Hoskins replaces Smuts

On 20 January 1917 Lieutenant-General Jan Smuts handed over the supreme command of the British forces in East Africa to Major-General Reginald Hoskins, until then commander of the 1st East African Division. Smuts had been summoned to London. In December 1916 the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, had invited the dominion prime ministers to special sessions of the War Cabinet and to an Imperial Conference. The prime minister, Louis Botha, remained at home, so the Union of South Africa was to be represented there by Smuts, his minister of defence. He was leaving in the middle of his own offensive, begun on 1 January on the Rufiji.

The front on the Rufiji

At the moment of the change of command the main British forces were already standing on the southern bank of the Rufiji, in two places. At Kibambawe, where the Germans had destroyed the bridge after the fighting at Beho-Beho, General Sheppard’s troops had been crossing little by little since the night of 5–6 January onto a sandbank in the middle of the river, cut off from the bank by a swamp and a backwater. Only on 17 January did they gain the southern bank, when the Germans fell back a few kilometres to a strong position at Mkindu. Further upstream, at Kipenio, Beves’s South African brigade held a bridgehead. The Nigerian Brigade also crossed there, and on 18 January took the table hill of Mkindu, and on 20 January, together with a battalion of the Cape Corps, drove the Germans out of Kipongo a few kilometres further south. From the north, from the direction of Dar es Salaam, smaller detachments were approaching the lower course of the river, and from the east troops of the 1st Division had advanced from Kibata to Mohoro.

The great aim of the offensive, however, had not been achieved. The German detachment from the Mgeta slipped out of the trap, and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, alarmed by the British crossing, moved his main forces from Kibata to the area of Lake Utungi, so as to come to the rescue if necessary. Meanwhile the rainy season arrived earlier than usual. The supply lines from the railway station at Mikese had lengthened to about 260 kilometres, with the Rufiji as the last obstacle, and the final 110 kilometres of road across black clay soil turned into a swamp. The motor vehicles came to a halt, porters were lacking, and the soldiers received ever smaller rations.

The new commander

Arthur Reginald Hoskins, born in 1871, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment, knew Africa as few British generals did. He had fought in the Sudan, in the Boer War, for which he received the Distinguished Service Order, and in Somaliland. Shortly before the war he had been inspector of the King’s African Rifles, the African rifle regiments, and in 1915 he commanded a brigade on the Western Front. He arrived in East Africa at the beginning of 1916 as chief of staff and from April 1916 commanded the 1st Division, made up of Indian, British and African units. In January 1917 he received the substantive, and not merely temporary, rank of major-general.

He was taking over an exhausted army. In ten months Smuts had occupied the whole colony north of the Rufiji, with Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Tabora and both railway lines, but according to Brigadier-General C. P. Fendall, who served in this army and wrote its history, the German forces were, as a fighting force, almost as strong and efficient as at the beginning of the campaign. Smuts’s own troops, on the other hand, had been ravaged by malaria, dysentery and hunger. Of the South Africans leaving along with Smuts, some were to be re-formed for the fighting in Europe, others to return to East Africa after recovering. The motor transport was worn out, most of the pack animals had died, and the porters were exhausted. Fendall wrote that Hoskins had been given a blunted tool, useless for an offensive.

Hoskins used the rainy season to rebuild the army: he reorganised the transport and the medical services, and brought in new battalions of the King’s African Rifles and troops from India. His position, however, was made harder by what Smuts said on arriving in London in March 1917: that the campaign in German East Africa “may be said to be over”. London therefore expected a quick end, and when it did not come the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, William Robertson, as the historian Ross Anderson writes, concluded that Hoskins had lost his grip on operations. At the end of May 1917 command was taken over by the South African general Jacob van Deventer, and Hoskins left for Mesopotamia.