British take Morogoro

On 26 August 1916 the troops of General Jan Smuts took Morogoro without a fight, a town on the Central Railway about 200 kilometres by rail west of Dar es Salaam. In the morning Smuts sent forward the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment and two companies of the Indian 130th Baluchis. According to the British official history (Hordern), they reached the town in the afternoon and found that the last German rearguards had left a few hours earlier. A good many German civilians, mainly women and children, had stayed in Morogoro. Before the British arrived there had been looting and disorder in the town, but the Rhodesians quickly restored order. Smuts himself rode into Morogoro with his advanced headquarters the next day, 27 August.

Morogoro, the seat of a German district since 1904, had grown after the railway arrived from Dar es Salaam and before the war was one of the main European centres of German East Africa in the interior. It lies at the foot of the Uluguru Mountains, a steep massif that closes the railway valley to the south. It was here that Smuts hoped at last to catch the main forces of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, which since March had slipped away from him at Kilimanjaro, in the Pare and Usambara Mountains, and in August in the Nguru Mountains too.

The plan to trap the Germans at Morogoro

After the fight for the crossing of the Wami River at Dakawa on 17 August, which cost the British about 120 men, Smuts’s main forces stood still for several days waiting for supplies. By then there was no longer any doubt that the Germans had fallen back to Morogoro. Smuts wanted to “bottle them up” there, as he later wrote in his dispatch. Both lines of retreat to the south, west and east of the Uluguru Mountains, were to be blocked. When on 22 August van Deventer’s 2nd Division took Kilosa, Smuts sent General Enslin’s mounted brigade along the western road to Mlali, followed by General Nussey’s brigade. He himself, with the rest of his forces, was to outflank Morogoro from the east.

On 23 August the infantry set out from Dakawa. Hordern counts this march among the hardest of the whole campaign: in about 30 hours the men covered about 48 kilometres in the heat, over difficult ground where there was no water between the Wami and Ngerengere rivers, and where grass fires blocked the way every so often. On the evening of 24 August the column halted on the Ngerengere, and the mounted advanced guard occupied Mkogwa hill. On 25 August men and animals had to rest. Reconnaissance then reported that the Germans were leaving Morogoro, and explosions could be heard from the direction of the town.

Lettow-Vorbeck declines battle

The trap did not work. On 24 August Enslin’s brigade reached Mlali but met strong resistance and for two days held out on Kisagale hill, waiting for Nussey, whose horses were dropping from exhaustion along the way. Lettow-Vorbeck reportedly considered attacking Enslin with all his forces, but gave up the idea; on the morning of 26 August his rearguards left their positions at Mlali, abandoning two naval guns. Most of the German companies went south by this road, towards Kisaki. Several others, covering the heavy artillery, chose the Kiroka Pass on the eastern side of the massif, and the supply columns with small detachments took a path through the mountains themselves, of which Smuts, as he admitted, knew nothing at the time. Hordern believes, however, that the plan failed above all because it was impossible to assemble enough troops at Mlali in time.

Lettow-Vorbeck himself recalled that the enemy expected of him “a final, decisive battle at Morogoro”. He thought the idea incomprehensible: with the enemy so superior, waiting for his columns to join up and fighting with the mountains at one’s back would have been “madness”. He preferred to conduct operations so as always to have only part of the British forces in front of him. Smuts, for his part, wrote that in Morogoro he found “much evidence of hurried flight and demoralisation” among the Germans, and decided to continue the pursuit, although his men and animals were exhausted and his transport had reached the limits of its range.

Significance

The South African official history notes that the capture of Morogoro, and with it a large part of the Central Railway, closed a distinct phase of the campaign. Since May Smuts had taken from the Germans both main railway lines and the healthiest, richest parts of the colony, and at the beginning of September his troops entered Dar es Salaam. Lettow-Vorbeck, however, kept his army. He fell back towards the Rufiji River and the Mahenge plateau, and the British troops, weakened by disease and hunger, had to follow him into ever more difficult country.