The Last Great Safari : East Africa in World War I 9781442235939, 9781442235922

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The Last Great Safari

The Last Great Safari

East Africa in World War I

Corey W. Reigel

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Corey W. Reigel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reigel, Corey W. (Corey Walter) The last great safari : East Africa in World War I / Corey W. Reigel. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-3592-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3593-9 (ebook) 1. World War, 1914¬1918—Campaigns—Africa, East. I. Title. II. Title: East Africa in World War I. D576.G3R46 2015 940.4'16—dc23 2014046917 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction 1 2 3 4

vii

Rethinking the First World War and East Africa: Questioning the Military Accomplishments in East Africa Not What It Seems: Questioning the Military Accomplishments in East Africa How Racism Influenced East Africa, 1914–1918 A History of Errors

1 39 83 115

Bibliography

133

Index

137

About the Author

139

v

Introduction

After the dramatic events of World War II, the mass slaughter and stagnant trenches of World War I, where death was too cheap, common, and seemingly meaningless, might not seem as interesting by comparison. The most studied topic of World War I is the Western Front of the European theater, followed by the Eastern and Italian Fronts and the Middle Eastern theater. The rest of the war, in the Pacific and Africa and elsewhere, has been relatively neglected, which is a shame. Not only did patriotic men suffer for their monarchs and motherlands and therefore deserve the same recognition as those in more famous battles but the Great War overseas often allowed more opportunity for individual initiative. In the overseas colonies one officer could be responsible for a command as large in area or civilian population as a European country. If creative and willing to improvise, he could conquer vast amounts of land with only a few men and primitive logistics, while individual acts of bravery could be decisive and duly rewarded. There were no tanks or submarines, aircraft were few, trenches and barbed wire were puny, and there was no poison gas. There were also many entertaining stories. Some of these stories created the myths, misunderstandings, and in some cases frauds that have come to dominate much of the literature. It is now a century since the Great War, and it is time to have a new understanding of the most interesting colonial theater, East Africa. East Africa had the most influence of all the German overseas colonies in World War I, and it attracted the most attention—which contributed to the misunderstandings. Both the Germans and the Allies claimed victory in East Africa. They could do that because their objectives altered with time and were asymmetrical, thus allowing each to point to the other’s failure. In fact the East African theater of operations was a kind of “successful failure” for both. The narrative histories are fond of telling stories of the individuals who vii

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struggled under adverse circumstances, but they offer little analysis of the results. The Germans claimed success because they had drawn the Allies’ men and other resources away from Europe, and because in the end they had never surrendered their command until after the war was over. This explanation was used as an emotional balm for their injured postwar nationalism, and their veterans were praised for besting the British at their own colonial game. The truth is that at best it was an exaggeration, as was their assuming the role of the underdog in a “David-versus-Goliath” battle, an interpretation that overlooked far too many mitigating factors. During the 1960s–1980s a new interpretation was added, a representation of the war in Africa as guerrilla warfare. With the failures of the United States in Vietnam and Latin America, and those of Europeans elsewhere, there was a desire among some military historians to find an example of Westerners successful at guerrilla warfare, especially in the tropics. Many authors thought the Germans in East Africa could fill this role because of the emphasis in that theater on mobility and evasion, and the word guerrilla began to appear in book and chapter titles. Much as Germany had misinterpreted the East African theatre for their own purposes directly after the war, so too did historians in the West years later find what they wanted to find— victorious White guerrillas leading loyal natives in a difficult environment. Admittedly relations between combatants and civilians were among the most important factors in the conflict. Africans were indispensible in this theater, but it was not guerrilla warfare. The civilians were not politicized. Recruits wore uniforms instead of attempting to move among the enemy dressed as civilians. Mao Zedong’s famous metaphor of the soldiers blending into a school of fish did not apply to World War I in East Africa. Rather than guerilla warfare, this conflict resembled instead a kind of safari, the last and the greatest, stretching over four and a half years. Racism was certainly at the root of the guerrilla myth. Westerners losing to Africans and Asians in the 1960s–1980s needed a more heroic counternarrative. But any fair evaluation of World War I in East Africa must also have a proper consideration of racism. Today racism makes people uncomfortable, so it is often discounted if not completely ignored in popular books. In contrast, the world of 1914–1918 was not only comfortable with racism, it had codified racism into a pseudoscience, justified by the bastardization of Charles Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. Of course the Europeans considered themselves to be martial races, but racism was also the basis of how Asian and African recruitment into their colonial militaries was conducted. Racism prevented Black soldiers from service anywhere but in Africa, although White South Africans could fight in Europe. The Germans even cooperated with the Allies to prevent any challenges to colonialism arising from Blacks taking advantage of the war between their masters.

Introduction

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Related to all of this was a conflict between the old and the new, between traditional East Africa and the modern industrial world. A reoccurring theme was how all of the European powers first attempted to use the most modern methods but when these inevitably failed the only logical alternative was to return to the traditional East African methods. The Germans were the best at this. For example in transportation they first maximized their use of railroads, lake and river steamers, and a few trucks, but these modern methods had limits. When they had to shift to traditional methods the German side possessed an advantage in relations with African civilians. Except for the naval personnel, the German soldiers were mostly “old Africa hands” who knew the people and the lands and therefore got more African cooperation than the Allies. Of course the British used “old Africa hands” as well, but they needed to expand to a much greater extent and needed many more African workers, and therefore more White civilian or military leaders. Instead of experienced men, however, they got wounded and ill veterans of the Western Front sent to recover their health in the colonies. During the last two years of the war all combatants used human portage as the primary method of transport in their military logistics, which strongly resembled the nineteenthcentury slave wars. In other areas, such as medicine, again the theme was to first maximize modern methods, but when these failed they resorted to traditional African methods, where again the Germans excelled. Far more men were lost to illness and malnutrition than to combat. Some of the best stories came from the navies. A sleek and impressive German cruiser threatened the India trade until this hunter became hunted. Then a real-life big game hunter disguised himself as an Arab in order to hunt this cruiser in the Rufiji River delta. Later aircraft and monitors finished the job. It was another big game hunter who originally proposed that the Royal Navy send an expedition to Lake Tanganyika to chase enemy steamers. Here too, small groups of ordinary men, or an individual could be important. In Europe each side employed masses of the most modern and largest of warships in a stalemate, but in this colony a single ship could be decisive, and an antique would still be useful. One of the European rationalizations for the occupation of East Africa was that peace would be imposed on lands that had known the slave wars for too long. The Europeans would then assist in the advancement of the Africans. Indeed because of colonialism, the Africans could not war against each other—until the summer of 1914, when in order to serve a greater loyalty, these same humanitarian colonists now directed Africans to kill other Africans in a fashion that was far worse than the slave wars. In order to do this, masses of humanity were mobilized and incorporated in a scale never before seen in eastern Africa. The Great War in Europe was infamous for anonymous death on a massive scale such that the sacrifice seemed meaningless. In Africa the individu-

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al mattered. Some of the great stories are of the German ability to make much of what little they imported, and to repair what they had. But when they lost the most developed parts of the colony the good stories became fewer. The Germans lived off of civilian food production and became dependent on the capture of ammunition, medicine, and other essentials. As the new methods failed the Germans turned to traditional methods, even combat. Briefly, the new twentieth century coexisted with the past, and daring men could accomplish greatness, which was always a good story. They almost made a complete circle, as first the nineteenth-century industrial European nations conquered Africa with modern tools and weapons, but then the modern war required the traditional African methods in order to create the Last Great Safari, which was an even better story.

Chapter One

Rethinking the First World War and East Africa Questioning the Military Accomplishments in East Africa

This book focuses on a reinterpretation of World War I in East Africa to understand military success given the influence of racism. Its purpose is not to provide a narration of events, which is a shame since this topic is a source of wonderful stories about daring men in dangerous circumstances. There are other impressive books that provide extensive details of events and entertaining narration, and a full recording is better left to them. This chapter is a narration of the basic events in order to facilitate the analyses of racism and military objectives in the chapters that follow. PRECOLONIAL WARFARE East Africa had a trade system and a tradition of warfare that later influenced European colonization and then the conduct of the world war in East Africa. The British and the Germans attempted to use the most modern methods of combat and transportation, but in the war both resorted to nineteenth-century practices, thus almost coming full circle. The Indian Ocean was a marketplace between the interior of eastern Africa and the rest of the world, but transportation was always a problem. There were no major rivers to move goods from Africa’s Great Lakes to the east coast. Horses and other pack animals were vulnerable to diseases. For centuries the only reliable method was human portage, which worked in all sea1

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Chapter 1

sons but always had limitations, thus making trade expensive. Long columns of people carried loads along well-known routes in a system of relays. For some, portage was a profession while others were only engaged occasionally. Merchants from Arabia, Persia, India, and beyond would sail to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba or the ports of Kilwa, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and others. Most often they traded textiles and metal products for the cloves and other items produced along the coast, but also they especially desired goods from the interior. In between the ocean and the lakes the land was difficult and semiarid and produced almost nothing of value except the people who carried the possessions of others. In earlier times the trade emphasis was on copper, but by the nineteenth century it was ivory, rubber, hides, and slaves. Slaves were not only an export item but were also used to carry other exports. The sultan of Muscat and Oman, Seyyid Said (1806–1856), was a shrewd and insightful businessman who expanded his empire to become overlord of Zanzibar. Upon his death the empire was divided between his two sons, making Majid Said (1835–1870) sultan of Zanzibar. He expanded and controlled the entire coast from the Rovuma River in the south to the port of Witu in the north (roughly the coastline of modern Tanzania and Kenya) and the islands. Seyyid built warships (that also conducted commerce) in Europe, America, Oman, and Bombay that gave him control of the coast. In the 1830s he had sixteen warships (some were large) and ninety small armed vessels, and when Seyyid died in 1856 he had eight warships and twenty armed vessels. The core of his army was a few hundred Baluchi soldiers that were supplemented in times of need by Omani soldiers, armed slaves, or recruits from Zanzibar, Madagascar, and the Comoro Islands. With the combination of naval supremacy and Indian soldiers (just like Britain) this gave Seyyid and then Majid an inflated political power from the perspective of Western nations, who treated them as the legitimate government of the Swahili Coast. 1 They directly controlled the Indian Ocean coastline but the sultanate claimed the interior all the way to the shores of the Great Lakes. Only the port of Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika and the city of Tabora (roughly halfway between the lake and the ocean) were under the sultan’s direct rule, but otherwise there was a loose network of alliances and pledges of loyalty that made the sultan a figurehead monarch over a vast commercial empire by indirect rule. Since the caravans moved trade, a symbiotic relationship evolved, with the states of the interior in supposed submission to the sultan as the overlord who provided a regulated marketplace. In reality the interior states governed themselves, and thus Omani government expenses were kept to a minimum. Omani acquisition of its new coastal kingdom encouraged the expansion of long-distance trade, especially in ivory when the nineteenthcentury demand grew dramatically in India and Western nations, and profits increased. Some societies, such as the Nyamwezi, combined ivory hunting

Rethinking the First World War and East Africa

3

with caravans. Trade of slaves, the second most important trade item, also expanded, with one to two thousand shipped to French colonies in the Indian Ocean each year (until it was banned in 1822) and the same numbers to the Middle East in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Another destination for slaves was the clove plantations begun by Arabs along the coast in 1810. 2 Caravan porters were specialists. The life of a porter was more complicated than lift, carry, walk, and professional standardization evolved over time. A caravan would move from sunrise until an hour or two before noon when the heat, and custom, would bring a rest of a few hours and a meal; then, if the weather permitted, there might be a few more hours’ march in the afternoon. Arranged in descending order of importance, behind the guide and his drummer were the ivory carriers, the carriers of trade goods, then the caravan’s tools and supplies, and finally the women and children who might accompany their husbands and fathers. Armed guards were stationed throughout the column, with the largest group just behind the caravan to catch stragglers. The leaders of caravans were often poor Arabs or Swahili who borrowed the wealth needed for difficult, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work, or they were the poor relations and in-laws of the wealthy merchants who remained in comfort on the coast. A few successful trips could be enough profit for the Arab caravan leader to purchase a clove plantation. A porter was paid about double the wages of unskilled laborers. There was logic to the system, which had evolved over time. Later the Europeans attempted to replace all this with modern methods, but when that failed they resorted to this system. These caravans were too valuable to not attract the wrong kind of attention. Therefore cooperative relations with the societies of the interior were essential for trade. The caravan operators were powerful enough to maintain discipline and deter attacks by thieves, but they did not have enough soldiers to engage in warfare with monarchs along the route. Collaboration might be achieved with intermarriages, or gifts (bribes or extortion), but even this was not enough, as ivory within Tanganyika was overhunted by the 1850s and 1860s. This pushed the ivory trade to the Great Lakes for new sources. There was still a growing world demand, so prices increased as the ivory caravans became fewer, such that before the Europeans took control in the 1870s and 1880s warfare had increased. Textiles from India or Europe and finished metal goods were the main trade items, but as the years passed obsolete Western firearms, and especially cheap guns made specifically for the African market, grew to become the primary trade good. Guns created an imbalance of power that made war easier. These guns rapidly expanded the power of those societies that got them first, hence the coastal people held a temporary military and commercial hunting advantage over those of the interior. One byproduct of these changes was that slaves became an increas-

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Chapter 1

ingly valuable commodity. An export slave trade continued into the 1870s, but slaves to carry the ivory exaggerated slave prices. Rather than the ArabSwahili caravan operators conducting slave-raiding wars, they purchased slaves from African societies that carried out wars to feed the slave trade, which was made easier with the newly acquired firearms. The violence escalated, as not only were men killed directly by the wars, healthy men were kidnapped and their productivity also taken, with the victim society suffering the loss of their contribution. Societies with a more centralized organization and nearer the caravan routes had advantages over weaker, more remote groups. Another byproduct was to make the established caravan routes more vulnerable than before, and more profitable. Ending the slave wars was one of the major justifications for European colonization. East Africa’s traditional export trade with Arabia, Persia, and India was later supplemented with Western merchants, starting with the Portuguese. In the early nineteenth century the United States dominated the Western trade until too many ships were lost in the American Civil War. German merchants began regular trade in 1847, and for a while French merchants and their government seemed interested in an East African colony. Instead, the British became involved with the sultan of Zanzibar as a means of ending the slave trade. As with other parts of the world, Britain desired to avoid the added expense of a formal colonial claim yet still influence, even dominate, the government and trade of East Africa. In 1873 the British forced the sultan to close the slave markets while the institution was still legal. Soon after this the Royal Navy used Zanzibar as an anti-slave-trade base of operations. Meanwhile the famous British explorers, some of the most popular celebrities of that era—Dr. David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, John Hanning Speke, and Richard Burton—all focused the world’s attention on the East African slave wars. They published books that described long columns of slaves shackled together and rivers choked with bloated corpses, and orphaned babies. Sir John Kirk, a medical doctor, accompanied Livingstone on an expedition into the Lake Nyasa region, where they witnessed the slave wars. This experience made Kirk dedicated to eliminating slavery, and later an excellent choice for British Consul to Zanzibar. Sultan Sayyid Barghash-bin-Said already owed his life and throne to the British. After the death of his father in 1856, Barghash attempted a palace coup against his brother Majid and should have been executed. The British sided with Majid, and after they captured Barghash he was exiled in Bombay (and in luxury) for a few years. After returning to Zanzibar and a peaceful life, he inherited his brother’s throne in 1870. Thus, for a while East Africa was an excellent example of the frugality of indirect rule; Britain controlled the region through Kirk, who influenced Barghash, who claimed everything from the Indian Ocean coast to the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

Rethinking the First World War and East Africa

5

THE EUROPEANS CHANGE THEIR MINDS The overseas empire and the navy were the two creations of Kaiser Wilhelm of which he was especially proud, and they helped to cause the Great War that ended his monarchy. For a brief time the newly acquired colonies gave Germans a sense of parity with the other powers, especially Great Britain. To protect these colonies the Germans had to create a navy equal to the other great powers, especially Britain. This represented a reversal of long-established policies and a substantial investment of wealth, time, resources, and manpower, and in the end it was all lost in World War I. Germany, like other colonial powers, could not justify the taking of foreign lands with a candid explanation of greed and envy. A rationalization was needed, something altruistic and noble. This was not new. The Conquistadores of Mexico and South America justified their actions with the three Gs of God, gold, and glory. In the nineteenth century, empires were justified with the three Cs: Christianity, commerce, and civilization. The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade evolved into suppression of all slavery everywhere. Thus one justification was that Germany would protect Africans from slavery and replace the system with legitimate commerce that would also help to civilize them with the assistance of Christian missionaries. At a time when nationalism was constantly growing in intensity, there was even a rivalry in church missions and converts. In addition to Protestant versus Roman Catholic, German missionaries competed with the French, British, and Belgians. The unification of Germany was a primary focus for so long that it precluded any serious interests in overseas passions. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 represented a completion of this objective and the need to create new grand strategies based on recent events. The acquisition of overseas possessions was the most significant change, portrayed as the generous actions of a newly strengthened and energized world power. This required the creativity of many men, but none more important than Prince Otto von Bismarck, the imperial chancellor. It was not a completely new strategy. For decades Bismarck distracted Germany’s rivals with diplomacy that pitted them against each other. One example was the 1881 League of the Three Emperors that allied Russia with Germany and Austria-Hungary. This not only precluded a war between Russia and the other two, but it redirected its energies against Great Britain in the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Austria’s rival Italy was similarly pacified by the Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy. France was a far more difficult problem, since it not only lost the Franco-Prussian War but the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, yet even here Bismarck showed skill and creativity. As much as possible Bismarck supported France’s side in international disputes such as the Egyptian Crisis. And in the competition for colo-

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nies Germany avoided areas of French interests. This created relations where Britain was emphasized as everyone’s rival, but Germany was allied with, or at least supportive of everyone else. Of course, this also fed an AngloGerman rivalry where colonies and sea power became essential. By 1884 Bismarck was prepared to reverse his opinions on colonialism because his original objections were altered if not ended. Few colonies had been profitable, and he feared they would become a burden to taxpayers, but the Industrial Revolution created new demands for raw materials and customers. Previously Germany and other countries advocated an Open Door free-trade policy in Africa and Asia, but not only did France and Portugal exclude competition in their colonies, it appeared as though Britain and others were going that way too. If Germany did not take foreign lands, then these raw materials would have to be purchased from its rivals, and those African and Asian customers would not be available. There was a rationalization that colonies would be the responsibility of private charter companies to govern, not the taxpayers. Bismarck avoided the word colony and only referred to protectorates, private commercial empires like the British East India Company, with limited government liability and responsibilities. This was how the British administered India and the Dutch ruled Indonesia until public scandals in both countries revealed how corrupt company officials falsified accounting, creating bankruptcies that required each government to take over these colonies. So even though the Germans intended to avoid the errors of their fellow colonial powers they made the same mistakes anyway. Perhaps it was even a self-deception. Every colonial power had the internal debate that separated the imperial enthusiasts from the critics, who were often called “Little Englanders” or “Little Hollanders.” This allowed everyone to feel that their opinions were heard, even if the empires expanded, and the Europeans rarely gave up a colony once taken. So even as new lands were added fellow countrymen could protest against all colonialism. No political party elected to govern ever wanted to take down their nation’s flag, regardless of principles, for fear that such an unpatriotic withdrawal would be used against them in the next election. Colonies might solve one problem that vexed Bismarck, the loss of population to emigration. Each year forty to fifty thousand Germans emigrated, and once gone few ever returned. Therefore, proponents argued for a German Canada, or Germany’s Australia, or the empire’s own India somewhere. Previously Bismarck saw little support for colonialism, but with the 1870s and 1880s this changed as cheap tabloid newspapers joined with merchants and missionaries to call for Germany to catch up with other Europeans. A newly created private organization, the German Colonial Union, joined the politicians in the Reichstag who demanded parity with the other great powers. The excitement of a gold or diamond discovery going, again, to an inferior nation was not logical. They pointed to the supposedly highly profit-

Rethinking the First World War and East Africa

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able company King Leopold II of Belgium had created in the Congo, which, however, was merely a façade that deceived everyone at that time. Those Germans who favored an overseas empire were always a minority, but their interests often complemented those of other groups so that a widely based coalition evolved over time. By spring 1884 all these interests converged, as many voters feared this opportunity would soon be gone forever. Another of Bismarck’s objections was that without an effective navy an overseas empire was a strategic liability. However, this could present new opportunities as well. The economy was depressed for years, but a massive government project like building a modern navy was a major investment in German industries, and a significant jobs program. Since grabbing colonies would be irresponsible without a navy, Bismarck saw how the voters would approve of this decision. Although he disliked democracy, even the Iron Chancellor needed to win elections. Since these colonies and navy would increase the rivalry with Great Britain it also served yet another purpose. Kaiser Wilhelm I approved of Bismarck’s conservative political actions, but he was eighty-seven years old. Crown Prince Friedrich was known to strongly favor liberalism and was married to a daughter of Queen Victoria, and all three hated Bismarck. Since Wilhelm would die soon, Bismarck feared he would be dismissed as chancellor, and he saw the new navy and colonies as weapons to divide Friedrich from Britain and at the same time give the conservatives in the Reichstag an important advantage. Anglophobia would win elections for conservatives, stimulate the economy, and box in Friedrich. Ultimately this was not needed. When Kaiser Wilhelm I died on March 9, 1888, Crown Prince Friedrich had terminal throat cancer and only held the throne for ninety-nine days. When his son became Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany already occupied most of its overseas colonies. By 1914 Germany had the fourth-largest overseas empire. In addition to the support of the kaiser and the chancellor, the high-risk investments of some adventurous men pushed German colonialism. Based on the Hanseatic League’s tradition of world trade there were German merchants along the coast of Africa and in the South Pacific from the 1850s onward. In 1868 the trading company of C. Woermann of Hamburg established a permanent trade post on the Wouri River delta, near the present-day capital of Douala, Cameroon. Another company, Jantzen & Thormahlen, was created in 1874. Each owned ships that established regular service with Hamburg, and they traded with other parts of West Africa, most notably Togoland on the Slave Coast. After purchasing extensive farmland from neighboring monarchies, they created plantations that emphasized fruit, especially bananas. In March 1883 Adolph Woermann spoke for all the German merchants in West Africa when he warned Bismarck that the other European powers were closing their colonies to competition and that the British intended to take Cameroon. He asked that Germany annex these lands and protect Came-

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roon with a naval base. In November 1882 Adolph Luderitz, a former tobacco merchant from Bremmen, asked Bismarck for less formal protection for his new business venture, exporting guano from the Skeleton Coast of SouthWest Africa (today Namibia). At first Bismarck wanted to reject Luderitz’s plans, but on April 9, 1884, he learned the Cape Colony government of South Africa planned to annex South-West Africa. This was the last incentive to change Bismarck’s mind on the issue of colonialism. Since he was a secretive man who thought out possible strategic scenarios long before they might be executed, Bismarck had a prior arrangement with Dr. Gustav Nachtigal to discreetly authorize him as imperial consul-general for the west coast of Africa to claim Togo, Cameroon, and South-West Africa as German protectorates. 3 Germany became a model student of the empire game and went through the requirements of having local monarchs receive Nachtigal as an emissary from Kaiser Wilhelm I. In exchange for some trade goods they signed (or made their mark) on a fill-in-the-blank treaty form and became imperial subjects who displayed the German flag. The fact that the Africans and Germans had incompatible perspectives did not matter. The Africans did not understand European legal concepts, the rights they had just signed away, or what would happen next. The Germans did not understand the African perspective of monarchs and the difference between personal and collective property rights. What did matter was that Britain, France, and the others would respect Germany’s signed treaties and warships. With the SMS Mowe in harbor on July 5, 1884, Nachtigal signed a treaty with Mlapa III that gave Germany legal title to the coastline of Togoland. On July 14, Nachtigal signed treaties with King Acqua and King Bell of the Cameroon coast. On August 7, the captain of the SMS Elizabeth annexed the port of Angra Pequena (renamed Ludwitz), while the rest of South-West Africa was claimed later that month by the captain of the SMS Wolf. The northeastern quarter of New Guinea (plus neighboring islands) was made a protectorate on November 4 after decades of trade by German companies. Meanwhile Dr. Carl Peters and two companions spent the last months of 1884 marching through Tanganyika also collecting the signatures of leaders on fill-in-the-blank treaty forms to create German East Africa. These became the first German colonies. For the most part, Great Britain had little choice but to accept this theft of lands that were only informally their spheres of influence. Prior to these events, Britain exercised control of Tanganyika through Consul Sir John Kirk, who advised the sultan of Zanzibar, who in turn claimed to rule all of East Africa. Togoland and Cameroon were also informally British and considered a part of Nigeria, while King Acqua and King Bell had also signed treaties with the British Consul for West Africa Edward Hewett. Rather than formally claim all these lands as Crown Colonies and thus accept the added

Rethinking the First World War and East Africa

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burden and greater expenses of responsibility, the informal British Empire, run with the help of traders and missionaries, worked well for decades. Then the scramble for colonies ended this frugal policy. At the time, Britain faced much more serious problems in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ireland, and elsewhere, such that German usurpation on the Skeleton Coast or the jungle islands of the Pacific were minor annoyances to be endured. This was the time that General Charles Gordon, employed by the khedive of Egypt as governor of Equatoria, was besieged in Khartoum by Muhammad Ahmed, the “Mad” Mahdi, and the British government obligated to rescue him. In addition, the government of Egypt was bankrupt and the British did not want their own taxpayers to bail them out, but rather that Europe’s banks should provide Egypt another loan. Prime Minister William Gladstone needed Bismarck’s cooperation with Egyptian financing so badly he was willing to accept some minor colonial losses in exchange. From Britain’s perspective it was all a question of priorities. India was so important that Britain acquired the Cape Colony of South Africa in 1815 to help secure the trade routes. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 so significantly shortened the route to India that British control of the canal was always the greatest priority. In order to secure the canal they needed Egypt, which required protection of the Nile River all the way to its source, Lake Victoria. Previously, Britain indirectly influenced the Great Lakes region through the sultan of Zanzibar, just as the khedive of Egypt was their tool. These methods minimized British expenses, but with the increased colonial rivalries they no longer worked. That is why German interest in East Africa was more provocative and escalated the Anglo-German rivalry. When Carl Peters snatched Tanganyika, not only did the British have no choice but to secure Kenya, it made the Great Lakes region and all of Central Africa the next center of competition for Germany and Britain as well as France and Belgium. Thus, to secure India, control of East Africa, including the Great Lakes was needed, which German colonialism now threatened. One of Bismarck’s objections to colonialism was that it made things more complicated. Certainly that was true in diplomacy and domestic politics, where the new empire was a campaign issue in the October 28, 1884, Reichstag elections. Those political parties that were to various degrees opposed to colonialism, the New Liberals, the Socialists, and many small Leftists parties shrank from 127 seats to 91. Those who generally supported Bismarck, if not colonialism, the Conservatives, the Imperialists, and the National Liberals, increased from 119 to 157 seats. Yet even here Bismarck was robbed of satisfaction. He believed that private charter companies would administer, develop, and (at least partially) protect the empire so as to keep taxpayers’ expenses to a minimum, not unlike the British informal empire. Instead, within a few years all the private charters failed in their responsibilities, went bankrupt, or were never established, and the status was altered to crown

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colonies. This meant that the Reichstag would control colonial finances and the opponents of colonialism could use this issue to embarrass the Iron Chancellor and make his administration more complicated. Bismarck’s next move was to call an international conference to determine the status of West Africa. The conference method of collective security had worked reasonably well since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. There were conferences about the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and Egypt’s debt; in fact one of the causes of the “scramble for Africa” was a humanitarian Brussels Conference called by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1876 to bring an end to African slavery. Leopold created a personal commercial monopoly along the Congo River and its tributaries that became known in 1886, without a trace of irony intended, as the Congo Free State. The Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885 would be able to preclude a European war if the great powers could divide Africa’s interior based on the claims along the coast and treaties signed with African monarchs. None of the participants were to declare any new protectorates without warning the others or without making some pretense of occupation. Typical of the Empire Game, decisions were made to benefit Europe, thus lines were drawn on maps with the rationalization that one of the purposes was to bring civilization and order to a savage continent. Just before the Berlin West Africa Conference concluded, Bismarck signed in secret a charter for the East Africa Protectorate on February 17, 1885. In the following months, agents of Carl Peters’s German East Africa Company continued to expand their claims deep into the interior to the Great Lakes by a combination of treaties and raising the German flag. All of this land was recognized previously as under the domain of the sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Barghash-bin-Said. To deal with this inconvenience the Germans responded in a traditional colonial fashion. On August 7, 1885, SMSs Gneisenau, Prinz Adalbert, Stosch, and two others entered Zanzibar lagoon and anchored near the sultan’s palace. Beyond the warship’s guns they carried a more serious threat, a passenger, Frau Emily Reute (formerly Salma binti Sa’id), the sultan’s daughter with a secondary wife, a Circassian. A scandal began twelve years before when she fell in love with a German merchant and became pregnant before escaping and later marrying him. Their son, Rudolph Said Ruete, the sultan’s grandson, could be made a rival and give the Germans a claim to all of East Africa. Britain had no appetite for a conflict with Germany at this time, and the government of Prime Minister Robert Salisbury urged the sultan to accept the loss of his mainland empire rather than risk the loss of everything. With the new protectorate established the warships sailed on September 24 taking away Frau Reute and her son. 4 In November 1886 the northern border with Kenya to Lake Victoria was amicably settled and a month later the southern border with Portuguese East Africa

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(Mozambique) was established. By this time Bismarck grew weary of colonialism and did not support any acquisitions after these. Rebellions against German authority came in stages after the Germans extended their control and created resentment among those who lost power to them. These conflicts created the military organization that eventually fought the Great War and became famous for professionalism and impressive accomplishments, the origin of the legend. During 1884–1886 the German East Africa Company extended its control over more area and established trade outposts. As the British had done with their informal empire, at first they cloaked themselves in the legitimacy of the sultan of Zanzibar and claimed they were his authorized agents. This did not last long and was not respected by all the people. Many new German taxes were imposed, adding to the anger. It was inevitable that the people whose livelihood was threatened by the new German government would rebel against these changes. One man, Abushiri bin Salim al-Harthi, represented this growing anger, and his name became associated with the first anti-German rebellion. The Abushiri Rebellion attracted many malcontents whose only commonality was a hatred of the German interlopers. Some were also in rebellion against the sultan of Zanzibar. Thus despite the name this rebellion lacked leadership and cohesion, as few accepted Abushiri as the leader. It was described at the time as an Arab revolt by slave traders, but the participants included Africans as well. For example, several clans of the Yao joined, since German administration harmed their ivory trade profits. Conflicts escalated during August and September 1888 when two Germans employed by the company were killed in Kilwa and in response marines were landed at Bagamoyo. The Germans lost control of the colony except the ports of Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam. The protectorate was a private company that created their own military forces to protect the merchants and administrators, but in a crisis like this, the navy could land marines as an emergency response force. The marines were not interested in projecting force everywhere inside these colonies. Later when the private company failed and the colony became an imperial responsibility, these armed forces were the nucleus of the government colonial military. In this case, Bismarck emphasized the antislavery/anti-Arab interpretation for the Reichstag to finance an expedition under the command of Major Hermann von Wissmann. To a German core of twenty-one officers, forty noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and eighteen doctors/orderlies they added six hundred Sudanese veterans of the Egyptian army. They also wanted Zulu but the South African government forbade recruitment, so instead four hundred Shangaan, a branch of the Zulu who decades earlier immigrated to Mozambique, were recruited. A military reputation made both ethnicities desirable, and being from outside the region meant these soldiers would not have conflicting loyalties. They were Germany’s first askaris, the East African word for professional soldier. Later, Somali were also recruited. 5

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The Germans still held Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo but little else when Wissmann began in April 1889. The rebels built fortifications of logs and mud palisades, which worked well in the preceding decades but were vulnerable to modern small-caliber cannon, while the obsolete guns of the slave trade were outmatched by more modern German rifles. Sometimes violence was not needed, as Wissmann made alliances against the rebels, thus outmaneuvering them politically, and the appearance of his force was enough to regain compliance with imperial rule. Abushiri was caught and executed December 15, 1889, and operations took another year to be officially completed. Instead this conflict continued and blended with other “pacification” operations until the next rebellion. One fatality of the Abushiri rebels was the German East Africa Company itself, which ceased to exist on January 1, 1891, and Tanganyika became the German East Africa (GEA) protectorate under Berlin’s rule. 6 The Reichstag could now influence Tanganyika directly. Since Wissmann spent more than four times his budget on the Abushiri pacification he was recalled. His replacement was a civilian, the former governor of Cameroon with a reputation for frugality, Julius von Soden. The former company’s military was now the Schutztruppe (defense force) with a veteran of the Abushiri campaign as its new commander, Emil von Zelewski. He wanted to extend these pacification operations against a different people, the Hehe of the Southern Highlands. From 1878 to 1882 the Hehe warred against their neighbors the Ngoni to a point of mutual exhaustion. They negotiated a peace that divided the Southern Highlands and allowed for Hehe expansion northward toward the wealth of the caravan routes. The German arrival in 1890 threatened the growing power of the largest state in the south of the colony. Both Hehe and Ngoni military organization was directly influenced by the Zulu military revolution, called the Mfecane, instigated by the Zulu monarch Shaka in South Africa at the beginning of the century. They relied on a short stabbing spear, called an assegai, and a shield, with tight, highly disciplined regiments and aggressive tactics. Every man was a soldier, serving first in the king’s army as teenagers and into their twenties, and then in the reserves for the rest of their lives. Thus, a peacetime standing army of a few thousand men could expand to tens of thousands of soldiers. The fact that they still used edged weapons in the age of the machine gun made them appear vulnerable. 7 In the summer of 1891 Zelewski invaded the Hehe homeland with 13 Germans, 320 askaris, two machine guns, and two cannon. At first all seemed conventional, but the Hehe found an opportunity for an ambush that would negate the German technological advantage. On the morning of August 17 the German column passed through a narrow rocky set of small hills that hid 3,000 Hehe soldiers. In about ten minutes they overwhelmed most of the column. Zelewski was killed by a sixteen-year-old Hehe. The German

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rearguard retreated to a hill and tried to rally survivors before evacuating 3 Germans and 64 askaris. The Hehe lost some 260 men. 8 Instead of immediate and extreme revenge the Germans paused for almost a year. Soden opened negotiations through the Holy Ghost missionaries at Kilosa and the Hehe king Mkwawa responded. While there was some reason to believe reconciliation might be genuine and possible Soden was also angry at his own military. It was all futile. In June 1892 the Schutztruppe attacked and Mkwawa retaliated. In early 1893 Soden was replaced with Colonel Freiherr von Schele who began very aggressive operations reinforced by diplomacy with other ethnicities to recruit them as allies, intending to isolate the Hehe and specifically Mkwawa. Some allies were victims of the Hehe in the preceding decades and now saw the Germans as tools of their revenge. On October 29, 1894, Schele’s force of over six hundred askaris attacked the Hehe-fortified capital, Iringa, with artillery and machine gun fire. That night a weak spot was found on the town’s southern side, and the Germans attacked there the next morning, taking the town and sending Mkwawa running. Yet the Reichstag again intervened. Schele’s aggressiveness was criticized, even though he was also awarded the highest military decoration, Germany’s Pour le Merite. When Schele resigned in protest the Germans turned to diplomacy and convinced many clans of the Hehe to accept their sovereignty; they signed treaties, displayed the German flag, released prisoners, and returned captured weapons. Mkwawa continued to resist for years but always on the margins, occasionally assisted by fanatics, and killing some Germans before his suicide in July 1898. 9 The Hehe campaign and the pursuit of Mkwawa extended German control over a wider area in a process that was typical of colonial warfare. While the German constabulary sought to restrain one people, the Hehe, which then became the pursuit of one man, Mkwawa, the effect was a large expansion of German power through the subordination and then incorporation of many ethnicities. Meanwhile the German people could take pride that extending their empire had brought order and peace to a land of chaos and their methods were less violent than they would have been without the moderating influence of the Reichstag’s criticism. An influence on military success was the economic changes that German colonialism brought to Tanganyika. Colonialism created a more diverse economy and a need for cash to replace barter. Cash was needed to pay German taxes, and it was widely believed to moderate behavior, as Africans acquired a desire for consumer goods. Not only traditional items such as cloth and metal tools but also kerosene lamps and hard liquor would create a desire to earn even more money and thus promote civilization. Some people easily accepted change and the German intervention as a logical and desirable development. Trade expanded quickly while new crops were introduced and old crops expanded. There were also many building projects that in-

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creased the wages of unskilled labor and especially skilled craftsmen. The new Colonial Department in Berlin was enthusiastic about infrastructure, so telegraph and even telephone lines were emphasized, as were railroads, river steamers, lake steamers, and harbor improvements. A symbol of all these developments was cotton. The Reichstag demanded economic self-sustainability and many societies were forced to cultivate government crops but were only paid a pittance for their work. This policy led to another inevitable rebellion, which held long-term implications for World War I. The Maji Maji Rebellion began with a reaction against German power. It was located only in the southern and eastern portion of the colony, based in the town of Kibata, south of the Rufiji River. These were lands that had only recently received German garrisons, missionaries, and government agents. Given the annual rainfall and the nature of the soil, this area could not support a sizable population, and the societies tended to be dispersed with decentralized monarchies, while other societies, such as the Ngindo, were described as stateless. Therefore this rebellion could not be directed by monarchs who ordered their people to cooperate, but rather involved many societies deciding themselves to temporarily unite against a common enemy. It did not offer a positive objective so much as a reactionary movement against the Germans, and to a lesser degree against the sultan of Zanzibar for allowing this foreign occupation. Few Christians or Muslims participated, but there was a religious appeal based on a local belief called Bokero and the snake spirit Hongo, which the Germans preferred to call witchcraft. A shadowy spirit guide, or witch doctor, Kinjikitile Ngwale (later called Bokero) began to attract people to a shrine where he preached unity in order to defeat the Germans. Based on the existing belief in “medicines” that protected people or their farms, he now offered a “war medicine” that would turn German bullets into water. Maji is the Swahili word for water, but the addition of castor, millet seeds, and oil made it maji maji (strong, or magic, water), a water strong enough to protect true believers from harm. The distribution of maji maji united the users in a common belief, a sacred bond, and wearing millet stalks around their forehead, and/or castor beans, became almost a uniform. 10 The first acts of rebellion began with the destruction of cotton plants in government plots in late July 1905. At first the Germans took little notice; such actions were unexceptional. So too when some local government agents, called akidas (usually Arabs, Indians, or Swahili), were attacked, it seemed of little consequence. The akidas collected taxes and enforced the cotton quotas, and they were corrupt and abusive in their power, so such minor disturbances were unfortunate but common. By early August, however, the local attacks escalated, including the deaths of askaris and akidas. Governor Adolph Graf von Gotzen grew more worried. There were only 588 askaris and 458 police in the region, mostly in coastal towns, with only some

