Fighting at Kahe

On 21 March 1916 at Kahe, a station on the Usambara Railway south of Moshi, the last battle of General Jan Smuts’s offensive at the foot of Kilimanjaro was fought. After the capture of the Latema Nek pass and the occupation of Moshi, the Germans had fallen back to a new position in dense bush between the Himo, Defu and Soko Nassai rivers, with its back to the Ruvu river, the upper course of the Pangani. Smuts wanted to drive them out of it before the rainy season, because only then could he safely extend the railway and prepare a further advance into the interior of German East Africa.

First attempts

The attack began at noon on 18 March. The South African brigades took the hills south of the road from Taveta without difficulty, but on 19 March they got stuck in the thorny scrub along the Himo, and the 3rd South African Infantry Brigade fought a fierce action until dusk with the German detachment (Abteilung) Otto. On the right flank the 129th Baluchis, veterans of the Western Front, were making good progress through the bush until they were stopped by wild bees. Smuts then recalled the brigades from the Himo and changed his plan. He entrusted the main thrust along the road and railway from Moshi to Kahe to the 1st Division, which after the departure of General James Stewart had been taken over by Brigadier-General S. H. Sheppard, reinforced with three South African battalions. General Jacob van Deventer, meanwhile, was to outflank the German left wing with a wide march through the bush from New Moshi and come out at Kahe from the west.

Van Deventer set out on the afternoon of 20 March and by the light of the full moon covered about 40 kilometres, meeting no one on the way except rhinoceroses. That same night, at about 10 p.m., the Germans, to the sound of bugles and shouting, attacked Sheppard’s camp at the so-called Store on the road to Kahe. Within two hours they charged five times across the cleared ground in front, once getting within ten metres of the trenches, but the defence, chiefly the 29th Punjabis and the 129th Baluchis, held. The British lost 33 men, and the next day they buried 18 Germans and askaris.

The battle of 21 March

On the morning of 21 March van Deventer’s mounted troops reached the Pangani opposite Kahe hill. Two squadrons crossed the swift, deep river with its swampy banks, where the current swept away the swimming horses, and at about 11 a.m. took the hill, from which a small German detachment had withdrawn. The rest of the brigade, under fire from a gun taken from the cruiser Königsberg, advanced towards the station. At 11.30 a.m. Kahe station was in South African hands, and the Germans withdrew across the river and blew up the railway bridge. Between noon and 2.30 p.m. Lieutenant-Colonel Bock’s units tried three times to retake the hill, without success. Van Deventer, however, did not have enough men to cut the line further south.

Meanwhile, at 11.30 a.m., Sheppard’s infantry moved off from the north. The German position was well chosen: on the east it was covered by the almost impassable Soko Nassai, on the west by the Defu, and in front of it stretched an open belt of grass 800 to 1,500 metres wide, under the fire of machine guns hidden in clumps of trees. The British had not expected the Germans until the Ruvu, and the maps were useless. At about 12.40 p.m. the leading units came out onto the open ground and were stopped. Neither the 29th Punjabis nor the 8th South African Infantry managed to cross the open space. An attempt to outflank the position across the Soko Nassai, a river full of crocodiles, also stalled. At 4.45 p.m. Sheppard received orders to dig in on the ground he had taken.

Losses and withdrawal

On 21 March the British lost about 290 men, mostly from the 1st Division, which reported 37 killed, 221 wounded and 3 missing. Governor Heinrich Schnee gave German losses for 18–21 March as 30 killed, 90 wounded and 51 missing, but the British official history (Hordern) considers these figures almost certainly too low.

The battle brought no decision on the field, but it decided the withdrawal. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was in Kahe village, from where he could not direct the reserves near the station. When he received a report that British mounted troops were moving into his rear towards Kisangire, he ordered the whole position abandoned during the night. According to Lettow, the report turned out to be false. The South African official history replies that even without it the loss of Kahe hill made his position untenable. On the morning of 22 March Sheppard’s patrols found the trenches empty and, between the road bridge and the railway bridge, the abandoned, disabled gun from the Königsberg.