Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (26 page)

The successful initial holding action gave von Lettow time to come to the scene himself and bring additional troops, quickly raising the number of defenders to more than a thousand. The British still felt they had the edge and brought the rest of their force ashore. But when they advanced en masse against the very skillfully positioned fire teams of the defenders, they were once again beaten back. At the cost of a handful of casualties, von Lettow’s forces inflicted heavy losses on the invaders: more than eight hundred dead and about five hundred wounded. The British knew they were beaten and decided to pull back to their ships and sail away.

At this point von Lettow’s chivalrous side manifested itself clearly. He agreed to a truce to provide time to bury the dead and send the wounded back with the British, and even hosted a dinner for his foes before they departed. He may have been a fierce fighter with a keen, cold strategic mind, but he was also a gentleman. While the end of the Victorian Era may have seen the British immediately begin setting up concentration camps in South Africa, von Lettow was determined to wage the ideal of a “war without hate” in East Africa.

Much has been made of von Lettow’s sterling character by historians and biographers, all of whom concur about his personal warmth, sense of honor, and unrelenting willpower. Among the more revealing insights into the man are reflections by the Danish writer Isak Dinesen (the
NOM DE PLUME
of Karen Blixen), who in 1914 had traveled on the same steamer to Africa with him. She was so taken with von Lettow that she wrote to her mother about him at the time, “He has been such a friend to me.” Years later Dinesen wrote of von Lettow, “He belongs to the olden days, and I have never met another German who has given me so strong an impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for.”
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One of the attendees at the “farewell dinner” in Tanga was a bright British intelligence officer, Richard Meinertzhagen, who would also become a great admirer of von Lettow—and who was to be one of T. E. Lawrence’s main “handlers” in the Arab revolt a few years later. As it turned out, Meinertzhagen would draw on lessons from von Lettow’s concept of operations when working with Lawrence in the campaign against the Ottoman Turks. It is also important to observe that the British acceptance of von Lettow’s truce-and-dinner offer spoke well of their higher intentions about fighting justly.

This sense of fair play extended even to occasions later in the campaign when von Lettow, out of almost all but the briefest contact with Germany by radio—his main stations having been captured or destroyed—was approached by the British who would then inform him of such things as his receipt of the
POUR LE MÉRITE
and his promotion to major general. This said, the British did not hesitate to use a faked radio message that caused Zeppelin L59, coming with supplies from Germany, to turn home without fulfilling its mission.

After the disaster at Tanga, the Royal Navy tried a descent upon Dar es Salaam, subjecting the city to a sharp bombardment. But the defenders returned a fierce and accurate fire, inflicting damage on a number of British vessels. Realizing that the city would be a tough target to capture from the sea, the attackers gave up and sailed off. In the wake of this failure, the British next tried a straightforward overland invasion from the north, briefly occupying the town of Jasin. But here von Lettow’s concept worked yet again, his small teams driving the British out of the town in bitter house-to-house fighting.

Not content with remaining on the defensive, von Lettow seized the initiative in 1915, mounting a swarm of raids on the British East African railroad line that ran for some four hundred miles between the port of Mombasa and Nairobi. The attacks were near constant, as von Lettow had subdivided his forces even further, all the way down to units of six to eight fighters. They were able to travel fast and light, and made maximum use of explosives to disrupt the line. There were so many of these little units that the British came to think that the German force in East Africa was far greater in size than it actually was. Indeed, this perception was so strong that the British military commander-in-chief, Kitchener—whom we first met in the Boer War—simply ordered his troops in Africa to stand on the defensive and try to hold on to what they already had.

But German actions continued to mount, reaching troubling levels later in 1915. The small-unit raiders went farther and deeper, creating increasingly annoying disruptions. Von Lettow was so greatly infected with the spirit of these raids that he went on one himself—with but one other German, a few Askaris, and native porters, no more than ten men in all. They were successful in causing some disruption; but the typical British reaction—to throw out counter patrols in pursuit—very nearly led to von Lettow’s capture. His raiding concept was sound, but the risks for every team remained high at all times.

Nonetheless von Lettow’s raiding campaign was having the desired effect: he had convinced British intelligence, Meinertzhagen in particular, that his forces posed a real threat to British East Africa. Soon Kitchener decided that more troops were needed in this theater and that the German threat must be dealt with decisively. While von Lettow was thus sparking a reaction that brought down a vastly superior force upon his head, this was indeed his strategic purpose. He thought the best way he could serve the overall German war effort was by causing the enemy to send large numbers of forces to deal with him rather than deploying them to the Western Front in Europe. In what came next, he certainly got his wish.

*

If von Lettow had pretty much held the initiative throughout 1915, it soon grew clear that things were about to change in the New Year. Not only were tens of thousands of fresh imperial troops coming into the theater of operations; they were placed under a skillful, energetic new commander: the Boer-hero-turned-British-loyalist, Jan Smuts. Large numbers of the fresh troops coming in were Boers too, freed up by their recent conquest of German SouthWest Africa, where the German commander Colonel Victor Franke had neither acquitted himself well nor held out very long.
5
So von Lettow had indeed achieved the large diversionary effect he wanted by causing such a ruckus in East Africa; but the British response soon placed him and his troops in the gravest peril. He had to respond to the new threat swiftly, and nimbly.

The most obvious new requirement was an immediate shift to the strategic defensive, given the number and quality of enemy troops massing for a multipronged invasion of German East Africa. Von Lettow could no longer send out most of his forces in small squads; still, he did not concentrate them in a single mass either. Instead he went back to his initial concept of fielding companies of some one hundred to two hundred fighters and dispersing them all around the edges of the colony. Most were deployed in the north, where the main threat was; but enough were sent to the east to deal with the Belgians, and to the south to keep the Portuguese from driving up from Mozambique.