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200 in widely dispersed guard posts called bomas, made of mud, timber, and thatch and maybe a little barbed wire. The bomas’ locations were not logical as much as ad hoc, and vulnerable. Nonetheless, Kinjikitile was an early casualty when he was arrested for treason against Kaiser Wilhelm and executed in Mohoro on August 4. Before his death he bragged that it was too late, as his medicine was already widely distributed. For a while this seemed to be true. On August 13 the Ngindo attacked the boma in Liwale, killing the garrison. The next day, other Ngindo came upon and killed the Roman Catholic bishop of Dar es Salaam, Cassian Spiss, with two Benedictine monks and two Sisters of Mercy nuns. This incident caused a panic throughout the colony. Gotzen telegraphed Berlin for assistance and two cruisers were redirected to land two hundred marines and more machine guns. 11 For a while it seemed as though the maji maji worked; the lands in rebellion were soon cleared of the Germans and their goons. On August 16 some clans of the Mbunga attacked the boma at Ifakara and killed all thirteen askaris and their German NCO. Other Mbunga ambushed Captain Hassel and sixty askaris on August 24, but after a fearsome firefight he escaped back to Mahenge. Hassel hanged suspected rebels and refortified his boma, which included a wooden tower with a retractable ladder. Inside the tower were a machine gun, ammunition, and four askaris with cans of food and wine. The next day the Mbunga launched sustained attacks that got close to the boma, with many men killed despite the maji maji. Next Mahenge was besieged until September 23. 12 The siege of Mahenge was the high-water mark of the rebellion. Already rebels did not believe in the magic, since so many were killed. Many important ethnicities such as the Hehe remained neutral. Gotzen planned an attack to envelop the region, but his purpose was not mere combat with the rebels. Rather he first sought to separate them from their base of support by offering lenient terms to those societies that gave up the individual offenders. Common soldiers would be pardoned if their leaders, “witch doctors,” and weapons were surrendered, and after a new affirmation of loyalty, their societies would then be forgiven. For the worst resisting societies famine was the real weapon. Gotzen’s army divided into three columns and entered the Maji Maji regions confiscating all grain in storage; also, all livestock were given to loyalists or destroyed. All crops in the field and any other items of value were destroyed, and anyone not killed in combat now faced starvation. The more a society participated in the rebellion, the more extreme their suffering. All the leaders of the rebellion were executed by the Germans or murdered by their own people. Hundreds of thousands died. So extensive was the devastation that the farms and cotton fields were soon reclaimed by forests and prairies. Gotzen’s revenge was so complete that when German and Allied forces passed through the area in 1917–1918 there was little food to be

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found—and it was now the Africans who sought revenge upon the Germans as they assisted the British. 13 With the loss of a bishop and 4 clergy, plus 10 Europeans, 73 askaris, and 316 auxiliaries the Maji Maji Rebellion normally would have been the most sensational item in the German newspapers, but surprisingly it was muted by even worse scandals in the rest of the empire. In German South-West Africa General Lothar von Trotha led an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama. This event began January 1904 and dominated the newspapers before and during the Maji Maji Rebellion. War in South-West Africa was entirely conducted by German soldiers, with some 14,000 serving in the colony and 1,500 killed in combat or by diseases like typhus. Then as these rebellions cooled, the newspapers next learned of scandals in Togo and Cameroon that involved governors and other officials in illicit sex and abuse of government offices. In what became known as the “Hottentots Election” of 1907, a realignment occurred as political parties opposed to colonialism—the Social Democrats, the Center Party—failed to unite, while the pro-imperialists— Conservative, National Liberal, and Progressive parties—gained Reichstag seats as the parties of order, responsibility, and reform. They also emphasized imperialism as patriotism, which was seductive. After this, the Colonial Department was separated from the Foreign Ministry and was elevated to its own Colonial Ministry with Bernhard Dernburg its first secretary of state. Dernburg was a passionate, energetic true believer in colonialism and he wanted to give order to the ministry that gave order to the kaiser’s empire. Dernburg wanted to create a professional Colonial Service composed of civil servants trained and educated in “scientific colonialism.” To make the empire profitable, the government first had to accept a significant investment of taxpayer money to develop the land and elevate the people. Only then could the settlers expand the economy as the Africans and Pacific Islanders became integrated into participation through their own production of cash crops for export. 14 These rebellions also caused military reforms that became the basis of Germany’s World War I overseas experience. Although this was not appreciated back in Germany, those in Tanganyika knew that the Schutztruppe was poorly prepared for the Maji Maji Rebellion and were taken by surprise. Most outposts, bomas, were set up poorly and vulnerable. The source of water for some bomas was outside the fort. The soldiers were not logically allocated so much as dispatched based on the latest events. Even recruitment policies were questioned, as the askaris were also blamed for contributing to the civilian discontent that caused the rebellion by abusing the people they “protected.” There was no order. The German colonial army was unique for the time and was the most advanced in the pre–World War I era. It was also the single most important factor in their future success in East Africa. It was standardized, mobile, and

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nearly autonomous as a self-contained, self-reliant mini-army, all in reaction to the Maji Maji Rebellion and other experiences. The foundation was that every company had eight to twelve German officers and NCOs, one hundred sixty to two hundred askaris, two machine guns, and professional carriers. Every company had medical doctors and orderlies, artisans for repairs, and two collapsible boats. In theory they could make forced marches for long periods without supply lines and were capable of responding to any unexpected problem. Each company got a new boma that was a well-designed fortress. Every boma had protective walls, cleared fields of fire, barbed wire, and prepared gun sites, with an internal source of water and generous stocks of food and ammunition. Each company was assigned a district to patrol. There were fourteen field companies, and their distribution reflected German priorities. The districts with settlers were smaller in area for more effective protection, while southern districts, the most recently conquered with the fewest settlers, were the largest. Each company had their own professional carriers, who wore simple uniforms and were subject to military discipline. To this standard foundation there were modifications as some field companies added artillery, mounted infantry (when the climate allowed), or additional machine guns. As will be explained more fully in future chapters, another change because of the Maji Maji Rebellion was the men. From now on the Germans sent only elite officers and NCOs, while the new askaris were recruited from inside Tanganyika. A new standard of camp discipline and hygiene was strictly enforced. Another reform was the expansion and standardization of the (paramilitary) police force, which in the Great War became an important supplement to the Schutztruppe. Since logistics and transportation were significant problems for all of the East Africa combatants in World War I, these reforms were essential to German successes. The last years before the war are often portrayed as peaceful and progressive. This is only partially correct. Tanganyika experienced impressive economic growth as more Europeans moved there and many infrastructure projects blossomed. These accomplishments significantly assisted the military in the Great War. There was peace in the sense that the new overlords prevented African societies from warring against each other, but pacification campaigns continued; they were just smaller, more efficient, and less notable. In January 1914 a new German commander arrived. Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck had an extensive and impressive resume and was one of, if not the most experienced German colonial officer. He was the beneficiary of military reforms and civilian improvements. Given that Germany took Tanganyika, Britain had no choice but to take Kenya. They were content with the nineteenth-century model of informal empire with their consul in Zanzibar dominating the sultan, and thus all of East Africa, while Indians were the major actors in the coastal trade. How inconsiderate of the Germans to then disrupt these arrangements, but at least

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the retention of Zanzibar was a British advantage. Because Kenya was only grudgingly added to the empire as a component of greater competition, there was reluctance at first, but when the Germans next made a play for Uganda, things changed. In the logic of the Empire Game, Kenya indirectly contributed to the defense of India. The Ganda kingdom of Uganda was located on the north shore of Lake Victoria, and a projected railroad from Mombasa, Kenya, would give Britain control of the Great Lakes region and the Nile River, thus dominion over Egypt and the Suez Canal, the shortcut to India. Thus, after Germany established a protectorate in East Africa, the British needed Kenya and Uganda in order to protect India. What followed was the typical pattern of private companies attempting to govern, including recruitment of a military, before bankruptcy forces the government to intervene. The Imperial British East Africa Company began in late 1888 but never made a profit. In 1890 Germany and Great Britain amicably divided the Lakes region such that British hegemony over Uganda was acknowledged, and in 1894 Parliament divided the region into two protectorates, Uganda and British East Africa (Kenya), including the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. The company had a small military based originally on some Sudanese veterans who became the foundation of the Uganda Rifles and the East African Rifles. In 1902 these two units were reorganized with the Central African Rifles of Nyasaland (Malawi) into the new King’s African Rifles, the famous KAR, which carried a great burden in World War I. However their development was different from the German experience, since the British Empire was different. If the KAR had to face a truly overwhelming challenge, they could always rely on the British Indian Army as an imperial strategic reserve. There was no German equivalent. Landing marines was of only limited use, and sending numbers of soldiers from Germany was not practical. 1914 TO 1915: NAÏVETÉ VERSUS EFFICIENCY No one expected a long war. In an accurate analysis of the Great War in East Africa it must always be remembered that all the experts predicted a short conflict, a few months or perhaps a year or so, and of course they expected that their side would win. The fact that it became a long and traumatic war caused a change in perspectives and in objectives, thus a change in how success was evaluated. The expectations of 1914 were not those of 1918. None of the colonies was prepared to fight the Great War in 1914 because none was expected to do anything more than wait for a major decision from Europe. The war could not be decided in the colonies. There were many shared expectations. The governors of Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, and Bel-

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gian Congo all hoped to remain neutral so as to not interrupt progress on projects or set a bad example for the Africans of White men killing each other, or even worse, Black soldiers killing Whites. In the 1885 General Act of Berlin there was a neutrality clause that seemed to apply to the circumstances in the summer of 1914 so that such sentimentality was reasonable. All these governors also experienced similar conflicts with their respective military commanders, who wanted to contribute to the war and mobilize the colonial armies along the borders to threaten their neighbors. Given what happened next they seem naive, like the last gallant acts of true gentlemen of the Victorian-Edwardian era. They did not know how the brutality of modern total war would overwhelm all of these men and their ideals as a tsunami of change washed away their values. The naval war would not permit neutrality. Dar es Salaam hosted a major radio station with which the German Navy was able to control resources around the world. The ports could assist cruisers, auxiliary cruisers, and blockade runners. These alone negated neutrality. Also the British prewar plans included sending Indian Army expeditionary corps to Europe and to East Africa when war was declared. Racism played a role, as it was assumed that Indian soldiers were naturally superior to Africans and that this conflict would be similar to a policing action by a colonial constabulary. Among the settlers there was great excitement, with volunteer units coming forward as if for the last, and greatest, safari. So even though none of the colonies was prepared for war, they all nonetheless began with an innocence that was later viewed as so divorced from reality as to be a source of ridicule. There were minor skirmishes along all the borders once the war began, with the first significant event on August 15, 1914, when German forces crossed the Kenya border near Kilimanjaro and captured the town of Taveta. A small piece, a tiny crumb, of the British Empire was occupied by the enemy. Commanded by Brigadier J. M. Stewart, Indian Expeditionary Force C (four thousand men) arrived in Mombasa September 1, to reinforce the KAR and protect the settlers near the border. Meanwhile Indian Expeditionary Force B (eight thousand men) under Major General Arthur Edward Aitken was originally organized to take Dar es Salaam but was later directed against the port of Tanga. What followed was significant, as it established reputations and expectations that characterized this theater for the remainder of the war. The British committed many errors, and the Germans made few mistakes. While some units in Force B were of an excellent quality, some were of poor capability without modern equipment; some did not even have machine guns. If their enemy had been only insubordinate natives, armed with edged weapons and muskets, such an obsolete colonial constabulary would have still been enough, but the sad truth was that the British Indian Army was not prepared for modern war. Expeditionary Force A, sent to France, was composed of the best units (two infantry and two cavalry divi-

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sions), but still did not have heavy artillery or modern telecommunications equipment and suffered mightily in the early battles. Many of the units in Forces B and C were not even under direct British control but were Imperial Services Brigades contributed by the Princely States, so training and discipline varied greatly. These arrangements were more logical and understandable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but were tragic by 1914. Other errors were that some units were loaded aboard ships in Bombay a month before their destination was determined, and their health suffered accordingly. Some units had their obsolete rifles replaced and they were too unfamiliar with the modern ones. There was no reconnaissance, no surprise, and no cooperation with the Royal Navy. November 2, 1914, the first British landing elements were observed and the local German commander sounded the warning that brought some reinforcements by the next morning with more on the way. Even though the British and Indians outnumbered the enemy, as more units disembarked (so too more German field companies arrived), they did not take advantage and attack aggressively. Lettow-Vorbeck arrived on November 3 and conducted a personal reconnaissance on a bicycle. Aitken attempted an advance on November 4 with his better units on the flanks and the poor ones in the middle, but there was no cohesion and they became separated and confused. German gunfire from prepared positions was well directed. As if that were not enough, gunfire hit beehives, sending angry swarms to attack anyone. When some African carriers panicked and ran, they were mistaken for German askaris, causing the British and Indians to assume enemy breakthroughs all along the line. The fear spread faster than the bees, and entire units broke and ran for the landing beaches with Germans in pursuit. On November 5 a hasty reembarkation began, but the panic remained. Vast quantities of weapons, ammunition, and supplies were simply abandoned and virtually gifted to their enemy. 15 A legend was born: David versus Goliath. Since eight thousand men with sixteen machine guns, a mountain artillery battery, and the big guns of the Royal Navy were defeated by (eventually) a thousand men with only four machine guns and no artillery, the Battle of Tanga became a parable. The British were incompetent, and the Germans were efficient. These reputations remained. Not only did the askaris appear especially fearsome, but under German leadership they were disciplined and fanatical, almost superhuman. Rumors spread that even the bees were trained to attack the British on command. Aitken was understandably blamed for the fiasco and removed from command, but the shame of defeat did not leave with him. Expeditionary Forces B and C were amalgamated into a new command under Major-General Richard Wapshare, who had commanded one of the two brigades at Tanga. His instructions were to take a defensive stance, as no additional assistance could be spared and his resources were judged adequate. Instead, Lettow-

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Vorbeck feared a British attack from Yasini (also Jassin or Jassini) to Tanga, so he organized a preemptive strike on January 12–18, 1915. Although successful, it was expensive, as he lost several good officers and fired about two hundred thousand rounds of small-arms ammunition. These losses could not be replaced. Also with the New Year, predictions of an imminent conclusion to the war faded, and Lettow-Vorbeck needed to contemplate a different future, perhaps a long war. Victorious or not, if they had just a few more battles like Tanga or Yasini he would no longer have an army. Not knowing how long he might have to fight, Lettow-Vorbeck was especially casualty averse. Next the British distributed units to protect the Uganda Railroad. This lifeline that ran from the port of Mombasa to Nairobi and on to Lake Victoria was vulnerable since it was so close to the border. This gave the initiative to the enemy and added to the legend of German superiority in the face of British incompetence. Many Indian units, especially those from the Princely States, were poorly disciplined, and their outposts neglected the most basic tasks such as posting sentries, putting up barbed wire, clearing fields of fire, or even arming sentries with rifles. German raiding parties enjoyed dramatic achievements, capturing outposts; destroying bridges, locomotives, and rolling stock; as well as capturing horses, mules, and supply columns. They too made errors—the first raids failed—but they learned from these early experiences and improved. This added to the David-vs.-Goliath theme, as small numbers of highly accomplished Germans humiliated the more numerous British. Since there was no expectation of resupply, German settlers made their own supplies as much as possible. Improvisation became another important chapter in the legend. Civilians were put to work supplying the army with almost everything. Beyond the obvious items of food and beer, they made their own medicines, uniforms, fuel, camping gear, and so on. In 1915 there were also important events in the northwest and southwest. The Belgians desired an offensive into German territory in the northwest even though the war made a virtual beggar of the Force Publique. Meanwhile, when in September 1914 German forces in the southwest attacked Abercorn, Northern Rhodesia, the local defenders got assistance from the Belgians. Even though they were of secondary importance, there was raiding by both sides, and the northwest and southwest commands spent most of 1915 building up their resources. In this first phase of the war there were some naval actions that were very dramatic but of limited consequence. They were divided between a tiny fleet of improvised war craft on the Great Lakes and the hunt for a beautiful cruiser on the Indian Ocean. Analysts have also interpreted these operations as distracting Allied resources, since some naval units had to be devoted to East Africa as long as the Germans were defiant.

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The cruiser SMS Konigsberg (named after the Prussian port city, which is today Kaliningrad) was visiting Dar es Salaam before the declaration of war. It was as deadly as it was beautiful. Built in Kiel in 1907, 3,400 tons, it could make 24 knots and carried ten 4.1-inch guns, two 3.5-inch guns, four machine guns, and two 17.7-inch torpedo tubes. Able to hunt for enemy cargo ships and faster than most warships, the Konigsberg’s presence in the Indian Ocean was obviously intolerable to the British. Also, its crew was elite, since overseas service for the navy, as it was for the army, was a privilege reserved for only the best officers and sailors. On July 31, 1914, Captain Max Looff took the Konigsberg out of harbor and escaped the three slower elderly British cruisers of the Cape Squadron tasked with shadowing it. Despite its potential as a commerce raider, it had only one victim, the City of Winchester (6,600 tons), the first British ship captured in the war, on August 6 in the Gulf of Aden. Typical of the time period, the need to refuel with coal hampered operations, as it could only cruise for a few days before resupply. One last opportunity came on September 20, when Looff learned that one of his pursuers, the old and small cruiser HMS Pegasus (1897, 2,170 tons, eight four-inch guns), was in Zanzibar harbor under repair and especially vulnerable. After only twenty minutes and not much of a battle, even though the Pegasus fired back, it was easily destroyed. As the Konigsberg exited the harbor the picket ship Helmut came out to fight and was also quickly sunk. The one-sided nature of this little battle made the Royal Navy especially motivated to exact revenge. By now Konigsberg needed a significant boiler overhaul and repairs, which could be done in Dar es Salaam, but that was far too vulnerable. Instead, Captain Looff took the ship far up the Rufiji River, camouflaged it and put out shore batteries. The boilers were dismantled and carried by thousands of porters, organized with impressive skill by the German civilian administrators, over a hundred miles to the workshops of Dar es Salaam and back again in the impressive time of ten days. Yet it was too late. The same work that made the Pegasus vulnerable now doomed the Konigsberg. More cruisers were sent and overwhelmed the coast until on October 30 HMS Chatham found Konigsberg six miles up the Rufiji. What followed was a dramatic siege, as Looff could not escape and the only question was how long it might take the Royal Navy to destroy his ship. Creativity was combined with courage as the Admiralty found a big-game hunter, Peter J. Pretorius, to charter channels, and then got aircraft, and later two monitors, HMSs Severn and Mersey (1,260 tons, two 6-inch guns, two 4.7-inch guns), to finish the job on July 11, 1915, after 255 days. Since these events overlapped the Battles of Colonel and the Falkland Islands and the operations of the cruisers SMSs Emden and Karlsruhe, the British were compelled to give the Konigsberg more respect for the harm it could do rather than what it actually did.

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This did not end the German Navy’s contribution. All of the Konigsberg’s guns were salvaged and served the army for the remainder of the war. Her officers and crew were an important addition to the Schutztruppe. The guns of the Pegasus were also salvaged by the British and given to their army; thus, the ghosts of these two enemies continued their dual. The German Admiralty sent a blockade runner, disguised as a Danish cargo ship and renamed Kronberg, to carry essential supplies to the Konigsberg, and also some for the Schutztruppe. The voyage began on February 18, 1915, and on April 14 she put into Manza Bay, near Tanga, with HMS Hyacinth in hot pursuit, hitting the Kronberg several times. Although its cargo for the Konigsberg was too late, the supplies for the army were of great value. Another blockade runner, the Marie von Stettin, arrived on April 17, 1916, with a cargo dedicated to Lettow-Vorbeck’s army. Although this was the last such attempt by ship, the British Navy were required to take precautions against German auxiliary-cruisers or blockade runners getting assistance from the colony until late 1917, when the Allies controlled the entire Indian Ocean coastline. September 21 to November 25, 1917, the Zeppelin L-59 attempted to be the third Admiralty blockade runner in an impressive example of professionalism, creativity, and daring. It was to deliver fifteen tons of precious cargo and then the airship itself was to be cannibalized for supplies and equipment, but the mission failed. The Great Lakes of Africa not only formed international borders but they were natural transportation assets. Early in the war the British gained naval superiority on Lakes Victoria and Nyasa, but the Germans dominated Lake Tanganyika. A big-game hunter, John R. Lee, in April 1915, brought the Admiralty a daring plan to bring the Royal Navy to Lake Tanganyika. This began one of the oddest chapters in naval history. Lee proposed a naval expedition that featured a motorboat that could be disassembled, carried by railroads, rivers, and ultimately human porters to one of the rivers that connected with Lake Tanganyika. First Sea Lord Sir Henry Jackson approved the project and authorized two forty-foot, 15-knot motor launches armed with one 3-pounder (on a fixed forward firing mount) and a machine gun mounted to the stern. Named HMSs Mimi and Toutou they were as odd as the expedition’s leader, Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey B. Spicer-Simson, who did have previous Africa experience but also a service record that was mixed if not poor. Nonetheless, he left England with four officers, twentyfour sailors, and all of their equipment and supplies and reached Cape Town, South Africa, on July 2, 1915. In one of the most impressive logistical accomplishments in history, they maximized the use of railroads and rivers but then moved overland, solving a great many problems along the way, using traction engines, oxen, and thousands of African civilian laborers organized by the local government officials with great efficiency. By October 28 they were at Lukuga, on the Belgian Congo side of Lake Tanganyika.

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Three civilian lake steamers were taken over early in the war by German sailors and turned into the gunboats Kingani (45 tons, one 57 mm gun) and Hedwig von Wissmann (100 tons, two 57 mm, one Hotchkiss revolving cannon), and the Graf von Gotzen (800 tons, one 4.1-inch gun from the Konigsberg) was not completed until June 9, 1915. With about four hundred askaris this lake detachment was aggressive and efficient. Not only did they raid the enemy coastline, they moved spies and others with ease and traded with the Africans in enemy colonies. On December 26, 1915, the Kingani was captured after a short battle, and much like in the Age of Fighting Sail and Admiral Lord Nelson, it was repaired, rearmed, and renamed HMS Fifi. Mimi and Fifi went hunting for the Hedwig von Wissmann on February 9, 1916, and sank it. After this, Spicer-Simson passed up chances to fight the Gotzen, and in other operations he was timid, before he went on an unexplained three-month tour of the coast, preventing the command from conducting any operations. Problems worsened after his return and the British attack on Bismarckburg, late May to early June, when Spicer-Simson avoided combat. Soon after this he was medically evacuated, and the Germans scuttled the Gotzen before the Belgians occupied Kigoma on July 28, 1916. The German uncontested control of Lake Tanganyika lasted seventeen months until the Royal Navy fought over the last eight months. All in all, it was an anticlimactic end to a colorful tale. It nonetheless inspired C. S. Forrester to later write The African Queen. 16 1916: A SUCCESSFUL FAILURE By the end of 1916 the Allies had conquered about three-quarters of German East Africa, including the most valuable lands, yet both sides claimed victory. Although the Allies controlled so much of the colony, the German army had lost few men and weapons and their very presence meant they too were victorious. Yet simultaneously both had failed. Lettow-Vorbeck was not defeated, thus the British had failed, but the Germans had lost most of their overseas empire and were about to lose the last little crumb. Asymmetrical objectives made this a successful failure for both. Based on the disappointments of 1915 the British reevaluated the role of East Africa in the war. This also caused a change in objectives. The German colony of Togo, its sphere of influence in China, and its possessions in the Asian Pacific were all taken in1914 and German South-West Africa surrendered on July 9, 1915. Cameroon resisted until January 1916, but that was due to the logistic difficulties of the environment (the world’s second greatest annual rainfall). In Europe and the Middle East the Allied Forces encountered such defeat and humiliation in 1915 that its success in Africa was not just a contrast, it was a tonic, since progress was undeniable. No longer

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satisfied with just the defense of the Kenyan border, in mid-November 1915 the Committee of Imperial Defense recommended the conquest of German East Africa, even though Secretary of War Lord Kitchener was known to oppose all such sideshow distractions. A veteran of the Western Front, General Horace Smith-Dorrien was originally chosen to be the new theater commander. He began planning offensives and sent staff officers to Kenya with orders to organize for the new campaign. On his passage to Cape Town he fell severely ill with pneumonia and was unable to continue. The new theater commander was Lieutenant-General Jan Christian Smuts. Earlier South Africa had conquered German South-West Africa with relative ease and few casualties and it was hoped the same would occur with GEA. Since South Africa was to provide the majority of soldiers, it was thought appropriate to acknowledge its new role in the war and within the British Empire by giving Smuts command of this theater. This was an important example of identity politics within the empire. Smuts had been an important Boer leader in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and his leadership was proof of a genuine reconciliation and mutual trust between the former enemies, something the appointment of Smith-Dorrien, or any other British general, could not achieve. It was believed that Smut’s knowledge of Africa and experience being the hunted would make him a wise hunter. Beyond these platitudes there were other reasons for his appointment. Within South Africa a Boer rebellion from October to December 1914 tried to take advantage of the distraction of the war in a foolish bid for independence. It was suppressed by loyal Boers, but it left the government in London shaken. Also South African recruitment for the war was disappointing. Whereas South Africans of British descent volunteered with enthusiasm early in the war, the Boers were another story. The fact that German South-West Africa was entrusted to the Union government meant something, but the granting of land in the new colony, as bonuses to veterans, led many to hope the same would happen in Tanganyika. This led to speculation that the Great War might give the Union government its own empire of South-West Africa and GEA within the British Empire. Beyond a land grab, another consideration combined hubris and racism. The Schutztruppe of German South-West Africa was all German professional soldiers (140 officers, almost 3,000 soldiers, and 7,000 male settlers of military age) yet 1,331 were killed in the conflict, compared to the South African loss of only 113 killed in action and 153 dead of illness or accident. Since the soldiers of the GEA Schutztruppe were known to be mostly Black Africans, many South Africans believed this would be an even easier job. The fact that the Anglo-Indian force performed so poorly was more a testimony to British incompetence than German-African proficiency. The new offensive began even before Smuts arrived in Kenya. Brigadier General Wilfred Malleson attempted to retake Taveta, the only piece of the British Empire that the Germans occupied in this war. There was no chance

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of surprise, as there had been a long preparation. At the town of Voi a spur of the Uganda railroad was built stretching toward the border and a water pipeline was created alongside it. Also reinforcements arrived. In addition to South African units, the Second Rhodesian regiment, the 129th Baluch regiment, the Twenty-Fifth Royal Fusiliers, and the Fortieth Pathans were sent along with artillery, armored cars, and aircraft. Sending units from the empire to solve a crisis in one colony was a traditional response for Great Britain, but the real solution was the King’s African Rifles. A modest expansion of the KAR was ordered for 1915, but due to racism many in London resisted the militarization of Africans. Instead they accidentally built a very heterogeneous army, which created yet another problem as these units variously answered to the War, Colonial, and Indian ministries, and they were to include the Royal Navy as well. When many are in charge, no one is in charge. This concentration of errors was revealed in Malleson’s attack, February 12, 1916, where six thousand of his men were defeated by thirteen hundred Germans in well-sited and constructed defensive emplacements. The South Africans lost more soldiers at the Battle of Salaita Hill, near Taveta, than in the entire South-West Africa campaign, and Smuts had not yet arrived. Smuts promised London a victory, and with the rainy season near he launched his own offensive against Taveta on March 5, based in part on the work of his predecessors. Beyond the railroad and water pipeline there were other reasons this region was a logical first objective. The area near Mount Kilimanjaro was called the White Highlands because the climate was reasonably hospitable to European settlers on both sides of the border. Taking a slice of enemy land made the settlers in Kenya feel safer and also took away productive European farmland from the opponent. With twenty-seven thousand soldiers Smuts hoped that a two-column attack would catch the German forces in a pincer maneuver and force them to commit to combat. LettowVorbeck refused to play by these rules and withdrew his forces, sacrificing land to preserve his army. He would occasionally turn and fight, especially from prepared defenses, but a decisive battle was always denied Smuts. This was the way the war in East Africa was fought for the next two and a half years, a constant tactical retreat. By March 22 the British forces were at the town of Kahe (west of the North Pare Mountains) and the Kilimanjaro area was theirs. Kenya was safe. Next the rainy season made movement impossible, so Smuts spent the time reorganizing, first by sending away most of the old British Indian Army (field and staff) officers who began the war. The replacements were mostly South African, but not all were Boers. His army was redivided into three divisions; the First had British, KAR, and Indian units, while the Second and Third were mostly the South Africans and Rhodesians. Significant preparations were made on the northwest and southwest fronts as well. A different

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British force, the fourth, called Lake Force and based on Lake Victoria, was to move south to the important town of Tabora while the Belgians were to march east to the same target. Another force based in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland was intended to go northeast into the center of Tanganyika. With the Royal Navy controlling the coastline, Smuts wanted to constrict the Germans from all directions into a diminishing territory, forcing them into a decisive battle. If only Lettow-Vorbeck would cooperate. After the Battles of Tanga and Yasini, Lettow-Vorbeck knew he had to avoid the type of combat that Smuts now wanted. The loss of the other colonies made German East Africa the more important if the kaiser’s overseas empire was to exist in the future. According to the unwritten rules of war and diplomacy as practiced by Europe in the preceding centuries, if there was still an effective military in GEA at the time of an armistice, then most or probably all of the colony would be restored. They did not know the future; therefore, to continue to exist was a victory. Furthermore, in 1915 LettowVorbeck came to appreciate that he could best assist the war effort by distracting Allied resources away from the more important theaters in Europe, and that seemed to be working. The fact that much of what the Allies brought against him would not have been used in Europe seems to have been unappreciated at that time. The Schutztruppe (estimated three thousand Germans, twelve thousand askaris) was divided into three unequal portions. Most of the soldiers and the better weapons remained with the northern force of Major Georg Kraut on the Kenyan border. Count Falkenstein held a southwestern force, fifteen hundred men, against the Northern Rhodesia–Nyasaland borders. Based in the town of Tabora, Major-General Kurt Wahle commanded the five thousand men of the western force, responsible for the northwest corner against the Belgians and the British forces from Lake Tanganyika to Lake Victoria. The rainy season surprised everyone when it arrived later than usual; it was heavier and stayed later too. Despite this, a well-planned movement began again, in the rain, on April 3, 1916. Smuts had three columns move against two objectives. This could be a point of negative criticism, since it divided his army when Smuts also wanted a decisive battle. The Second Division with all the cavalry regiments was to make a lightning attack on Kondoa Irangi, then move on to the Central Railroad at Dodoma. Capturing the Usambara Railroad, from the White Highlands to the port of Tanga was the objective of the First and Third Divisions. Given the challenge of transportation in this theater the use of railroads was an obvious objective. So obvious that Lettow-Vorbeck spent the rainy season preparing defensive positions and depots in anticipation of battles that would occur weeks or months later. They became experts at the fighting withdrawal. The use of cavalry was a disaster. Horsemanship was at the center of the Boer’s fight against the British Empire in the Anglo-Boer War, and the core

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of their military identity. Cavalry was an important resource that could be imported to provide the desired lightning mobility. It was too good not to use. So why was cavalry absent from the military history of East Africa up to this point? Certainly the Omani-Arabs understood cavalry and could have afforded such a useful weapon, Germany too. The tsetse fly dominated the region that the Second Division conquered and the spread of cattle disease killed tens of thousands of horses, mules, and oxen. Not only did wild animals gorge on the carrion, but there are many stories of them attacking lines of animals harnessed together, such as horse artillery teams. With such losses and remounts difficult to maintain the cavalry lost the advantage of mobility and they were never lightning quick. The Second Division also had trucks, cars, and motorcycles but the limitations, especially in the mud, were considerable. Often teams of draft animals were required to pull trucks out of mud pits. Horses were useful in the White Highlands but the fighting was no longer there. Smuts was not a fool. He knew this region was deadly for horses and all draft animals, but he was willing to trade them for the asset of superior mobility to pin the Germans into a pitched battle. If they were forced into one decisive battle, which presumably Smuts would win, then the loss of horses would have been justified. If it had worked and ended German resistance, and saved South African lives, the dead horses would have been a cheap price to pay. By April 18 what was left of the cavalry seized Kondoa Irangi after a German withdrawal. There were combat casualties, as German ambushes from prepared defenses were very effective, but losses to disease complicated by malnutrition and exhaustion were greater. Units lost half their numbers in a matter of weeks. The men who took the town were not much healthier than their few surviving horses. The Germans took advantage and attacked Second Division on May 9 and 10, inflicting a severe beating before suddenly disengaging. The exhausted Second Division did not move on to its next objective until late June. Against the Usambara Railroad the First and Third Divisions faced similar developments. Since their route was obvious the Germans would set ambushes but not stay long to fight; the actual enemy was disease, made worse due to malnutrition caused by poor logistics. Still they captured land. The offensive began May 22 with the main force following the railroad but then moving southwest, and by June 18 they took Handani and fought the Battle of Makinda on the Lukigura River June 23. Tanga was captured July 3, when three warships of the Royal Navy bombarded the town and landed the Fifth Indian Light Infantry (the infamous mutineers of Singapore 1915) without opposition. If Kitchener’s opinion had still dominated, this would have sufficed since the Kenyan border was now safe. Instead, Smuts hoped the Central Railroad was important enough to compel a major battle.

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From Makinda, the First and Third Divisions attempted another pincer maneuver around the Nguru Mountains and its difficult terrain, but again there was disappointment. The Second Division resumed its advance with some difficulties, occupying Dodoma on the Central Railroad July 29, and then turned eastward. Smuts hoped a major battle could be forced in between the Second Division in the west and First and Third Divisions in the east, with the town of Morogoro the target the Germans would be required to defend. Instead Second Division’s turn eastward was snarled by difficult country, shelling by Konigsberg guns, and more ambushes. It was never clear which was the hammer and which was the anvil, as neither British force could hold the Germans in place for the other to envelop and smash them. Instead, when the First and Third reached Morogoro on August 26 it was too late; the quarry again slipped away, but the Central Railroad was in Allied possession. Other hollow victories occurred. August 15 a Royal Navy task force (the aged battleship Vengeance, the aged cruiser Challenger, the monitors Mersey and Severn) landed marines and the Zanzibar Rifles to take the old trade port of Bagamoyo, where a Konigsberg gun shot at the warships. More soldiers were landed, and they marched south to Dar es Salaam, which with help from the navy was peacefully taken September 4. The remaining ports of Kilwa, Mikindani, and Lindi were also taken in September. On the other fronts there was also progress, since land was taken during the late spring and summer of 1916, but the German units were never trapped into a significant fight. The Belgians had a large number of problems and handicaps that restricted their capabilities. The fact that Belgium was occupied meant that weapons, ammunition, and all other equipment were hard to find, and all were the charity of the British or French or purchased from the (still neutral) United States. Leaders were few and limited the expansion of the Force Publique, since there were never enough officers. Logistics were especially complicated, as items landed on the Atlantic side had to cross half the continent, but then the Belgians had more problems moving supplies farther westward and even needed the British to help by supplying professional carriers. The Belgians desired revenge and an offensive early in the war but during 1915 could only wait and grow stronger. They especially craved the conquest of Rwanda and Urundi (today Burundi) as bargaining chips in case the war ended in arbitration. The Great Lakes region was especially wealthy in agriculture and supported densely populated monarchies in the precolonial era. This made the region a focus of intensive European rivalry in the decades before the war and therefore even more important in 1916. Under General Baron Charles Henri Marie Ernest Tombeur, the Belgians committed fifteen thousand askaris and by May 1916 they occupied all of Rwanda with one column while another took the Lake Tanganyika coastline and the ports of Kigoma July 28 and Ujiji (the western terminus of the Central Railroad) August 2.

