British take Mwanza

At about 3 p.m. on 14 July 1916 British soldiers entered Mwanza, the main German port and base on Lake Victoria, in the north-western part of German East Africa. The town was taken by the troops of Brigadier-General Charles Crewe, carried across the lake by the steamers of the British flotilla. Most of the German garrison had withdrawn a few hours earlier.

Crewe’s plan

A year earlier the British had considered Mwanza too strong to attack, and had struck at Bukoba instead, sailing away after destroying the wireless station. The situation changed in the spring of 1916. Belgian colonial troops, the Force Publique, occupied Ruanda and Urundi and reached the lake, where they linked up with the British. General Jan Smuts sent to the lake Charles Crewe, a well-known politician from the Cape Colony, who now commanded a grouping called Lake Force. The natural next step was a joint march south, towards the Central Railway and Tabora, seat of the German command in the west of the colony.

Crewe at first wanted to advance on Tabora from Nyamirembe on the western shore of the lake. It turned out, however, that the place was quite unsuitable as a base: there was a lack of water and food, and the surrounding country was hilly, overgrown and full of tsetse flies. The only sensible base was Mwanza, which had to be taken quickly, before the Germans reinforced the garrison. On 2 July Crewe proposed a joint landing to the Belgian commander, General Charles Tombeur. Tombeur, busy pursuing the retreating Germans, preferred to go round the lake by land. When his reply arrived on the evening of 8 July, Crewe decided to act alone, without waiting for Smuts’s answer. He had about 1,900 men with 15 machine guns, but almost no artillery. The German garrison of Mwanza was estimated at 600–800 soldiers.

The landing at Kongoro

The core of Crewe’s force consisted of the African soldiers of the 4th Battalion, King’s African Rifles, the Uganda Police Service Battalion and Baganda riflemen from the Uganda Protectorate, Nandi scouts, as well as irregular African scouts of the Skin Corps and the disease-weakened Indian 98th Infantry. They were assembled at Nyamirembe and on the island of Ukerewe, and the six armed lake steamers, among them Winifred, Nyanza, Sybil and Usoga, could carry only the troops and the most essential porters. Crewe did not intend to attack the town from the water. He decided to land his men on the eastern shore of the peninsula on which Mwanza lies and approach it from the landward side.

On the evening of 11 July Winifred and Nyanza, with Lieutenant-Colonel C. R. Burgess’s first group, approached Kongoro Point in the dark. The steamers overshot the chosen sandy beach, and the first soldiers got stuck in dense papyrus in deep water. When they had extricated themselves, they at once ran into a German patrol. By morning the British had occupied the surrounding hills. On 12 July the second group, under Lieutenant-Colonel H. B. Towse, landed further north, at Senga Point, and advanced along the shore, outflanking the German shore defences, which the defenders had to abandon. On 13 July Towse reached the hills near Hale, about 11 kilometres from the town. During the night and the following day the Germans shelled the area with a gun taken from the cruiser Königsberg, without wounding anyone. The local population several times cut the telephone cable linking headquarters with the steamers.

Entering Mwanza

On 14 July both columns pressed on across difficult, hilly country. In front of Burgess the Germans had taken up a good position and it looked as though they would make a stand. At about 1 p.m., however, Towse unexpectedly appeared on the Issenga hills, behind their left flank. According to the British official history (Hordern), the German commander had no idea at all that this column was approaching. The defence collapsed. Burgess passed through a narrow defile which, as one soldier recalled, a single machine gun could have held, and entered the town. As the soldiers caught sight of Mwanza, the mast of the wireless station was just coming down. Hordern writes that the station was reputedly able to communicate directly with Damascus, and through it with Germany.

Most of the Germans had left the town before 1 p.m. The Europeans sailed off into the depths of Mwanza Gulf, and about 500 askaris departed along the road to Tabora. They must have been in a hurry, because in the German houses the British found tables laid for lunch, with the food untouched. They also captured the gun from the Königsberg, from which the Germans had managed to remove the breech-block. The pursuit failed: the steamers lay far off, without communication, and set out only at noon on 15 July. During the night of 15–16 July a detachment with Crewe on board captured the German steamer Muansa and several smaller craft with baggage at Nyatembe, but the Germans themselves had already gone inland, and in the morning they repulsed a British detachment at Misungi.

According to Hordern, 2 British soldiers were killed and 8 wounded in the whole operation. The British counted 24 dead on the German side and took 14 wounded prisoner, including 10 Germans. Hordern concludes that an important place had been taken from the enemy at trifling cost, but that his troops, as so many times before, had avoided battle and withdrawn intact. The capture of Mwanza was the first stage of the long march on Tabora, which British and Belgian columns were to approach from the north in the weeks that followed.