The basic concept of operations in each area was to fight holding actions as long as practicable, inflicting maximum losses on the enemy, then to retreat before being outflanked. It was a strategy guaranteed to slow the enemy advance and, in some instances, such as against the Portuguese in the south, it stopped them in their tracks. But the Boers came on in much greater numbers and confirmed their reputation as excellent fighters. So in the north von Lettow’s campaign began to unfold as a long series of holding actions and well-timed retreats.

Again and again Smuts would throw out a column of riders to try to encircle
SCHUTZTRUPPE
companies, but his flankers were always slowed enough in the dense scrub-and-bush country to allow the defenders time to pull back to their next position. So it went, week after week, month after month. The British and Boers suffered heavy casualties in their frontal assaults against Askaris and Germans armed to the teeth with machine guns—two blockade runners had successfully brought them guns and ammunition from the fatherland—and the cavalry never seemed to be able to come to grips with the enemy.

Yet von Lettow was being steadily pushed south as Smuts kept driving even during the rainy season. The pestilential climate grew even worse, with mosquitoes bringing malaria and tsetse flies carrying sleeping sickness. These were, in Byron Farwell’s words, “the true enemy.”
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The British suffered the worst from the insect-borne diseases, as their tropical uniforms consisted of short pants and sleeves that left a lot of skin for the bugs to attack. The Askaris and Germans wore long pants, jodhpurs, and long-sleeved tunics, leaving only their hands and faces easily accessible. Even so, the Germans suffered too. Von Lettow himself experienced no fewer than four major malaria attacks during the war in East Africa.

As the campaign unfolded during 1916, Smuts drove relentlessly southward and von Lettow resisted, falling back slowly, inflicting as much damage as he could, and delaying the seemingly inevitable loss of the colony for as long as possible. Aside from being harried by Smuts, von Lettow was increasingly harassed by his colonial governor, Schnee, who preferred to surrender and put what he called “an honorable end” to everyone’s suffering. Von Lettow would have none of this, happy in the knowledge that his few thousand fighters had by now stayed in the field for two years and caused well over a hundred thousand Allied troops, over a million horses, and enormous amounts of war matériel to be diverted from serving the Allied cause in Europe.

The only real doubter about the need to expend huge resources going after von Lettow was Kitchener. But in June 1916, while en route to Russia on a diplomatic mission, he went down with nearly all hands—about 650 sailors—when the cruiser
HMS HAMPSHIRE
was sunk by a German mine off the Orkney Islands. It seems that after Kitchener’s passing the British efforts to finish off von Lettow intensified. And the steady gain of territory, von Lettow’s abandonment of cities like Dar es Salaam, and his apparent inability to resume the offensive all bespoke an apparently great British success that was finally coming to fruition.
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At the end of the year Smuts was called to Britain to serve on the Imperial War Council. He placed his cavalry commander, Major General Jacobus van Deventer, in charge, confident that the campaign against von Lettow was all but over. Van Deventer pursued Smuts’s tactics: frontal assaults buttressed by flanking movements. Fresh forces were coming in—more Africans now, the better-acclimated Nigerians and the King’s African Rifles—and the British were becoming more bush-wise. They even took to launching small-unit raids at night on the villages that provided a substantial portion of von Lettow’s grain supplies. These night raids hurt his operations as much as any of the larger British field maneuvers ever had.
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The Allied forces also enjoyed some technological advantages, fielding as they did the first of the new hand grenades, “Mills Bombs,” and the Stokes-Brandt trench mortar, the latter being the deadliest weapon in all of World War I. The Germans obtained only a few of these, and only by capturing them on their occasional offensive forays. Their few field guns, salvaged from the raider
KOENIGSBERG
that had been trapped in the Rufiji River delta, were worn and almost out of ammunition. At the tactical level the only German edge was in machine guns, and the British stubbornness in continuing the practice of making frontal assaults played right into the hands of the
SCHUTZTRUPPE
’s sole area of superiority.

Throughout the remainder of 1917 the British continued to drive von Lettow southward, hemming him in on all sides. In October van Deventer thought the campaign could be brought to an end with one more major push by an advanced flying column of some six thousand troops at the Mahiwa River. Most of von Lettow’s remaining forces—about fifteen hundred troops, the vast majority of them Askaris
—
were there; and this time, instead of a brief defense and a further retreat, von Lettow chose to stand his ground and fight.

The resulting battle was exceptionally bloody for the British, with about one-third of their force killed or wounded in several days of fighting. Von Lettow made several deft counterattacks, but in the end he credited his victory to the stubborn British adherence to the same balky tactics they had employed on the Western Front in Europe. As von Lettow saw it, the British lost this battle because they still “did not hesitate to try for success, not by skillful handling . . . but rather by repeated frontal assaults.”
9
In comparison to the enemy’s two thousand plus casualties, his own losses were about one hundred killed and four hundred wounded. But proportionally it meant that his losses were about one-third of his force, the same percentage of casualties suffered by the British. So he continued to retreat southward, right to the border with Portuguese Mozambique.

Even though von Lettow had landed a sharp blow against his forces, van Deventer, overseeing more than a hundred thousand pursuing troops, felt he had von Lettow cornered at last. But the great German bush fighter had one more trump card to play: in the wake of the Mahiwa battle, he intended to mount a major strategic offensive. Despite the weariness of his greatly reduced force and the overwhelming odds posed by the huge numbers of troops coming at him from every side but the sea—where the Royal Navy was waiting to bombard him if he dared venture near the coast—von Lettow conceived the notion of a most irregular offensive. In November 1917 it began with his crossing south into Mozambique—moving
AWAY
from the enemy’s main forces. But he did not stay away.