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The two thousand men of Lake Force were mostly the new recruits of the Fourth KAR battalion under Brigadier-General Sir Charles Preston Crewe (a South African politician) and were Smuts’s most western force. On Lake Victoria a small fleet of craft were used by the British to first take (an already deserted) Bukoba June 28 on the western shore before the July 14 capture of Mwanza on the southern shore. The Germans engaged in a firefight that included a Konigsberg gun, but they planned an escape that worked perfectly, again. For both Crewe’s Lake Force and the Belgians their next target, Tabora, was obvious. It was so conspicuous that the Germans made extensive preparations. Tabora was historically important as a market city on the caravan routes and became a railroad depot and the army’s recruit training base, and then the wartime capital of the colony. Crewe’s advance faced few Germans but was slowed by a very arid and unyielding region that made resupply especially troublesome. Meanwhile, the two Belgian columns also converged against Tabora. The northern column marched across Rwanda to Lake Victoria then southward, almost parallel to Crewe. The southern column followed the Central Railroad from Lake Tanganyika eastward with a better supply route and less hostile environment but more frequent German resistance. They engaged the German defenses of Tabora on September 10 and the northern column joined in on September 12. A significant battle lasted until September 18; the Germans had two Konigsberg guns, extensive defense works, and an opportunity to make the Allies pay dearly for this city, but they were not willing to fight to the end. In three orderly columns the Germans departed Tabora. This gave Belgium the occupation of Rwanda, Urundi, and northwest Tanganyika as bargaining chips in future diplomatic negotiations. Crewe’s exhausted and dehydrated force arrived six days later. Brigadier-General Edward Northey commanded three thousand men (KAR, South Africans, and companies of the Northern Rhodesia Police and British South African Police) of the Nyasaland-Rhodesia Field Force. They too gained vast areas while dealing with severe transportation and logistics problems. They started May 23 and captured the German district headquarters of Neu Langenburg with its stocks of food and ammunition abandoned on May 29, 1916. As with the other fronts the Germans would launch an occasional counterattack but otherwise Northey’s men marched into enemy territory faster than their supply lines could keep up. There were fights like Malangali on July 24, but that never stopped the advance. They took Iringa August 29, which was the objective set by Smuts before this offensive began. The problem was that events changed his plans such that Smuts could not use Iringa as intended. In London it all looked successful; after the frustrations of 1915, there was now under Smuts’s command undeniable progress with acceptable combat fatalities. To look only on a map was to observe the advance of hundreds

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of miles on every front and an enemy incapable of stopping the Allies. Perhaps the greater enemy was the environment. During 1916 the hospitals were overwhelmed with an ever-increasing number of sick men due to prolonged malnutrition, diseases, and exhaustion. Despite attempting the most modern methods of transportation, failures accumulated and even the Allied acquisition of Tanganyika’s ocean ports, lake ports, and railroads was not enough. The lions, hippos, and venomous snakes were frightening enough, but they were responsible for few casualties. Instead it was insects, microorganisms, and the diseases they carried that generated the vast majority of casualties for all the combatants. Malaria (and with it blackwater fever) was the worst but there was cholera, typhoid, dysentery, typhus, guinea worms, and chiggers, and for every combat casualty there were thirty more due to illness. As will be explained more fully in a later chapter, there were different experiences due to racism such that the Allies suffered worse than the Germans and all of this influenced combat effectiveness. Weeks after an offensive began Allied units suffered half to four-fifths of the soldiers hospitalized, reducing regiments and battalions to the size of a single company. Transportation problems made all of this worse. Allied soldiers on the frontlines often only received half or quarter rations of food for weeks or even months at a time because there was not enough transportation and too many mouths to feed. This prolonged malnourishment made the illnesses more debilitating and recovery more difficult. The hospitals closest to the front were least capable and moving the ill to the rear also required transportation, which reduced the amount of deliverable food to the frontlines. Almost like the parasites that drained sustenance from the ill soldiers, those in hospitals consumed resources from the supply lines, reducing what made it to the front lines, in a vicious circle. The more successful the operation, the longer the supply lines, and the more fragile the whole system became. Columns in 1916 could advance for only a short time before reaching a point of exhaustion requiring a pause to build up reserves and removal of the helpless. When they were sent home to Britain, India, or South Africa to recuperate, they no longer competed for supplies with their comrades in the combat zones, but few men returned to any military service. They did not face chemical warfare in Africa, but as in Europe, many soldiers were incapacitated and had their lives shortened, their health forever compromised, due to service that stole their youth and their strength. After Tabora and Morogoro Smuts’s army needed time before the next push. At this point the conflict was unintentionally one of attrition. Smuts imported more resources as the KAR expanded, and British West African units and West India Regiments joined the theater, but overall the units of White men and Indians mostly were a spent force beyond redemption. In the remaining months of 1916 Smuts still desired a decisive victory and there

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were some important battles as they crossed the Rufiji River, but the energy of earlier in the year could not be repeated. At Kilwa new KAR units were landed and attacked inland, as the region supplied the Germans with food. There was a German attack on Kibata in December when Lettow-Vorbeck sensed an opportunity to not only defeat his enemy but also inflict a humiliation similar to Tanga. Instead, it was more of a draw. This was one of the few events that strongly resembled the Western Front with trenches, barbed wire, and intense close-quarters combat. For Lettow-Vorbeck, there were now fewer askaris and officers, while the colony’s best lands were lost. Still his “force in being” meant something in the event of an armistice, and he thought he was influencing the whole war by distracting Allied resources. In January 1917 Smuts left East Africa to represent the Union of South Africa at the Imperial Defense Conference. To the government in London he portrayed the theater as almost finished and only a “mopping up” operation remained. It seemed reasonable, since so much territory was occupied by the Allies. There were those at the time who thought this appraisal was disingenuous and self-serving. Later more were of this opinion. 1917–1918: A FULL CIRCLE? The longer it continued the more this conflict resembled the precolonial period, with the failure of modern methods forcing a reversion to traditional tactics. Asymmetrical objectives meant that both sides could claim victory, even in this last, most meaningless phase, since no one knew when the war would end, or how. Similar to a year earlier, the British had a new theater commander just before the rainy season, and the government in London wanted new successes. Major General Arthur Reginald Hoskins was an excellent choice, yet he only held the position until May 3, 1917, during a difficult time of transition. He was a conventional British officer with an extensive prewar Africa record including service as an officer in the KAR and then its inspector general and as commander of First Division under Smuts. He continued the withdrawal of most White and Indian combat units, although he specifically retained artillery, engineer, hospital, communications, and other specialist units. This was important. For the remainder of the war these White and Indian technical units attempted to bring modern warfare technology to a conflict where the muscle of the army, the infantry units, was now mostly Black soldiers from eastern Africa and the British West African Field Force. Even after he was dismissed, Hoskins’s plans to expand the KAR were enacted, with a peak of thirty-five thousand askaris. He reorganized the supply system and placed more emphasis on the recruitment of professional carriers such that more food and other necessities reached the fighting men. There were also some

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attempts at combat under Hoskins, but the rain was too severe for anything significant. Then on May 3 Hoskins was ordered to a new command in Mesopotamia, and Major General Louis Jacob van Deventer was made the new British theater commander. Even though he commanded Second Division under Smuts, he was an unexpected choice, since the army was now mostly Imperial Service units and van Deventer was a Boer for whom the English language was sometimes difficult. Perhaps this was an example of the influence that Smuts, and South Africa, still exercised. In 1917 the rainy season was early and heavy. Hoskins had emphasized the Indian Ocean ports of Kilwa and Lindi as the centers of new offensives to further constrict German territory, which van Deventer now continued. From Kilwa a sharp firefight on July 6 at Mnindi led to the more influential Battle of Narungombe (an important water source) July 17–19, where the British attacked well-prepared German defenses, and won. In this and other battles of the summer and fall of 1917 the inexperience of the recently formed KAR units was evident compared to the adroitness of the Germans. Yet the Schutztruppe had an increasing weariness as shortages of ammunition, food, and other necessities took a growing toll. It would probably be too much to call Narungombe a turning point, but for the Germans, the good times were over. In September van Deventer attempted another decisive battle in an offensive from Kilwa and Lindi, which Lettow-Vorbeck anticipated in the Battle of Mahiwa, October 16 to 18. In a series of bold strikes both sides battled themselves into a state of exhaustion in one of the bloodiest fights in the theater, each losing about a third of its men, and the Germans used too much of their ammunition. Lettow-Vorbeck wanted to repeat the success of Tanga, but the British had improved too much while his own forces had grown fragile. Critical to German success was the trust Lettow-Vorbeck placed in distant subordinates to the west of his main force. Given the difficulties with telecommunications, these officers needed to appreciate Lettow-Vorbeck’s priorities and also avoid a pitched battle but still give combat when there was an advantage. That is why the actions of Captain Max Wintgens were so controversial. In the early period of the war he was given command of the Rwanda-Urundi area, and with only a few hundred askaris and the older weapons, he was a model student of Lettow-Vorbeck. He faced a larger Belgian force with evasion punctuated by an occasional ambush or firefight, making them pay for the land they conquered as he slowly retreated to Tabora. As a subordinate of Major Kraut, he led another column after the retreat from Tabora when in February 1917, without orders and for reasons still debated, he led his men in a rogue command that covered two thousand miles by October 2, 1917. First they moved suddenly southward to Northern Rhodesia in a feint that threatened Northey’s supply lines but then abruptly reversed and marched north through land only recently taken by the Allies.

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Wintgens had seven hundred askaris, three jungle guns, thirteen machine guns, and hundreds of carriers, giving him enough firepower to defeat any unit small and fast enough to catch him, but faster than any units strong enough to defeat him. The Belgians sent back to this region units they had just withdrawn. Van Deventer assigned many units (including aircraft) to the Wintgens pursuit and the Tenth Horse Regiment was sent from South Africa specifically to chase him. The land was so difficult there were occasions when the Germans came within a mile of Allied units and no one knew it. Sudden changes of direction without any obvious objectives added to the Allied anxiety. Wintgens eventually allowed himself to be captured after he fell ill, but Lieutenant Heinrich Naumann continued for months before he reached the Mount Kilimanjaro region and finally surrendered 14 Germans, 165 askaris, and 250 carriers near the Kenyan border on October 2. Lettow-Vorbeck hated Wintgens for what he had done. Even though he stated that the objective of GEA continued resistance was to distract Allied resources from Europe, and Wintgens had distracted 4,000 Allied soldiers away from fighting him, Lettow-Vorbeck still resented the loss of control more than the loss of those men and weapons. Following the Battle of Mahiwa, Lettow-Vorbeck decided to alter the formula. Ever since the war moved south of the Rufiji River the German procurement of food became an ever-increasing problem. His movement was often in anticipation of a harvest that the British eventually realized and used against him. This region was thinly populated because the climate and soil limited agriculture and it was made worse by the Maji Maji Rebellion and subsequent reprisals. The local population, especially the Hehe, Ngoni, and Pangwa, were openly hostile to the Germans and assisted the Allies. Small detachments were attacked. Both the Germans and British took all the food they could find and both recruited (kidnapped) carriers who then could not farm. As if that were not enough, in the fall of 1917 a three-year drought began. The people of this region suffered a severe famine. Therefore, in order to continue the struggle Lettow-Vorbeck reorganized his main force and separated the weak, ill, and injured from those officers and men in the best condition, and with the remainder he invaded Portuguese East Africa (PEA, or Mozambique). He expected to be joined by Captain Theodore Tafel’s command of ninety-five Germans and twelve hundred askaris, four guns, and forty-three machine guns, but in the confusion common in war, Tafel surrendered November 28. Six of Tafel’s officers and twenty askaris refused to surrender, and after about a week found their comrades. As with Wintgens, Lettow-Vorbeck was bitterly disappointed by Tafel, yet he still performed well without those men. In GEA he traded land for time by evading a battle to the last man, and the only way to continue this was in PEA, where movement was still possible. It kept alive the possibility that his force could still

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mean the restoration of GEA in a postwar peace negotiation, and he would still distract Allied resources from Europe. The Portuguese, Britain’s oldest ally, held the oldest European colony in eastern Africa, yet by the Great War it was the least developed with the poorest colonial military, weakest civilian administration, and subjects that were not yet “pacified.” The Barue Rebellion overlapped this time period such that the Portuguese fought two conflicts simultaneously. During the first part of the war Portugal remained neutral, and the British took advantage of this by moving men and supplies through their territory. Germany also used the cover of neutrality to move mail and spies, and the governor of PEA might have been bribed by the German Colonial Ministry. March 9, 1916, Germany declared war on Portugal, who then attempted an invasion of GEA in October and November 1916, which failed miserably. Lettow-Vorbeck kept a small force along the border that occasionally raided their new enemy. Reinforcements from Portugal, Goa (India), and Angola were sent to PEA, and more soldiers were recruited in the colony, but often these men fell ill and were evacuated again without even an opportunity to contribute. Therefore the state of war improved the colony’s military only slightly. When Lettow-Vorbeck invaded PEA the British had no choice but to send impressive quantities of military supplies to the Portuguese with the frustration of knowing that a portion would later be captured by the enemy and used against them because their ally was too incompetent. On November 25, 1917, 268 Germans, 1,700 askaris, and an estimated 3,900 carriers, 370 carrier-boys, and over 600 wives and children, crossed the Rovuma River and captured the outpost at Negomano, which had large stocks of food, weapons, ammunition, and military goods. There were between 1,000 and 1,500 Portuguese soldiers, but only 200 to 300 survived the battle, as discipline in the German askaris broke down and for a while the officers were not in command, precipitating a massacre. This breakdown demonstrated another change in the Schutztruppe, as those selected to fight on also tended to be the more recent recruits and less disciplined than the “Old Guard.” The next months of the conflict have often been summarized as “the Germans chased the Portuguese (for supplies) and the British chased the Germans.” The Germans divided into several columns that marched parallel to each other westward down the Lugenda River valley in search of food, ammunition, and other valuables to be taken from Portuguese Army outposts, civilian plantations, or commercial warehouses. Each column was subdivided. With an emphasis on mobility and firepower, the advance guard carried most of the machine guns and was led by officers who were to respond to opportunities immediately, aggressively, and on their own initiative. The rest of a column would be a reasonable distance (up to one day) behind with the supply and medical units, next the camp followers who often disciplined themselves in order to keep pace, and then a robust rear guard to repel the

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enemy and also catch deserters. During the 1917 to 1918 period they often moved through fields of elephant grass up to twelve feet tall. In the thick bush there were not roads so much as paths only wide enough for single file, such that a column could stretch for miles. Without modern communications Lettow-Vorbeck had to trust column commanders who in turn delegated great responsibilities to the advance guard. The moment contact was made with the enemy the advance guard would make a flanking maneuver and attack aggressively to maximize surprise and confusion and hopefully carry the day by storm. The people of this region were recent victims of Portuguese “pacification” efforts and were willing to cooperate with the Germans, providing quality information and selling them food, but they hated the British and tried to foil them. Every few days one column would capture a boma that contained needed supplies already divided into fifty-five-pound loads and ready to move. Anticipating the rainy season Lettow-Vorbeck wanted to rest his army in the fertile Lurio River region. The Portuguese resented British arrogance and feared being cheated out of their colonial rewards at any peace treaty negotiations so they originally had poor cooperation with van Deventer, but that was changed by Negomano. Not only did the Portuguese Army command subordinate itself, but the obstructive civilian administration now also had to answer to van Deventer and his staff. The British and South African officers could not hide their contempt for their ally and treated Mozambique more like a conquered land, rather than a comrade to be protected. At first van Deventer wanted to continue supply lines from GEA southward, but when this proved impractical he reluctantly agreed to reposition to the Indian Ocean ports of Porto Amelia (Pemba) and Quelimane and the Lake Nyasa port of Fort Johnston. From these cities there were a few roads or railroads, but the engineers put their recent experiences to good use and repaired, expanded, and improved the infrastructure as best they could. When trucks, river steamers, and trains reached their limit, the British forces again relied on human carriers. German transportation was exclusively porters. They both resembled the trade caravans that the region had known for so long. The land was often thick jungle with rivers and steep mountains that made for some of the worst logistics problems of the entire war, and human beasts of burden were always the ultimate solution. Since there were not enough willing porters, all combatants forced locals to temporarily serve, a practice too similar to the slave raid wars. When the Germans entered PEA the only force close enough to challenge them was General Northey’s, so van Deventer had to accept that the rest of the army could not be repositioned from Kilwa and Lindi before the rainy season began, and another pause was enforced by the mud. When the pursuit resumed in April it followed the familiar pattern, with Lettow-Vorbeck’s columns seeking resupply by capturing outposts and the British hoping to

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force them into a battle. Occasionally small elements of the German Army were captured or killed but nothing decisive. The Battle of Nhamacurra July 1–3, 1918, seemed to give van Deventer his desired opportunity, since it was near a railroad connected to Quelimane. Briefly, the Germans stayed in one place; fought significantly, including artillery; defeated the Anglo-Portuguese garrison; and captured food, alcohol, clothing, medical supplies, 350 new rifles, and vast quantities of ammunition. Seemingly it had all the Germans needed and more than they could carry away. Since the victory was so close to Quelimane, van Deventer thought this city was the next target, especially when the replenished German units made a sudden push to the south. This was a deception. When van Deventer reacted and concentrated his units into this region, Lettow-Vorbeck had already executed a 180-degree turn with the intention of recrossing the border, leaving van Deventer holding an empty sack. For a few days the Allies continued to march south as the Germans moved north. There were still skirmishes when British or Portuguese units occasionally caught a piece of a column, and the Germans were now suffering from Spanish Influenza, but on September 28 the first elements recrossed the Rovuma River into Tanganyika. Discipline among the Germans was a persistent problem, unlike earlier, when men would desert, visit with family and friends, and then return. But as they moved north, some askaris stayed behind in Mozambique as freelancers (or bandits) in the chaos of Portuguese colonial rule. At first he made it appear that Tabora was the new target, but that was another ruse. Lettow-Vorbeck hoped to panic the British into shipping forces in Mozambique to Dar es Salaam and then via the Central Railroad to Tabora, as if a recapture of the colony was his objective. He would then only have to deal with those fewer, weaker, isolated British units that were of the occupation force. British units were indeed shipped from PEA to Dar es Salaam, creating another delay in the pursuit. On October 19 the Germans suddenly turned southwestward, north of Lake Nyasa and entered Northern Rhodesia. On November 13 they learned of the Armistice. The undefeated Schutztruppe marched into Abercorn on November 25 with 155 Germans, 1,168 askaris, 1,522 carriers, 1,726 camp followers, 37 machine guns, 1,071 rifles, and a Portuguese field gun with 40 rounds. Lettow-Vorbeck still had considerable capability. If the war had continued, they could have enraged the British by marching on a city in Nyasaland or Northern Rhodesia—something that actually appeared on a map—captured and destroyed it. Or he could have gone north, into the Belgian Congo’s mining region in Katanga and attacked the flow of vital minerals into the Allied industries. The newspapers would feed on such disasters with sensationalism, and it would have been so severe an embarrassment as to compel an exaggerated government response. Either scenario also would have brought German forces closer to the railroads and a standing battle they could not win. The

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Germans were in greater danger the closer they were to a transportation hub and the Allied advantage of quantity; that is why Quilemane and Tabora were deceptions. Instead, Lettow-Vorbeck most likely would have stayed away from modern transportation, continued westward, and found refuge in the remoteness of eastern Angola, where Portuguese colonial administration was as poor as in northern Mozambique, and a force still in resistance could have kept imperial claims alive. Angola was not “pacified” until the 1920s. NOTES 1. C. S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy and Trade on the East African Littoral 1798–1856 (New York: Africana Publishing, 1971), 248, 255–64, 282, 368–69. 2. Ibid., 199–205, 288–89. 3. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912 (New York: Random House, 1991), 201–17. 4. Ibid., 283–96; Nicholls, The Swahili Coast, 255. 5. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912, 346–51; John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 88–97. 6. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 94–99. 7. Ibid., 107–9. 8. Ibid., 108–9. 9. Ibid., 109–16. 10. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 616–18; Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 168–71. 11. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 616–19. 12. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 619–21; Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 171–79. 13. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 620–23; Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 179–85. 14. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 622–28. 15. For the most recent and extensive account see Ross Anderson, The Battle of Tanga 1914 (Charleston, SC: Tempus, 2002). 16. The most extensive treatments are Giles Foden, Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), and also Peter Shankland, The Phantom Flotilla: The Story of the Naval Africa Expedition, 1915–1916 (London: Collins, 1968).

Chapter Two

Not What It Seems Questioning the Military Accomplishments in East Africa

Myths are easier than history. The real purpose of history is not to simply tell again the comforting stories that are beloved because they are so well known, but to investigate in order to confirm or question what is taken as fact. Myths surround reality and can become mistaken for the truth. In the East Africa theater of operations in World War I the German forces performed with professionalism and creativity that is praiseworthy. But some authors have gone further and created myths about German successes that have obscured the actual accomplishments. The Allies also faced a great many of the same problems yet were denied as much admiration from these same authors. This prejudice has created an imbalance in a military evaluation. Much of World War I in East Africa was counterintuitive. Sometimes bigger is not better, faster is slower, and all that you need is both too much and not enough. For example, the British naval blockade cut off GEA from being resupplied, which should have negatively affected the Germans. The blockade was, indeed, very effective. But it gave General Paul von LettowVorbeck the rare opportunity to run an independent command that almost made him a military dictator, since there was no interference from Germany. The Allied forces encountered the opposite problem. While the British, Belgians, and Portuguese could import war material without restriction, they endured significant interference from their home governments. The British blockade forced GEA to be creative in order to maximize their self-sufficiency, and so throughout the first half of the war German forces ended up well cared for while the Allies endured considerable supply difficulties during the 39

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whole war. The blockade simplified German command and control in a fashion the Allies would have envied. A MILITARY REANALYSIS OF LEADERS, SOLDIERS, AND LABORERS Most military analysis of this theater of operations embraces two complementary myths: the myth of David versus Goliath and the myth of quantity versus quality. Typical portraits cast German forces as fewer in number but of superior quality. This was largely the case. They were cut off from the homeland, whose central command placed upper limits on the size of the wartime Schutztruppe, while the leadership comprised mostly elites, who solicited greater dedication from their askaris. The Allied forces in East Africa were much greater in number but slower and less efficient than the enemy, justifying their Goliath reputation. But this mythology overlooks the importance of perspective. For Germany, East Africa was the most important colony in a newly created empire and was the beneficiary of considerable enthusiasm and goodwill. Thus Tanganyika got the best leaders Germany had to offer. Britain, conversely, owned other possessions far more important than East Africa. From the British perspective Kenya and Uganda were acquired reluctantly and basically to help protect India and Egypt. This influenced the conduct of the war itself. German leadership, both military and civilian, was elite, highly motivated, and therefore very efficient, while British attitudes bespoke reluctance and manifested as expending the minimum effort to get the job done, as well as even altering the definition of what “done” meant. In the other theaters of operations during World War I vast numbers of men fought in small areas, but in East Africa very few soldiers fought over immense distances. This required leaders to operate differently from those in Europe or the Middle East. The trench warfare in Europe was static, where the defenders had the advantage in set-piece battles that allowed commanders to direct their units from a remote headquarters. In East Africa, however, warfare often was carried out in fluid movements that favored the attack and required the commanders to be personally involved at or near the frontlines and to share the hardships of the soldiers. Thus the better officers earned a reputation and the respect of their soldiers. The Germans had an important advantage here in the leadership of the theater commander and his officers. Lettow-Vorbeck was frequently at the front lines and did not shirk the same dangers he asked his men to face. When the war began he was one of the most experienced colonial officers in the army and was therefore the best-qualified man for the defense of Germany’s most important colony. Born in 1870, the son of a general and the product of the best military

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academies, he entered the army as an officer in the prestigious Foot Guards. The Boxer Rebellion in China (1900–1901) provided his first overseas experience with Germany’s contribution to the International Force. During the 1904 Herero Rebellion in German South-West Africa, Lettow-Vorbeck served as adjutant to General Lothar von Trotha. He was at the Battle of Waterberg on August 11, 1904, and later led a company in pursuit of (but never caught) the leader Cornelius Fredericks of the Bethanie clan of the Nama (Hottentots), where Lettow-Vorbeck was wounded in the chest and left eye in January 1906. His enemy’s use of the bush to evade a battle of unfavorable odds taught him lessons he would employ later. After some staff assignments in Europe he commanded the Second Marine Battalion from March 1909 to January 1913. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in October 1913 and appointed originally to command the Cameroon Schutztruppe, but he was soon reassigned as commander of the GEA Schutztruppe, arriving there in January 1914. Of course, there was concern for another native rebellion, but even before his arrival the prospect of a European war was being given greater priority. His tour of Tanganyika’s army outposts and visits with settlers was virtually a strategic reconnaissance before the war. 1 Early in the war Lettow-Vorbeck had a dispute with the civilian governor-general, Dr. Heinrich Schnee, who asserted that as governor of the colony he controlled the military and that Lettow-Vorbeck was subordinate to him. Technically this was true, but the provision was made with a typical native insurrection in mind, not a European war, so argued Lettow-Vorbeck. During the first months of the war Schnee also hoped the colonies would remain neutral. Lettow-Vorbeck then ignored the governor and began military preparations with the support of most settlers. The victory at Tanga discredited Schnee, but more important, it gave Lettow-Vorbeck a wonderful advantage as virtually the military dictator of German East Africa. Most authors belittle Schnee due to his conflict with Lettow-Vorbeck. This overlooks the fact that German military efficiency was based in large part on civilian prewar accomplishments. Dr. Schnee’s career was impressive, and that he was one of Germany’s best colonial administrators assigned in 1912 to the most important colony was taken for granted. At a time when civilian colonial service was viewed with some contempt as a less valuable career choice, Schnee was an energetic, idealistic liberal reformer who genuinely believed the Kaiser’s empire could elevate some of the world’s less fortunate people, a German version of the “white man’s burden” theory. His governorship in the South Pacific was considered very successful. In his short term in office in GEA before the war he emphasized education, public hygiene, transportation, and economic diversification, and he completed several projects that proved later to be of great assistance to the war effort. Any general improvements to the colony were useful in the war effort. One asset was the civilian government’s mobilization of African laborers to work at a wide variety of tasks in support

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of the army. Without African labor on both sides this war could not have occurred at all. As the war continued Schnee still insisted that he was in command, which annoyed Lettow-Vorbeck but did no harm. Both wrote letters of complaint to Berlin that arrived in August 1916, but no real action was taken. Schnee remained with the army even after they left GEA and he no longer had a colony to govern, and he was there for the final surrender at Abercorn. When Lettow-Vorbeck and approximately one hundred thirty officers and men of the Schutztruppe marched through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in March 1919 (the only German WWI command so honored) Schnee was there too. 2 Every day and every step of the way Schnee shared every hardship, but the myth discredits him. The six British theater commanders never came anywhere near the power and authority exercised by Lettow-Vorbeck, yet they had to solve more problems. The first half were Indian Army careerists, often described as fossils, and the last half were curious choices. All quarreled with the civilian governors of several colonies and they also were burdened with Belgium and Portugal as supplicant allies. Major General Arthur Edward Aitken as the commander of the Indian Expeditionary Force B was the first theater commander, and he was typical of the group. Aitken’s family connections got him this command, courtesy of his brother Max, who was a member of Parliament and a newspaper publisher who was soon made Lord Beaverbrook, one of the most powerful men of his generation. 3 As an experienced India officer Aitken held all Africans in contempt as inferior to Indian soldiers, so GEA was viewed as yet another task for the imperial constabulary. The quote used most often to represent this attitude, “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers,” 4 is typical of racial attitudes at that time. When he then lost the Battle of Tanga he was removed from all command, demoted to lieutenant-colonel on half pay and not employed again. His replacement was worse. Major General Richard Wapshare commanded the Twenty-Seventh Bangalore Brigade at Tanga and was no more prepared for this challenge than his predecessor. His elevation to theater commander was based on his proximity rather than any professional attributes, and his selection was more of an indictment of the war leaders in London that after such a failure as Tanga they could not find an uncontaminated replacement. On the defensive after such a fiasco, he also proved inept in response to attacks on the Uganda Railroad. His career was based on conformity, and he was described as indecisive and a “Colonel Blimp” type character, so it was unrealistic to expect such a man to be creative when faced with an unfamiliar adversary. On April 3, 1915, he was demoted to brigadier and transferred to the Mesopotamia Theater, and his replacement, Brigadier General Michael Tighe, was worse. At Tanga he commanded the infamous Imperial Service Brigade, and he was also an old Indian Army officer but with more of a fighting reputation than his two

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predecessors. When elevated to theater commander he was also promoted to major general. He suffered from gout and alcohol abuse and was in command when successful German raids on the Uganda Railroad expanded greatly. Later Tighe served as a division commander under General Jan Smuts until March 1916, when he was sent back to India. These three old India generalsin-chief represented how much the British underestimated their opponents but also how low a priority East Africa was during 1914–1916. In a global war of many theaters of operations, East Africa was of the least priority at that time, thus even the stigma of failure at Tanga was not enough to prevent Wapshare and Tighe from getting a chance. Decades earlier they had been typical of the modern imperialists who expanded the British Empire against the obsolete empires of Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu kingdoms. 5 Suddenly in the Great War they were now the ones who were obsolete, but East Africa had a military history of receiving what was no longer good enough elsewhere. Relative to Lettow-Vorbeck, who was more diverse in his experiences, these men were older and based their careers on mostly Indian service and conformity. Major General Horace Smith-Dorrien was supposed to be next to take command, but illness prevented this, leaving to speculation how well he might have performed in East Africa. Instead, General Smuts became theater commander at a time when the position became more complicated. His invasion of GEA required the cooperation of civilian colonial governors, the Belgians, and many bureaucracies on a scale far greater than his predecessors, much in contrast to his time as a Boer commando, when all administration could be completed in the saddle. Even his earlier conquest of German South-West Africa could not compare with this challenge. There was a staff, but even that was an ad hoc collection of officers from many backgrounds. Unlike Aitken, Wapshare, and Tighe, he could learn from his errors and change, but more important, Smuts connected with the common soldier (mostly fellow South Africans in 1916) and provided a new type of leadership. He gave up many creature comforts to remain up front with the fighting soldiers and shared their experiences. The Indian Army generals were accustomed to a distance between soldier and general, and this could not change. In this manner of leadership Smuts more resembled his rival than the others, as Lettow-Vorbeck also spoke with askaris and Germans more as comrades. Lettow-Vorbeck did not have to accommodate allies, but Smuts needed Belgian (and later Portuguese) goodwill more than Wapshare or Tighe had. Under the circumstances such Allied interaction was about the best that could be expected. Where Smuts earned criticism was in his inability to reconcile his aversion to casualties with his desire for a climactic, decisive battle. After fighting the British in the Boer War, Smuts had spent several years in South African government posts. He stated he could not go back to South African politics with the reputation of a butcher. But instead of too

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many dead, Smuts caused many to lose their health for the remainder of their shortened lives. Major General Reginald Hoskins took over after Smuts, and he might have been more of a challenge to Lettow-Vorbeck, but his term as theater commander was too brief for a balanced evaluation. His prewar experience made Hoskins an ideal choice, since he knew and respected Africa and Africans. As the commander of First Division under Smuts, his leadership was not questioned. Later, as theater commander, his expectations of the Belgians and Portuguese were reasonable. His ability to orchestrate forces in combat operations was barely tested, due to the rainy season and the rotation of combat units, but realistically the initiative was always with Lettow-Vorbeck, and there was no reason to believe that would have changed. Instead he represents the frustration of a missed opportunity. Did South African Major General van Deventer prolong World War I in East Africa after he took over from Hoskins? It would be too easy to blame him, just as it would be wrong to overestimate Hoskins or Smith-Dorrien. He earned a reputation as a fighting general and would not have shirked from a final battle if there were one. But in other areas he was inadequate. When they moved into regions with the greatest logistical challenges, van Deventer’s command struggled, and for long periods his men were not on full rations. He underestimated the Germans for using Black soldiers when most of his own were Black, and he was not diplomatic with the Allies. It is easy to criticize him, but could others have done better over such difficult land? Overall Lettow-Vorbeck was a better theater commander than any of his six rivals, he was not defeated at the end of the war, and this added to the myth. But the circumstances faced by each side were not identical and the problems grew more severe as the war continued. If he had had to manage allies, would Lettow-Vorbeck have treated these relations as poorly as he did Governor Schnee? He was admired for simply taking control of the colony as a wartime emergency, which was a unique opportunity. It is difficult to imagine a similar scenario in another theater. Moreover, in this unique situation he benefited from the support of other GEA leaders, who were elite but few, while Allied officers and noncommissioned officers were numerous but varied greatly in quality. It helps if your opponent is incompetent, more if he is a fool. Beneath the theater commanders each side needed qualified field officers, and again the Germans were better than the Allies. Why? In order for the German army to successfully expand many men had to provide leadership to the field companies, while others maximized the ability to support them technologically. In March 1916 the maximum expansion reached 3,007 Germans and 12,100 Africans. The German leadership divided into roughly three groups, Schutztruppe, sailors, and settlers, each with advantages generally not enjoyed by the Allies. The peacetime Schutztruppe was led by exception-

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al men who knew Tanganyika very well and understood their askaris. Early in the war they were supplemented by many naval officers, sailors, and marines who were not familiar with Africa but were elite professionals. The settlers were well acquainted with Tanganyika and her people, and most had military experience. These three groups provided leadership of greater capability than the Allies. The Abushiri and Maji-Maji rebellions (and other events) heavily influenced the Great War by forcing the Germans to emphasize the personal initiative of Schutztruppe officers and NCOs. The very first GEA officers were semi-criminal and looking for a second chance, and frequently they failed. The government learned from these errors. The new standards were very high. A German officer needed an almost perfect record and a minimum of three years service before even volunteering for a rigorous selection process. There were medical examinations and tests of intelligence and character all designed to identify and remove the weaker of the best young men Germany had to offer. If there was any defect, better an early discovery than during a firefight in the bush. This made the Schutztruppe leaders a collection of the best colonial officers of the prewar era, and somewhat analogous to a modern special forces unit. The kaiser’s overseas empire included some of the most inhospitable lands on earth, and these officers needed to do better than just survive; they needed to dominate an outpost. The mental and emotional strain could be greater than the physical demands. They could be the only White man for hundreds of miles and govern over hundreds of thousands of people, a great responsibility that few have known. They might be fighting every day for weeks, such as in the rebellions. The rewards for these men were also considerable. A tour of duty of two and one-half years counted double toward pensions, and even in peacetime they were still paid for combat duty. There was no promise of promotion, but it was more frequent, with colonial service admired by any review board. When the Great War began, these leaders were an elite corps of combat veterans who enjoyed the considerable advantage that the war was mostly fought on their own territory. There were 260 officers and NCOs before the Great War began, forty-five Germans in the police, and the last additions to this category were a few artillery specialists brought in by the second blockade runner Marie von Stettin. 6 The German Navy contributed a number of officers and men who frequently added technological skills to the newly expanded Schutztruppe. Like the prewar army, overseas service for the navy was also restricted to the best officers and men through a rigorous examination process. On the Indian Ocean coast the survey ship SMS Mowe (650 tons, three 37 mm guns, 102 officers and sailors) was assigned to the peacetime task of surveying and periodically clearing the sandbar at the entrance to Dar es Salaam, but once at war the ship’s captain, Lieutenant Moritz Horn, and his crew transferred to

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Lake Tanganyika to command the Hedwig von Wissmann, while the Mowe was scuttled as a block in the same channel she used to clear. On July 29, 1914, the German commercial ship SS Zieten was intercepted by SMS Konigsberg and a number of sailors (including two deep sea divers) and a hundred marines in transit from the China colony to Germany were taken off and eventually landed in GEA. When the blockade runner Kronborg was sunk in April 1915 most of her crew joined the Schutztruppe, while the ship’s captain, Lieutenant Carl Christiansen, made his way via Mozambique back to Germany carrying official correspondence. SMS Konigsberg had a crew of 322 officers and men, and in July 1915 when she was finished off, her remaining crew also joined the army. A perfect example of technical contributions was Lieutenant Richard Wenig, the ship’s gunnery officer, who served his salvaged guns with such precision that the German forces earned a reputation for using artillery like a sniper. He remained with Lettow-Vorbeck to the very end, even after the ship’s guns were all lost. These naval personnel often added a technological expertise such as telecommunications, mechanics, armorers, medical, and gunnery officers. Captain Max Looff then became a pest to Lettow-Vorbeck, as he asserted he outranked the colonel, often sided with Governor Schnee, and attempted to keep control of his crew. The German Navy contributed 24 officers and 559 NCOs, sailors, and marines. 7 The settlers were an important advantage. Of some five thousand three hundred Europeans in GEA there were about twenty-seven hundred militaryaged men from the German or Austro-Hungarian empires. Most settlers had served in the army and some were still in the reserves, and there were even veterans of the Schutztruppe. This was common in European colonialism at that time, since ex-soldiers aided in common security, one of the better examples being the French veterans who settled in North Africa. One justification for a German overseas empire was as a repository for Germany’s excess population. Instead of losing good Volk to immigration they could create a “German Canada” or a “German Australia.” Despite the topography, South-West Africa was first thought of as such a colony, but when this proved too difficult Tanganyika was emphasized. During 1901 to 1906 Governor Graf von Gotzen encouraged poor ethnic Germans from Russia to relocate, as well as irredentist Boers, but Governor Freiherr von Rechenberg (1906–1912) disliked the idea of large-scale settlement as potentially antagonizing the Africans into rebellion. 8 It is interesting that late in the Great War the Germans spoke of Russia as a resettlement colony, with vast numbers of veterans as soldier-settlers, the way they once dreamed of Africa. Captain Tom von Prince was the epitome of this settler-veteran experience. Born of a Scots father and a German mother, he was first educated in England until 1880, when he was orphaned and moved to Germany and completed his education in military academies, where Lettow-Vorbeck was a

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classmate. After service in the German Army he went to GEA and served under Governor Herrmann von Wissmann. After the 1891 Zelewsky massacre he fought against the Hehe with such ferocity that in 1907 he was rewarded by the kaiser with the hereditary title “von.” He retired to Tanganyika in 1900 and established a farm in the Usambara Mountains and also organized settlers into volunteer sharpshooter companies in 1913. Early in the war these volunteer companies were separate from the field companies, but as the Schutztruppe expanded, the need for leaders was too great for the settlers to keep segregated formations. These settlers were already well acquainted with Tanganyika and her people so they were excellent officers and NCOs. It was von Prince who captured Taveta, Kenya, and he played an important role at the Battle of Tanga, where he was killed in action. Although technically not a settler, Major General (retired) Kurt Wahle still represented the talent that made the Schutztruppe so successful. He was in GEA to visit his son (a settler) when the war began, and rather than assert his superior rank he instead offered his services to Lettow-Vorbeck. First he was inspector of the lines of communications in which capacity he maximized the efficiency of logistics, then in November 1914 he commanded the defense of Dar es Salaam. Based on Tabora, he next supervised the training of recruits while also commanding the western forces which he led in a strategic withdrawal throughout 1916. Too ill to continue, Wahle was left behind on October 17, 1918, to the care of the British hospitals. With the eager cooperation of settler-officers like these Lettow-Vorbeck had an enviable command. There were also Boer farmers who moved to GEA rather than live under British rule, and they were also a wartime asset. These professional colonial soldiers, plus their sailor and settler brethren, represented a concentration of talent and experience seldom experienced, and the quality of Allied leadership was necessarily inferior by comparison. Whereas the Belgians and Portuguese had problems of their own, it was still the British who carried most of the burden, and their soldiers came from such diverse origins that in this theater there was no typical unit. The British Indian Army dominated the first part of the war, the South Africans the middle, but it was the King’s African Rifles in the last phase that was closest in character to the Schutztruppe. If an analysis begins with the exclusion of these other units, the officers of the KAR were by all accounts very good but not as proficient as the Germans. The prewar King’s African Rifles evolved in a pattern very similar to the Schutztruppe, with one important exception: other British colonial constabulary units (most likely the British Indian Army) could assist in an emergency. Originally composed of the East Africa Rifles, the Uganda Rifles, and the Central African Rifles, in 1902 they were consolidated into the KAR with four battalions (seventeen companies with one machine gun each) in Nyasaland, Uganda, and Kenya. When the war began there were 62 officers, sec-

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onded from regular British regiments, and 2,319 men. This gave the KAR about one officer for thirty soldiers when the Germans had one leader for about ten men. It was expanded but only slowly at first, as the Indians and South Africans attempted the conquest with the KAR as minor contributors. Under Smuts the KAR grew to 8,000 men which Hoskins wanted to triple, and by the end of the war there were 35,000 askaris. Of course this required more officers and NCOs. This was another British deficiency, as the new arrivals created a decline in the quality and capability of leadership. Some leaders were settlers who knew Africa and her people, and they had already served in some volunteer units such as the East African Mounted Rifles, the East Africa Regiment, and the Nyasaland Volunteer Rifles, which provided some advantage. As the finite number of “old Africa hands” were already mobilized the “lack of experienced officers . . . was a great handicap to the new KAR units. It was no unusual thing for officers to lead their troops into battle without being able to say a word in their own language.” 9 Many were combat veterans of Europe’s Western Front who were sent to the tropics “for their health” and knew nothing of Africa. They had the advantage of combat experience but were then subjected to the harsh environment after surviving poisonous gas attacks. Superficially the leadership of the KAR resembled the Schutztruppe, but the Germans enjoyed an overall better quality and greater depth of experience. Another significant advantage for Lettow-Vorbeck was that British colonial governors and settlers interfered with the conduct of the war in a way that the Germans seldom experienced. From 1893 to 1905, GEA had military governors, which created a legacy. From 1905 onward the civilian governors also commanded the Schutztruppe, but there was relatively little violence after the Maji-Maji Rebellion. Another complication was that in many parts of the colony there were not enough civilian administrators and in their absence the army officers often performed these tasks in addition to military duties. The Schutztruppe was mostly autonomous, but there were still civilian versus military disputes before the war began, which blended with the new contest between Governor Schnee and Colonel Lettow-Vorbeck. If a Schutztruppe officer or NCO hoped to become a settler upon retirement he was probably biased against the interfering civilian governor and the civil servants. Instead of protecting Africans from exploitation these officers could not attempt objectivity. Settlers often viewed the civilian administrators as interfering in their businesses (especially the use of African laborers), and since most served in the army, they sided with Lettow-Vorbeck. Many German civilian administrators were reservists and therefore joined the expanded Schutztruppe. After the victory at Tanga Lettow-Vorbeck had the enthusiastic support of the settlers, who virtually ignored Schnee. The level of cooperation was so extensive, and his command of colonial resources so complete, that Lettow-Vorbeck nearly became a military dictator.

