Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (25 page)

De Wet was captured by a pro-British Boer, tried and convicted for armed insurrection, and sentenced to six years in prison. He was out in a year. He was worn out too, spending his last years quietly, dying in 1922 at the age of sixty-seven. But the remarkably effective fight he masterminded against a vastly superior foe—so redolent of the operations of Denis Davydov, Abd el-Kader, and Nathan Bedford Forrest—still resonates loudly among all those today who think about or are called upon to fight in irregular wars.

BUSH FIGHTER:
PAUL VON LETTOW-VORBECK

British Army File photo

Germany was a latecomer to the infamous “scramble for Africa,” gaining its colonies there only during the decade before the Anglo-Boer War. Perhaps this was due to German unification having occurred so recently, in the immediate wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), or possibly because the press of Continental power politics had so captured the German mind for several centuries. Maybe the Reich looked outward now because its young Kaiser Wilhelm II had become enthralled with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s ideas about sea power and the need for far-flung ports and coaling stations. Whatever the reasons for coming late to colonialism, Germany quickly showed a real appetite for it. Wherever they settled—and there were four holdings in Africa from which to choose: Togo, Cameroon, SouthWest Africa and East Africa—German colonists brought a passion for order. But they also proved just as prone to exploit and brutalize the native populations as any of the other imperial European powers.

Misrule led to bloody, militarily vexing insurgencies in three of their four colonies in the years before World War I, giving the Germans “plenty of scope for humiliation,” as the historian Thomas Pakenham wrote.
1
The natives fought guerrilla-style against German forces whose outlook was overwhelmingly conventional; and few of these troops actually had combat experience, given that the last war their country waged was in Europe more than thirty years earlier, against the French.

The most serious uprising took place in SouthWest Africa (Namibia today) in 1904–1905, when two tribes rebelled, one after the other. The Herero acted first, having become fed up with German expropriation of their cattle and exploitation of their women. After them came the Nama, whose motivations were more mystically inclined, having to do with a self-appointed “sacred mission” to rid Africa of the troublesome whites. Each tribe resorted to guerrilla tactics, the Nama proving far more adept. They fielded no more than a few hundred fighters, but nonetheless kept a German force of more than fifteen thousand troops hopping all over the Kalahari Desert for many months.

The insurgency in SouthWest Africa was largely over by the end of 1905, concluded more by German doggedness than military skill. But a few of the Kaiser’s officers learned a great deal from this campaign. One of them was Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a career soldier who had fought as part of the international force that relieved the siege of the European legations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in China. He had thrown himself into counterinsurgent operations in the Kalahari with a passion, being often at the leading edge of the action. This sort of initiative led to his suffering serious wounds to the chest and left eye. He was taken for treatment to South Africa, where he spent time visiting with many former Boer fighters during his convalescence.

Meanwhile another rebellion arose, this time in German East Africa (Tanzania today) by the Maji Maji. But this one was swiftly put down, by just a few hundred troops and at a fraction of the cost of the campaign in the SouthWest colony. By the end of this revolt, the German home government was beginning to realize that colonial misrule and corruption were serious problems, and that reform measures were necessary. Soon East Africa became a colony where progressive measures were pioneered, and with some success. Unlike the heavy jungles of Togo and Cameroon, or the aridity of the SouthWest colony, East Africa’s harsher environs were offset by mountains, lakes, and a modicum of reasonably arable land. Its native population of six million began to come into some kind of existential understanding with the six thousand German settlers.

Thus the last years of peace before the Great War broke out were prosperous, peaceful ones for German East Africa. And even as the storm clouds gathered over Europe, there was hope that any major conflict could be contained there and not spread to the colonies. The basis for this hope was the Congo Act of 1885. It arose from the proceedings of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Berlin Conference, in which all the colonial powers agreed to refrain from bringing war to central Africa in the event of an outbreak of conflict in Europe. Somehow, it was hoped, mother countries could go to war while their colonies in the Congo River basin would remain neutral. It was not to be. In the circumlocution of one member of the House of Lords at the time, it was held that “the Berlin Act remains in force, except insofar as it has been abrogated.”
2

On some level the German central government understood that this attitude would prevail, and realized that any war with Britain on the opposing side would result in their overseas colonies being isolated from the fatherland and conquered one by one. It was also accepted that the massive German naval buildup during the prewar years—aimed at countering the Royal Navy in the North Sea—would prove virtually useless for purposes of breaking the British maritime stranglehold on the colonies. While some effort was made to create small but swift and powerful naval task forces to mount far-ranging attacks, complemented by a handful of lone-wolf raiding vessels, this form of
KREUZERKRIEG
(cruiser warfare) could at best be used simply to distract the British and perhaps delay or disrupt their offensive moves.

