British take Mpwapwa

On 11 August 1916 the South African troops of General Jacob van Deventer’s 2nd Division entered Mpwapwa, a former German administrative station in the central part of German East Africa, north of the Central Railway. The Germans abandoned the settlement as the column approached, but their rearguard held out until evening on the hills beyond it. The British official history (Hordern) and the British chronology of the war give 11 August. The report of General Jan Smuts and the South African official history based on it shift everything by one day: they date the fight at Chunyu to 11 August and that at Mpwapwa to the evening of 12 August.

East of Dodoma

At the end of July van Deventer’s division, which had been at Kondoa Irangi since April, reached the Central Railway near Dodoma and Kikombo. For the next week it gathered its strength at Nyangalo, on the road to Mpwapwa. It was now to move east along the line and link up with Smuts’s main force, which since 5 August had been forcing its way through the Nguru Mountains towards Morogoro. Facing van Deventer were German companies under Captain Otto: one at Kongwa, several between Chunyu and Msagali and by the railway, and in Mpwapwa itself only detachments of recruits and police.

On 9 August van Deventer issued his orders, and at dawn on 10 August the division set off. The 3rd South African Horse moved from Kikombo along the railway, while the main force took the direct road south-east, through Chunyu and Mpwapwa, to come out on the line at Gode Gode. The advance guard was formed by the 9th South African Horse with three armoured cars, and the core of the column by the 10th and 12th South African Infantry of Brigadier-General Berrangé’s 3rd Brigade, with batteries of artillery. Behind them, and soon overtaking them, came the rest of Brigadier-General Nussey’s 1st Mounted Brigade.

Chunyu and Mpwapwa

At about 5 p.m. on 10 August, after an exhausting march, the column halted before the hills at Chunyu. There the Germans were covering the approaches and the only water in the area. Berrangé at once sent the 10th Battalion into the attack. By dusk its men had taken the lower slopes, while the 9th South African Horse worked round the enemy’s flanks and during the night came out on the ridge. Before dawn the Germans withdrew. Beyond Chunyu the road was so bad that the armoured cars could not reach Mpwapwa in time and thereafter took almost no part in the fighting.

On 11 August mounted patrols again ran into the Germans some 16 kilometres further on, at Mpwapwa. The German rearguard had occupied steep hills above the road beyond the settlement, abandoning the settlement itself when the column came up. The terrain was mountainous and thickly overgrown. At 5.15 p.m. the 10th and 12th Battalions moved to the attack, now supported by two field batteries and mountain guns, while the mounted regiments worked round both German flanks. The infantry managed without much difficulty, but between the mounted regiments in the enemy’s rear a gap almost a mile wide remained. Nussey tried to close it in person with about fifty men and called on the 9th Regiment for help, but it, sent elsewhere by the divisional commander himself, arrived only after dark. As so many times before, the Germans, under cover of night and the bush, filtered through the cordon and got away.

Two days’ halt

British losses at Mpwapwa were slight: according to Hordern, 2 killed (an officer and a private), one died of wounds and 14 wounded. The Germans left more than 20 dead, and five Germans were taken prisoner. But the troops were at the end of their strength. In 32 hours they had covered almost 65 kilometres of difficult country, on scanty rations and with little water, had fought twice and had outrun their supplies. On 12 and 13 August the division halted at Mpwapwa, while airmen reported that the Germans had fallen back to Kidete on the railway. Only on 14 August did supplies arrive and part of the force move on to Gode Gode.

Mpwapwa lay on the old caravan route from the coast into the interior and was one of the oldest centres of German administration inland: the Germans had set up a boma here, that is, a fortified seat of government, as early as the beginning of the 1890s. The capture of the settlement opened van Deventer’s way to the railway at Gode Gode and further east, through the narrow gorge of the Mkondokwa river in the Usagara mountains, to Kilosa. Each time, however, the Germans, defending prepared positions in difficult country, held up the pursuit for a few hours and slipped away by night.