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British colonial rule emphasized separate civilian administrators more than the Belgians and Germans. With their recent admission to the colonial club there were not enough civil servants, so the Force Publique and the Schutztruppe were conflated with civil administration. Relatively few junior officers and NCOs were entrusted with a large tract of land and many souls in an almost independent command. Since telecommunications was still limited, these junior leaders could not consult headquarters but had to exercise their own judgment. If their use of force was excessive, or even criminal, there were few, or perhaps no, European witnesses to object, and probably no consequences. A similar observation can be made about Lettow-Vorbeck. His was also an independent command, since Governor Schnee was almost powerless and the government in Germany incapable of providing instructions. If Lettow-Vorbeck abused power to improve efficiency it was only a continuation of prewar practices. In the British colonies the settlers and the civilian governors were of mixed opinions about the war effort. In Kenya they interfered with the KAR before the war and even opposed its expansion during the war. After the Nandi War ended in 1906 the KAR declined because the settlers preferred the less expensive police force and they distrusted the KAR as an instrument of the Colonial Office when they desired greater self-rule. Because of its healthy climate, Kenya’s settlers concentrated in the White Highlands along the border of GEA. There were some similarities of Kenya’s settlers to their German rivals, such as retired army officers, but the British also included some of the wealthiest aristocratic settlers in colonial history. They desired vast estates for business and entertainment, a combination of hunting safaris, exotic fishing trips, and the comforts of home nearby, which required cheap labor. Boer settlers, and their own peculiar form of racism, were disproportionally influential in Kenya, as they viewed the acquisition of African land, most often by fraud, as entitling them to cheap labor. The settlers feared any competition for wages that drove up the cost of labor, such as a war, and they resented the interference of the governors and the Colonial Office in their businesses. Once the war began, the KAR expanded only slightly but the demand for military labor for the Carrier Corps, railroads, and dockyards was so great that in September 1915 British East Africa began compulsory conscription of labor. The settlers, especially the Boers, next insisted the same law be extended to serve their private economy. Even though pay as an askari or even as a carrier was greater, many Africans preferred working for settlers in order to avoid the military. The demand for laborers was so severe that neither the civilians nor the military needs were ever satisfied. A strong central government might have solved this, but the British experienced only petty bureaucratic infighting. The war was at first administered by the Colonial Ministry in London and only in ad hoc increments did the War Ministry assume responsibility for

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military operations in East Africa, and they still had to share power with the Colonial Ministry. Since South Africa and Southern Rhodesia enjoyed Home Rule they were beyond the control of the Colonial and the War Offices. Confusing matters more, the Royal Navy kept its own agenda while the Indian Army units in eastern Africa were still under the authority of the headquarters in India. When the various British Theater Commanders attempted to include the Belgians and Portuguese, they needed the Foreign Ministry. To exercise their authority they encountered an accumulation of Byzantine bureaucratic impediments, while Lettow-Vorbeck’s command and control of GEA was as enviable as it was simple. Much like Schnee, Sir Charles Belfield, governor of British East Africa, wanted the colonies to remain neutral in the war in order to maintain progress and keep control of the masses. Since it was expected to be a brief war, the progress civilization made should not be spoiled by White men killing other White men in front of the Africans. He objected to expansion of the KAR but also disliked Indian Army units in his colony. Belfield resented the interference of the theater commanders and was more likely to assist business interests. He spent most of 1915 fishing. Kenya was the major base of operations against GEA, and this low level of cooperation was at least obstructionism and at worst near to treason. In April 1917 Belfield retired and his chief secretary, Sir Charles Calvert Bowring, acted as governor (until January 1919). Bowring was an enthusiastic supporter of the war when the KAR reached its peak and the need for professional carriers was greatest. Governor of Uganda, Sir Frederick Jackson, was a fervent war supporter, with fewer settlers to contest his administration. Jackson assisted the KAR expansion and recruited Ugandans to serve as professional carriers for the Belgian Field Force. Imagine how events might have turned out had Belfield had a different attitude or been replaced earlier, and if Lettow-Vorbeck had been forced to deal with his own Belfield instead of ignoring Schnee. One characteristic of the war in this theater was the dedication and professionalism of East African soldiers. Since the non-African units ultimately proved inadequate, the triumph of Africanization was the key to success. Both the Germans and British received dedication from their soldiers that was very impressive. One pillar of the Lettow-Vorbeck myth was the fanatical devotion of askaris to him and to their unit commanders. The legend states that they seldom wavered on the battlefield but were fearless in bayonet attacks and loyal to the point of obsession, such that they sacrificed themselves to save a comrade. They were as dedicated as Napoleon’s Old Guard. The problem is that these histories offer only a narration of this accomplishment and any analysis is flimsy. Also unappreciated are the precolonial reputations. Consider how the Hehe and the Ngoni were regarded as highly disciplined and aggressive soldiers before the Germans commanded them.

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In their enthusiasm for Lettow-Vorbeck, historians have overlooked the fact that the Schutztruppe was not his creation. Rather, he benefited from the success of his predecessor, Colonel Freiherr von Schleuntz. He was in GEA only a few months before the war began, and most of that time was spent on inspection tours, leaving little or no time for any significant change. In his own narrative, Lettow-Vorbeck acknowledges his debt to Schleuntz, 10 the most underappreciated contributor to this conflict. Before the Maji-Maji Rebellion, the Schutztruppe recruited from certain “martial” ethnicities outside Tanganyika. This was considered one of the causes of the rebellion, so after 1907 recruitment was more from inside the colony and no longer emphasized ethnicity but prioritized previous personal experience instead. This was still the policy in the war. To the 2,472 prewar askaris another 2,140 (paramilitary) police were elevated to askaris, and some 2,000 retired askaris and police were recalled. To this, 600 former carriers were recruited, and of 3,888 new recruits, a few hundred had previous experience as “askari boys.” Therefore, only a little more than 3,000 could be called raw recruits with little if any previous military experience. Every account emphasizes the German askaris’ loyalty and devotion, which is often described as fanatical. This is an important part of the myth of German success, and it implies that the KAR was inferior. Yet the data provided by the German chief medical officer suggests this devotion may not have been so extreme. Of 13,430 German askaris who served during the course of the Great War, 290 were killed in action; 508 died of disease/ illness/accident (not including 162 dead of Spanish influenza after the Armistice); 3,669 were wounded; 4,275 were captured; 4,510 missing in action; 2,847 deserted. 11 Those killed in action and dead of disease are a testimony to the nature of this conflict and the efficiency of the German medics, since they are low in relation to British casualties. The desertion rate deflates the claims of fanatical devotion, as does the number of missing and captured. Consider how in April 1916 at Lolkisale all of the Twenty-Eighth Field Company surrendered once Captain Paul Rothert was wounded. On November 1916 near Lake Ruka 54 Germans and 249 askaris easily surrendered after only token resistance. Another example might be the “accidental surrender” of Captain Theodore Tafel’s column of 120 Germans and 1,400 askaris, rather than continuing the war in Mozambique. The new, raw recruits were more likely to desert than the veterans, while the lack of food and other privations increased the desire, especially during 1917 when they operated in the devastated lands of the Maji-Maji Rebellion. Perspectives on this topic have also been influenced by postwar events. After the war many pro-empire Germans emphasized the askaris’ loyalty and devotion as proof of German colonial accomplishment and the worthiness of the restoration of these possessions. They had nostalgia for a missed opportunity, a loss that was unfair to a great nation and a superior race. Also, the standard for fanatical devotion

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was elevated by the Japanese in World War II and by others later. More troublesome are the 4,510 missing in action. Undoubtedly some died while still loyal and performing military tasks, but such a large number suggests desertion without official attribution. How many simply discarded their uniforms and just went home? The prewar Schutztruppe inculcated askaris to believe they were superior to other Africans (even traditional leaders) because they served the colony’s rulers. They were also made to feel better than those in British service. After the Nandi War ended and the KAR shrank, many unemployed soldiers then enlisted in German service and could appreciate the contrasts. Pay in German service was double that of the KAR. The Germans gave more opportunity for promotion to noncommissioned officers, and askaris in German service seldom were required to perform manual labor or camp chores, while this was common in the KAR. Instead, a German askari was more likely to be entrusted with the supervision of civilian laborers. A German askari was provided with an “askari boy” to support him as a noncombat assistant, just as standard as his government-issued backpack and rifle. Traditional religious and cultural practices were mostly tolerated by the Schutztruppe, such as animal sacrifices previous to a celebration. In the KAR (and others) such “pagan” practices were suppressed, and officers interfered in soldiers’ private lives by discouraging offensive cultural practices and polygamy, yet ironically the prewar British Indian Army was religiously respectful. Another contrast was an askari’s family. A traditional East African military practice was for the family to accompany the soldier on campaigns to care for each other. The prewar Schutztruppe reluctantly allowed families to live in the boma or nearby. They came to the pragmatic realization that askaris forced to leave their families were more likely to desert, but if families came along, their fate could be attached to that of the field company. On long trips they marched with the carriers, protected by a small detachment of one German and several older or wounded askaris. The family prepared the askari’s meals, carried his belongings, nursed him if needed, and in emergencies could provide the field company with a workforce. Since they came to know military life, it was like an apprenticeship. Additional food and medical care for these families was included in planning. Even though this system worked, Lettow-Vorbeck was vexed by the conundrum of the extra mouths to feed and on several occasions he attempted to leave them behind, but failed, one of his few failures. Families and “camp followers” were not allowed in the KAR due to logistics and a preference to recruit single men, but India was again a different story. A transference of identity occurred. Africans fought and died for the benefit of European powers, but it is important to note that most had little or no contact with Whites before the war and the idea that they loyally served a distant monarch out of patriotism was an absurd creation of postwar imperi-

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alists. The real focus of devotion was not Kaiser Wilhelm II but their unit and their comrades. Often described as mercenaries because so many came from outside Tanganyika, these men did not feel attachment to the land or an ethnicity but to their brothers-in-arms who came to depend on each other. The fanatical devotion was not to the empire but to their field company, to an individual German officer, a personal connection, not patriotism. The same development was observed in the KAR. The previous German advantages faded away such that during 1917 to 1918 the askaris of both armies were about equal in quality and character, the Old Guard being replaced by less experienced and disciplined new recruits. This was the time of more frequent misconduct and more desertions as well as increased victimization of civilians by both British and German askaris. Some soldiers first served the KAR but then enlisted with the Schutztruppe before the war. Then during the war the KAR recruited inside the prisoner-of-war camps. Also, some ex-Schutztruppe in the KAR then deserted back to the Germans. While in the KAR, askaris who were ex-Schutztruppe “had won a reputation for efficiency on parade and violence and indiscipline off duty.” 12 After the war some ex-Schutztruppe enlisted in the KAR. It is possible for a man to have switched allegiance several times. What does this say about fanatical devotion? When used to praise LettowVorbeck, the references to bravery and tenacity in combat and loyalty to leaders are true, but they also included assumptions about race. These were Africans faithful to White men. It is also true that examples of such professionalism are to be found elsewhere, but they are not considered as exceptional when soldier and officer are of the same race/ethnicity. A more logical explanation was that the ratio of leaders to askaris was better in German service than in British and that the Germans were more tolerant of culture and religion, respecting each askari as an individual because the Schutztruppe had a greater percentage of Old Africa hands in their leadership. Would bravery, tenacity, and fidelity be judged on the same basis if the topic were Europeans fighting in Europe? Without Africans the Europeans could not have fought in this theater. Just as the British first tried to use soldiers from outside the region, and failed, so too they first tried to minimize the use of African laborers and failed. The Germans had no choice and not only had to use Africans as soldiers and laborers but found that the Africans were also better at it. This heavily influenced the conduct of the war. From 1914 to 1916 the British tried the alternatives and failed, while the Germans got the most out of “native relations.” Note how much of 1916 was dominated by the Belgians or British assaulting defensive positions prepared by well-organized African labor. This advantage also faded away during 1917–1918 when the war was fought in areas often hostile to the Germans, in which case the method of operations once

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again resembled the nineteenth-century caravan and slave raids of the Omani Arabs and their dependants. Imagine if Africans had not been available to labor for the Europeans. What if the military had used uniformed soldiers instead of African civilians to support those in combat? Note that in Europe and the Middle East civilians were not employed like they were in East Africa. Whereas amateurs are obsessed with strategy and tactics, professionals emphasize logistics. In East Africa the problems of logistics were far greater than the difficulties of combat, and worse than any other theater of operations in the Great War. This means that how the Europeans recruited and then treated their carriers and other laborers was far more influential than the differences in weapons each side used. Where transportation was a significant problem human carriage was the only solution. Once again, the Germans were better in this category than the British, while the Belgians and Portuguese earned an especial condemnation. Every history of this event mentions the carriers and other African laborers, but it is often too brief. Logistics is not a sexy topic and labor recruitment even less so. Consider how modern industrialized warfare requires more rear-echelon soldiers to support and maintain frontline units than combat soldiers. Before the Industrial Revolution the militaries of Europe (and elsewhere) had military tasks performed by civilians on campaign and even on the battlefield. For example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries civilians on contract to a European army delivered artillery to a battlefield then waited nearby until the pieces needed to be advanced or withdrawn. Other civilian teamsters carried ammunition, food, fodder, wounded, and dead. If these civilians bolted during a battle, as sometimes occurred, they could turn the outcome. It is also worth noting that in this period the Europeans also had families and camp followers attend their soldiers. During the nineteenth century the civilians left the battlefield as modern transportation increased the volume of goods, and logistics became the duty of professional soldiers. Still there were some exceptions, such as during World Wars I and II when civilians crewed merchant ships and were exposed to the dangers of combat. As with other subjects of World War I in East Africa, the role of noncombatant labor remains confused, frustrating, and even counterintuitive. Definitions were capriciously used, and although bureaucracies attempted to bring order, the written records are woefully incomplete. Even the terms employed during the war, such as carrier, porter, and follower, or the distinction between contract, periodic, or casual labor, even skilled laborer versus unskilled laborer, are so filled with contradictions they can only perpetuate misunderstandings. A more detailed list includes: armed scouts, headmen, interpreters, guides, cooks, bakers, mountain gun carriers, machine gun carriers, mortar carriers, signal porters, stretcher bearers, stevedores, canoe men (aka boatmen, paddle men), truck drivers, steamer crewmen, road/bridge

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builders, drain/latrine/trench diggers, hut builders, wood choppers, railroad gangs, dock workers, tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, grooms, sweeps, carpenters, carrier police, and personal servants. Adding to the confusion are plural enlistments, desertions, fraud, and the differences between volunteering and “recruitment,” the euphemism for forced labor, which all agreed was illegal but widely practiced anyway. For the purposes of this analysis three groups of noncombatants will be considered: specialist laborers, ordinary carriers (porters), and limited noncombatants. If ammunition, food, and other essential supplies do not reach the soldiers, then the army will cease to exist. In colonial warfare the difficult topography and distances make this observation of the obvious even more painful. In the Victorian era there were great variations in practices and experiences. Some histories describe armed carriers as providing extra defensive firepower, while others depict carriers chained or tied by the necks or ankles to prevent escape. In the decades before World War I the formula that worked best was soldiers supported by professional carriers, who expected combat. For example, when Britain organized the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) in 1897, one reform included the recruitment of specialist carriers for the artillery and machine guns. When these men signed a twoyear enlistment they received a modest uniform, military training and discipline, a rate of pay greater than casual laborers, a pension, and the prospect of gratuities. They carried unusually heavy loads of sixty to seventy pounds plus their own goods. They were required to expose themselves to danger by delivering the load during a battle, assist in the weapons’ assembly, and then wait nearby in case there was movement. They shared the fate of the WAFF unit they served. For all other loads the WAFF used large numbers of temporary carriers. When the WAFF served in East Africa from 1916 onward they brought nine thousand carriers with them, but after nine months only 37 percent remained effective with death rates of 16 to 20 percent. 13 One of the post Maji-Maji Rebellion reforms for the Schutztruppe was the establishment of 250 specialist laborers for each field company, supplemented as needed by ordinary carriers. These specialists wore uniforms and had ranks, as well as military training and discipline. The most prestigious jobs were the machine gun bearers or jungle gun carriers. The machine gun or artillery piece was carried disassembled, but even under enemy fire these men were expected to deliver their load and assemble the weapon, then wait nearby. During battle they brought ammunition, water to cool the machine guns, tools, and if ordered to move the weapon under enemy fire they had to accept the risks. They were the equivalent of soldiers. If they had been White, they would have been called soldiers. Lettow-Vorbeck called the machine gun carriers “Equally soldierly” and observed that they tended to be Nyamwezi and Zukuma. 14 When the Schutztruppe was at its largest size in March 1916 there were some forty-five thousand carriers in service. 15 Many

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carriers were relatives of askaris, and since they understood German expectations they became a pool of potential recruits, identifying more with their field company than their ethnicity. Medics were another specialist laborer example where the Germans excelled. As a pragmatic development, they supplemented German doctors as sanitary noncommissioned officers to prevent diseases and as stretcher bearers/dressers while in combat. The prewar KAR relied upon assistant surgeons seconded from the Indian Army, but this later proved unacceptable. Instead the East African Medical Corps and the Uganda Native Medical Corps were created and later combined into the African Native Medical Corps, which peaked at 10 British officers and 1,500 medics. Of the 1,700 who served, 113 died, but only 2 were killed in combat. British racism required these arrangements, as blacks were not treated by the (Whites only) Royal Army Medical Corps or the Indian Medical Services. 16 The ordinary carriers-porters were essential. They were the means of transportation. They brought everything needed for combat but expected different treatment from the specialized laborers such as less pay, less discipline, but also less danger and only short periods of service. They were mostly young men but also included women and children, and in addition to human carriage they could be an emergency labor force. Based mostly on the East African nineteenth-century caravan tradition, the practices were institutionalized and then continued during the Great War with little alteration. It is not that the Europeans wanted to use human carriage so much as they had no choice. Lettow-Vorbeck observed that a three-ton truck in one day could carry a load that required six hundred carriers and four days. GEA had only three trucks and three cars in 1914. The British attempted to use modern transportation as much as possible, but that always reached a limit and then only caravans of traditional carriers could complete the task. The professional standard was that a carrier consumed his own load in twenty-five days, eating two pounds of grain a day unless he could be resupplied while on the march. To deliver six thousand pounds of cargo in a five-day journey, one hundred carriers were needed, plus twenty more to carry the food for all one hundred twenty carriers; thus twelve hundred pounds of grain to transport six thousand pounds of cargo for five days, if all went well. Often it did not. Convoys became lost or distracted while accidents and poor weather created delays. Carriers stole their loads, fell ill, or deserted. Sometimes families accompanied the carriers and also had to be accommodated. One variation was to establish semipermanent supply depots a few days apart so that less of each load was food for carriers, they faced fewer hardships, and they were less likely to be accompanied by families. This shuttle system worked better but was more fragile and expensive and required more men. 17 No wonder the British tried every modern solution first before settling for the traditional system.

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Another example of German organized labor was the response to the unexpected. When the Konigsberg was in need of an engine overhaul Dar es Salaam could not be used directly. It did have the workshops, but it was too vulnerable in the way that had doomed the Pegasus. Instead, after being hidden in the Rufiji Delta, the ship’s boiler plates and machinery were disassembled and carried overland by thousands of Africans, organized by German officers who were prewar civil servants. In another example, when the first blockade runner was sunk, a massive salvage operation began. The two deep sea divers taken off the Zieten were put to work alongside thousands of laborers. Since the cargo of rifle cartridges was contaminated by seawater, hundreds of carriers worked for months to disassemble each round to dry the gunpowder and reclaim the ammunition. Similarly, when the second blockade runner arrived, the cargo was arranged to comport with the East African carrier tradition. The entire fifteen hundred-ton cargo was organized into sixty- to sixty-five-pound loads and thousands of carriers waiting for the ship completed the task in four days. The Germans were better than their enemies at organizing African labor, and this was an important advantage. It was already common before they arrived, so the Germans inherited a system that worked. As a part of their prewar job, civilian district commissioners organized professional carriers in a relay shuttle system that was fully employed in the war. These Old Africa government administrators then became Lettow-Vorbeck’s subordinates, and they made the system as practical and efficient as Africa would allow. Since most of the war was fought inside Tanganyika, they had this important advantage: they knew the land and the people. As the Schutztruppe shrank late in the war, so too did the need for the same massive numbers of carriers. Before the war the KAR did not have specialized carriers but hired them as needed on a casual ad hoc basis. Of course, prewar Kenya experienced the same professional carrier caravans, but the British did not standardize service like the Germans. Instead pay, rations, recruitment, and so on were all improvised until the Military Labour Bureau (MLB) was set up in 1916 for the vast numbers of carriers and other workers. Since the numbers of civilian workers was so great, the MLB needed a great many White men to supervise them. Of course, the most desirable were settlers and others with a professional Africa background, but they were finite, so another task of the MLB was to train newly arrived leaders. Similar to the KAR experience many of these new men were the wounded survivors of other theaters, sent to recover their health in the sunny tropics while still serving king and country. This also means that despite the best intentions of the MLB the Germans still had a better quality of leadership for their workers. Another contrast was payment. As much as possible the Germans paid in cash. The origin of the coins mattered little, since anything was better than nothing. The Germans even collected the brass casings of spent cartridges to melt them down and mint coins while in the

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field in order to pay African laborers something. The British were fond of issuing promissory notes (IOUs). Admittedly the Germans did this too, but they still had more of a reputation for cash. In 1917 and more so in 1918 everyone used compulsion for laborers, which many Africans, and others, equated with the slave wars of the nineteenth century. The limited noncombatants (or casual labor) were the most numerous but also the least documented and understood. In work areas far from the front lines they were safer, faced fewer hardships, often close to home, and better fed. They worked the dockyards and built roads, bridges, and railroads, but the largest category was farmers. Since askaris and carriers preferred their own food, the British government purchased grain crops from Kenya’s Black farmers, who had little alternative. Another example was the dock workers of Mombasa, who experienced a sudden spike in the demand for their services after the declaration of war and so got an increase in pay. When the war moved south, many also relocated to work the ports of Tanganyika, where their comforts were poorer and their health suffered. Limited noncombatants had the highest desertion rates, although some escaped to better paying jobs elsewhere. In this theater of operations statistics are especially suspect. However, about one million carriers and other workers serving the needs of all the armies is the most accepted standard. This includes the observation that some Tanganyika civilians worked for the Germans first and then the British and the Belgians. Of the carriers in British service roughly 376 were killed by combat, but 44,911 (official figures) died of disease/illness/accident, hastened by prolonged malnourishment and exhaustion. Not only were laborers fed less than soldiers but they were also of lower priority too. Realistically, the civilian fatalities were several times that of the official figures. In addition to poor food, they were not issued the quinine that was mandatory for soldiers, so malaria was the second greatest cause of death for Allied carriers, following dysentery. Deserters shot by those tasked with guarding them were customarily not recorded, since poor discipline was a professional embarrassment. The Belgians recruited 190,000 to 260,000 carriers of their own Congolese (not including Ugandans provided by the British). The prewar reputation for brutality of the Force Publique was so odious and infamous that whole societies literally ran away and hid in the most inhospitable places just to avoid working for them. The Portuguese were considered to be worse. Since carriers were the only transportation beyond the harbors or railheads, these failures in native relations can only be considered a severe handicap to winning the war. 18 Where all of this came together—leaders, soldiers, and noncombatant military laborers—was in the vital area of camp sanitation and discipline. If great efforts were taken, the Europeans and askaris were kept as healthy as possible so that they could then engage in combat. This meant for every

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soldier there needed to be several civilian workers to serve and support him. Without this, soldiers became underfed and soon fell ill, with the environment causing more losses than combat. In this area, perhaps the most important aspect of this theater, the German system was superior and based on prewar practices. For each German or askari there were several civilians dedicated to keeping him healthy. For the Indians and South Africans there might be one civilian “boy” supporting many soldiers (if even that) paid for from their private funds. Malaria and dysentery do not distinguish between good men or bad. If an army cannot survive the environment, they cannot win battles. When the war began the combatants tried to emphasize modern solutions to age-old problems, but when these failed they turned to traditional methods, creating a hybrid of the two. This created military advantages and disadvantages for each belligerent, but the Germans were more successful. The famous German discipline was put to the test in the daily routine of camp sanitation. The Maji-Maji Rebellion was again the inspiration, as the Schutztruppe ideal was to maximize preparedness for any emergency without the slightest warning. Just as each askari had an “askari boy” assigned to him, so too, each German was served by a staff of five or more whose duties were to preserve the health of the soldiers and officers. Beyond the tents, mosquito netting, and a folding cot, a well-established routine of clearing campsites, boiling water, preparing meals, maintaining equipment, and sterilizing clothing was all intended to minimize exposure to disease. Strict discipline included the uniform. Regardless of the weather, it was a court martial offense if all buttons on the tunic were not fastened, neck and sleeves, with pants stuffed into puttees in order to minimize insect-borne diseases. Even with all these precautions Lettow-Vorbeck contracted malaria ten times. All Germans, askaris, specialized carriers, and some other noncombatants were immunized against cholera, smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever. Late in the war, when different strains were encountered in Mozambique, the German medical staff created specific new vaccines. In every aspect, the German medical staff was superior to the Allies, again because Tanganyika was Germany’s most prized colony. In the 1890s until 1906 the famous scientist Dr. Robert Koch conducted investigations in GEA into cholera, malaria, and sleeping sickness. In 1900 the Colonial Economic Committee (settlers and commercial investors) agitated the Berlin government for a research station based on the example of Buitenzorg, the Dutch agricultural institute in Java. Forty miles west of Tanga the Amani Institute was established in 1902 with a staff trained in botany, chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. Amani partially compensated for the blockade by producing medicines and research, despite the circumstances, and therefore was an essential wartime resource. When the war began there were sixtythree civilian or Schutztruppe doctors who were also held to an elite standard

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(under thirty-five years old, not married, educated at Hamburg’s Institute of Tropical Medicine), plus eleven missionary, railroad, or ship’s doctors and five veterinarians. When combined with German medical NCOs and African medical orderlies, this gave the Schutztruppe one of the best doctor/medic to patient ratios of World War I. 19 Using malaria as an example, it is easy to understand how modern and traditional methods were combined into a hybrid, and an advantage. Noncombatant African labor prepared hygienic campsites to reduce the chance of infection, while a daily dose of South American quinine was used as a prophylactic. They began the war with a generous supply of quinine. Before the war German settlers planted cinchona trees in the Usambara Mountains, and the trees’ bark was distilled by the Amani Institute into pure sulfate of quinine, nicknamed “Lettow Schnapps.” Before the enemy captured Amani the Germans carried away the supply of bark to produce less refined quinine. The blockade runner Marie von Stettin brought another two hundred kilograms, and quinine was also captured from the Allies. This combination of manpower and quinine, of long-sleeved clothing and boiled water, was not perfect, and during times of urgency shortcuts were taken, but it was still the best of both the modern and traditional methods. 20 A characteristic of this conflict was the substitution of African solutions employed by the Germans due to the blockade. They studied traditional African medicine to create a remedy for diarrhea by using “uzara” root. To replace conventional bandages, a common tree bark could be beaten and sterilized to make absorbent bandages and compresses. After removing the fat, raw cotton found in Mozambique became surgical cotton-wool. A disinfectant alcohol extracted from several plants lowered the rate of gangrene and tetanus. Ointments were made from hippopotamus and elephant fat, peanut oil, and wax. All of these practices kept the German forces in fit fighting trim during the first half of the war but then deteriorated. Food became a growing problem; therefore, malnourishment began as the availability of medicines got worse. No one remained healthy. In Mozambique different strains of infectious diseases, smallpox, cerebro-spinal fever, and croupous pneumonia succeeded each other at a time when the Schutztruppe had fewer noncombatant laborers and camp discipline declined. Except for the rainy season, during the last year of the war the Schutztruppe was always on the march, thus men never fully recuperated and a lower standard for “healthy” became the new normal. Still it remained that in this area the Germans held another important advantage without an Allied equivalent. Their soldiers were kept healthy and got plenty of attention if they were not, but the worst German medical cases could be surrendered to the advancing Allies, reducing the German supply situation while increasing the burden of Allied responsibilities. The Allies had no choice but to accept and care for some very needy patients, who

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exacerbated an already failing supply system. 21 It is counterintuitive, but despite the blockade the Germans were relatively healthier. For the Allies it was worse. Some British units practiced camp sanitation similar to the Germans and were healthier than the rest of their army. In the South African and Indian units racism combined with shameful medical incompetence to make many patients a self-inflicted wound. Supply lines stretched to Europe, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, but naval superiority was not enough to guarantee good health. The King’s African Rifles and the West African Field Force employed some of the same camp sanitation practices as the Germans, which others interpreted as pampering the White officers with luxuries, such that the Nigerians were called the “bed and bath” brigade. The South Africans and others considered noncombatant laborers as extra mouths to feed and an encumbrance to modern warfare. They also, sadly, believed in acclimatization. Unfortunate policies were based on misconceptions, as racism mixed with ad hominem observations. One fallacy was that White Africans acclimatized after living in the tropics for years. For ages before World War I this was so widely believed it seemed scientific. White Kenyans, Rhodesians, and South Africans were believed to be so hardy they could go to Tanganyika as if on the veldt. Although they were more comfortable they were also, literally and figuratively, more exposed to illnesses. They wore loose, short-sleeved clothing, slept on a blanket on the ground, drank raw water, and at the end of a long and difficult day they made camp and cooked for themselves. They suffered mightily. Combat casualties were few relative to those who were incapacitated. Africa’s illnesses reduced them before they reached the front line, and they became another liability to the inadequate supply lines. Anyone could become ill from an insect bite, by raw water, or from just breathing. Few men did not get malaria, and if it advanced into blackwater fever (renal failure) about half died. The combination of camp discipline and quinine was not perfect, but acclimatization was a fantasy. German methods were objectively better, since the mosquito had fewer opportunities. So too with another common insect, the sand flea (aka chiggers, jiggers), which, like blowflies, burrow under a human or animal’s flesh to lay a nest of eggs that feast upon the host as they mature. Not only were Germans less exposed to these threats, their traditional treatment was superior. Using only a sewing needle, or even a thorn, skilled African women meticulously removed the insect eggs one at a time, leaving a clean wound to be treated with homemade disinfectant alcohol and bandages. The British method had a surgeon cut away the surrounding flesh in order to remove the nest. This left a gaping wound that provoked infection, often leading to gangrene, but invariably left a few eggs behind anyway that matured, perhaps requiring amputation. 22 In East Africa insects were more lethal than lions, hippos, or snakes.

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From raw water they got guinea worms. At the time of the Great War it was not known how they spread. Transported inside a water flea, the larvae of the guinea worm entered the wall of the intestines, traveled to other parts of the body, and then weeks later it broke through the skin. If done correctly it might be extracted at this point, but often this was fumbled and spread the infestation. It is accompanied by general pain, severe irritation/itchiness, fever, diarrhea and/or vomiting, and creates enough damaged muscle and organs that infections, gangrene, and death may result. Boiling the water kills the larvae. This was also the prevention for dysentery, which was known at the time but not always practiced. Without laborers the task of boiling drinking water was compromised by exhausted soldiers who also believed they became acclimatized. Raw water might be inadvertently consumed too. Like malaria it seemed everyone got dysentery eventually, but with precautions both could be minimized. Within the British forces the White Africans from Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and South Africa suffered the highest rates, followed by the Indians, since these had the fewest noncombatant laborers to assist them. The units that were prewar colonial constabularies—the King’s African Rifles and West African Field Force, which employed carriers and others—were healthier but not as well as the Germans. Some volunteer units composed of settlers (e.g., the East African Mounted Rifles) did better, as they took precautions, including civilian retinues and their own supplies, as if it were another safari. It is important to note that one command had a perfect record, admittedly with unusual circumstances: the Naval Africa Expedition to Lake Tanganyika. Dr. Hother McCormick Hanschell, assistant director of the London School of Tropical Medicine, accepted a Royal Navy commission to serve as the expedition’s medical officer. Apparently he was the perfect choice: not one of his officers and men was seriously ill during the entire ordeal. As a specialist, he had the knowledge, and in the field he was the strictest of disciplinarians who greatly exceeded his authority for the protection of his men. The Royal Navy issued equipment and supplies that were grossly inadequate, so he purchased a great deal with his own funds. Men were vaccinated against smallpox and inoculated against typhoid. When on the march the campsites were sanitized for both the Europeans and their African laborers. Since the Africans were so close to the sailors he concerned himself with their health as well. With the assistance of civilian government officials Dr. Hanschell went in advance of the expedition to create a sanitary corridor, and if government buildings or villages were found to be infested with fleas, lice, ticks, or rodents they were completely burned, even though he had no such authority. Admittedly Hanschell was an exception in that he only had to care for twenty-eight White men (some Old Africa hands) and only temporarily care for hundreds of African workers. It was as if each sailor had his own

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personal physician. 23 Qualitatively and quantitatively other British medical abilities decreased when the numbers of men increased. The Belgians were worse and the Portuguese were the worst at medical care. Similar to the British and Germans, the Force Publique combined inoculations, quinine, and manpower to create conditions as sanitary as possible for the Europeans and askaris. When the war began they were not prepared. Recruiting more soldiers was easier than finding more doctors and medical orderlies. Also, supplies and men that landed on the Atlantic coastline had to cross half of Africa to reach the Great Lakes region, at least until 1917 when the British controlled the Indian Ocean ports. Belgian convalescent hospitals were not established in the Great Lakes region until 1917. Despite having the oldest European claims in eastern Africa, the Portuguese were the least capable, and sadly medicine was one of their worst subjects. They believed in acclimatization and did not vaccinate Africans (civilians and askaris) against smallpox and dysentery, and most soldiers sent from Portugal were not either. Because of political instability in Portugal, these failures were overshadowed by worse embarrassments. Some regular army units that landed in Mozambique fell ill and were immediately sent home again without even leaving the port. A frequent observation was how many officers and men suffered from untreated syphilis. It was not the Germans who created Allied casualties so much as Africa and hubris. The last great safari was devastating. ASYMMETRIC OBJECTIVES In most military conflicts the two sides desire the same objective, and thus determination of success or failure can be as simple as possession at the end of combat. If both claim the same real estate, the winner is usually in occupation (and effective control) of the disputed land. By the end of 1917, every inch of German East Africa was occupied by the armed forces of Belgium and the British Empire. This should have been the end of a simple story. Instead, the war in East Africa continued for another year because the objectives were not the same. Both sides could claim success because the Germans distracted Allied units and continued to exist, while simultaneously the Allies conquered land and won battles. Yet, since the Allies never defeated the Germans, and the Germans’ diversion of Allied resources was exaggerated and perhaps insignificant, there was failure on both sides. It was a successful failure. The colonies were not prepared for the Great War. Almost all colonies had a military that was separate from a (paramilitary) police force, but it was not expected to be an important contribution in a European war. There were exceptions. The British Indian Army was used before World War I in China,

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parts of Africa, and elsewhere as an imperial constabulary strike force, and they planned to send some divisions to a European war. The 1914 solution to GEA was supposed to be British Indian Army Expeditionary Forces B and C. In the years just before the war, the French government decided to use African units in Europe, but the Germans, Belgians, Spanish, Dutch, Italians, Portuguese, and Americans had no such plans to use colonial soldiers outside of their homelands; therefore, no colonial army was prepared in 1914 for modern war. The experts predicted a short war of only a few months, a year or more at the most. This was a reasonable assumption, since in the decades before 1914 Europe’s wars tended to be brief and limited, so the colonies could simply await the decisions from Europe. Were that the case, then simple resistance to retain a claim to the colony (at least some of it) until war’s end would have been enough. If the colonies could help, even that might be limited to assisting warships, but the colonies were not supposed to war against each other on behalf of the motherland. The common criticism of the lack of preparedness of the Schutztruppe and the KAR is unfair, since their only role was as constabularies to keep control of the African people. Therefore, the colonies had not stockpiled large amounts of war matériel; no one expected a long war, and the colonies had little if any role to play in the outcome of a prospective European conflict. With the benefit of hindsight this was wrong, perhaps even naive. Imagine if prewar investments had been made and Lettow-Vorbeck had commanded an impressive arsenal and a larger number of officers. Since it was not a quick war, the objective of each belligerent changed as the war dragged on. For German East Africa this was an easy evolution. The first problem was the support of neutrality by Governor Schnee and others, but this lasted only a few months. Similarly another anticipated role of GEA, as a support base for the naval strategy of cruiser warfare, failed after a few months as well. The projected strategy was that modern cruisers like Konigsberg would capture enemy freighters the way that frigates caught merchantmen in the age of fighting sail, and that GEA could support the effort by providing supplies and bases, and receive the captured cargo ships as prizes. This did not happen. The refueling of coal was too great a burden, and the coast was never secure. Dar es Salaam was not a German Singapore. A major naval base was another imperial ambition that never was. Economic warfare in the Indian Ocean was a disappointment. Instead, the Konigsberg itself was trapped. Much like the army, if the navy had made a much greater prewar investment, perhaps cruiser warfare might have succeeded. There was another imperialist ambition in this early period that was also later forgotten. They dreamed of a German Middle Africa. Like a pipedream, the details were vague, but the start of the Great War was invested with many heady ambitions. Just as British imperialists imagined their empire from Cape

