Ceasefire in East Africa

On the morning of 14 November 1918, on the Chambeshi river in Northern Rhodesia, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck met the British district commissioner of Kasama, Hector Croad, and agreed to stop fighting. Three days after the signing of the armistice at Compiègne, the last front of the Great War on which Germans were still fighting fell silent. The German column, which had taken Kasama a few days earlier, was undefeated in the field and until the last moment did not know that Germany had lost the war.

A skirmish at the rubber factory

On 13 November Captain Spangenberg’s advance guard reached the Chambeshi, where the British had gathered stores and documents removed from Kasama in a rubber factory on the south bank. The bank was guarded by eleven men of the Northern Rhodesia Police, convalescing after illness, and a few local officials. According to the account of one of them, G. A. M. Alexander, a small detachment of the King’s African Rifles that had been posted on the river with a machine gun the previous night threw it into the water in the morning and scattered. When the Germans deployed on the far bank and opened fire, a European shut up in the factory fired at them with a heavy-calibre hunting rifle. The roar under the tin roof was so tremendous that the Germans reportedly took it for a field gun. The exchange of fire lasted about twenty minutes. It was interrupted by news that came over the telephone line strung through the trees from Broken Hill: an armistice had been concluded in Europe. The British hung white flags made from napkins and a tablecloth on the bank and on the roof, and the Germans ceased fire.

A dispatch in a courier’s bag

Lettow-Vorbeck learned of the armistice independently of his advance guard. On the morning of 13 November he set off with the main body after Spangenberg. While he was waiting on his bicycle for the troops at the spot chosen for the camp, Captain Müller brought him news: at Kasama Captain Koehl’s rearguard had captured a British motorcyclist carrying a dispatch from General Jacob van Deventer dated 12 November. Van Deventer wrote that the British prime minister had announced the signing of an armistice at 5 a.m. on 11 November and the cessation of hostilities on all fronts at eleven. He had ordered his own troops to stop fighting unless attacked and expected the same of the Germans.

Lettow-Vorbeck cycled to the river to join Spangenberg. At about midnight he received a second dispatch from van Deventer, dated 13 November. The British commander cited Article 17 of the armistice and demanded the handing over of all Allied prisoners, a march to Abercorn, today’s Mbala, and the laying down of arms there. Europeans were to keep their personal weapons “in recognition of the gallant fight”. Lettow-Vorbeck wrote that this news, if true, bore witness to the desperate position of the fatherland, for nothing else could explain the surrender of a force that was still proudly holding its own in the field.

The meeting on the Chambeshi

On the morning of 14 November Lettow-Vorbeck met Croad by the river. The plaque on the later memorial gives the time as 7.30, while the general himself wrote of eight o’clock. He gave Croad a telegram to the Kaiser reporting what had happened and announcing that he would comply with the terms. Croad told him about the mutiny in the fleet, the revolution in Germany and the still unofficial news of the Kaiser’s abdication. Lettow-Vorbeck thought this unlikely and believed it only on his way home. In the afternoon he returned to his main body and told the Europeans that he intended to carry out the terms. The British prisoners were released, among them Colonel Dickinson, who had spent more than three months with the German column. According to a study by the Western Front Association, Lettow-Vorbeck formally accepted the terms only on 16 November.

At the moment of the ceasefire the column numbered, according to Lettow-Vorbeck, 155 Europeans, including 30 officers, doctors and officials, 1,168 askaris and about 3,000 other Africans, porters, women and children. It was well armed and supplied. The soldiers and officers, convinced that Germany could not have lost the war, received the news with disbelief. Since 1953 the meeting place on the Chambeshi has been marked by a memorial, which recalls that in East Africa the guns fell silent three days later than in Europe.