which after the fighting in the Nguru Mountains was approaching the railway from the north. The advance began at dawn on 10 August. Kilosa was about 145 kilometres away, and the road was barred, by contemporary estimates, by six to ten German companies under Captain Otto.

The Germans used tactics the South Africans already knew well. The rearguard defended successive hills until dark and slipped away through the bush at night. So it was on 10 August at Chunyu and a day later at Mpwapwa, taken that same day after a march in which the soldiers covered about 65 kilometres in 32 hours on meagre rations and with almost no water. So it was also on 15 August at Kidete, where the Germans had two guns, one of them on a railway platform, and the South Africans lost 3 killed and 39 wounded. Every engagement ended in a night retreat by the enemy and a day or two’s pause, because the division was outrunning its own supplies.

Beyond Kidete the road, the railway and the Mkondokwa river run together for about 40 kilometres through a winding gorge in the Usagara Mountains. Van Deventer later wrote that “every yard” there was defended by the enemy, and fighting went on daily from 15 to 22 August. The ground favoured the defenders, but on 19 August at Msagara Brigadier-General Berrangé’s infantry climbed by night the steep slopes on both sides of the valley, where no one expected them. The Germans abandoned their trenches in the valley and the retreat turned into flight. Hordern stresses that the division suffered no casualties that day.

The last position

On 20 August the mounted troops drove the German rearguard off the hills about 8 kilometres west of Kilosa. In the afternoon a long-range gun from the sunken cruiser Königsberg began shelling them. It was a sign that reinforcements had arrived from the east. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck had in fact recalled Captain Otto with two thirds of his force to Morogoro and entrusted the defence of Kilosa to Major Georg Kraut with two companies. Van Deventer expected stiff fighting and brought up all the artillery available, although his heavy guns were stuck at Mpwapwa for lack of petrol. On 21 August his cavalry began to outflank the German positions from the north and south. According to a German account cited by Hordern, Kraut feared for his left flank, and when a British patrol ran into it in the evening, he ordered a retreat south, towards Myombo. On the morning of 22 August the road to Kilosa was open.

A division at the limit of its endurance

The victory cost little blood. Van Deventer attributed the small losses to his avoiding frontal attacks wherever possible. His men and animals, however, were at the end of their strength. The supply line, over 320 kilometres long from Moshi to Kondoa Irangi, had now almost doubled in length. The road from Mpwapwa to Kilosa ran through country infested by the tsetse fly, so almost all the horses, mules and oxen were infected. On 22 August van Deventer telegraphed to headquarters that the horses and transport were “completely exhausted”, and that the men could not stand a further march without at least six days’ rest. The infantry stayed in Kilosa, and mounted patrols set off after the Germans, who were slowly falling back south-east towards Uleia.

After the capture of Kilosa van Deventer controlled the whole central stretch of the Central Railway, from Saranda to Kilosa, and General Wahle’s German troops, standing further west around Tabora, were cut off from Lettow-Vorbeck. Smuts hoped now to trap the main German force at Morogoro by cutting its lines of retreat south on both sides of the Uluguru Mountains. The fall of Kilosa came, as Hordern writes, “unexpectedly soon”, so that same day Smuts sent General Enslin’s mounted brigade along the western road to Mlali. Despite the protests of van Deventer, who described the state of his men and horses, on 24 August his own mounted brigade under General Nussey also had to set out from Kilosa after Enslin.