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Town to Cairo, there were German fantasies of an empire from Togo and Cameroon on the Atlantic to Tanganyika and the Indian Ocean. German Middle Africa was to be at the expense of French and British colonies and the Belgian Congo. In the excitement of the first months anything seemed possible. Later, when Portugal entered the war, Mozambique and Angola were added to the wish lists. Early in the conflict Lettow-Vorbeck announced a prewar idea that to distract Allied resources from more valuable theaters of operations would be GEA’s contribution to the war effort. It was pragmatic. It acknowledged that the war’s decision would be in Europe and that the British naval blockade would not be defeated. “In cold truth our small band . . . had occupied a very superior enemy force for the whole war. According to what English officers told me, 137 Generals had been in the field, and in all about 300,000 men had been employed against us.” 24 If Lettow-Vorbeck had distracted 300,000 Allied soldiers from the Western Front that would have been a significant contribution, but, as will be shown later, this was a gross exaggeration and an important myth. Nonetheless, Lettow-Vorbeck desired a diversion as much as possible, and if this war followed the unwritten rules of centuries of European wars and statecraft, then an army in resistance to the Allies would give Germany a right to retain Tanganyika. They did not know how long the war would last. With the November 1914 attacks by Indian Army Expeditionary Forces B and C, Lettow-Vorbeck could feel justified that he was distracting resources, just as the Royal Navy sending ships to hunt the Konigsberg was a preoccupation. Even further proof came a year later when more units were sent to Kenya in preparation for a general invasion. One man who understood and agreed with Lettow-Vorbeck was Lord Kitchener. He opposed any units being sent to East Africa, and after Smuts’s first victories secured the Kenyan border and the settlers were now safe he advocated a stop to all offensives. If the war had ended at this point, much of the Lettow-Vorbeck success story would remain as it is. But in fact few of these resources were useful elsewhere, so it was not so much a diversion from the Western Front as an attraction of mostly undesirable units and obsolete weapons. For the Allies, the goals also altered as the war continued. Despite a Kenya governor who desired neutrality, the Royal Navy needed to eliminate GEA as an enemy asset, and there were prewar plans for the Indian Army to occupy Dar es Salaam (which was redirected against Tanga). Therefore the British began World War I with an aggressive policy against all German colonies. The failure at Tanga and other disappointments caused a temporary shift during 1915 to simple border security as Britain emphasized other theaters of operations. How could the Allied capture of GEA cause Germany’s defeat? It could not. Instead, Allied frustrations in 1915 caused yet another change in priorities for the British. Some success somewhere was needed to

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provide encouragement to the public and legitimacy for the government. In 1915 the Western Front, Russia, and Gallipoli were great setbacks if not humiliations, but successes in German South-West Africa and Cameroon prevented a unanimous verdict of incompetence. They might be cheap little victories, but they were still preferable to none at all. If the war had ended in negotiations at this point the Allies had little credibility, but since they did not know how much longer this Great War would continue, more victories would be needed in 1916, even if they too were discounted in the end. Even though it did nothing to weaken Germany, the capture of colonies was worth something—bargaining chips for peace negotiations, an emotional balm since colonies were traditionally assumed to be valuable. Therefore the 1916 invasions of GEA that took all of 1917 to complete were frugal victories. Next the objectives evolved again. The events of 1918 more resembled a nineteenth-century colonial constabulary action, as if the hero of civilization, Great Britain, had a moral duty to protect the innocent Africans from the criminal Germans, the way it had once been the leader of the antislavery movement. In Britain’s frustrations, Germany was now portrayed as anticivilization, and the actions in Africa were held up as proof that world domination by the Huns would reverse progress. Objectives in East Africa had to be malleable. Adding to the confusion of Allied asymmetrical objectives were conflicts of interests within the British Empire. During World War I colonies got colonies of their own as a reflection of their maturation into nationhood. The Union of South Africa was rewarded with a protectorate of their own, German South-West Africa, while Australia conquered German New Guinea and groups of Pacific islands that became their bonus, and New Zealand got German Samoa. It is worth emphasizing that all three colonies were alarmed at the potential threat posed by German possessions, which caused militarization in the decade before the war. There was talk that India would get Tanganyika. Indian nationalists were agitating for equality, and while some wanted independence others wanted dominion status equal to Canada and the others. There was a long history of Indians interacting with eastern Africa; before the British got to South Asia there were Indians living in Tanganyika as merchants and professionals. In the nineteenth century some of the Omani government officials were Indians, who then served the German government, while others worked for private companies. When the war began, some 15,000 Indians lived in GEA, and despite the fact that most came from the land of their enemy, the Germans could not remove them without harming their own interests. During 1914 through 1915, when Indian soldiers were an important part of the British effort, there was a proposal to reward India with Tanganyika after the war. This would help to give the pro-dominion faction a lever against the independence party with the prospect of a colony for India’s expanding population. 25 The famous imperialist Sir Harry Johnston cited the

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phrase, “the America of the Hindu,” in reference to East Africa, and mentioned that to the natives, Indians would be more welcome than whites.” 26 “India’s Canada,” or “India’s Australia,” however, conflicted with the addition of South African soldiers. Not only were South Africans also promised GEA as their protectorate, but Smuts used his authority to block the ambitions of Portugal and Belgium. Since Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were projections of South African interests, the Great War seemed a heavenly opportunity to expand into Tanganyika and Kenya, where Boers already lived. To make Africa, from Cape Town to Cairo, all theirs seemed not only logical but an expression of God’s will. 27 At some point it was no longer the short war everyone expected. As the war grew worse, the objectives changed. To justify such suffering, the Allies became more intransigent in demands for territory. In Britain the newspapers and politicians mentioned the “big loot” that the division of the Ottoman Empire would bring. The German colonies were another form of plunder. The Admiralty came to fear submarines so much that a German restoration became completely unthinkable regardless of Lettow-Vorbeck’s persistence. After having illusions that it might go to allies or become a dominion, the London government kept Tanganyika. Objectives changed over time for the Belgians. Since almost all of Belgium was occupied in the first days of the war, the Force Publique was dependent upon the charity of her friends. In 1915 the Belgians greatly desired offensives in Africa to create victories that could become bargaining chips if there were a peace negotiations conference. Since they did not know how long the war would take, or its outcome, they needed some advantage against the Germans. Therefore in addition to contributing to the 1915 invasion of Cameroon, the 1916 occupation of Rwanda, Urundi, and the northwest of Tanganyika was important to them far out of proportion to the actual value. Could Belgian control of these lands force Germany to evacuate Belgium? No, but it was the only contribution their empire could make. This was slightly altered during 1917 and 1918 when the Force Publique did not actually conquer territory but cooperated with British forces to curry favor with their senior partner. Contributing to the asymmetrical nature of the conflict was the fact that the Germans usually held the initiative because they could withhold a major battle by a fighting withdrawal, but if they did choose to fight the British had little choice but to accept, even if at a disadvantage. The desire of General Smuts (and others) for a major battle, to decide it all, made the costs worse, since Allied intentions were so well known. During 1914 and 1915 the German initiative in border raids was an embarrassment for the Allies but no worse. The advantage in numbers during 1916 might appear to give the Allies the initiative, but this is counter to the situation on the ground. British, or Belgian, units would accumulate in front of a German fortified position

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until the Allies held a local advantage in numbers. When combat commenced the German defensive advantage would negate the superior enemy numbers, and then as a battle developed the Germans began an orderly withdrawal to the next defensive positions already under construction by the well-organized African laborers. This advantage in African labor faded such that during 1917 to 1918 the British were about equal in this area. Kitchener was one man who understood all of this, but he was overruled by the politicians, who needed a success somewhere. In June 1916 Kitchener was killed, and there was no alternative voice of moderation regarding East Africa. If this had been a symmetrical conflict, then the objectives, tactics, resources, and abilities would be about the same for each side, like chess or checkers. The only area where this was true was Africa itself. The land, weather, diseases, roads, and rivers treated all the same. This meant that combat tactics had to be different from Europe and a quick strategic decision was not possible. Despite the attempts to use modern weapons and equipment, the war was still fought at a traditional African pace. Smuts’s use of cavalry was as much a disappointment as were the warplanes and armored cars. Ideas about movement, communications, and firepower that seemed logical in London did not translate to the reality of East Africa. If the Germans had had the opportunity they too would have employed modern solutions more often, but the blockade forced them to embrace the hybrid of solutions sooner than the British, making them appear more successful and Lettow-Vorbeck wiser than his rivals. Even if more of everything had been available to everyone, it would not have changed the monsoon seasons or the malarial mosquitoes. Africa treated them the same. They all suffered. When considering asymmetrical objectives there was another scenario that represents a missed opportunity for Germany. The Allies could not defeat Germany by taking her colonies. Germany could not directly attack Britain but could indirectly weaken Britain because their economies were not identical. The German economy was based on control of European resources, while Britain relied on her colonies and world trade, making their vulnerabilities different. Since Germany could not directly attack Britain itself, what if it attacked its colonies instead, thus destroying trade and the reliability of its economy? This was the reasoning behind the economic warfare, to strangle Britain with the U-boats. If more significant army and naval resources had been placed in Germany’s colonies, then Britain’s trade would have been devastated. If the German army could have taken the offensive against enemy colonies, the Allied economies would have panicked and weakened, far worse than they did. The Germans did not have to take India, but only contest the use of the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately for Germany, its overseas empire was still new and underdeveloped and not the German Singapore of its fantasies.

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THIS WAS NOT GUERRILLA WARFARE World War II is a more popular historical topic than World War I, and many studies of the Great War have been overshadowed if not neglected. Note that 1939–1945 is not called The Great War II or the Second Great War. World War II has better video, movies, and publicity. By the end of World War II, warfare had many new developments, including the use of guerrilla warfare to advance national liberation movements. These experiences caused a renewed interest in World War I in East Africa. Many scholars were looking for examples of Whites successfully engaged in guerrilla war in the tropics, due to the experiences of the Malaya Emergency, the Vietnam wars, the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe conflict, and others. They thought they found it in Lettow-Vorbeck. There was also a racial fascination. They were attracted to the askaris’ reputation for fanatical devotion, as evasion was misinterpreted as guerrilla tactics. The post–World War II era experienced what can be called “people’s war,” as the guerrillas used Mao Zedong for their inspiration, not a Prussian nobleman who was an officer of Kaiser Wilhelm’s army. Guerrilla war is a political act that employs military tactics that bear a passing resemblance to the evasion tactics employed by Lettow-Vorbeck. World War I in East Africa was not guerrilla warfare. The word guerrilla is overused. Since the early 1960s it has become a sexy word—fashionable, creative, even cerebral. There are guerrilla theater troops, guerrilla environmentalists, guerrilla advertising, guerrilla lawyers, guerrilla medicine, guerrilla filmmakers, guerrilla capitalism, guerrilla fashion, guerrilla social activists, and at times even orthodox elected politicians have declared themselves to be guerrillas. Such capricious use of the term has diluted its meaning. The classic examples from before World War I were Spanish and German resistance to Napoleon’s occupations and the Boers’ campaigns of 1899–1902. These were civilians without military training and too weak to engage in conventional battle defending their homelands from foreigners. They had no uniforms, and when pursued they either tried to blend in with the other civilians or retreat into remote, difficult lands. By hiding among their neighbors, a political act occurred, since these fighters depended upon the others to not reveal to the enemy who in their community had taken up arms. Since the people were mostly united against foreigners, this support was often present. When Napoleon was defeated, it was primarily by conventional armies, and in fact guerrillas have seldom won wars without orthodox military support. These military operations were asymmetrical, which again resembles East Africa. This dynamic happened again in World War II in Europe and Asia against the Nazi Germans, their associates, and the Japanese. Civilians living under enemy occupation at that time might surreptitiously plant explosives or commit other clandestine attacks, but otherwise,

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to use Mao’s metaphor, they acted as a fish hiding in a school of its own kind. The other World War II example was the way of the partisans, who operated in groups and occupied difficult land located in forests and mountains to create liberated areas. But without heavy weapons they could only fight small enemy units, as experienced in Yugoslavia, the Baltic nations, the Soviet Union, and China. Since the Axis occupation was already despised, politicization was not necessary, despite a few collaborators. At most these partisans distracted Axis resources until conventional Allied armies liberated the nation. After World War II, the use of the word guerrilla came to refer to people politically motivated toward national liberation, often with a communist/ socialist agenda. Beyond the end of colonialism or the overthrow of an illegitimate, oppressive indigenous regime, the purpose was the politicization of the citizens, often by provoking government retaliation against the people so that the traumatized survivors were forced into a decision. Examples might be Cuba, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia, Nicaragua, RhodesiaZimbabwe, and East Timor. Army brutality might not make the people communists, but it would ensure they would not assist the abusive government. The era witnessed COIN (counterinsurgency) operations that included an internecine element. No one could tell what was in the heart and mind of his neighbor. Rather than a military tactic that supplemented orthodox warfare, as with the partisans of World War II, these guerrilla struggles were primarily political acts where the loyalty of the people was the real objective, not land. This was not the case with World War I in East Africa. German forces wore uniforms. They began the war in standard-issue uniforms made in Germany. The first years of the war German and African women in Tanganyika made homespun uniforms that were not quite the same, but after 1916 this source was no longer available. Thus during 1917 and 1918 German forces often wore Allied uniforms instead, not as a deception but as a practical solution. They did not attempt to blend into the civilian population as in Mao’s example of a school of fish. And there was no attempt to nationalize or politicize the people. In fact it was common practice of the Germans to leave their worst wounded and ill not hidden and protected from the enemy but in the temporary care of African civilians with the intention that these patients would soon be in Allied custody. In fact maintaining European rule by not allowing the Africans to be politicized was one area of cooperation between the Germans and the Allies. This was not guerrilla war. As a resistance inside enemy-occupied territory, guerrillas tend to be drawn from the civilians, the common folk who resist invaders despite a lack of military training. The Schutztruppe officers and NCOs were the cream of the kaiser’s army, supplemented by professional naval officers and men, and settlers who (mostly) also had military training. Most askaris were already trained and experienced before the war. Many authors have called the Ger-

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man askaris mercenaries, which if true, excludes them from being guerrillas. They were not amateurs but a corps of well-trained professionals, willing to accept great responsibilities and confident to take the initiative. The use of ambush and evasion resembled a guerrilla tactic, but conventional forces use hit and run raids too. The Germans engaged the Allies’ most forward units with snipers, ambuscades, and a crude form of landmine that sometimes was a manually fired improvised explosive device (IED). All this was done with uniformed soldiers who dodged pursuers but did not hide among the civilian population. For conventional soldiers and for guerrillas the concepts of “front lines” and “rear areas” communicate commonly held ideas concerning risks. Guerrillas greatly desire the uncertainty of danger to be maximized, for rear areas to never be safe because the front lines are everywhere and nowhere. In East Africa there were front lines and rear areas, and even if the exact location of the enemy was not known the general direction was. Often there were prepared defensive positions with trenches and modest use of barbed wire in battles that resembled a humble version of the European Western Front. Not only was Lettow-Vorbeck conventional in combat for World War I but his methods resembled World War II examples as well, which added greatly to the mythmaking. In Burma the British Chindit forces (again employing Indian soldiers) under General Orde Wingate and a similar American force, Merrill’s Marauders, named for General Frank D. Merrill, and in the Pacific Colonel Evans F. Carlson of Carlson’s Raiders, all used similar tactics. The Schutztruppe raids on the Uganda Railroad and elsewhere were later called guerrilla operations, while similar operations were conducted in World War II by small elite units. The British examples were the Long Range Desert Group, the Special Air Service, Popski’s Private Army, the Small Boat Section, and the Commandos, which all used the same modus operandi as the German raiders of 1914–1916. All were elite units that used hit-and-run tactics, often against lines of communication, and they employed evasion, mobility, and the environment to avoid detection and battle. If evasion and ambush, hit and run are guerrilla tactics, then all of warfare is guerrilla and the description becomes meaningless. Are submarines guerrilla because they use stealth? Are warplanes guerrilla because they hit and run? This was not a people’s war and these men were not guerrillas. Lettow-Vorbeck knew the term guerrilla warfare but did not use it in his memoirs. This should be proof against a guerrilla classification since the master himself chose another description for his tactics. Perhaps a translation problem contributed to this misunderstanding. Printed in 1920, Meine Erinnerungen aus Ostafrika, with two identical English-language versions printed in 1920 and 1957 as My Reminiscences of East Africa, contained a certain discrepancy. The word guerrilla appears in the English-language versions only four times; two chapter titles, chapter 7, “Guerilla Warfare and

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Further Preparations” and chapter 9, “The Subsidiary Theatres of War: Guerilla Warfare Ashore and Afloat until New Year, 1916.” And it is used in text twice, inside each chapter. If guerrilla warfare was so important to LettowVorbeck’s success, why would the term be used so sparingly in his own account? In the original 1920 German version, the word Guerillakreig was not used, but rather Kleinkrieg, literally “small warfare,” describing operations involving units with fewer men and not the main front against Kenya. This cannot be an error. He knew about the German reaction to Napoleon called Kleiner Krieg, small unit actions to assist the main effort. Popular histories called Lettow-Vorbeck a guerrilla, but he did not use the word because this was not guerrilla warfare. Like so many other myths, the guerrilla fable remains current, but it is not unanimous: “[B]ut it suited [the British] better to believe that he had conducted a guerrilla campaign. That was nonsense. Lettow-Vorbeck was a Prussian general staff officer, with all the preconceptions that that implies. . . . Lettow’s strength lay in dispersal and striking against weakness.” Also “A true guerrilla strategy would have rested the defence of German East Africa on the opportunities for fomenting revolution in the adjacent colonies of the enemy. . . . Lettow-Vorbeck did not exploit this chance: he saw the fighting as a matter between armies in the field and the territories as simply ground over which they operated.” 28 BELGIAN AND PORTUGUESE CONTRIBUTIONS The Belgians and Portuguese contributions were never as significant as those of the British, but they were made despite severe misfortune. Most authors on this topic have disrespected, belittled, and abused the Belgians and Portuguese. They earned a poor reputation because of international rivalries and a general prejudice based on humanitarian scandals in their colonies; also they were needy. They were especially not ready for war. What they could do to help was distract German resources away from the British and provide what they could. Considering all their handicaps, what they did contribute was very difficult for each. Yet in many accounts they appear as more of an Allied liability. The Portuguese were mostly deserving of such scorn, but not the Belgians. The Belgian military had to overcome many obstacles in World War I. Under the Free State the government made military decisions that later caused discipline and efficiency problems, but reforms by the new owners, the government in Brussels in 1908, improved the Force Publique in the years before 1914—only not enough. The colonial defense force had Belgian leaders but also recruited other European volunteers (Scandinavians, Italians, and Dutch). Thus the connection to the Belgian Army was tenuous, and the

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Force Publique was not an extension of the European military the way the Germans and British (and everyone else) built colonial armies based on their homeland experiences. Perhaps this contributed to the poor morals and atrocities that made Congo far too similar to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness description. Also there had been more of a business ethos, thus an emphasis to minimize expenses in order to maximize profits. As a result, they had fewer leaders (only one to one hundred) than the Germans or British and more ill discipline. Before 1904 these officers and NCOs were expected to combine business operations and civil administration with their military tasks, making it easier for these soldiers to abuse the civilians worse than the nineteenth-century slave wars. At first they volunteered for the best of reasons. Some saw the Force Publique as an international humanitarian response to the Arab slave raiders made infamous by Dr. Livingstone. Cardinal Lavigerie blessed them for confronting the evil slave trade. Instead of the boredom of garrison duty there was an opportunity to do good for God and humanity while also achieving personal fame and professional glory. A minority joined for the prospect of wealth, or they were psychopaths attracted for the wrong reasons. Released from peacetime predictability these early volunteers went to an entirely different environment, experienced great suffering accentuated by sudden combat, and often exercised greater power than they ever would have back home. About one-quarter of the officers were from Italy or Scandinavia. An underappreciated subgroup was about 500 Scandinavian merchant sailors who worked Congo’s great rivers and lakes. From the Belgian Army’s 648 officers and 1,612 NCOs (most from the infantry) who volunteered (Belgian law forbade conscripts in the colony) for service in the Congo Free State from 1878 to 1908, almost one-third died. Aristocrats seldom volunteered; instead, it was the mostly rural middle class, who relied on their education and ambition. After service none were allowed to become settlers in the Congo but some did create colonial businesses. 29 There never was talk of a Belgian Canada/Australia. After 1908 the government no longer desired foreign volunteers, and it was not a pan-European antislavery crusade. Yet some foreigners still served, such as Lieutenant-Colonel F. V. van Olsen, a Dane, who commanded a brigade-size force from Katanga that in 1916 conquered the German coast of Lake Tanganyika up to the Central Railroad, then westward to Tabora. Since the Congo Free State was a hybrid of commercial enterprise and supposedly autonomous government, one curious creation was a separate military unit called the Katanga Troop, the paramilitary police of the Katanga Charter Company that governed and mined the southern region of the Free State. When taken over in 1910 and absorbed into the Force Publique the almost three thousand men generally had a positive reputation for better

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discipline and professionalism. These former Katanga companies were the first sent to the German border when the war began. The well-known declaration of neutrality was supposed to keep Belgium safe in any European war, so it seemed reasonable to assume Congo would not have to face an international opponent. Still, with such a thin foundation, the Belgians did as much as they could under very adverse circumstances. With only a tiny navy and no real naval tradition they attempted operations on the Great Lakes. In late August 1914 two battalions from Katanga moved to help defend Abercorn, Northern Rhodesia, against German attacks. At about the same time the only significant Belgian steamer on Lake Tanganyika, the Alexandre Delcommune, was attacked by German vessels and was so badly damaged it was ineffective until 1916. Governor of Uganda Sir Frederick Jackson requested Belgian assistance to suppress a rebellion in the Kigezi district in January 1915 and got another Katanga battalion. Although the Belgians wanted very badly to take the offensive, much of 1915 was spent building up resources, expanding the number of new battalions, and waiting for the British to change their objectives in East Africa. There were aggressive probes by the Belgians and the Germans. As a colonial constabulary, the Force Publique had only operated in small units, but they were now reorganized into battalion/regiment-size units that were deployed along the borders. As they expanded the number of askaris, their reputation improved. These newest units carried 8 mm Gras single-shot rifles because nothing better could be easily obtained. They lacked ammunition and artillery (just like everyone) but on Lake Tanganyika they deployed some seaplanes and worked on another steamer, Baron Dhanis, and put weapons (one 57 mm, one 47 mm cannon) on a ten-ton barge with the tedious name Dix Tonne. Modest though these activities may have been, the Germans still respected them and transferred resources to face this growing threat. Thus, the Belgian contribution diverted German strength, just as Lettow-Vorbeck claimed his resistance drew away Allied units from the Western Front. During 1916 as a part of the Allied general offensive the Belgians conquered Rwanda, Urundi, and northwestern Tanganyika up to the major garrison town of Tabora. Rwanda and Urundi were valuable because they were wealthy in agriculture and supported a large population. By agreement with the British this was supposed to be the limit of Belgian participation, but that was based on the assumption that German resistance in Africa would end in 1916. Instead, in 1917 Belgian units were transferred to occupy the Indian Ocean port of Kilwa to relieve British units, and they extended the occupation from Tabora to Mahenge to free up other British troops. Also in 1917 a Belgian brigade joined the chase of Captain Max Witgens’s “rogue column” and another assisted General Northey’s pursuit of Captain Tafel’s column until his surrender in late November 1917. In late 1918, the Belgians helped

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pursue Lettow-Vorbeck in Tanganyika. All these achievements were made despite most of their homeland being occupied by the enemy. Of all the combatants in World War I the Portuguese were the most sorrowful. The government was in a state of chaos that greatly compromised any military effort. After a period of quasineutrality they attempted invasions of GEA from March to December 1916 and then resisted the German invasion of PEA from November 1917 to June 1918. Representative of all of Portugal’s suffering was that the April 1918 Ludendorff Offensive began by targeting the overextended Second Portuguese Infantry Division because it was the most vulnerable and incompetent on the Western Front. The greatest handicap to their military efforts in WWI was the complete failure of the Portuguese government. An eastern Africa empire began in 1498, but it was later neglected until the Congress of Berlin in 1884–1885 reanimated colonial policies with the dread that the empire might be easily lost. The new contestants, Belgium and Germany, were suddenly and uncomfortably Portugal’s neighbors while her traditional ally Britain seemed to shield Portuguese claims not out of loyalty so much as establishing rights to her lands. At the time, Portugal was burdened with a massive debt without prospect of relief, a monarchy-versus-republic political factionalism that almost paralyzed the government, and an inability to attract foreign capital because of the aforementioned. So to develop the colonies they revisited the policy of concessionary companies, not because they worked well before, but rather that they had no choice. The south was directly administered by the colonial government. In 1892 the Mozambique Company was chartered to develop central PEA, while their rival the Nyasa Company got the north. The outsourcing of development to private companies made them the government, law and order, to the Africans on their land, and made the Portuguese colonial authorities irrelevant. The brutal paramilitary police of the concession companies became infamous for abusive working conditions and exploitation equal to slavery. In response, some Africans escaped into the bush or across international borders or fought back as in the Barue Rebellion of 1917. In Mozambique the Portuguese employed a variety of soldiers and methods, seemingly with little reason. There were units from Portugal even though they suffered from illness. Colonial units were recruited from within Mozambique. Since they practiced a form of feudal land tenure, there were also unofficial forces, private armies, employed by settlers or businesses such as the Nyasa Company. These included armed slaves and mercenaries (African, European, mulatto, Arab, and Persian) as well as entire societies hired for protection. A prewar army in PEA often included a small corps of Portuguese and colonial regular troops supplemented by large numbers of mercenaries and private armies paid by the colonial government or promised the opportunity to loot the enemy. Portuguese, colonial and Nyasa Company units were used to attempt the 1916 invasion of GEA, and of course to

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oppose the German invasion of PEA, but at times private forces seemed to have given a more credible defense (of plantations and trade outposts) than the government troops. After the war began Portugal sent out reinforcements to PEA even though they were still neutral. They built fortifications and roads along the border with Tanganyika and suffered from the climate. A second European contingent was sent as replacements in October 1915, while the government recruited Africans and the private company paramilitary police also expanded. When Germany declared war on Portugal the government had fifteen hundred European soldiers and twenty-eight hundred askaris widely dispersed throughout PEA suppressing rebellions. Later the Barue Rebellion began in northern Mozambique and Portugal lost control of everything in the north except the largest cities. Nonetheless, Major Francisco da Silveira invaded the disputed Kionga Triangle of GEA with a small force in March 1916. In May a force of four hundred soldiers attempted to cross north of the Rovuma River supported by the protected cruiser Adamastor (1896, 1,729 tons, two 5.9-inch, four 4.1-inch guns) and the gunboat Chaimite (1898, 335 tons, two 3-pounder guns), vessels so obsolete that any other combat job was unimaginable. Despite the naval power, this force was massacred. Also in May a new commander, Major-General Franco Gil, was sent out with three thousand new troops, but they soon fell ill and nine hundred fifty returned to Portugal without ever leaving the port. Nonetheless, in September 1916 Gil’s forces attacked northward, making slow progress over difficult land but moving toward a region wealthy in agriculture. Since there was a food shortage Lettow-Vorbeck had no choice but to concentrate six hundred askaris and a Konigsberg gun to push them back across the Portuguese border. After this the Portuguese sent a fourth European contingent in early 1917 that concentrated against the Barue rebels until the equation was altered in November 1917 by the German invasion. When Portugal entered the war there were only forty-five German askaris holding the Rovuma, and these were present on the insistence of Governor Schnee over Lettow-Vorbeck’s objections. Later, when facing Smuts’s offensive and also losing land to the Belgians, this Portuguese effort distracted even more German resources. If Lettow-Vorbeck’s image as a military genius was based on the distraction of Allied units from the Western Front, then why are the Belgians and Portuguese not respected by the same standard? In part, the British prejudice of that time has been repeated without challenge. It is also true that both nations had severe handicaps. Although Belgium was an industrial nation, the German occupation left the Force Publique a beggar. Republican versus monarchist politics made a pitiful Portugal even more distressed. For all of these misfortunes it still could have been even much worse for the Allies: what if France had also been a combatant in East Africa? Italy?

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DISTRACTED RESOURCES Lettow-Vorbeck did not distract manpower from the Western Front so much as he attracted resources that were unsuitable anywhere else. An important part of the myth was that this diversion assisted the German war effort. This was an exaggeration. Some quotes for Allied manpower committed are not so much inflated as delusional. If an analysis includes a realistic appreciation of racism, then the actual distraction was so tiny as to be insignificant, and that also reduces the Lettow-Vorbeck myth. The Germans accomplished a great deal with rather little, and they were creative and motivated such that their performance was professional and admirable, but praise of the German achievements has been imbalanced. The reasons why they were successful are many, but the Allies’ defects made it easier. Most of the histories have exaggerated the Allied manpower such that they claimed a few thousand Germans defeated a million of the enemy. Since World War I became a war of attrition, the diversion of a million soldiers away from Europe would have been impressive if it were true. Instead, in March 1916 Smuts commanded some 73,330 Allied soldiers: 27,575 British and South Africans, and others; 14,300 Indians; 6,875 KAR; 580 Europeans and 14,000 Africans of the Force Publique; and an estimated 10,000 Portuguese forces. Lettow-Vorbeck had 15,017 officers and enlisted men. 30 At nearly five-to-one odds the German resistance was tenacious and impressive, but they still had to give land such that when Smuts departed in late 1916 the Germans had lost not only a majority of GEA but the most valuable parts. At the November 1918 surrender 155 Germans and 1,168 askaris faced a KAR of 35,424 (or odds of almost 27 to 1), while some sources claim 120,000 or 150,000 Allied soldiers. Even this is a gross overestimation to the point of a lie. Most Allied soldiers were on occupation duty throughout Tanganyika, something that was required even had the Germans quit, and only a few thousand were actively in pursuit of the quarry. Racism made this misrepresentation even worse. As will be more fully explained in the next chapter most Allied units could not have served anywhere else during the war due to racism. Black soldiers would not have served in Europe or even the Middle East. White Africans could have volunteered for European service, but few did. Some of the Whites in eastern Africa were there after having been wounded in other theaters and thus were not necessarily distracted from a more important theater. This is devastating to the myths that have sensationalized this historical topic. If German East Africa had surrendered early in the war, or if Germany had never even acquired an overseas empire, the saving of Allied resources would have been so tiny as to be insignificant. Only a few battalions of Indians and British would have been used elsewhere.

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When considering the weapons and equipment employed in eastern Africa the same observation can be made: they distracted little that might have been used elsewhere and attracted resources unacceptable in other theaters of operations. One characteristic of this conflict was the use of obsolete weapons. It adds a certain charm that World War I, famous for industrial competition, included bows and arrows, sometimes poisoned arrows, spears, swords, muskets, and even smoothbore muzzle-loading cannon. In the prewar period, colonial administrations alternated between generous developments and frugality to the point of being miserly. For example the Germans made impressive investments in infrastructure such as railroads and harbor facilities, while the army was sent obsolete weapons. The most famous was the singleshot “old smokey” Mauser model 1871 rifle, which used black powder metallic cartridges, creating clouds of smoke. Against Africans armed with edged weapons or muzzle-loading muskets this was perfectly acceptable and the smoke revealing their positions was not much of a problem. They already owned the guns and vast amounts of ammunition, so it appealed to the Bismarckian sense of frugality. Also, at 11 mm this was a powerful weapon at the shorter distances of bush warfare where the German use of the machine gun dominated. The German preference was to base combat on the machine gun with the riflemen protecting/supporting it. In 1914 the “old smokey” was still useful against natives but was criminally obsolete against a modern European enemy. Germany had a replacement program for all the colonies, but in GEA these were still the majority of the rifles. When war began they had 10,500 “old smokey” rifles, 579 of the 1898-model Mauser rifle, and 1,600 1898-model carbines. 31 For the other European colonial forces it was a similar story of prewar frugality and old single-shot rifles. Belgian askaris in 1914 still had 11 mm Albini single-shot rifles seconded from the Belgian Army. Portuguese askaris had 8 mm model 1887 Kropatschek rifles. Even some units of the Indian Army still had 1871 Martini-Henry single-shot rifles in 1914. During the war the two blockade runners brought modern Mausers with millions of rounds of ammunition, but the capture of enemy rifles was most important, while out of necessity the “old smokeys” were kept until late in the war because of the generous supply of ammunition, and they worked. The Allies had some problems with obsolete rifles, but the quantity involved was miniscule relative to Europe and the Middle East. Single-shot rifles were used by expanded colonial units but not on the Western Front. With machine guns it is a similar story, Africa got the older less reliable weapons when Europe got the newest and best. Light machine guns were an obvious advantage in jungle warfare and the British introduction again provoked German envy. Was the diversion of Allied rifles and machine guns from other fronts important? Perhaps it was but not important enough to change the results of the war.

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Prewar colonial armies also had strange collections of artillery. Obsolete guns were still useful against natives, as were smaller cannon. For example the Germans had some 1871 105 mm howitzers and a few 1904 105 mm guns, but the ten guns salvaged from the Konigsberg (also 105 mm) were most appreciated. For the British it was similar. The prewar KAR did not have artillery because if there were a need the Indian Army was assumed to be the solution. South African artillery tended to be prewar 13-pounders (for the cavalry) and 127 mm guns and 132 mm howitzers, supplemented by British 12-pounder naval guns plus the 100 mm guns salvaged from Pegasus. The South Africans also used German artillery captured in the South-West Africa campaign. The Konigsberg guns still were greater in range but the real edge was in the gunner’s proficiency, where the Germans were again superior. Prewar armies also emphasized small-caliber artillery (e.g., 20 mm, 37 mm, 40 mm, 47 mm, and 60 mm) of odd pedigree. Some were alpine/ mountain guns, pack howitzers, and there were some naval guns. What they had in common was easy disassembly for movement so that porters could each carry a component. Since traditional African fortifications were made of logs, bricks, and little else, such small cannon were still useful. The naval weapons were from warships intended to repel torpedo boats, and to be put aboard a ship’s boats for inshore use. They could also be easily disassembled for movement, thus old Nordenfelt or Hotchkiss revolving cannon were given to the army. Consider that the two German blockade runners brought 47 mm ammunition, two 60 mm mountain guns, and four 105 mm howitzers, plus shells, as an indication of priorities. In 1916 the British introduced Stokes mortars with the obvious virtues of mobility and quick deployment. Could all of these be a significant diversion from more important theaters? If none of the British artillery had been sent to East Africa it is doubtful even a single battle would have been different in any of the other theaters. Some Rolls-Royce armored cars were sent in 1915 and 1916. These were not obsolete and would have been useful elsewhere. Some were new, but a few were veterans of German South-West Africa. If they had arrived earlier they could have been a deterrent against raids on the Uganda Railroad. Although still appreciated when they did arrive, as the war moved south into more dense forests their practical use diminished. At times infantry were used to cut roads so that these armored cars could advance. These weapons were diverted from other theaters but in such small numbers it was hardly significant. Similarly, the diversion of Allied aircraft and warships occurred, but it was of little influence. Instead East Africa tended to get weapons not useful elsewhere. The hunt for the Konigsberg included some floatplanes/seaplanes, and in March 1916 the Navy donated four Voisins, that were too slow and vulnerable for combat anywhere else. On Lake Tanganyika the Belgians also had a few floatplanes. So too the British got some Cauldrons and eight BE2c

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airplanes that were so hopeless against enemy aircraft they could only be used where the enemy had none. At times they were useful, such as in the open savannah, but where there was a thick jungle canopy the aircrew could not see enough. One creative use was in 1917 when warplanes flew to areas projected to be German food sources and burned the crops in the field. Without fear of enemy aircraft the British also used planes to transport personnel and even as an early air-ambulance. There were German aircraft in the colony when the war began. A Doppelfalz, an aged civilian plane, attempted a reconnaissance of the British in Zanzibar in the first days of the war when two gunboats shot it down. Nonetheless distant Nairobi responded with several days of panic, fearing an air attack. Later this plane was refitted with floats and attempted to assist the Konigsberg. 32 Lack of fuel ended this plane’s career. Much like the environment was difficult for the foreigners so too it was unhealthy for the wood and canvas aircraft of the era and planes disintegrated quickly. The Royal Navy also tended to send to the colonies warships that were aged and of limited usefulness, such as the unfortunate Pegasus and two other cruisers, the Hyacinth and Astraea, which were inferior to their rival, the Konigsberg. There were other events, such as the pre-dreadnought battleships Goliath and Swiftsure used to escort the forty-six transports of Indian Expeditionary Force B, and the Vengeance was used in 1916 to capture GEA’s ports. These were diversions but of little consequence. The pre-dreadnought battleships were no longer decisive weapons. The British had air and naval superiority in East Africa which helped in this theater of operations but in winning the war it made little difference. There was one distinct opportunity for modern British technology to seize the initiative away from the Germans. When the focus was on the White Highlands on the Kenyan border region and the Uganda Railroad in 1915 the use of obsolete aircraft and armored cars, trucks, and cavalry against the small demolition parties would have been effective. If they had followed the advice of Lord Kitchener and simply secured the Kenyan border to sufficiently protect the settlers, these modern weapons could have helped to contain the German raiding parties. Lettow-Vorbeck acknowledged he was incapable of conquering colonies but held a tactical advantage when on the defense. If the Allies had resisted the temptation of taking enemy territory, other than perhaps a sanitary corridor along the border, this would have denied Lettow-Vorbeck the advantage of a tactical fighting withdrawal, while the Uganda Railroad would have been safer due to distance, airplanes, and just enough imperial resources to make Tanganyika an informal prison camp. This would require restraint during total war. Instead, politics required a conquest, which most believed would be easy enough. There was one category where continued German resistance was a hardship to the Allies. Shipping tonnage was a fragile, sensitive problem since the

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economic warfare of the U-boats came close to starving Great Britain. An active theater of operations distracted shipping, and all British theater commanders always complained of an inadequate capacity. Since logistics is not a sexy topic, and most histories emphasize combat and entertaining stories of bravery, this observation was seldom made, even by admirers of LettowVorbeck. Yet this was not a complete victory for the Germans, since the cargo ships that supplied van Deventer were the oldest, least efficient, and most vulnerable, unlikely to see combat working the Indian Ocean coastline. If they had been released from this theater these hulks could have replaced others elsewhere and freed up more tonnage for more important theaters, even the Atlantic. NOTES 1. John Arquilla, Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World (Plymouth, UK: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 144–56; David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 149–50, 181–82. 2. John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 149–51, 154, 241, 249. 3. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 82, 266. 4. Richard Meinertzhagen, Army Diary, 1899–1926 (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960), 105. 5. Ross Anderson, The Forgotten Front: The East Africa Campaign 1914–1918 (London: Tempus, 2004), 49–51, 59–61, 70–72. 6. Charles Miller, Battle for the Bundu: The First World War in East Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 17–20. 7. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Germans Who Never Lost: The Story of the Konigsberg (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 148–49. 8. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 142. 9. Hubert Moyse-Bartlett, The King’s African Rifles (Aldershot, UK: Golden and Polden, 1956), 333. 10. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1920), 8. 11. Ludwig Boell, Die Operationen in Ostafrika (Hamburg: E. S. Mittler, 1952), 427. 12. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 248. 13. James K. Matthews and David Killingray, “Beasts of Burden: British West African Carriers in the First World War,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 13, nos. 1–2 (Winter 1979): 7–8, 11, 18; Melvin Eugene Page (ed.), Africa and the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1987), 143. 14. Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa, 212. 15. Boell, Die Operationen in Ostafrika, 148. 16. G. J. Keane and D. Tomblings, “The African Native Medical Corps,” Journal of the Royal Africa Society 19 (1919–1920): 295, 303–4. 17. Geoffrey Hodges, The Carrier Corps: Military Labor in the East African Campaign, 1914–1918 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 143–49. 18. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 249–51. 19. Dr. Moritz Taute, “A German Account of the Medical Side of the War in East Africa,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 8 (1939): 3, 16–18; Ann Beck, “Medicine and Society in

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Tanganyika 1890–1930: A Historical Inquiry,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, no. 3 (1977): 11, 46. 20. Taute, “A German Account of the Medical Side,” 10–11. 21. Ibid. 22. Taute, “A German Account of the Medical Side,” 8, 16; Lewis J. Greenstein, “Africans in a European War: The First World War in East Africa with Special Reference to the Nandi of Kenya,” PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1975, 35, 141–43. 23. Peter Shankland, The Phantom Flotilla: The Story of the Naval Africa Expedition 1915–16 (London: Collins, 1968), passim. 24. Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa, 325. 25. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 264. 26. Alfred W. Lever, “The British Empire and the German Colonies, 1914–1919,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1963, 65. 27. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 264. 28. Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2003), 80–81. 29. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa 1884–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 58–72. 30. Ludwig Boell, Die Operationen in Ostafrika (Hamburg: E. S. Mittler, 1952), 58. 31. Boell, Die Operationen in Ostafrika, 29. 32. J. O. E. O. Mahncke, “Aircraft Operations in the German Colonies, 1911–1916,” Military History Journal of the South African Military History Society 12, no. 2, December 2001.