When war did come, most German raiders were quickly dealt with, their positions betrayed by radio reports sent by the ships they were attacking. And the great cruiser squadron commanded by the Graf von Spee, after winning an engagement at Coronel, was destroyed soon after in a sea fight off the Falkland Islands.
3
Not much help from the sea would come to the German colonies.

All that was left, then, for German strategic planners was to try to beef up their colonial armies. In Africa these were comprised mostly of native troops, with a small leavening of German officers. The forces were quite small, usually just a few thousand troops, far less than the size of the expeditionary force the Germans had sent to the SouthWest colony in 1904–1905. In East Africa, for example, the entire defense force at the outbreak of war in 1914 consisted of a little over 2,500 native Askaris and about 250 Germans. In all, this amounted to roughly a brigade-strength
SCHUTZTRUPPE
that was assigned the task of defending a territory the size of Germany and France combined.

Given the need to concentrate manpower in Europe, where German war plans contemplated having to fight both in the east and the west (the famous Schlieffen Plan was designed to knock out France quickly, then to focus on Russia), hardly a man could be spared for the colonies. But in the case of German East Africa, one man was indeed sent: von Lettow. After his experience in SouthWest Africa, he had held a staff position back in Germany. Then, from 1909 to 1913, he commanded a detachment of marines, the closest thing the Germans had at the time to troops ready to fight in irregular settings.

Just four months before the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, von Lettow—a minor nobleman, he signed his letters only as “Lettow” when corresponding with his equals and betters—was sent to East Africa with orders to prepare the colony for effective defense against a likely British invasion. He was the right man to dispatch, being the German army’s most experienced colonial warfare officer. From the day he arrived he began to think about creative ways in which he could use his tiny force to tie up huge enemy concentrations, thus helping to relieve pressure on his comrades who would be fighting on the main battlefields in Europe.

Over the course of the next four years this middle-aged man (he was forty-four at the start of the war) would conduct a vigorous, vexing, and highly effective campaign against overwhelming material odds in one of the world’s most extreme climates and over some of its roughest terrain. He would be wounded in combat, suffer multiple bouts of malaria, and would even have to expend precious energy in an extended bureaucratic contretemps with the German colonial governor, Heinrich Schnee, who kept hoping that the Congo Act—which the British chose to subvert from the very outset of the war—might somehow be revived to restore peace.

In the face of all these obstacles and challenges, von Lettow rose up and mastered them—but not simply by reverting to hit-and-run guerrilla tactics from the beginning. No, his particular brilliance was in seeing how irregular concepts of operations could be used to engage the main conventional forces of the enemy. It is this innovation that should most interest us, and which most befuddled his British foes.

*

The Great War in East Africa

From the opening days of the war, the British viewed German East Africa as ripe for plucking. It was surrounded by colonies of the Allied powers: Britain’s East Africa (mostly today’s Kenya), Rhodesia, and Nyasaland; the Belgian Congo; and, from 1916 when Portugal decided to join the war against Germany, Mozambique. The Royal Navy’s command of the sea completed the envelopment of the seemingly helpless German colony. Thus there were many avenues of approach by land and along the coast, and only a relative handful of defenders, most of them native tribesmen armed with weapons dating from the Franco-Prussian War. However good an officer von Lettow might be, he had only a few months to work his small
SCHUTZTRUPPE
into shape before war came in August 1914.

Von Lettow realized that there was simply no way to mount a conventional defense of the colony by concentrating his force in one place and trying to use his “interior position” to strike at one or another of the invaders as they came. This approach would have been classically German, echoing the strategy employed by Frederick the Great in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) when he struck in turn from his central position against invading French, Austrian, and Russian armies. Von Lettow knew that this method would not work. The distances involved were too great, and his forces were far too few.

So instead of massing the
SCHUTZTRUPPE
centrally, he broke his small army into many smaller detachments, usually of just 100 to 150 Askaris and a few German officers in each, then dispersed them around the frontiers of the colony. The idea was that each small detachment could fight an initial holding action when it came under attack; other nearby companies of the
SCHUTZTRUPPE
would then come in support as needed. They would be like the antibodies of the human immune system. The whole concept of operations was made possible by von Lettow’s faith in the fighting qualities of the native African troops, whose language he spoke—he was fluent in English too—and whose culture he respected, right down to allowing their families to accompany them in the field.

Aside from deploying to defend the borders, von Lettow also placed garrisons in the main coastal cities of Tanga and Dar es Salaam in the event of an amphibious invasion. Tanga was in the north, quite near the border with British East Africa, and it was here that the British chose to strike first, taking maximum advantage of their sea power. Early in November 1914 they sent an expedition of some eight thousand troops, along with a naval task force, against about two hundred German and Askari defenders. The first wave of roughly two thousand was decimated by a spirited resistance that reflected another of von Lettow’s innovations: the idea of breaking his small companies into even smaller combat teams, built around individual machine-gun and sniper nests that fired for a while, then moved to new locations.