German East Africa during World War I. Map illustration by Amanda Carney

Military movements 1914–1918. Map illustration by Amanda Carney

Route of the Royal Navy Expedition to Lake Tanganyika. Map illustration by Amanda Carney

Illustrations of the Konigsberg and Pegasus. Illustration by Amanda Carney

Chapter Three

How Racism Influenced East Africa, 1914–1918

Racism was the most important human influence in this theater of operations. It determined which Africans and Asians went to war, and where. Racism was given the legitimacy of a science to justify colonial policies. The fact that Europeans travelled to distant and different territories, adapted to the conditions and conquered the people was proof of racial superiority. Expansion was confirmation of a race’s health. Racial wars were brutal but it was believed they established the later successes of world powers by making them stronger as they tamed natives and nature. White supremacy was so important even the conduct of the Great War was subordinated to it. Racism even influenced the definition of success, since most Black African units would not have been used outside of Africa. Most of the popular narrative histories minimized this topic if any reference was made. This is as understandable, as it is unfortunate, since candid discussions of race make people uncomfortable. Yet it remains that racism greatly influenced the success of these nations in World War I. THE MARTIAL RACE THEORY AND ALIEN BATTALIONS In 1914 most educated people were convinced that some peoples were genetically superior soldiers. Just like horses could be bred for speed or traction, and cattle bred to emphasize meat or dairy, so too, humans had separated into natural soldiers or not. Centuries of colonial experience seemed to reinforce this concept. It was the center of European military recruitment of colonials. Today such racism is rejected. In modern warfare (World War I itself is a perfect example) masses of ordinary men were made into soldiers and sailors 83

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in a short amount of time to meet the needs of conflict in the industrial age. The rapid expansion into wartime citizens’ armies was a common feature in twentieth century warfare. It was military training, education, and indoctrination that converted Europeans and Americans into warriors, providing them with the qualities that were attributed to breeding in the Asians and Africans who fought in the same Great War. Racism achieved the status of a legitimate science in the era before World War I. It was a mixture of ad hominem, recent events, a bastardization of Darwinism, and political necessity. It was a pseudoscience. In nineteenthcentury ethnography, the scientific description of individual cultures was an attempt to bring order to European empires that had become more diverse as colonization expanded. Later another pseudoscience, phrenology, the study of human skulls to characterize races, emerged to add a veneer of scientific legitimacy to rationalization. Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest was later misapplied. Since the accomplishments of the White race were obviously greater, they must be superior. Darwinism could also explain the subdivision into martial or non-martial Asians and Africans. Biological determinism was combined with cultural relativism to create an ethno-military doctrine that communicated authenticity. In reality this was the appeal to prejudice and special interests that defined ad hominem rationalizations. Colonial rule in India agreed with all of this. India was often the standard against which administrative policies were measured both in the British Empire and in others. British experiences were considered worthy of imitation and African colonial armies were based on experiences in India. When the Europeans first established themselves along the coast of India they wanted to emphasize trade over conflict. When war occurred, the typical European military force was soldiers and warships dispatched from the mother country supplemented by the army of an ally Indian monarch and then additional local hired men of convenient character. Since these conflicts tended to be more between rival companies than their governments, this system worked for a long time. From an Indian perspective, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasized conflicts between dynasties, and conspiracies from within, while the European competition that evolved into the Anglo-French rivalry was only a tiny distraction along the coasts. This formula was altered on October 24, 1746, at the Battle of Adyar, also known as the Battle of San Thome. The Army of the Nawab of Carnatic, some ten thousand soldiers, was defeated by one thousand French and Indian soldiers. Any battle with a one-to-ten ratio that goes against expectations is noteworthy, but this was more important, as it changed warfare, and then India. The three hundred French soldiers of the French East India Company were joined by seven hundred Indians trained by French officers in the modern European way to form three ranks from which they maneuvered and fired volleys of muskets before a bayonet charge. This proved that European tac-

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tics, training, and discipline were superior to traditional Indian methods. Soon after this, the English East India Company copied it for their army. The European officers made their Indian units superior to traditional Indian military units and equal to any European army. Indian soldiers fought as well as any other, and as an added business advantage, they were less expensive than European soldiers. The British Indian military became so successful that France lost in the competition for India, and in the nineteenth century essentially the same formula was applied to the new opponents, the Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Punjabis in the hills and mountains beyond the coast. The next major influence upon military recruitment and racial theories was the 1857 Mutiny. India under the East India Company was administered by three presidencies, Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, each with their own army, but only the latter mutinied. In the previous decades the Bengal Army was the principal weapon against the Gurkhas and Punjabis. The Bengal Army was multiethnic and intermixed, in contrast to the Bombay and Madras armies, whose units were segregated by race and caste. The mutinous soldiers tended to come from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and they were mostly Rajputs and Bhumihar Brahmins. In 1857 only a portion of the Bengal Army mutinied, but it was Gurkhas, Pashtuns, Punjabis, Sikhs, Kumaoni, and Garhwalis who remained loyal and fought for the British. For the British officers and administrators who came after the mutiny, the martial race theory was a reasonable explanation for all of this. Behind the pseudoscience was the ancient practice of divide and conquer, divide and rule, which blended well with the martial race theory. Of all the Indian people, the British believed that only a few castes and ethnicities were of a martial quality, based on breeding, religion, environment, and recent experiences. Therefore each battalion/regiment (or at the very least each company) should remain exclusively composed of men of the same caste or ethnicity, practicing strict segregation. When the British then deployed these units to a different region, among a strange religion or people, they were alien battalions. Without connections to the local people these alien battalions imposed British laws when they obeyed army orders and thus advanced the divide, conquer, and rule strategy. An example might be a battalion each of Gurkha and Sikh infantry garrisoned in a Hindu or Muslim region, and vice versa. The British encouraged separate identities, rewarded obedience, and to these soldiers they were the only source that mattered for honor, respect and authority. The Hindu religion placed an upper limit on recruitment. They divided into four varnas, or social orders (each subdivided into castes), of Hinduism with only the second, the Kshatriya order, as natural warriors. The Hindus believed in an unchangeable status of each caste based on birth, which in turn determined their occupation, due to concepts of purity and pollution. Just like

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their ancestors, the Kshatriya were literally born soldiers. This reinforced the martial race theory since all others were considered non-martial and it behooved British administrators to not offend religious doctrine. It also justified the logic of homogenous alien battalions since religious observance of food preparation and sharing, death rituals, and others created a degree of exclusivity that almost required segregation. Their immortal soul was far more important than the suffering of this life and even a minor dietary compromise was completely unacceptable. Death in a state of contamination was a much worse disaster than death itself. This made the logistics of a campaign more difficult since the origins of foods were also critical and without compromise. They could not just be given cans of bully beef like other soldiers. Therefore Indian military history has many examples of Hindu soldiers who faced death in combat while starved rather than risk dying while polluted. This also meant that there was a natural upper limit to the number of Hindu soldiers who could be recruited. There were other limits to the number of non-Hindu ethnicities acceptable for recruitment where the martial race theory played a role. Ethnic minorities who recently fought the British with ferocity and determination were admired and recruited. In the nineteenth century that meant the Gurkhas and Sikhs were emphasized. They lived along a traditional invasion route, so the Gurkhas were frequently at war. A mid-eighteenth-century monarch reorganized his army in imitation of the British military and conquered both rival Nepalese and Indians. Soon after the British defeated the Gurkhas in 1816, recruitment began. Also, the Sikhs, whose religion was recently established in a contested region, had many enemies, and thus they became highly militarized, which the British appreciated. The Sikhs, Gurkhas, and other minorities were in a mutually dependent relationship with the British. For the British, a romantic reputation for loyalty, elitism, and courage blended with, for the Indians, an honorable professional livelihood compatible with traditional values. The British did not just pay them to be loyal; they allowed them to be soldiers. If an Indian’s sense of identity was based on being a soldier, then they needed British service. The dozen or so British who officered each battalion or regiment showed respect for their soldiers’ religious and other beliefs and often learned their language. Colonialism protected minorities from abuse by the Hindu and Muslim majorities, while their exotic warlike attributes were encouraged and rewarded. As an alien battalion they were separated from civilians and dependent upon the British. Brigades each had one British battalion or regiment and several Indian units. The British units were the ultimate alien battalion. Having regular British infantry battalions or cavalry regiments alongside their Indian brethren communicated respect, and equally sharing risks in combat showed professional admiration. One infantry brigade had one British battalion and three Hindu, Muslim, or minority battalions; and cavalry brigades had one British

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regiment and two Indian regiments. Fighting shoulder to shoulder with British units created élan within Indian units, and made them identify with the colonial overlord, which further separated them from the Indian people. Not only did the British Indian Army expand control of South Asia but as the nineteenth century ended it was an imperial constabulary serving in Africa, and in China they fought in the Opium wars and the Boxer Rebellion. An additional source of soldiers was the twenty-nine Princely States that were, in theory at least, independent or autonomous and could maintain their own armies, under British supervision. The quality of these units varied widely, as some were considered among the best in India but others were little more than mobs. During a great crisis these Princely units formed into Imperial Service brigades, intended to serve alongside the British Indian Army. One man who represented all of this was Lord Frederick Roberts of Kandahar, commander in chief of the Indian Army 1885–1893. As a product of the Victorian era he believed in the martial race theory and that the Hindus of southern India’s Madras Army of 1857 had lost their martial spirit due to long periods of urbanization, civilization, peace, and prosperity, which made them effeminate. In contrast, he thought the rural, backward, more primitive, uneducated societies of northern India were more warlike. 1 A casualty of the 1857 Mutiny was the East India Company, which was revealed to be bankrupt. Instead of treating this like just another private business failure the British government took over the governance of India. Reforms at the end of the century included the merger of the three presidency armies into the British Indian Army and a reduction in the number of units from the former Bengal Army but an increase in units composed of northerners. The British Indian Army was the primary influence on recruitment of African colonial military units, as before World War I most British officers in Africa were India veterans. Alien battalions and the martial race theory when applied to Africa was modified and more nuanced but still enjoyed the full confidence of all Europeans. One important difference was that due to environmental and health concerns units of the regular British Army were not brigaded with Africans during peacetime. The British West African colonies were instead garrisoned by the two West India Regiments (on an annual rotation) who were different from the local population and kept separate in barracks, thus an alien battalion. When there was a conflict, such as the numerous Ashanti wars, units of the regular British Army temporarily served alongside the West Indians, local levies, and African units from outside the colony. By the end of the century this was no longer sufficient. When the Colonial Office decided on significant military reforms in West Africa they chose an officer with considerable experience. Captain Frederick D. Lugard was an Indian Army officer before extensive service in Africa, where he directly influenced the foundation of several British military colonial units. He embraced the logic of the martial race theory with alien “batta-

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lions, composed of races which have no affinities with the population of the region in which they are serving.” 2 Applied specifically to Africans, Lugard also believed in the Hamitic theory—that the genetic legacy of ancient Asian invaders made “negroids” the best soldiers among Africans, and the “nilotes” better than pure negroes. A pure black African was, he believed, a coward, while a lighter skin color proved a foreign influence and increased the natural martial inheritance. 3 As one of the most experienced colonial officers, he was certain that this was true. Lugard also considered the role societies played within a colony. He preferred ethnic minorities with little financial, political, or social standing so that they would depend upon the British for influence and protection, consistent with the strategy of divide and conquer, divide and rule. Since the West Indians were from the Caribbean, paid and treated almost like Europeans, Lugard considered them ineffective against societies in the interior, where it was the locally raised forces that did the actual dirty work. The 1897 war scare with France reminded government officials that British West Africa was vulnerable. Lugard replaced the West Indian regiments with regional recruits, and the Colonial Office wanted these new units interconnected into the West African Field Force (WAFF). The mini-armies of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast (Ghana), and Nigeria were originally intended to assist each other against invasions by France and to suppress rebellions, but they later made significant contributions to the Great War. Similar to those in India, British colonies in Africa began with privately owned trade companies as the first colonial government, with their own armed forces that became the foundation of the government armies. Therefore, as the first WAFF commandant, Captain Lugard inherited in Nigeria the legacy of private enterprise—the Hausa Constabulary (later named the Lagos Constabulary) and the Niger Coast Constabulary in the southern half of the colony, and the Royal Niger Company’s Constabulary in the northern half. These were reformed into the Southern and the Northern regiments until shortly before World War I, when they were merged into the Nigerian Brigade, of segregated battalions. The Gold Coast Constabulary was established in 1879 with a core of Lagos (Hausa) constables, again an alien battalion. So too, the foundation of the Gambia company was soldiers drawn from the Sierra Leone Frontier Police. To this alien core were added locals who were ethnically martial but did not conflict with British colonial authority. In Gambia, when the West Indian soldiers were replaced by seventy-five Mendes from Sierra Leone they were as much an alien unit as the West Indians had been. Next the Fulas, Jollofs, and Mandingos of Gambia, as well as Bambaras from the French colony Senegal, superseded the Mendes. 4 The Gold Coast Regiment was a fine example of racism influencing military recruitment. The coastal societies were considered non-martial due to the long history of interaction with Europeans in trade-based cities. The

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Ashanti were martial, and after several wars they were respected by the British Army, but as the overwhelming majority population in the colony they were politically untrustworthy. Instead, the original Lagos (Hausa) constables were supplemented by the martial races of the far north, the Grunshi, Kanjarga, Moshis, and recruits from French territories. “The men of the Regiment, . . . recruited from the people of the far interior which lies to the northward of the Ashanti, are for the most part sturdy, thick set fellows, with rather blunt but not pronouncedly negroid features, which show traces in some instances of a slight admixture of Arab blood.” 5 The concerns and experiences of the British in West Africa were very similar to India, thus adding a veneer of logic to what was still ad hominem, but not science. In Nigeria Lugard proved a master of identity politics and the nuances of racial expectations. The previous constabularies recruited Igbo, Yoruba, Nupe, and Hausa/Fulani, but by the time he took command southerners were increasingly questioned as worthy recruits since these ethnicities found expanding opportunities in commerce and civilian administration. As Muslims, Lugard admired the Hausa/Fulani as a martial race, but they were politically dangerous since their empire had recently dominated most of northern Nigeria. Therefore Lugard also recruited the Karem/Bornu, since they too were Muslims from northern Nigeria and were rivals of the Hausa/Fulani. He recruited animist-traditionalists such as the Birom, Igbirra, Ingala, and Tiv to counterbalance the Muslims. As Lugard later explained in his famous book The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, “Recruiting should not be restricted exclusively from Moslems, who may be susceptible to religious propaganda. Diversity of language is the chief difficulty in using pagan tribes, but they learn the lingua franca with surprising rapidity.” 6 Once recruited, a form of segregation created mostly homogenous companies. As the new overlords of a region, the British prevented interethnic warfare, but the price for this order was cooperation with colonial rule. As in India, the minorities who served in the WAFF were rewarded with prestige, respect, perhaps preferential treatment, and an income as professional soldiers that was compatible with their traditional values. In central and eastern Africa the same formula was applied with slight variations. When the British arrived they brought with them superior weapons and disciplined professional soldiers, Indians or Africans, who formed the first colonial units that next recruited from the local martial races. In 1892 Sir Harry Johnston used two hundred Sikh soldiers seconded from the British Indian Army to occupy Nyasaland (Malawi). To this core other soldiers from outside Nyasaland were recruited to the new Central African Rifles (CAR) regiment, including Arabs and Zanzibaris from the Indian Ocean coastline and Makua from Mozambique. They were considered good soldiers, but inferior to the Sikhs and more expensive than the local recruits, so next they were phased out. Then the martial ethnicities of Nyasaland, the Anguru,

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Mambwe, Marimba, Ngoni, Tonga, and Yao were recruited. Despite being one of Nyasaland’s larger populations, the Yao divided into competing clans that made them safer for recruitment. Clever and fierce as an enemy, when the British first fought against them the Yao won their admiration; they “considered the Yao the best, on account of their obedience, self-reliance and good marksmanship. Crime was rare and the men were smart.” 7 They served in the German Army too. The Tonga “identified themselves with European interests more rapidly and completely than any other tribe, possibly on account of their need for protection from the Angoni and the Arabs.” 8 Just as there were aliens in the Central African Rifles, so too it was the alien battalion in other parts of Africa. They fought in the Gold Coast in the 1899–1901 Ashanti War as well as in Gambia, Mauritius, Mozambique, Northern Rhodesia, and Somaliland. In 1900 the CAR was reorganized into two battalions, each with a Sikh contingent (NCOs, drill instructors, artillery gunners) plus six African companies (mostly homogeneous) of 120 men each: three Tonga, two Yao, and one Marimba. 9 Later Nyasaland’s soldiers served in Kenya as part of the King’s African Rifles. In December 1890 when he entered Kampala, Uganda, Captain Lugard’s little army included Sudanese and Somali and he later recruited Swahilis and Zanzibaris. These founders of the Uganda Rifles Regiment were all foreigners to the people of Uganda. Most of the Sudanese were veterans of the Egyptian Army and were a source of pride for Lugard, as the “best material for soldiery in Africa.” 10 Things changed by 1897 when the Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth Companies, less than one-quarter of the Uganda Rifles and exclusively Sudanese, mutinied. Local forces, reinforced by Sikh soldiers, soon broke the mutiny, but the pursuit of the last few criminal offenders lasted until 1901. The mutineer Sudanese complained about long periods of difficult campaigning, their pay in arrears and less than what askaris (or even porters) in other colonies were paid, and their officers being arrogant and distant. To investigate this embarrassment Sir Harry Johnston was appointed special commissioner and in July 1899 he recommended a complete reorganization of the government and the regiment. One important feature was the separation of police responsibilities from the Uganda Rifles with the creation of a Native Constabulary of fifteen hundred men under civilian authority. Changes to the Uganda Rifles included a much larger British officer and NCO cadre, and four hundred Sikh soldiers, who were always trusted more than the Africans. The post-mutiny regiment included loyal Sudanese, Swahilis, Ganda, and Somali but later emphasized the martial races of Uganda, the Acholi, Itesso, and Lango. 11 Since the Sultan of Zanzibar had a long history of importing soldiers from India, Persia, and Arabia, this practice was easily continued in Kenya when the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA) became the government. At first the IBEA hired Arab, Indian, Sudanese, Swahili, and Zanzibari mer-

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cenaries on an ad hoc basis. In July 1895 the British Foreign Office inherited this colorful and convenient force when the IBEA went bankrupt and Kenya became the British East Africa Protectorate (BEA). The IBEA military was renamed the East African Rifles and was too small and weak to deal with the Mazrui Rebellion of 1895–1896 when the Twenty-Fourth Baluchistan Regiment was sent to the rescue. 12 In the reforms of 1904–1905 the martial race theory was applied to the reorganization of British Central and East Africa. On April 1, 1905, British Somaliland, Kenya, Uganda, and Nyasaland were transferred from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office and a new East Africa Department was created with most of the staff transferred from the West Africa Department. 13 In 1904 the East Africa Rifles, the Uganda Rifles, and the Central Africa Rifles were reorganized into the King’s African Rifles Regiment, consisting of four battalions. All Indian contingents withdrew and the Arabs and Sudanese were gradually replaced with the martial ethnicities from within these protectorates. The martial race formula required some minor alterations, since some warlike societies resisted recruitment and others were distrusted, but it was otherwise employed. In Kenya the Masai were the most desired martial race, but recruitment was disappointing as only a few served in the IBEA, East Africa Rifles, or the KAR, even during the war. They were considered brave, intelligent, and of an exceptional physique, with “military qualities in direct proportion to the amount of influence left by foreign invaders. . . . There is little doubt that the Gallas, Masai and Nandi have traces of non-African strains in their blood.” 14 Kenya’s other large martial race, the Nandi, impressed the British in a series of nasty wars against the Masai and then the British that only ended in 1906 and were therefore not recruited before the war. Instead the Wamyema and Wakedi, warlike minorities, were the prewar recruits. “They are easy to deal with, as they have few wants, are not excitable, and have little religion of imagination.” 15 Another large society, the Kikuyu, were considered non-martial by the British and did not provide soldiers for the prewar KAR. “They were called ‘Njoroges’ in the newspapers in much the same way that Irish-Americans have been known as ‘micks.’ Their reputation among the Europeans was for slyness, trickery, lying and stealing. While it had to be admitted that some Kikuyu were warlike this was attributed to an admixture of Masai blood.” 16 Only seventy-one Kikiuyu served as askaris in World War I. Instead, for many generations the Kikuyu emphasized portage, which the Masai and Nandi considered to be unmanly. From the time of the sultan’s caravans and then the British, especially during World War I, the Kikuyu, as well as the Ganda of Uganda preferred to work as carriers. Of the four KAR battalions, two were recruited in Nyasaland and one each in Kenya and Uganda, but in garrison duties one of the Nyasaland battalions served in Kenya and Somaliland. This worked since Nyasaland

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was densely populated and with a poorer economy than sparsely populated Kenya. The KAR, like the West African Field Force, was a logical extension of the Indian experience. The use of an alien battalion was a conventional and ancient practice that usually worked well. The concept of martial races was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At a time when Europe and America used science to explain the world, racism seemed a logical genetic explanation for the human condition, and most educated people believed it to be true. The French and Belgians employed the martial race theory and alien battalions with some deviations from the British policy. When Henry Morton Stanley began his 1880 Congo River conquest, sixty-eight of his men were from Zanzibar from his earlier work with Dr. David Livingstone. The Congo Free State began as a private business venture with its own small army of a few White officers and African soldiers, which made alliances with African societies and the Arab merchants of the Great Lakes region. Since it was a business that needed to minimize expenses, the army was tiny. The civilian administrators and leaders of the Force Publique were too few and often not Belgian but Scandinavian, Italian, Dutch, British, or American. Often only one officer or NCO commanded a unit that was the garrison for a district as large as the state of New Jersey, which meant a sergeant might administer millions of people. Such power and responsibility was accompanied by little or no supervision or accountability. The pressure of isolation and vulnerability in an extremely hostile environment created the opportunity for some of the worst brutality and human rights violations of the modern era. The most extreme example was Captain Leon Rom, upon whom Joseph Conrad partially based the character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. In the Belgian Congo, more than any other colony that later fought in GEA, the military was used to extract wealth from the civilians. The maximization of profits was intimately intertwined with the military. In the pursuit of ivory, gold, wild rubber, and later domesticated rubber the Force Publique functioned like a goon squad of thugs. They became most infamous for the method of chopping off a hand of those who failed to meet a quota, but they also held as hostages the families of workers, in addition to perpetrating murder, rape, arson, and theft. This was where the alien battalion policy was successful. If there was no affinity with the victim, it was easier for this military to commit criminal acts. In this time period the population of the Congo declined dramatically. The first soldiers for the Free State were the Zanzibari veterans, Hausas from Nigeria, and Xhosas from South Africa. Then the Belgians were embarrassed by the 1886 Arab Revolt. Although a brief and small event, it indicated the need for expansion. The original eight companies (of one hundred to one hundred fifty men) were twenty-two companies (of two hundred to three hundred men) by 1897. They obtained British permission to recruit soldiers in Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, and Nigeria. Between 1892 and 1894

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the Force Publique warred against the Great Lakes Arabs, and their ally the Tetela, and conquered all of Lake Tanganyika’s western shore, in a conflict infamous for violence against civilians. The foreignness of the soldiers helped to make this possible. In December 1894 they also decisively defeated the Mahdi’s Dervishes. Since the West Africans were more expensive than local recruits, and in 1896 Britain ended recruitment in its empire for the Free State, the Belgians followed the familiar practice of replacing them with indigenous martial race recruits, the Azande, “Bangala,” and the recently defeated Tetela. Some were volunteers, others joined to avoid the forced labor that the Belgians introduced. Most soldiers were forced to enlist by their monarchs, who were richly rewarded for each man, sold in chains to their new commands, as if a continuation of the slave raiding wars the Free State was supposed to end. In several separate incidents in 1897 Tetela units mutinied and murdered their officers. Some heard of the Sudanese Mutiny in Uganda and attempted to join them. These criminals were hunted until 1901,when the last were caught. The Tetela were no longer recruited. The Bakongo were martial but unacceptable; since they were such a large population, they could threaten colonial rule. The “Bangala” were not an actual ethnicity so much as a Belgian creation to counterbalance other martial societies. Segregated units were first practiced, but since this assisted the formation of mutinies the policy was reversed in the 1890s. 17 When the world learned of these abuses the Free State government was terminated in 1908 and the Belgian government became responsible for the Congo, but malevolence changed little before the Great War. After their 1871 defeat, French leaders reconsidered recruitment of African soldiers to compensate for the widening population gap with Germany. Reflecting their own concerns, opponents of African recruitment feared “black mercenaries” as a Praetorian Guard used in France against citizens in yet another variation of the alien battalion theory. Supporters of African recruitment emphasized that these colonials would only be brought to Europe in a large conflict, not unlike the British Indian Army, a strategic manpower reserve. There were several generals and civilian administrators who advocated such a large colonial army; one of the more famous was General Charles Mangin, who published the influential book La force noire in 1910, proposing it as a weapon for use against Germany. He even argued that such an army was payment of Africa’s debt to France for ending slavery and imposing a French peace on a violent and chaotic continent. Although all French West African soldiers were called “Senegalese Tirailleur” only a portion was actually from Senegal. The martial race theory was employed with their own ethno-military definitions of civilization and savagery but still created preferences for certain races based on recent experiences and prejudices with a pseudoscientific veneer. The French also segregated men into battalions or at least companies based on ethnicities. They considered the

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Bambara, Lebu, Mande, Serers, Tukulor, and Wolof to be warlike. The militarily impressive Maures and Tuaregs were unacceptable because they were too individualistic. 18 Although France did not participate in the East African Theater of Operations it is still worth noting how important the martial race theory was for recruitment. When establishing their own empire, the Germans studied India and the Dutch East Indies, creating “scientific colonialism,” which included the martial race theory and alien battalions. Admiration blended with jealousy for the German colonial enthusiast, since it was Britain’s empire that made it great, and the idea that even a small nation like Holland became wealthy by colonies while Germany had no such opportunities was maddening. At the time, it appeared that even a minor nation like Belgium might soon become fantastically wealthy. Then, in just a few years, the German government claimed foreign lands for a new overseas empire, and talent was released in a new direction. Nationalism prevented such candor, but the German colonists directly copied the successful examples and thus studied colonialism as if it were a science. European experiences in India and Indonesia directly affected German East Africa, and the British Indian Army was the standard against which other colonial armies were evaluated. Even the civilian governors of GEA, who were considered to be liberals and “nigger lovers” by their peers, embraced a scientific racism. “All men, it was believed, could be classified into races as animals could be classified into species. Each race had a distinct skin colour, physique, mentality, character, history, and cultural attributes. Like animal species, human races represented different stages in the scale of evolution, with the white races at the top and the black at the bottom.” 19 Given the technology gap between the races and the differences in achievement, it is understandable that educated Europeans and Americans would be drawn to these conclusions. The need for order and predictability was important. It should also be remembered that Europeans subdivided themselves based on class that, until recently, included different expectations of civil, political, and human rights, all based on birth. They believed that God made some aristocratic men to be officers and gentlemen by birth, while the lower classes were born to take the orders of their superiors and thus be good soldiers. Blue-blood nobles were better than commoners. If not all Whites were equal, why expect different of others? “Each race contained sub-groups which could also be classified on an evolutionary scale, so that Bushmen were a lower form than Bantu, who were themselves lower than ‘Hamites’ like the taller, lighter-skinned, pastoral Masai.” 20 Even those who were more sympathetic toward the Africans still used racism as if it were a science. “Governor Schnee, a man of liberal sympathies and academic temperament, compared the distinction between aristocratic, pastoral Hamites and plebeian, earthy Bantu to that between antelope and cattle.” 21 These differences in perspective most often expressed themselves

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in the use of African labor. This was especially true of the military occupation. In every colony there was a conflict between the civilian administration, settlers and other commercial interests, missionaries, and the home government over the use (or exploitation) of native labor. Related to this was the perspective on colonialism. Did colonialism exist to help, protect, even improve the less fortunate, inferior peoples? Was it a form of noblesse oblige, the White man’s burden? Was there a moral obligation of the better off to engage in an honorable, charitable advancement of civilization? Or were the natives more like beasts of burden, placed there to serve the needs of their superiors, and incapable of elevation? How these questions were answered, at that time, gave order to their world. As a new business, the German East Africa Company (1885 to January 1, 1891) wanted to keep expenses to a minimum while they attempted to replace the sultan of Zanzibar’s government with their own. These two objectives were incompatible. From the local population the company hired a few thugs, while the new German administrators were both arrogant and naive. These and other factors provoked the Abushire Revolt of 1888. The company was reduced to tiny bits of land and completely discredited. The government intervened with the navy, landing marines to stabilize the area but little more. Since soldiers from Germany would be easy victims of tropical diseases the government instead recruited Africans from other lands to form an alien battalion for GEA. Herrmann von Wissmann recruited Sudanese (many veterans of the Egyptian Army) and from Mozambique some cousins of the Zulu for a total of eight hundred men. Later Somali were also hired, since they all had martial reputations, and had no affinity for the people of Tanganyika. With some exceptions ethnic segregation of companies was largely practiced. The Maji Maji Rebellion was the next influence on recruitment for the Schutztruppe. Not only were the foreign soldiers loyal but their reputation intimidated many societies to remain neutral or even assist the Germans. On the other hand, some Germans thought these soldiers contributed to causing the disturbance. The uniform was used as protection when askaris (and sometimes their wives) committed crimes against civilians and abused their authority with the tacit acceptance of the Germans. After the Maji Maji Rebellion the martial race theory for recruitment did not end but was emphasized less, and the alien battalion concept faded away. The British closed their empire to foreign recruitment, thus ending the supply of Sudanese and Somalis. No other foreign sources existed, so they had no choice but to recruit from within Tanganyika. Some foreign askaris remained in Tanganyika even longer than the Germans. By 1914 the Sudanese and other foreigners were few but very loyal and served as NCOs. After the British took over Tanganyika, some remained and served the postwar KAR. For new recruits, the Germans used local martial people such as the Hehe, Ngoni, Nyamwezi,

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Tonga, and Yao. These societies were located near each other and frequently fought. These societies were also divided by the international colonial borders, and so some were British subjects recruited into the KAR based on their martial reputations. Another recruitment example was the prewar KAR veterans who joined the Schutztruppe. In Kenya, distrustful settlers pressured in 1907 for a reduction of the KAR as an economizing measure. The Second Battalion, composed mostly of Ngoni and Yao from Nyasaland, was disbanded in 1911. Many then joined the Schutztruppe, where their experience was so valued that the Germans made an accommodation by giving orders in English in these companies. The martial race theory was still important, but the prior training and professionalism made the ex-KAR soldiers practical and too good not to use. The ease with which these soldiers switched allegiances also led to the characterization of these professionals as mercenaries. The martial race theory of recruitment did not end for the Germans so much as a better method, a form of apprentice system, evolved. Each German askari had a “boy” assigned to him as a personal assistant, and each German had several boys, all provided by the government as if the askari boys were equipment. Many were the younger brothers or cousins of the men they served. While performing chores they became acquainted with army life and campaigning. The carriers were another source of soldiers. By serving as carriers or as askari boys they became acculturated toward the field company they served, transferring their identity. The Germans encouraged them to feel superior to the people of Tanganyika because of their association with the colonial government. The uniform made them better than others. One common characteristic was that most of the martial races of eastern Africa were from cattle-based economies. This did not apply to all martial races and does not include other regions of Africa. Cattle were tended by boys and by older men who were veterans. Males of the customary age for soldiers, late teenage to late twenties, could then form a professional army to execute the king’s commands. Martial societies kept cattle as wealth, which allowed for similar societal and military practices. For example all created age-based regiments. Males born in a certain cycle of years, up to a period of seven years, formed one age-based class or group. They shared experiences as boys, and then, as teenagers in an age regiment, they served together through indoctrination and military training, temporarily separated from civilians. Their identity was refocused to the unit and to their comrades in arms. They were not allowed to marry, have sex, own property, or eat certain foods, until service was complete. Endurance physical training was extensive and without compromise so that all soldiers were expected to run all day, fight a major battle at their destination, and win. Traditional tactics were very aggressive, and the weapons required advanced discipline and training, thus demanding much repetition and a rather large, well-defined leadership cadre.

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Warfare often focused on cattle, since it was literally mobile wealth. In combat they sought to quickly overwhelm opponents with a decisive crushing force because these martial societies were often smaller in number than the opponent and they could not afford a prolonged conflict. After years, or even more than a decade of service, they then formed a military reserve as a new age regiment began its turn to serve as soldiers. Failure brought great shame. If they did not serve or were humiliated in war, then they were not ‘real men’ in their own society and this could not be altered. They were not real men if they had not experienced combat. Worse than second-class citizens, they could not own cattle, have sex, or marry, and often they were forced into humiliating unmanly tasks, such as portage. Conversely, acts of courage in combat were recognized and rewarded materially. Brave men earned a title preceding their name so that their reputation would be remembered every day. They were given wealth, which could be precious metals, the best cattle, women, and slaves. A promotion in rank might also be recognition of valor. When the Europeans arrived, of course, they admired the martial qualities of these cattle-herding societies. 22 One conflict, the Hehe versus the Ngoni, can illustrate these historical factors. They fought several wars, culminating in 1879 at the Battle of Nyamulenge. According to legend, the founder monarch of the Hehe, Munyigumba, killed Chipeta, the leader of the Ngoni, in single combat. Since they employed similar weapons and tactics, these wars were indecisive but drained resources from both societies, leaving them weak just prior to the German wars of conquest. Instead of their normal reputation for aggression the Hehe were defensively oriented against the Germans, perhaps as a consequence of the preceding conflict. 23 The fact that they were a cattle-based economy influenced their perspective as warriors. Cattle made these martial races more powerful than grain- or vegetable-farming societies, which were frequently their easy victims. Also they were restricted to land that was good for cattle, which in eastern Africa meant many regions were unacceptable and this required a seminomadic existence. Herding cattle without horses demanded physical exertion and stamina, which reinforced physical fitness. At every moment they protected the cattle from theft by criminals, attack in war, and from animal predators. With the same spears and shields used in war these men fought lions, where coordination with their fellow soldiers was again essential. As impressive as these accomplishments were, they could not stop the spread of cattle diseases. In the late nineteenth century the spread of rinderpest and other deadly illnesses caused a great disruption to their economies, making service as an askari more attractive. These martial societies also attacked the trade caravans if they failed to pay a tax, toll, or bribe. Cattle herding was not the only method to military success. The Nyamwezi were mostly agricultural but also engaged in the caravan business and

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ivory hunting, which developed into a martial reputation. Often they acquired the latest guns before their rivals, which added to their notoriety. In a Nyamwezi caravan the porters were frequently armed for protection. So too, ivory hunters used armed carriers, as their cargo was a tempting target. Beyond just shooting back, a modicum of tactics and discipline gave the Nyamwezi a fearsome military reputation as hired guns. They supplemented their population with the acceptance and integration of ex-slaves, so the biological definition was malleable. A symbiotic relationship was later created with the Germans since the Nyamwezi had a martial reputation and a diverse economy that merged well with colonialism. The Yao experienced a similar development. In addition to agriculture they emphasized the caravan profession, which in the nineteenth century blended with the slave trade. The Yao’s direct connection with the Indian Ocean trade meant they were the first to acquire new firearms, which gave them an advantage in the Slave Wars and fame as a martial race. This merged into conflicts with the Europeans when suppression of the slave trade was a primary justification for colonial occupation. Defeated in war, the Yao’s criminal reputation as slavers prevented recruitment for a while until circumstances changed the opinions of both the British and Germans. Some martial societies could not have a genetic explanation for their success since their racial identities were recent creations. The Ngoni (sometimes spelled Angoni) were cousins of the Zulu who broke away from the empire and moved north. They kept the extreme practices and traditions of Shaka that made the Zulu so successful. Frequently they absorbed and converted victims so that genetically they became an amalgamation of several ethnicities. Thus, more than an ethnicity the Ngoni were the ruling class of a highly militarized society. The “Bangala” were not an ethnicity in the usual sense. Bangala was widely learned as a second language but few spoke it as their primary. Bangala is also a region of the Congo, west of Lake Tanganyika but ending well east of the Atlantic coastline. The word was applied to people who were of many ethnicities and were freed as slaves but could not return to their original homes. Without much alternative, many went to work for Europeans with their lingua franca now serving also as an identity. Similarly the “Manyema” were ex-slaves of many ethnicities who resided in southeast Congo and the Kigoma region of Tanganyika. The Hehe were approximately twenty-nine different communities united into a militarized confederation by Munyigumba in the mid-third of the nineteenth century. 24 Since the Europeans needed to categorize people, they created these new descriptions even though it was not consistent with the logic of the martial race theory and genetics. It could be malleable because it was not a science. Africans believed in sorcerers and magic that would protect them from bullets with the same certainty that Europeans believed in the martial race theo-

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ry, scientific colonialism, and White supremacy. For each, their belief was logical, from their perspective. During the war the need to expand military units conflicted with adherence to prewar beliefs. If this were a real science, then the answers would not alter. Instead the Europeans expanded the definitions to recruit more martial people. Recent enemies were reconsidered as acceptable. The British Indian Army included new ethnicities and castes, while the KAR and WAFF also got new sources of manpower. When the war began, the British Indian Army was about two hundred forty thousand men, and by the end almost one million Indians had served in uniform. This meant recruitment standards had to change while accommodating Indian religious beliefs and values, if not European logic. Brahmins were recruited for the more technically demanding roles such as clerks and the Indian Medical Service. In 1917 a new territorial system of recruitment began, based on districts and provinces. Also seventy-five new classes, closely related to those previously recruited, were declared eligible. For example, on the lower end of the caste scale the Paraiyans expanded from 696 recruits in 1914 to 3,345 by 1919, and the Ahirs from 487 (1914) to 19,546. “All the veterans interviewed said that the new recruits, which included the persons from the new classes, did well in the war after proper training and some experience. This war, thus, partially shattered the myth of the theory of ‘martial races.’” 25 One aspect of British racism was altered by the war, even though the scale was still tiny: some Indian officers could issue orders to British soldiers, as if they were racial equals. For a long time there were Indian officers who commanded Indian soldiers, but due to racism they could not issue orders to a British soldier. In 1917, King’s Commissions were granted to a highly select few. “Ideally the British officials would have liked to grant these commissions to Indian Officers already in the Army, men who came from the ‘martial classes.’ However, most of these men lacked the education and social graces required of commissioned officers.” 26 Since this acknowledged equality it carried a great potential. After the war the military schools of Sandhurst and Indore admitted a few Indian cadets. The last significant rebellion, in Kenya the Nandi, ended about 1906. Although clearly a martial race, the society was too large and dangerous to be trusted for mass recruitment before World War I. After 1906 the Nandi preferred to avoid the British and simply tend their cattle. They were disgusted by portage or employment as laborers on plantations, finding it unmanly. The colonial government imposed peace between Africans such that the Nandi were prevented from campaigning against neighbors, but this created a new problem since one age class was untested yet nearing the end of their term for military service. Without combat to prove their worthiness they would not become real men. For both Nandi and British 1916 proved to

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be serendipitous. The KAR needed massive expansion, so the Nandi were suddenly considered safer. The need to prove their manhood in combat and thus fulfill the rites of passage could be satisfied in the Great War so twelve hundred Nandi joined the KAR with great enthusiasm. “Many Nandi went off to the Great War in the same spirit as their fathers and elder brothers, as recently as 1905, had gone off to raid their Luo and Luyia neighbors or to defend their territory against the Maasai, the Arabs, or the encroaching British administration.” 27 These veterans achieved the prestige they needed to be men, and their pay allowed them to purchase cattle after they were honorably discharged. Other examples of wartime changes to policy, or rationalization, were the Tiv of Nigeria, previously considered too primitive to be soldiers. In 1917 the manpower urgency was so great they were reconsidered and were successfully enlisted in the Nigeria brigade of the WAFF. The Germans also made convenient reevaluations. After the Zelewski massacre of 1891 the Hehe were too dangerous for the Schutztruppe. Yet circumstances changed, so recruitment of the Hehe began before 1914 and during the war it expanded. If stereotyping created a self-fulfilling prophecy of military prowess, it also produced expectations of those who were too civilized to be warriors but instead became medics, clerks, signalmen, and other specialists, based on racism. Here the ad hominem logic was due to frequent interaction with certain societies, which created a greater level of comfort for the Europeans as opposed to the aloof martial races. For example in Nigeria the British considered the Igbo physiques inferior to the Yoruba, whom they favored as infantrymen. The Igbo’s long association with the British created a great facility in the English language, and many became converts to Christianity, creating the prejudice that they were more intelligent and should be signalers, technicians, and clerks. Also some Africans favored the roles of humble carrier or specialist clerk, and medic, just as others preferred to be riflemen. The specialist clerks were paid more than ordinary askaris and enjoyed better relations with the Europeans. As carriers avoided combat, some Africans liked this less disciplined, less rigid, and safer job. Before World War I the KAR had Indian assistant surgeons to supplement an inadequate number of European doctors instead of Black medics. 28 Then this system was grossly inadequate during the massive wartime military expansion. The Royal Army Medical Corps was for Whites only just as the Indian Medical Services cared for their own. Racism demanded segregation, just as Indian religious sensitivity required exclusivity. The Uganda Native Medical Corps and the East Africa Medical Corps were established and then combined into the African Native Medical Corps. At its peak, it had ten British officers and about 1,500 medics (1,700 served, 113 died, 2 killed in combat). 29 African societies with the longest and closest associations with

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the British were chosen. The Ganda and Zanzibari were “unusually quick at learning.” 30 The Ganda were “Of precocious intelligence, he can be a willing, cheerful, trustworthy and industrious assistant. Unsympathetically handled he may be slothful, obstinate, sulky, or even mutinous, and utterly regardless of personal consequences.” 31 Even admiration included racism. It was said of Swahilis that “owing to their superior intelligence and adaptability they make excellent signalers and clerks.” 32 Another writer who had also taught British and Indians remarked, “Many thought the African lacked the intelligence needed for a useful signaler. . . . To my amazement the Africans were quicker to learn than any Indian I had trained. The speed with which they mastered the Morse code was remarkable. I think the reason was the African’s natural sense of music and rhythm.” 33 Although such notions might be amusing today, the perspective of these observers must be considered. At a time when the vast majority of Whites only knew Africans from the media, these authors knew these men as individuals, this respect and admiration for a comrade was genuine, which made African natural “rhythm” logical and positive, to them. They wanted to believe that biology determined the martial destiny of a race of people. One problem was that the definition of race was not as consistent as science required. Through controlled breeding of domesticated animals, certain attributes can be refined over time. Humans are not controlled in their reproduction like livestock. The martial race theory seemed to work because the colonial powers needed to bring order to other lands, so they made a pseudo-science to create legitimacy with ethno-military doctrine. In Africa and Asia it worked based on how they understood their time. Could the martial race theory of Roberts and Lugard be applied to Europeans? Was every European ethnicity a martial race when only a few Asian and African were too? How could all of Europe be martial, but only portions of other lands? It was not logically consistent. Did civilization and urban life make Europeans effeminate as it did some Indians? Did Darwin’s survival of the fittest create martial ethnicities among the industrial nations? European nationalism of the time emphasized the military heritage of each nation, but none agreed to the role of effeminate cowards made too intelligent by civilization to engage in war. The martial race theory was not science. WHITE SUPREMACY WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE WAR Everyone needs to prioritize. Even though it was, at that time, the greatest conflict of the modern era, retaining White superiority over a Black population was more important than winning the war itself. The Europeans cooperated in East Africa to maintain colonial control, even during periods of combat operations. Settlers in all of the colonies feared a rebellion because

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the Great War threatened order. Retaining White control of Africa was a justification for the Union of South Africa to enter GEA. Also some of the most martial of races, such as the Zulu, were never utilized due to racial fear and the need to maintain White superiority. There was always the fear that if the natives ever united, their masses could overwhelm the colonials. This phobia was common to all frontier pioneering experiences, and for good reason. Occasionally it came true. It was in the nature of empires that a tiny minority controlled the majority. So too, the first settlers on a frontier were few in number relative to the natives. An insurrection could hypothetically succeed if the Africans (Native Americans or Asians) united against the common enemy, which in reality was infrequent. In the decades before World War I there were examples of native rebellions enjoying temporary successes, with Whites besieged or even massacred, including women and children, but they never succeeded in reversing colonialism. Not only was this great drama for newspapers back home, it was also one of the reasons for colonial militaries like the KAR, WAFF, and Schutztruppe. The anxiety provoked by the idea of masses of Blacks obliterating the settlers was shared by all colonial powers. Related to it was the accidental empowerment of Africans with modern technology. Part of the “White Man’s Burden” was the responsibility to exclude Africans from White conflicts, in the killing of Whites, and they should not learn modern technology that might later be used in a rebellion. Not just weapons, but cars, trucks, locomotives, river steamers, and telecommunications could all be tools of treachery if the colonized learned to use them. Some settlers feared an expansion of the KAR might unintentionally generate a PanAfrican or Pan-Muslim movement by bringing men from many societies together. 34 The fear of losing control of their African subjects was so great the Germans cooperated with the Allies to retain White supremacy, despite the war. “While their countrymen in Europe fought the bloodiest war ever known, in Africa Europeans were instinctively white men first—and German and British second.” 35 As the Germans exited a region, they often abducted the local African leaders for a few days until the British or Belgians occupied the land, thus preventing attempts at independence. All the combatants sought influence with the enemy’s subjects and encouraged rebellion but not the killing of settlers. Early in the war both sides encouraged their subjects to kill Africans on the other side of the international borders, but this ended when the front moved. “The first duty of all Europeans in Africa, of whatever nationality and regardless of the hostilities in Europe, was to maintain control of native populations at all costs.” 36 It might be Total War in the homeland but on the edge of civilization there were restraints based on mutual selfinterest.

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The John Chilembwe Rebellion illustrates this confluence. Nyasaland supported a large population, a poor economy, and less than a thousand White settlers in January 1915 when a rebellion began under the leadership of John Chilembwe. He was a member of the Western-educated elite of Africans who became partially integrated into colonial society. After a Christian mission education he attended an African American seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1899 and was exposed to the ideas of Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington. When he returned home there was growing anger over labor exploitation by settlers and the colonial government. With his own interpretation of Christianity, and demanding “Africa for the Africans” he next called for the killing of settlers and the unity of Africans as a component of the Apocalypse. News of the rebellion spread quickly after the killing of three White men, and the kidnapping of two women and five children. The defense of one town, Mlanje, was directed by a wounded, prisoner-of-war, German Lieutenant von Veltheim, since racial unity, and self-survival, was more important than World War I. The KAR was briefly diverted, and it was over in a few weeks with Chilembwe and some his followers killed, and others imprisoned. Relative to other insurrections the Chilembwe Rebellion was objectively small, brief, and isolated but in 1915 it was shocking. The very idea that despite a significant advantage in weapons and other technology the Whites of Nyasaland were nearly erased by the Blacks was the worst horror, especially if it spread like a grassfire as an example to other oppressed colonial subjects. Settlers were powerful but also vulnerable, and fear was always present. Even in peacetime many colonies faced some degree of native resistance, but during World War I every colony experienced some rebellion. This justified fear. Settlers feared that if the Africans understood that the Europeans were distracted by a Great War they would be tempted into violence. Before the war, settlers generally distrusted the colonial government, and frequently they quarreled over access to labor, which grew worse during the war despite the call of patriotism. Settlers demanded more services from government yet simultaneously feared the government and the idea of sharing power. In the British Empire the highest rates of volunteer enlistment were the White Rhodesians and Kenyans, but for the first two and a half years they obstructed the inclusion of “their Blacks” in the war. They needed cheap labor and the war threatened their prosperity. Even before 1914 this was an old topic, as the government competed for native labor with the farms, mines, and businesses of settlers. 37 The German admiration of India as a model of administration omitted one very important difference. India did not have settlers but German East Africa did. German South-West Africa and GEA were valued as settlement colonies that according to nationalist extremist beliefs contributed to the rebirth or

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renewal of the German people. 38 Another inspiration for colonies was German envy of the American pioneer experience to revitalize the national spirit. Popular fiction in the nineteenth century about the western frontier inspired a variation with Africans replacing the Plains Indians as German cowboys tamed a wild land. 39 The reality was that only a tiny minority of German immigrants could be settlers. Most wanted reasonable jobs in existing cities, not the difficult and dangerous life of a pioneer. Colonial pioneers were mostly unattached men, which created a new racial problem when they had sex with local women. The belief in White supremacy caused the Germans to emphasize racial purity as a component of scientific colonialism. They feared race mixing. If it were not prevented, mixed race children would contaminate German racial purity because African blood was considered to be so powerful. In the years before World War I laws were passed in Germany and her colonies to prevent mixed race marriages, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse. It was believed that even a minor contamination could, over a long enough period of time, cause a catastrophic failure for an entire race. Inferior genes would pass defects over generations, thus they felt the need to regulate racial hygiene. 40 There was interracial sex anyway. When settlers were accused of “going native” it was racial treason. It diminished their authority with the natives if they lowered themselves with local women. Miscegenation also seemed scientific. All the European colonies had laws intended to maintain race relations, as did the United States. The French and Dutch preferred to view these more as private concerns so long as there were no public embarrassments that required government regulation. 41 British and German policy required a separation of the White race from others but the Germans took this to the greatest extremes. Beyond just physical relations there was a fear of Whites who would lose their own identity and instead create an affinity with the local population. One man who represented this rare experience, and was a celebrity for it, was the German doctor Eduard Schnitzer. While employed by the Ottoman Empire he converted to Islam, changed his name to Emin Pasha, and married an Abyssinian woman. Later he was employed by the government of Egypt to administer Equatoria, the southernmost province, when the Mahdi Rebellion besieged his outpost, making him a minor celebrity. At the same time, the British General Charles George Gordon of Khartoum became a martyr. 42 A less well-known example was the Irishman Charles Stokes, who made his life in central Africa as a Church Missionary Society lay missionary, before going native. He became a trader in ivory and guns, married a Nyamwesi princess, and he played a minor role in Uganda politics in the late 1880s. He was hanged in the Congo in January 1895 by the Belgians for gunrunning. British newspapers later emphasized outrage, demanding three times that the Belgians court-martial the responsible officer, Captain Hubert-Joseph Lo-

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thaire. He was acquitted each time. What made this incident so severe was that Lothaire “was prepared to break the ultimate law of the white man in Africa: never harm another white man, for fear the Africans may follow your example.” 43 It was considered a war crime to violate White superiority. For example, when White prisoners of war were guarded by Blacks it was considered a war crime. “Many of these white men had been compulsorily employed under native guard on public conservancy and similar work—a degradation which the local natives had not failed to note—and complained bitterly of the callous brutality with which they had been treated.” 44 When French West African Senegalese and African American soldiers were used in the postwar occupation of the Rhineland it was a calculated insult. Germany was racially shamed. At that time many Germans interpreted it as a humiliation and an attempt at racial pollution. 45 Blacks killing Whites, even if it was in a conventional combat, was worse. Race was one major reason for South Africans and other White Africans to fight in GEA. Smuts “felt that Germany had committed racial betrayal by teaching natives to kill Europeans. Although the Allies had also armed Africans, Smuts chose to place primary responsibility on the Germans, and suggested a postwar ban on military training of natives by any European nation.” 46 This belief was so common and deeply held at the time that it had the authenticity of science. “It was feared that African troops with their military training could form the deadly core of future risings. There was also an odd ‘unwritten law’ in Africa that African troops should not be used to fight white men, a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ honoured by the British and Boer forces in the Anglo-Boer War.” 47 Southern Rhodesia would not recruit Blacks, but as the war became longer than first thought their values shifted. They organized some for military labor first and by summer 1916 the government was resigned to the creation of a Rhodesia Native Regiment (RNR). “The Administration decided to abandon the ‘unwritten code’ in the face of German ‘treachery’ in using African troops. As the Rhodesia Herald put it in a report sounding remarkably like an advertisement for a lonely hearts club: ‘Natives accustomed to life in the bush were wanted to meet similarly skilled natives acting in concert with the Germans.’” 48 Since Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland were an extension of South Africa the settlers there too were offended by militarized Blacks, but there was a difference. South Africa did not raise any Black combat units, but the Rhodesians did, and of course Nyasaland recruited for the KAR. Beyond Black and White, the South Africans also used intervention in GEA as a means of addressing identity politics within the Union. They hoped victories would boost a sense of unity among the White “tribes” of South Africa. There were Boers who still wanted complete independence from Great Britain. Many remained bitter after the Boer War, but the recent eco-

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nomic changes brought by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration left many Boers feeling estranged within their own homeland. They were always outnumbered by Black Africans, but the recent arrival of South Asians, and immigrants from all over Europe, left the Boers with new sources of discomfort. Most Boers thought these were the wrong kind of White people. Although not British these immigrants from eastern and central Europe were called “British” because they were not Boer, and they learned English as the lingua franca. They were not even farmers, which added to the Boer sense of alienation. Change in the last decades was so great many Boers felt alienated and threatened, like strangers in their own home. A labor strike in 1912 symbolizes this conflict. Labor unions representing mostly immigrant White mine workers declared a general strike with mass demonstrations in Johannesburg. It included red flags and Marxist slogans, clashes with soldiers, and twenty-one dead and forty-seven wounded. It was also White men killing each other. A renewal in January 1914 was met with swift government repression. Suddenly the arrival of World War I changed priorities. By a 1911 agreement with London the Union of South Africa was to conquer German South-West Africa, whom Smuts called “bad neighbors.” This campaign overlapped the Boer Rebellion, and both regrettably included Whites killing Whites, even if it was kept to a minimum. Boer-British relations worsened in the first years of the war as anglophile South Africans tended to enlist in British or Australian regiments for service in France while Boers loyal to London fought in German South-West and against rebel Boers. Otherwise Boer recruitment for the war was disappointing. In the October 1915 elections the Botha-Smuts government was returned but by a small, fragile majority. Almost half the Boers opposed participation in the war, and they disliked the Botha-Smuts administration. 49 This was when the war was used to influence identity politics. East Africa was announced as the next objective. It was implied that this was to curry favor with the Boers, with hints of a Greater South Africa in the making. South-West Africa was just occupied with land grants for veterans. Were more rewards of land in GEA coming in the future? Since a few Boer families lived in Kenya and GEA (after 1907) the prospects of these lands were well known to Boer annexationists as a form of South African Manifest Destiny. Another compromise to mollify the Boers was that instead of ordering into action units of the Union Defense Forces (UDF), South Africa’s army, new units called Special Service battalions were raised of all volunteers, half Boer and half British. In exchange for political expediency the Special Service battalions lost military capability, most especially unit cohesion. The swift capture of German South-West Africa was due to UDF training, experience, and professionalism. But the Special Service battalions were hastily organized and before basic or field training was completed they were deployed. These

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soldiers were UDF veterans of South-West Africa mixed with raw recruits, but at least each man had volunteered for combat. This created another problem. Before the October 1915 elections there was talk of South Africans serving in France (to which some Boers objected). Some UDF veterans assumed that France was the destination when volunteering for the Special Service units. Not only was France more desirable, but Africa meant Imperial Service duty which reduced their pay by up to two-thirds. When the soldiers learned of this, so many desired transfers the pay dispute was resolved in their favor. 50 Smuts called the South-West Africa campaign the first achievement of a united nation and hoped to repeat this with GEA only bigger and better. Botha and Smuts hoped to manipulate Boer identity with military victories in the service of the British Empire. 51 EAST AFRICAN TRAUMA For many East Africans racism meant their world got steadily worse. The nineteenth century was bad enough, but the arrival of colonialism with World War I was a calamity so severe that many considered it proof of the Apocalypse. While it might be easy to dismiss this as so much self-pity and hyperbole, consider the unfolding of civilization and colonialism from the African perspective in the decades before World War I. The new colonial governments had little in shared beliefs with these Africans, which made the use of force virtually inevitable, and racism made it acceptable. Traditionally, East Africa participated in world trade by conveying product from the Great Lakes region via the caravan system, and by growing cloves and other products along the Indian Ocean coastline. During the nineteenth century this economy grew in size and became more diverse as the Western nations desired more goods, especially ivory, creating the slave wars. When the horrors of these wars were brought before an audience by Dr. David Livingstone and many others, it helped to justify colonialism by the claim that civilized European order would end such criminality and exploitation. For some Africans it meant that their lives got much worse when colonialism ended the slave wars. In order to stop the criminality of slavery the Europeans needed to directly control these “backward” lands. Europeans conquered Africa with a large number of “small wars” (relative to the West), but for the Africans these were frequently existential in scope, since the Europeans could be genocidal. If some societies became extinct because they did not adapt to European colonialism, it was logical according to the misinterpretation of Darwinism. In Europe and the United States there were supposed to be rules of war that separated and protected civilians from combat, although exceptions occurred. In Africa often the civilians were the target. By calling some Africans “savages” the immorality of murdering

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civilians could be justified as progress, and honorable, for professional soldiers who obeyed their officers and killed these savages, and their children. Did the prewar brutality of the Schutztruppe, KAR, WAFF, and Force Publique against civilians influence these askaris in World War I? These men were the “Old Guard” foundation upon which their units expanded during the war. Colonial economic development could mean financial destruction for some Africans. When the Central Railroad in GEA connected Dar es Salaam with Ujiji it was not only an enormous improvement for the Germans but it also suddenly caused unemployment in some caravan societies. Many African farmers lost their land to the formation of European plantations and were then hired as laborers to work the same land they lost. The requirement of cash crops and that taxes be paid in cash were seen as acceptable European methods of forced modernization. Rinderpest destroyed East Africa’s cattle herds so swiftly—and concurrent with the 1890s wars of conquest—that it added to a doomsday interpretation. Missionaries stated this cattle plague was God’s punishment. 52 The societies that appreciated change and adapted to the new requirements of colonialism, often by working for the Whites, were more likely to prosper; those who resisted the most risked being labeled “savages.” The lives of many Africans grew steadily miserable, and then suddenly the Great War made everything much worse. Since Western evangelical Christianity had recently been introduced many East Africans viewed these developments from this perspective and came to believe that this accumulation of misery, which peaked with World War I, was the Apocalypse. Simultaneous with the war, there were natural causes of crop failures as well as forced collections of food (worse than locusts), creating famines that in some areas lasted for years. Many Africans suffered when their young people worked for the Europeans instead of their own societies, while others were forced to work for the armies and then never returned. Those that did return home often carried diseases that then spread and killed their families. “Out of a Kikuyu population of less than one million, about 120,000 perished in the carrier corps, the famine, and the influenza epidemic.” 53 Of Kenya’s Black men aged sixteen to forty years old, over half served in World War I in some capacity and about one-eighth died. 54 In Nyasaland, the war was called thangata, meaning “forced labor,” like slavery. “Many recalled the days of the slave trade and drew the appropriate analogy; ‘slavery was the actual way people were taken to war.’ The fear was great; the expectations were colored by the realization that virtually none of the slaves captured in the nineteenth century ever returned. . . . When some did return, their reports of hardships did nothing to reassure those who still faced the prospect of unwelcome service.” 55 One of the justifications for colonialism was that the inferior and vulnerable would be protected by the more advanced and better educated. At the

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end of the antislavery movement there was a paternalistic racism that Black slaves had souls, therefore slavery was immoral, which was modified into the ‘White Man’s Burden’ of colonialism. Protection from the Arab slave trade required conquest by Europeans, and in order to pay for all this benevolence the Africans had to produce a profit. Imagine if Germany had as many fatalities and suffered as much as the East African people, would, indeed could World War II have occurred? RACISM MADE BLACKS UNUSABLE ELSEWHERE On July 27, 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II called upon his army to use extreme violence and brutality, with no quarter given and no prisoners taken, whenever any resistance to German authority was encountered, using positively the example of Attila and his Huns. It was an edict for a race war. He was not talking about Africa but of a “yellow peril.” In China a hatred of foreign influences created a resistance movement that became known as the Boxers. The murder of the German minister to the Qing dynasty, Clemens von Ketteler, began the Boxer Rebellion. In a demonstration of civilization versus primitivism, the imperial powers in China (plus the United States) then sent an international military relief force to rescue the community of diplomats, merchants, and missionaries who were besieged in Beijing for fifty-five days. When the German expeditionary corps of General Alfred von Waldersee arrived in October 1900 there was no one left to rescue, but they killed thousands of Chinese in revenge anyway. These victims had nothing to do with the murder of Ketteler or the Boxers, but that did not matter in racial warfare. As with most Westerners, German racism did not manifest itself only in the exploitation of Africans, but included a great fear that masses of Chinese and Japanese threatened the existence of Whites. Wilhelm II foresaw an inevitable Darwinian conflict over room to expand and live, Lebensraum, that could go badly for the Whites, even leading to extinction, unless they united. 56 White prejudices were also applied to Middle Easterners and Latin Americans, and there was a certain delight in subdividing Europeans based on stereotypes as well. For Whites, racism was simply a basis for understanding their time. The idea that warfare between Whites should exclude civilians was a basic assumption, but the rules were different for Asians and Africans. The distinction was logical for them because of racism. British racism also made a distinction between Black Africans and other Blacks, which included suitability for military service. Unlike the French, who used Black Africans and North Africans (and Indo-Chinese) on the Western Front (and elsewhere), the British refused to use Black soldiers in Europe. On the other hand, British racism would allow Black soldiers to serve in the Middle East so long as they were not African. The West Indies

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regiments served in GEA and then later served in Palestine along with the West India regiment. These were Black men, but not African. From South Africa the Cape Colony Coloured Corps (CCCC) also served in GEA (eighteen thousand men) and Palestine but since they were of mixed race (as the word colored was used in South Africa) they were not considered Black. But Black African soldiers, the KAR, WAFF, and RNR, could not serve elsewhere. Bigotry created its own restrictions. Thus, the idea that the Germans diverted hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the European theater of operations in World War I is a myth; the actual number was puny. Further, among the White units that served in Africa, few were useful elsewhere except for some support and specialist units. The Second Loyal North Lancashire Regiment (890 officers and men at the Battle of Tanga) was the only regular British Army unit to serve in East Africa in the war. It was distracted from the Western Front (or elsewhere). The War Office later recruited the Twenty-Fifth Fusiliers (also known as the Legion of Frontiersmen) as part of the New Army, but it is unlikely they were diverted from Europe. These men were “old Africa hands” sent specifically because of their previous experiences, or were international volunteers, citizens of many nations, as if they were a “foreign legion” (of questionable loyalties) and Africa was a safe place to send them. Many were too old for any other unit (the biggame hunter Frederick Courteney Selous was a sixty-four-year-old captain), and some volunteered specifically for East Africa. Diseases devastated this unit such that by July 1916 of the original 1,166 men fewer than 200 remained. There were also White units composed of settlers that were important contributions but would not have served in other theaters. From Kenya, the East African Mounted Rifles and the East Africa Regiment were created at the same time as the Uganda Volunteer Rifles and the Nyasaland Volunteer Rifles. In the exciting rush of the first days of the war they protected the borders and served in combat. They had important knowledge and experiences of Africa. Later the units dissolved as illness claimed some and others transferred to the King’s African Rifles or the Carrier Corps, where they served as officers and NCOs. As an alternative, when the war began other settlers volunteered for British or Australian units in order to fight in France. Some Indian units might be considered as distracted from other theaters, but not all. From 1914 to 1918, of the 46,906 Indians in eastern Africa, 17,525 belonged to combat units, and most “were not regarded fit for the European theater, hence were not the first-rate troops of the Indian Army.” 57 Some of the better units, however, such as the Gurkhas of the Second and Third Kashmir Rifles or the Twenty-Ninth, Thirtieth, and Thirty-Third Punjabis would satisfy Lettow-Vorbeck’s objective of diverting troops to Africa. Whereas it is true that some of the lesser units might have served in theaters against the Ottoman Empire, some may not have been good enough. When

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the 130th Baluchis learned in 1914 that their destination was Mesopotamia they mutinied. The more famous example was the mutiny of the Fifth Light Infantry in Singapore in 1915. Were they later sent to GEA as punishment or for redemption? Because of these (and other) incidents, the British developed a prejudice against sending Muslim units against the Ottoman Empire, and eastern Africa seemed a safe alternative. Even some of the lesser-quality Indian units could still be of use in garrison or occupation duty in the far corners of the empire where combat was less likely. Also, the almost thirty thousand Indians in support units (transportation, telecommunications, hospitals, construction, etc.) were distracted from other deployments and thus satisfied Lettow-Vorbeck’s objective. The KAR and WAFF had no such support specialists and relied upon the Indian Army for these services, which were also needed in Mesopotamia and Palestine, as well as the far corners. To expand the Force Publique, officers and NCOs were sent from Europe. These Belgians were technically an example of resources diverted from the Western Front; however, the numbers were so few it would be a folly to argue it had any significance. Interestingly, the Portuguese and their unfortunate policies would be an example of the success of Lettow-Vorbeck’s strategy of distracting Allied units. Since they sent soldiers from Portugal to Mozambique (where they fell ill) they were not available for the Portuguese Army’s other role of supplementing the French Army on the Western Front. This would account for a few thousand European soldiers. But even this minor accomplishment is further diluted by prejudices, since the Portuguese had such a poor reputation in this war. The Zulu were one of the most martial peoples in Africa, but these “natural soldiers” were excluded from participation due to South African fears and the imperative of White superiority. The Zulu were too good to use. Shaka, the founder monarch, completed a military revolution that turned his empire into a modern Sparta in an amazingly short time. Starting in 1816 with a decade-long event called the Mfecane (“the crushing”), their influence radiated to distant lands and was only interrupted by the arrival of European colonialism. Militarization was taken to the greatest extremes physically and psychologically, emphasizing stamina, fitness, and highly aggressive closecombat tactics. It was all stunningly successful, and an empire was created with an intimidating reputation. The Zulu became the only power that could threaten White rule in southern Africa, thus prompting a British invasion of their territory. When the Zulu won the Battle of Isandlwana January 22, 1879, completely overwhelming a British column and killing almost everyone, their reputation as fearsome fighters became even greater. This incident of Whites losing to Blacks added enough urgency to the war that the Zulu were later defeated after many reinforcements were dispatched. The empire was then divided between thirteen chiefs and the army disbanded, but in 1906 the Zulu rebelled again, only to be massacred in two battles. When

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World War I began, the reputation that stretched from Shaka to the 1906 rebellion guaranteed that the South African government would prevent any militarization of the Zulu. Outsiders often made the obvious suggestion that the most warlike people should be enlisted, but there were White South Africans that objected to even sending Black laborers to France. The Union Defense Forces were not just a conventional national military but also a constabulary in case of a Black rebellion, a race war. During 1911 and 1912 the South African Parliament debated the Defense Force Act, and Minister of Defense Jan Smuts emphasized the internal security roles and explicitly native rebellions. The act included a provision, Article 7, that the obligation of military service would be exclusively for those of European descent, and that Africans could be used only as noncombatants. It also stated this might be repealed in case of war. It never was. The separation of the races for military purposes was necessary for the perpetuation of White minority rule. This idea was based on the familiar explanation that military training of Blacks might later be used against Whites, but also the argument that a uniform made Blacks and Whites equal, which was unacceptable, of course. World War I was a war of attrition, and yet the need to mobilize manpower was not enough to change racial policy. In 1916 the London government asked the Union to reconsider the utilization of such a deep manpower reserve of potential Black soldiers, but they were politely refused. The Botha government had already contributed a brigade to the effort in France as well as the conquest of German South-West Africa, and (at that specific time) they also appeared to be adding GEA to their list of contributions to the Allies. Instead of complying with London’s request, the Union government did agree, with considerable trepidation, to dispatch noncombatant Africans for military labor in France, where there was a great demand. Fearing these men might interact with Europeans and be contaminated with the wrong ideas about racial order, Botha insisted that his Union government control the Blacks while they were in France. They were quartered in barracks-style compounds, similar to the Kimberly diamond mine experience, and separated from civilians, with South Africans officers in direct control. These requirements seemed reasonable to London, but to many in South Africa even this was far too dangerous. The possibility that somehow, despite precautions, these Black men might somehow have sex with White women was one of the greatest and most persistent objections. Beyond morality, this threatened the inequality that was the basis of South African culture. Another objection was that it might also increase the cost of labor within the South African economy. Despite various recruitment goals of tens of thousands of laborers only twenty-one thousand were sent to France, where a few of them did meet women. 58 Authors who greatly admired Lettow-Vorbeck understandably were tempted to magnify his David-versus-Goliath accomplishments by stating

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that three thousand Germans and fourteen thousand loyal askaris humiliated a million Allied soldiers that otherwise would have served on the Western Front—or if not a million, at least three hundred thousand. But like the obsolete weapons that tended to be shipped to eastern Africa, the limitations imposed by racism dictated that mostly units unusable elsewhere were deployed here. An estimate of tens of thousands of soldiers, Europeans, Indians, and a few others, seems reasonable. And in World War I, the loss of tens of thousands was a normal week, or a bad day. NOTES 1. Frederick S. Roberts, Forty-One Years in India (London: Longmans, 1897), 383, 442. 2. Sir Frederick D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Blackwood, 1929), 577. 3. Ibid., 575. 4. M. A. Haywood and F. A. S. Clarke, A History of the West African Frontier Force (London: Gale & Polden, 1964), 7. 5. Sir Hugh Clifford, The Gold Coast Regiment in the East Africa Campaign (London: John Murray, 1920), 9. 6. Lugard, The Dual Mandate, 575. 7. Hubert Moyse-Bartlett, The King’s African Rifles (Aldershot, UK: Golden and Polden, 1956), 24. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Ibid., 24, 27. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Ibid., 76, 78, 83–84. 12. Gordon H. Mungeam, British Rule in Kenya 1895–1912: The Establishment of Administration in the East Africa Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 23–25. 13. Ibid., 136–37. 14. W. Lloyd-Jones, K. A. R. (London: Arrowsmith, 1926), 138. 15. Ibid., 74–75. 16. Lewis J. Greenstein, “Africans in a European War: The First World War in East Africa with Special Reference to the Nandi of Kenya,” PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1975, 194–95. 17. Chris Peers, The African Wars: Warriors and Soldiers of the Colonial Campaigns (South Yorkshire, UK: Pen & Sword, 2010), 107–52. 18. Joe Lunn, “French Race Theory, the Parisian Society of Anthropology and the Debate over la Force Noire, 1909–1912,” in The French Colonial Mind. Vol. 2, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 221–39. 19. John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 149. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Peers, The African Wars, passim. 23. Ibid., 174–77. 24. Ibid., 123–24, 140, 175, 181–82. 25. DeWitt C. Ellenwood and S. D. Pradhan (eds.), India and World War I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 222, 57; Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 68–73. 26. Ellenwood and Pradhan, India and World War I, 199; Cohen, The Indian Army, 71–72. 27. Greenstein, “Africans in a European War,” 110. 28. Lloyd-Jones, K. A. R., 148.

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29. G. J. Keane and D. Tomblings, “The African Native Medical Corps,” Journal of the Royal African Society 19 (1919–1920): 304. 30. Ibid., 295; Greenstein, “Africans in a European War,” 135–38. 31. Keane and Tomblings, “The African Native Medical Corps,” 303. 32. Lloyd-Jones, K. A. R., 74. 33. Wynn E. Wynn, Ambush (London: Hutchinson, 1937), 107–8. 34. Greenstein, “Africans in a European War,” 39–41, 57–58, 170–72. 35. Brian Gardener, On to Kilimanjaro: The Bizarre Story of the First World War in East Africa (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith Company, 1963), 74. 36. Greenstein, “Africans in a European War,” 39–40. 37. Ibid., 76–84. 38. Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 89–90. 39. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 107–14. 40. Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 241–51. 41. Martin Thomas, ed. The French Colonial Mind, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 177–86. 42. Conrad, German Colonialism, 117–23. 43. Nicholas Harman, Bwana Stokesi and his African Conquests (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), 211. 44. Charles Hordern (ed.), Military Operations East Africa, vol. 1, August 1914–September 1916 (London: Britannic Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1941), 455n2. 45. Conrad, German Colonialism, 189–91. 46. Alfred William Lever, The British Empire and the German Colonies, 1914-1919 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 132. 47. Peter McLaughlin, Ragtime Soldiers: The Rhodesian Experience in the First World War (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: Mardon Publishers, 1980), 73. 48. Ibid., 74. There was a First Rhodesian Native Regiment raised in 1916, and a Second RNR created in 1917; they were amalgamated into the RNR (of two battalions) in January 1918. Usually they are just called the RNR. 49. James Ambrose Brown, They Fought for King and Kaiser: South Africans in German East Africa 1916 (Johannesburg: Ashanti Publishing, 1991), 33–47. 50. N. G. Garson, “South Africa of W.W.I,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (1979): 70–76. 51. W. K. Hancock, Smuts: The Sanguine Years, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 400–401. 52. Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 98–99. 53. Donald C. Savage and J. Forbes Munro, “Carrier Corps Recruitment in the British East Africa Protectorate 1914–1918,” Journal of African History 7, no. 2 (1966): 339. 54. Ian R. G. Spencer, “The First World War and the Origins of the Dual Policy of Development in Kenya, 1914–1922,” World Development 9 (August 1981): 737. 55. Melvin Eugene Page, Malawians in the Great War and After, 1914–1925, PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1977, 75–76. 56. Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 104–11. 57. Ellenwood and Pradhan, India and World War I, 70, 183. 58. Albert Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World War (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 37–49.

Chapter Four

A History of Errors

Misunderstandings happen because people are not perfect. Memories are faulty. And history can be used to support an agenda; therefore, connections might be emphasized that stretch logic to prove a prejudice. In the case of World War I in East Africa, the original foundation of research material was especially narrow, such that there were relatively few sources. When the opinions are sparse they become disproportionally influential. Of all the participants in East Africa, only a scattering wrote anything about it, and a tiny minority eventually dominated the narrative. One of them lied. His deception contaminated the fountain of popular narration histories, producing some especially good storytelling that was unintentionally based on falsehoods. Some of those good stories never happened. Once they were part of the narrative, these fictions were repeated without challenge because they were so entertaining, and this assisted the mythmaking. When the topic of World War I in Africa became notable in the 1960s, it was in part to prove a point about the supposed use of guerilla tactics by Whites, and this task was eased by the sparse number of sources, and the lies. Some authors found what they wanted in East Africa’s World War I, even if it was not there. A NARROW FOUNDATION Relative to other theaters of operations in the Great War there were few sources for historians. The majority of soldiers were illiterate. Many military units were temporarily created specifically for this brawl and were poor at keeping accurate records. Of the South African units many were Special Service battalions, ad hoc organizations for GEA only, although there were some UDF units as well, with better records. The volunteer regiments from Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Kenya, Uganda, and Nyasaland were poor 115

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at record keeping, and during the war they faded into insignificance before they disbanded. Accidents destroyed some archives. The difficulties of campaigning in a tropical environment ruined many documents, while in 1919 a fire destroyed Nyasaland’s archives 1 and the KAR war diaries were lost in a 1927 fire. German records kept in Leipzig were destroyed in World War II. Upon this narrow foundation, popular narrations of the war published in the 1960s were led astray, misdirected, as authors used the topic to prove their preconceptions, even if it meant ignoring contradictions by use of selective logic. The Germans never published an official history. Instead Lettow-Vorbeck became the de facto spokesman for his command. More than that, he came to personify this conflict. The Allies sent many generals over the course of the war, but there was only one Lettow-Vorbeck. It is understandable that his writings became authoritative, but they naturally contained some errors and omissions. Supplementing Lettow-Vorbeck was his chief medical officer, Dr. Ludwig Boell, with his Die Operationen in Ostafrika (1952), which was so meticulous it virtually serves as an unofficial German account. In addition, Governor Schnee and his wife, Ada, published their memoirs, as did Captain Max Looff as well as Nis Kock (a sailor aboard the blockade runner Kronborg) and a few others. As participants, they contributed examples of their own experiences but without the breadth of the whole conflict. The commander and his chief medical officer thus had a gravitas with regard to the overall picture that no one else had. These authors’ reputations were virtually crystallized in the following decades. This was another important element of the Lettow-Vorbeck myth. During the war, government propaganda celebrated the Schutztruppe and its daring leader. This hero was then embraced by postwar Germany for his unsullied reputation, the only one to occupy a portion of the British Empire without losing a battle, never surrendering, and beating the British at their own game. He upheld national honor. Even his participation in the March 1920 Kapp Putsch against the liberal government earned him more respect as an unrepentant conservative, monarchist Junker. After a brief prison sentence, he was elected a deputy in the Weimar Republic’s Reichstag until 1930. Lettow-Vorbeck hated the Nazis and refused to cooperate with them, so in retaliation he was harassed, humiliated, and surveilled, and his offices were vandalized by SA troopers. He was too admired to be eliminated and too popular to ignore. And his suffering later added to his reputation, making it easier to praise Lettow-Vorbeck’s World War I service. Post–World War II Germany needed men of honor to redeem national integrity after so many had compromised themselves by conforming to Nazi inhumanity. Representing the grace and dignity of the old order, uncontaminated by Nazi guilt, Lettow-Vorbeck was elected again.

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Governor Schnee was a Nazi. Although Adolf Hitler hated the idea of overseas colonies, an influential minority still desired them. To pander to this constituency some Nazi propaganda advocated a colonial restoration, with Schnee in charge. The contrast of anti-Nazi Lettow-Vorbeck being persecuted while Schnee embraced ignominy crystallized the difference between the two men. This directly influenced how authors later wrote about World War I in GEA. Since Schnee was a Nazi, any disagreement with LettowVorbeck was now interpreted in this light. It negated Schnee’s colonial and World War I service. The British planned a two-volume official history but only completed the first (August 1914 to September 1916) when World War II diverted their attention. This is one reason why the first half of the war is better documented than the last half. Of the six theater commanders Smuts was the only one to write a memoir. Unlike the Germans, the British did produce some unit histories—of the KAR, the volunteer regiments, and South African UDF units. One important example was K.A.R. (1926) by Wilson Lloyd-Jones, which was later supplemented by Hubert Moyse-Bartlett’s The King’s African Rifles (1956). There were some memoirs by White soldiers, but not Africans or Indians. Leo Walmsey wrote about his difficulties as a pilot, Frances Brett Hart described his problems as a doctor. Collectively these works emphasize the racial order that was the basis of their society, and these priorities were reflected in publications during the war and for decades after. In 1917 the colonialist Sir Harry Johnston published The Black Man’s Part in the War, where he praised Africans but maintained the orthodoxy of White superiority. He called for more humane treatment of Africans, and to convince his readers he included a newspaper quote “‘I have heard of men with dusky skins being pure-white inside, and I have certainly the proof of that on more than one occasion on this border.’” 2 One of the themes was that the British were better, more moral colonial overlords than the Germans— though the truth was they sinned as well and as often. For example, Sir Charles Lucas wrote in The Empire at War (1924) that all Nigerian soldiers were volunteers, and this falsehood remained popular even after it was proven wrong. 3 Beyond these examples there was little interest in this topic relative to other theaters of operations. Even though it was Germany’s overseas empire that made it a truly world conflict, most narrations of World War I make only a tiny reference to Africa and the Pacific, if any mention is made at all. In the 476 pages of The Real War 1914–1918 (1930) by the revered Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the East Africa theater was mentioned only twice, less than two full pages. In more recent works by John Keegan (1999) and Martin Gilbert (1994) Africa and the Pacific receive a few lines of narration on some pages, and Hew Strachan (2004) provides a 28-page chapter in a 340-page

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book. Admittedly this could still be argued as a reasonable balance, since most of the war was concentrated in Europe and the Middle East. When considered as a whole, few sources on the African theater of World War I existed before the renewed interest that began in the 1960s. Relative to the other theaters of operation, the senior officers published little, the governments were negligent of their customary obligations to document events, and some of the sparse records kept during the war were subsequently lost. MEINERTZHAGEN It was just too good to be true. One of the most important sources (second only to Lettow-Vorbeck himself) was Richard Meinertzhagen, who served in East Africa from the Battle of Tanga until late 1916. His Army Diary, 1899–1926 (1960), “the diary he kept so illegally and so successfully as to lend later a living quality to the British side of the war,” 4 was the origin of many wonderful and exciting stories that made this topic resonate with readers. These stories were repeated, in some cases plagiarized word for word, in the popular narrations that were published from the 1960s onward. Indeed what little popularity this topic enjoyed was based in part on Meinertzhagen’s tales. The popular narrative histories contain far fewer colorful stories after he was transferred out of East Africa. His stories were often complete fiction. There was much to admire. For a while, almost unanimously, Meinertzhagen was described as a prototype for the James Bond character later created by Ian Fleming (they were friends). An inquisitive, creative, impressive mind harnessed to a daring, confident personality, Meinertzthagen seemed to be a man of action whose influence was discreet and behind the scenes. One admirer stated, “No conscientious study of the East Africa campaign can be considered complete without frequent reference to the diaries he kept” 5 Another wrote, “Meinertzhagen was the sort of man characterized as being too clever by half. In East Africa he was a male Cassandra, and he later complained: ‘Throughout my service in East Africa, information I gave commanders about the army was ignored. . . . [C]ommanders disregarded it because it did not suit them or they listened to unreliable gossip.’” 6 Erroneously he was also described as “completely free from rancor and jealousy of some of his colleagues.” 7 Much of Meinertzhagen’s writings emphasized self-justification, which reflected the Cassandra observation. In many entries he warns superiors of an imminent catastrophe, and if the fools had only done what he said, a disaster would have been avoided. His self-aggrandizing was based in large part upon finding fault in others. In a similar vein he recounts his convincing testimony in numerous courts-martial, usually for the prosecution. His side always won. He imagines himself a heroic crusader who is

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too modest for the accolades, such as at Port Said 1899, when he rescued a little English girl from prostitution; Odessa 1910, when he saved a Jewish girl from a pogrom; and March 1910, when he saved a Greek girl in a train accident and then delivered a premature baby, all done with the self-assurance and panache of an English gentleman. 8 None of it happened. Meinertzhagen might have been a mass murderer. In many of his stories he not only killed the enemy in combat but he was also quick to summarily kill his own Indian or African soldiers for cowardice. He wrote of killing unarmed native civilians, servants, and spies, and he threatened to kill other officers, even his own unit commanders. Many stories emphasized the gory details of Meinertzhagen’s supposed protracted fights to the death. He was accused of murdering his wife and of having incestuous relationships. It is possible that some of this happened. It is possible that none of this happened and that his false-modesty bluster was a self-generated myth. He was a complicated man. It is curious that he deliberately created a reputation for being dangerous as well as always correct, when most likely what he truly wanted was respect. For a long time few authors bothered to question if he was too good to be true. The one who meticulously researched and made all the necessary connections was Brian Garfield in The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud (2007). He wrote about the man’s entire life and discovered a great many accusations from boyhood to the grave, too many to list here. In some cases, Garfield states, Meinertzhagen may have been truthful, or the evidence is not conclusive, but he also found proof that he lied. He stole the honor earned by other men. Often they were brave men killed in combat and thus could not defend themselves from a glory-seeking scavenger. Meinertzhagen kept diaries that were later extensively rewritten, yet he passed them off as having been created at the time these incidents occurred. Garfield found damning evidence in pages that were supposedly written at the time of the events but on paper and with typewriters that were only manufactured much later. There are numerous examples of official accounts that never mention him, while other documents place Meinertzhagen at some other distant place at the exact same time he claims to have performed a heroic deed or made an insightful prophecy. Meinertzhagen wrote “predictions” long after the event, and thus was uncanny in his accuracy, a male Cassandra. These diaries were not just believed but also repeated, even plagiarized by many authors, because Meinertzhagen told entertaining stories. 9 It would be too much to document each fiction Meinertzhagen invented about his time in East Africa. But there were a number of deceptions that built upon each other and were repeated as true by other authors after Army Diary was published in 1960. Meinertzhagen claimed he was the chief intelligence officer for the Indian Expeditionary Force tasked with the capture of Tanga because he knew GEA and was the best choice. He was not. In 1914

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Meinertzhagen was only a captain, and Lieutenant-Colonel J. D. Mackay of the Middlesex Regiment was the intelligence chief for East Africa. His KAR service was much longer than Meinertzhagen’s and his travels in East Africa far more extensive. Meinertzhagen claimed he knew the Force’s destination in August, but that decision was not made until September, another lie. Meinertzhagen attended the October 31 Mombasa Conference, when the British finalized the invasion plans. Later, he stated he was a significant participant, especially in the debate regarding ending a naval truce before the attack and thus allowing the enemy time to prepare. The question of a truce was confused, since some claimed it was in effect but others stated that the September 20 destruction of HMS Pegasus ended such silliness. Also on August 8, 1914, the aged cruiser HMS Astraea shelled the Dar es Salaam radio tower, but missed, and HMS Chatham returned October 21 and destroyed the radio tower, which is hardly consistent with a truce. Meinertzhagen wrote that he passionately disapproved of giving any warning that the truce would end and allowing time for enemy reinforcements, which is what happened. In the officially recorded notes specifically about the naval truce his name never appears. Next Meinertzhagen claimed that General Aitken asked him about the enemy defense of Tanga, which he said was light. Meinertzhagen later tried to have it both ways and also wrote that he warned of four thousand Germans at Tanga and that failure could have been avoided had the generals not ignored his reports. In fact Tanga was lightly held, a fact known to everyone since the war was still new and they only recently began expansion; there might not have been four thousand soldiers in all of GEA. Also, no participant ever mentioned his contributions at the conference, nor does the official record, based on the notes of staff officers. Later he bemoaned Tanga as a mighty failure of intelligence (when he claimed he was the “chief” intelligence officer!) that could have been avoided if only the fools had listened to him; he tried to have it both ways. 10 During the Battle of Tanga there was great confusion. Meinertzhagen wrote that he went ashore on November 4 and began a series of adventures. Why would the “chief” intelligence staff officer take the combat leadership role he next asserted? When the Thirteenth Rajputs broke and ran, Meinertzhagen kicked and shot many, even killing an Indian officer who tried to draw his sword on him. Later he took command of twenty-five Kashmiris and led most of them into Tanga, and to their death. Nine were machinegunned in the first rush, then others were lost until only two remained with him near the Customs House, where Meinertzhagen engaged in a long, inconclusive gun duel with none other than Lettow-Vorbeck himself. With only one soldier left, he next encountered seven scared Rajputs but got six back into combat and killed the last coward. This did not happen. The only German machine guns that day were outside of Tanga. To summarily execute two Indians (one an officer!) as if it were a trifle while casually losing

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twenty-four of twenty-five men in an afternoon was more than callous. Since it was the Second Loyal North Lancashire Regiment at Tanga’s Custom House that day, these memories were appropriated. The duel with LettowVorbeck was a planted false memory. In a 1926 dinner party with his former adversary Meinertzhagen first made a connection that seemed plausible and lent itself to Lettow-Vorbeck’s actual experience. This was one of the ways he maintained deceptions. His creations were possible in that he often based them on common facts and the specific experiences of other officers. Not a single witness collaborated any of his Tanga adventures. 11 Even the one Tanga task credited to Meinertzhagen might have been bungled. Since he spoke fluent German, on the afternoon of November 5 he was sent under a flag of truce to negotiate the return of wounded prisoners. In his diary he paints a scene of professional respect and comity, as if they were old friends, with a breakfast of beer, ice, eggs, cream, and asparagus. In Lettow-Vorbeck’s account he hints that the Germans did not appreciate the actual situation until Meinertzhagen’s visit. Perhaps he was too comfortable and told his new friends too much. 12 In Army Diary one week after Tanga, Meinertzhagen prophesied that Lettow-Vorbeck would engage in strategic withdrawal and never allow a prolonged battle. In the opening acts of a world conflict, the duration and magnitude of which was still unknown, he accurately predicted the next four years, justifying the male Cassandra analogy. In the weeks after Tanga what he actually wrote were intelligence reports for superior officers, which were preserved and show that his genuine, official predictions were as conventional, and wrong, as everyone else’s. He anticipated an orthodox defense of all GEA, especially the railroads, productive farmland, and cities that the enemy would have to protect. 13 Soon after New Year’s 1915, a very ill Lt.-Col. Mackay was made governor of Mafia Island. Perhaps he was sent there because he suffered from malaria, or maybe he was eased out of his chief intelligence position after the Tanga fiasco (or both). In the preceding weeks General Wapshare appreciated Meinertzhagen as a safari guide. In addition to his KAR experience Meinertzhagen was a naturalist with contributions to zoology and most especially ornithology. 14 So for the last great safari it was reasonable to elevate him as chief intelligence officer (officially in March, promoted to major September 1, 1915) as someone experienced and conveniently already in the (least priority) theater, just as Wapshare was promoted. Yet in his Army Diary and in many popular histories he was chief since the declaration of war. His actual behavior was conventional and acceptable, but later he wrote accounts of his confronting superior officers and barking commands at them. If he had been so disrespectful on a fairly frequent basis, he never would have been elevated to chief. In his diary he was the warrior he wished

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he had been, but in reality that man would have been rejected. He was at heart a conformist. 15 In this new capacity his mythmaking reached greater levels of creativity. In some cases he claimed credit due to brother officers; other times he exaggerated some actual incidents. And there were wholly imaginary events. He supposedly ran a network of three thousand spies/agents who only cost 150 pounds a month. Some of these agents used Meinertzhagen’s own invention, the Dirty Paper Method (DPM). The theory was that due to a shortage of toilet paper the Germans would take used paper, including valuable information, to the latrines where his agents would later retrieve it. Another legend was that Meinertzhagen printed counterfeit German paper currency to destroy their economy. At healthy waterholes he used deception and posted “poison” signs and placed small dead animals nearby to keep the water from the enemy. He kept files on every German officer, including samples of writing, signatures, and biographies. All or some of these were repeated with enthusiasm in the popular narrative histories because they were damn good stories. As impressive as all this was he also kept up his hobbies, most especially ornithology, and he was popular within the better social circles. 16 How could he produce so much? He did not. The spy network was the creation of Lt.-Col. Mackay and other KAR officers, who recruited Africans to act as military scouts or as intelligence agents, thus Meinertzhagen benefitted from the work of his predecessor. To justify the claim of three thousand men, Meinertzhagen said he commanded two units that were completely separate from him, the Uganda “Skin Corps” of Captain James J. Drought and the famous South African big-game hunter Pieter Pretorius’s network. Also many of the men Mackay recruited were Nandi. Here the problem was that Meinertzhagen was believed to be responsible for the 1905 ambush and murder of a Nandi leader (and others), so when he was elevated in 1915 their support ended, and the network suffered accordingly. The DPM appears to be fiction since there is no record of any secret revealed, and the underlying premise is doubtful. Were the meticulous Germans really so careless with sensitive information? Perhaps the DPM was more of a way to delight in shocking prim and proper party guests. The attempt at counterfeit currency was true, but a failure, since the final product had so many flaws it was unbelievable. Perhaps his counterfeits became latrine paper? He claimed to have created files on the colony, and on individual Germans, but it was mostly information collated by others before the war, including the Royal Navy East Africa Handbook. To this was added information that Meinertzhagen actually generated (interrogations of POWs, captured documents, etc.) with the help of a reasonable staff, but he told Smuts (or allowed him to think) it was all the work of one remarkable man. 17 There were complaints about the reports Meinertzhagen wrote, as they tended to be more a chronicle of recent events than insight into enemy

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sensitivities. The same complaint was made of his predecessor and successor, suggesting this mediocrity was normal. Also in most military experiences a lack of intelligence is a common grievance. Given that the enemy had little in the way of telecommunications, there was no real radio traffic to intercept, as there was in other theaters. This was not an area rich in information to be gathered. In Meinertzhagen’s book it was different; he had the data, but those idiots ignored him. Yet another observation is that official records show few officers asked Meinertzhagen for information, perhaps because they already knew he had little of value to offer. 18 Lieutenant Gordon Saffery Johnson served on the intelligence staff and was Meinertzhagen’s assistant and privy to a more personal and insightful view of this controversial man. “Meinertzhagen was a very efficient intelligence officer with lots of brains, no scruples, and quite unreliable. . . . I would not trust him a yard or believe a word he said unless I knew that it suited his book to tell the truth in this instance.” 19 In the 1960s Johnson called Army Diary fictional. When Leonard Mosley’s book Dual for Kilimanjaro was published in 1963, Johnson identified many comical errors but said the author should be forgiven for believing the Meinertzhagen lies. 20 One of his better-known stories was a bloody Christmas dinner. Meinertzhagen and Captain Drought with fifteen of his scouts crossed the border on Christmas Day 1915 and were told by Africans that a German camp was nearby. They found it, without any sentries, so they were able to rush it with bayonets, Meinertzhagen being the only one to shoot when he entered the tent of a stout German who went for a gun. The dead German’s dinner was on the table so he and Drought enjoyed an excellent but gruesome feast with a fresh corpse beside them as a dinner companion. It never happened. Records show Drought was hundreds of miles away at Mwanza, Lake Victoria, and Meinertzhagen was at headquarters in Nairobi. Would it not be foolish for the chief intelligence officer to be on such a dangerous mission? 21 Was another favorite story also a fraud? Meinertzhagen was well known for carrying a knobkerrie, an African war club, for the rest of the war, after he used it to kill its previous owner Captain Friedrich von Kornatzki, May 9, 1916, at the Battle of Kondoa Irangi. He was there at about the time of the battle, with two other staff officers, 22 and Kornatzki was killed that day. This would again require the chief of intelligence to engage in combat and risk capture by the enemy and thus endanger operations. It is possible, but no other source mentions it. 23 Although the specifics are in dispute, Meinertzhagen was in declining health in 1916. Lt. Johnson said it was pernicious anemia, but Meinertzhagen was vague in his descriptions. He slowly faded from the campaign during the summer as others on his staff accepted more responsibilities such that by November he was ordered by Smuts to be medically evacuated. After rest in England he was sent to Cairo in May 1917 as a staff intelligence officer in

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Palestine. Even though no longer assigned to the East Africa Theater, he still claimed credit for its successes. When Zeppelin L-59 attempted in November 1917 to be a blockade runner with a carefully prepared cargo for the Schutztruppe it flew as far south as Khartoum before turning back to its base in Bulgaria. Meinertzhagen claimed the credit. On the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza he established a radio that signaled L-59, in the German secret code, which meant that Lettow-Vorbeck had surrendered, thus the mission was cancelled. This was a lie. The transmitter atop the Great Pyramid was installed a year before by the Royal Navy. The actual radio message began with Lettow-Vorbeck, who informed the German Navy that the last region of GEA suitable and safe for a zeppelin to land was recently lost to the enemy. On November 23 the navy recalled their own airship. 24 The most famous Meinertzhagen World War I deception did not occur in East Africa, but since it is very insightful about his self-aggrandizing it is worth a brief consideration. Much like his bloody knobkerrie, Meinertzhagen was famous for “the haversack ruse.” Before the important Battle of Beersheba, October 31, 1917, he tricked the enemy into believing the real attack would be on Gaza. Meinertzhagen filled a haversack with phony documents then rode near the enemy lines and when pursued he pretended to lose it. When the haversack was taken to enemy intelligence they believed it to be good fortune and acted upon the misdirection. This is one of the best known stories from the Palestine Front, and it has been portrayed in movies. This mostly happened, but not because of Meinertzhagen. Lieutenant-Colonel James D. Belgrave, who also served on the intelligence staff, conceived and executed the haversack ruse. Meinertzhagen wrote that “his” ruse worked, and this statement was repeated by many authors without any independent confirmation. It did not work. The truth is the Belgrave haversack was recovered and sent to headquarters where German and Turkish officers debated its contents and resolved that they could not accept it as genuine. There was no diversion of manpower. One important reason Meinertzhagen got away with the lies was that Lt.-Col. Belgrave was killed in combat June 13, 1918. He stole the honor of a dead man. 25 These may not have even been the most brazen of his deceptions. In Palestine he fought a notorious German double spy that included a graveyard gun battle, and it continued as a postwar duel. There was a story about his attempt at rescuing the Romanov imperial family from Russia’s Bolsheviks. Later he claimed that on two occasions in the 1930s he could have shot and killed Adolf Hitler and regretted passing up the opportunities. After World War II another story was that he spent one day fighting for Israel’s independence. These too did not happen. What also did not happen was Meinertzhagen’s role in World War II. As the prototype for James Bond, World War II should have been the peak of his career. If not spying himself, he should have trained or handled agents, or hunted enemy operatives. If not MI-5 or

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MI-6 he could have been a colonial administrator in India, Africa, or the Middle East since he was a linguist and so knowledgeable. Instead, he was completely inactive. He was not even in the Home Guard. Winston Churchill and a few others knew him and kept Meinertzhagen isolated due to a profound mistrust. Still he put on his old World War I Mid-East uniform and wandered the halls of government to chat with friends and have lunch. The old uniform could pass for that of the contemporary Mediterranean theater, and he could deflect inquiries by saying he was doing something very hushhush. Meinertzhagen was the product of an era in British history when the correct education, accent, and friends were an admission to power. The snobbery of the elite worked. He exploited this before and during World War I, but later the more powerful cliques of this ruling class identified him as unacceptable and ostracized him. They never denounced him in public or the newspapers, since that was unseemly and brought the wrong kind of public attention. During World War II, the greatest crisis, Meinertzhagen was a pariah beyond redemption. 26 It is interesting to note that both Lettow-Vorbeck and Meinertzhagen were shunned by their own governments at the same time, but for very different reasons. His lies influenced how we view this conflict. When Meinertzhagen belittled his side he also inflated the enemy, thus he exaggerated the successes and failures of each. In order for him to be a hero at Tanga, the Indian soldiers have to be cowardly and the Germans efficient. During the 1915 raids on the Uganda Railroad the same formula was emphasized. It is important to stress that in his presentations the Germans were overwhelmingly proficient and clever (therefore contrasting with the British) in order to maximize the dangers they posed and thus his own accomplishments. Part of Meinertzhagen’s charm was his severe criticism of men in command, often a popular point of view, as the statements that entertained his readers also exaggerated the faults of authority figures. His criticism was correct because he wrote it long after the war, which made the commanders appear even worse fools than they were. In truth he was about as well informed as his commanders, and surviving records prove his understanding of the enemy was the same as those he criticized. Army Diary emphasized, exaggerated, even falsified the errors of others, but it was also entertaining. Did this contaminate the opinions of publications that followed? FIND WHAT YOU WANT Upon this narrow foundation authors in the 1960s and beyond expanded this topic, unaware how tainted some of the information was. Some just wanted to tell the entertaining stories, while other authors needed this topic to prove a point. A few wanted to find successful tropical White guerrillas, due to

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some World War II experiences and then the Malaya Emergency, Vietnam wars, and Rhodesia-Zimbabwe. There were also academics, mostly social scientists, who worked this topic from many perspectives. When these were contaminated with Meinertzhagen’s flights of fancy, and the more innocent errors that naturally happen, was there too much distortion? This was always a wonderful source of compelling stories, even without Meinertzhagen’s adulterations. During World War II there were military operations that resembled East Africa 1914–1918. One author writes, “My interest in von Lettow has been shaped over the years by various studies I have made of irregular forces in action. . . . Colonel Carlson and General Merrill were notable men because they, like Brigadier Orde Wingate, thought outside normal military channels. Carlson, in particular, had been a student of the Chinese Communist guerilla . . . [and] was aware of the von Lettow story.” 27 So too the wars of liberation in the post–World War II era had similarities that helped to renew interest. In 1960, Meinertzhagen’s Army Diary provided such wonderful material it eased the success of the popular narrations that were later published. Leonard Mosley wrote Duel for Kilimanjaro and Brian Gardner On to Kilimanjaro in 1963. Then in 1971 J. Roger Sibley published Tanganyika Guerrilla, followed by Charles Miller’s Battle for the Bundu in 1973 and Edwin P. Hoyt’s Guerilla in 1981. The use of the word guerrilla in book titles shows the author’s priorities and the experiences of that time period. “In recent years it has become popular to hold up the late ‘Che’ Guevara of Argentine and Cuba as the ne plus ultra of guerilla leaders. . . . But there are at least two other guerilla leaders . . . Aguinaldo, the leader of the Filipino Insurrectionists and von Lettow-Vorbeck. . . . My opinion is that von Lettow was the most successful guerilla leader in world history.” 28 Since they wrote when the Vietnam wars (and other conflicts) and counterinsurgency operations were uppermost in the military consciousness, the connection to World War I in East Africa was logical. Lettow-Vorbeck “could have conducted postgraduate courses in irregular warfare tactics for Che Guevara, General Giap and more celebrated but far less skilled guerrilla fighters.” 29 Many wanted to find a White guerrilla in a tropical environment. Some also wanted to emphasize the enthusiastic, loyal, and obedient askaris due to the racial basis of the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe War. The deputy librarian of the National Library of Rhodesia, S. Monick, wrote “Guerrilla Warfare in German East Africa, 1914–1918: A Preview of the Future” in the 1970s to analogically support the minority White government in Salisbury, stating that it “is of extreme interest to all engaged in COIN [counterinsurgency] operations within the Zambezi salient today.” 30 He described colonial warfare against Africans and then World War I and the Allied failures. Monick emphasized the David-versus-Goliath interpretation, “In short, the East African theater of war was the classical prototype of terrorist strategy—exploiting his opponent’s supremacy of numbers as a fea-

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ture of his weakness rather than a strength.” 31 He also referenced how T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) had a similar achievement with attacks on the Hejaz Railroad. Monick displayed his own prejudice when he referred to LettowVorbeck as a guerrilla but not in the style of “the central criminal philosophy of today’s terrorist, be he African, Palestinian, or Irish.” 32 And yet he compared him favorably to the notorious mercenary Major Mike Hoare of Congo infamy. One man’s hero is another man’s criminal terrorist. Monick wanted a White guerrilla and Lettow-Vorbeck was impressive. The popular narration books repeated, even plagiarized Meinertzhagen’s most entertaining stories. The bloody Christmas dinner, Kornatzki’s knobkerrie, the DPM, Tanga, and other lies were retold with gusto. This is as understandable as it is forgivable, since Meinertzhagen always included plausibility and he expressed widely held opinions, in addition to ripping good stories. From the 1960s onward academics have also studied this conflict, with a new emphasis on the Africans, and neglected topics have been investigated, some of them for the first time. The contributions of civilian laborers, especially the professional carriers, were given their due respect. Some scholars visited with veterans and interviewed porters, finally giving these participants a voice for the first time. The influence of the war on an entire society was studied. Many falsehoods were revealed. In the 1970s and 1980s Lewis S. Greenstein wrote about the Nandi of Kenya and their wartime experiences, just as Melvin Eugene Page studied Nyasaland (Malawi) with interviews that broke new ground in our appreciation. So too, Geoffrey W. T. Hodges provided a detailed examination of military labor for the Allies. They proved that Africans were sometimes forced to be soldiers or laborers under circumstances similar to the nineteenth century slave wars, only more efficient. These authors did not plagiarize Meinertzhagen, but they did repeat many of the myths about German guerrillas as David versus Goliath. The academics quoted from the popular narrations but the reverse was not frequent. ECHO Lettow-Vorbeck learned of the Armistice two days after it began and surrendered his command on November 25, 1918, at Abercorn. The fact that he remained in arms when Europe was at peace was exaggerated by nationalists who emphasized an irredentist, dead-ender scenario, rather than blame the infancy of telecommunications. If they had had a direct radio connection with Berlin, the Schutztruppe would have surrendered earlier. Captain Hermann Philipp Detzner surrendered January 5, 1919, and was feted by ultraconservatives similar to Lettow-Vorbeck as an honorable professional officer who fought on after the Armistice. Myths were created about him too, almost

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a microcosm of the lies and misunderstandings of the Great War in East Africa. Based on his previous service in Cameroon, in February 1914 Lieutenant Detzner began a more accurate survey of the border between German and Australian New Guinea. He was so deep in the interior when war was declared that he did not learn about it until November 11. Rather than surrender, he kept his command of four Europeans and twenty native Schutztruppe in resistance for the next four years. After the war he published Four Years among the Cannibals, in which he claimed exploits that were exaggerations or complete lies, much like Meinertzhagen. In this myth, Detzner distracted an Australian battalion as his column marched in the jungle to show the German flag to the natives, and there were three attempts to reach the Dutch half of the island. He also claimed scientific discoveries and said that the Australians abused natives. He was promoted to captain during the war and to major after his return to Germany. “The stories he spread after the war about his heroic deeds, his attempts to breakthrough against the Australians, and his journeys across New Guinea were all manifestly untrue.” 33 The reality was that this command was supported by the Neuendettelsauer missionaries, who enjoyed especially good civilian relations because one of them married a local native woman. They provided food and shelter. When an Australian army patrol approached, the loyal natives warned Detzner, who temporarily withdrew deeper into the mountains. 34 His deceptions unraveled first in 1919 as Australian and British officials responded to unjust allegations. Next the scientific information was proven fraudulent before the German missionaries published their denunciations in 1929. In 1932 Detzner admitted he mixed fact and fiction, but he did not make a full confession so much as he no longer defended his original tall tales. The parallels to East Africa are insightful. His actions were reminiscent of Lettow-Vorbeck, but his words resembled Meinertzhagen. There was an assertion of distracted resources but in reality this was tiny (less than a battalion) and without his continued resistance there would have been the same occupation troops anyway. He was a hero since he never surrendered and beat the British at their own game, which became more important after the war when the combination of the loss of colonies and military redemption was important to the German national pride. They tried to find what they wanted, even if it was not actually there. For some Germans what was really important was the desire for colonial redemption, so they emphasized how the natives of New Guinea preferred the former German administration and how they were later abused by the Australians. Like East Africa, favorable native relations with German civilians were essential for Detzner’s success. Some Germans wanted to stress the military accomplishments, where, similar to East Africa, there were asymmetrical objectives. By not losing, by not engaging in a decisive battle, Detzner became a hero, for a while. It is

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interesting that the Australians treated Detzner the way the British should have treated Lettow-Vorbeck. Once they had control of the coastline there was little need to pursue Detzner, and the jungle was almost like a prison camp. He was also similar to Meinertzhagen in stolen credit and honor, as well as exaggerations and lies. A few of Detzner’s scientific discoveries were genuine, but most were fiction and others were stolen from one of the German missionaries, who protected the ingrate. What does it say about the frailties of the human ego that Detzner and Meinertzhagen lived more adventures than most men but somehow that was not enough for them, and still they dared to lie and claim even more accomplishments? MYTHS DEMYSTIFIED A number of errors accumulated over time, some were innocent and inevitable, but others were deliberate. To understand 1914–1918 in East Africa it is important to appreciate the era before European colonialism. Too many authors treat East Africa as if it had no military history before the Europeans, but in World War I the combatants reverted to many traditional military policies because when modern industrial solutions failed customary methods still worked. This was not guerrilla warfare. Lettow-Vorbeck was famous for using snipers, evasion, ambush, and the fighting withdrawal to lure the enemy onto prepared defenses. His unit leaders were among the best officers and NCOs in the German Army and Navy, while his soldiers were also elite. Guerrillas are citizen-soldiers that employ military operations to politicize their own people, as demonstrated in the Vietnam wars. Soon after Meinertzhagen’s book was published the popular narrations that followed were influenced by the Vietnam conflict, Rhodesia, and other events where Whites failed in tropical environments against true guerrillas. Therefore some authors wanted Lettow-Vorbeck to be a guerrilla to fulfill their needs, just as ultranationalist Germans exaggerated his accomplishments to fulfill their agenda. The asymmetrical objectives blended with the David-versus-Goliath myth. The German claim that Allied resources were distracted from the Western Front (or others) is partially true but still discounted. Racism influenced this argument, since many units could not be used outside of Africa, and even many of the weapons and equipment used were unacceptable elsewhere. Lettow-Vorbeck did not distract European resources so much as he attracted the discards. The German improvisation, like the Swiss Family Robinson, was one of many characteristics that created a contrast with the rest of the war. Whereas the rest of the war was an anonymous industrial abattoir, in East Africa, one man could influence the outcome, or he could lie about his accomplishments.

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Those who suffered the most were mostly ignored. African suffering was as great, or worse, than that of Europeans, and yet they did not get proper recognition from the popular narrative histories. Without these civilians there could have been no war in East Africa, they provided the manpower of a quartermaster corps. Therefore World War I in East Africa owed much to the nineteenth century to make this the last, and the greatest safari. NOTES 1. Colin Baker, “Civil Response to War, the Nyasaland Civil Service, 1914–1918,” Journal of African Studies 11 (Spring 1984): 33n.3. 2. Sir Harry Johnston, The Black Man’s Part in the War (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, 1917), 66–67. 3. Sir Charles Lucas, The Empire at War, vol. 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 136; Akinjide Osuntokun, Nigeria in the First World War (London: Longmans, 1979), 237–56. 4. Edwin P. Hoyt, Guerilla: Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany’s East African Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 58. 5. Charles Miller, Battle for the Bundu (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 56. 6. Byron Farwell, The Great War in Africa 1914–1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 197. 7. W. K. Hancock, Smuts: The Sanguine Years, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 412. 8. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 50–52, 72–74. 9. Ibid., passim. 10. Ibid., 81–89. 11. Ibid., 95–100. 12. Ibid., 100–101; Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1920), 44. 13. Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, 104–5. 14. Even this is not simple, since he committed massive fraud, misinformation, and theft of specimens. 15. Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, 103–8. 16. Ibid., 103–12. 17. Ibid., 103–17. 18. Ibid., 106–8. 19. Ibid., 102–3. 20. Ibid., 106, 274n13. 21. Ibid., 112–13. 22. Charles Hordern (ed.), Military Operations East Africa, vol. 1 (London: Britannic Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1941), 281n1. 23. Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, 116. 24. Ibid., 118, 125–27. 25. Ibid., 14–37. 26. Ibid., passim. 27. Hoyt, Guerilla, 205. 28. Ibid., 206. 29. Charles Miller, Battle for the Bundu (New York: Macmillan, 1971), ix. 30. S. Monick, “Guerrilla Warfare in German East Africa, 1914–1918: A Preview of the Future,” Originally Assegai: The Journal of the Rhodesian Army. Reprinted, Soldier of Fortune 1, no. 4 (Fall 1976): 44–47, 53. 31. Ibid., 46. 32. Ibid., 46–47.

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33. Hermann Joseph Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 25. 34. Ibid., 25, 99, 280n128.

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Index

Abercorn, 21, 37, 74, 127 Abushiri Rebellion, 11–12, 45, 95 Aitkin, Maj. Gen. Arthur Edward, 19, 20, 42, 120 Ashanti, 87, 89, 96 Askaris, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 32, 40, 43, 49, 51, 52, 53, 56, 70 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11 British warships: Astraea, 80, 120; Chatham, 22, 120; Challenger, 29; Fifi, 24; Goliath, 80; Helmut, 22; Hyacinth, 23, 80; Mersey, 22, 29; Mimi, 23; Pegasus, 22, 23, 57, 80, 120; Severn, 22, 29; Swiftsure, 80; Toutou, 23; Vengeance, 29, 80 Cameroon, 7, 8, 16, 24, 65, 67, 128 Chilembwe, John, 103 Dar es Salaam, 2, 11, 12, 19, 64, 65, 108, 120 Detzner, Captain Hermann Phillip, 127, 128, 129 Deventer, Maj. Gen. Louis Jacob van, 33, 36, 37, 81 Falkenstein, Count, 27 Force Publique, 21, 29, 34, 58, 63, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 92, 93, 108, 111

German warships: Elizabeth, 8; Gneisenau, 10; Graf von Gotzen, 24; Hedwig von Wissmann, 24, 46; Kingani, 24; Konigsberg, 22, 46, 57, 64, 65, 80; Kronberg, 23, 46; Marie von Stettin, 23, 45, 60; Mowe, 8, 45; Prinz Adalbert, 10; Stosch, 10; Wolf, 8 Gotzen, Governor Adolph Graf von, 14, 15, 46 Guerrilla, viii, 69, 70, 71, 72, 115, 125, 126, 129 Hausa, 88, 89, 92 Hehe, 12, 34, 50, 95, 97 Hoskins, Maj. Gen. Arthur Reginald, 32, 33, 44 Kikiuyu, 91, 108 Kilwa, 2, 11, 32, 33, 36, 74 King’s African Rifles Rgt., 18, 19, 26, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 61, 62, 64, 77, 91, 92, 96, 99, 100, 102, 108, 110, 111, 116, 117, 120 Kirk, Sir John, 4, 8 Kraut, Major Georg, 27, 33 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 7, 8, 10 Lettow-Vorbeck, Lt. Col. Paul Emil von, 17, 20, 21, 24, 27, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 81, 111, 116, 137

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Index

118, 120, 121, 126 Looff, Captain Max, 22, 46, 116 Lugard, Captain Frederick D., 87, 88, 89, 90, 101 Mahenge, 15, 74 Maji Maji Rebellion, 14, 15, 16, 17, 34, 45, 48, 51, 55, 59, 95 Malleson, Brig. Gen. Wilfred, 25 Meinertzhagen, Col. Richard, 118–125, 126, 127, 128, 129 Mombasa, 2, 21, 58 Nandi, 49, 91, 99 New Guinea, 8, 66 Ngoni, 12, 34, 50, 90, 95, 97, 98 Northey, Brig. Gen. Edward, 30, 33, 36 Nyamwezi, 2, 55, 95, 97 Nyasaland (Malawi), 18, 89, 91, 103, 115, 116, 127

Smith-Dorrien, Gen. Horace, 25, 43 Smuts, Lt. Gen. Jan Christian, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 43, 67, 76, 105, 112, 117 South-West Africa (Namibia), 8, 16, 24, 25, 46, 79, 103, 106, 112 Stewart, General J. M., 19 Tabora, 2, 27, 30, 31, 33, 37, 47, 74 Tafel, Captain Theodore, 34, 51, 74 Tanga, 19, 20, 21, 27, 28, 41, 42, 47, 59, 65, 118, 119, 125 Taveta, 19, 47 Tighe, Brig. Gen. Michael, 42, 43 Togo, 8, 16, 24, 65 Tonga, 90, 96 Uganda, 18, 40, 50, 74, 90, 91, 115 Ujiji, 2, 108

Pemba, 2, 18, 36 Peters, Dr. Carl, 8, 9, 10 Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), 35, 36, 37, 59, 60, 63, 65, 75, 76, 89, 95 Prince, Tom von, 46

Wahle, Maj. Gen. Kurt, 27, 33, 47 Wapshare, Maj. Gen. Richard, 20, 42, 43 West African Field Force (WAFF), 55, 61, 62, 88, 89, 99, 100, 102, 108, 110, 111 Wissmann, Major Hermann von, 11, 12, 47, 95 Wintgens, Captain Max, 33, 34, 74

Roberts, Lord Frederick, 87, 101

Yao, 11, 90, 96, 98

Schutztruppe, 12, 16, 25, 27, 33, 35, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57, 60, 64, 70, 95, 100, 102, 108, 128 Schnee, Dr. Heinrich, 41, 44, 48, 49, 64, 76, 94, 116, 117

Zanzibar, 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 17, 18 Zelewski, Emil von, 12, 47, 100 Zulu, 12, 95, 98, 102, 111

About the Author

Corey W. Reigel, associate professor of history, teaches courses in military studies and non-Western history at West Liberty University, the oldest public college in West Virginia. His PhD is from Temple University under the direction of the late Dr. Russell F. Weigley, Distinguished Professor of History and the dean of American military studies. Dr. Reigel applies a war and society appreciation to lesser-known, neglected military subjects.

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