That damned, elusive Prussian
Sam Leith TIP AND RUN: THE UNTOLD TRAGEDY OF THE GREAT WAR IN AFRICA by Edward Paice Orion, £25, pp. 488, ISBN 9780297847090 © £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 `G ott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?' was the indignant outcry of Captain Berndt, as he rowed alongside the Guendolen. Captaining the Guendolen was Berndt's British friend and drinking partner Captain Rhoades, a man noted for his 'Rabelaisian wit' and 'unprintable songs', but who had just steamed up to the German end of Lake Nyasa and disabled Berndt's ship the Hermann von Wissman with a single shot. Rhoades was not drunk. It was August 1914, and the Great War had just — unbeknownst to the unfortunate Captain Berndt — kicked off in Africa.
When we think of the first world war we tend to think of exhausted Tommies drowning in freezing mud in the fields of Flanders. We tend to think rather less of ragged South African troops and native askari starving, burning, succumbing to malaria and infestations of jiggers in their toenails, being taken by lions and crocs, drenched in tropical rain, marching hundreds of miles across the most hostile countryside imaginable. But that was happening too, and it's Edward Paice's project in this extraordinary, admirably researched history to rescue the African theatre of war from dismissal as a sideshow.
Not long after war started in Europe — an event conveyed to a British district commissioner in Northern Nyasaland in the coded message `Tipsified Pumgirdles Germany Novel' — it became clear that there was no chance of the African colonies being left out of the fighting. The German light cruiser Konigsberg slipped out of Dar-es-Salaam just in time to avoid confinement, and was later to become a colossal headache for the Royal Navy. German East Africa's civilian governor, Heinrich Schnee, at least ostensibly working to maintain détente in Africa, found himself fast losing ground to the determined preparations for war of his military opposite number, Paul von LettowVorbeck. If von Lettow-Vorbeck initially comes across as a sort of Prussian Dr Strangelove, it's not long before we see him vindicated.
German East Africa, cut off from its fellow colony in the south-west (now Namibia), which in any case capitulated to South Africa early in the war, was surrounded on all sides by the properties of its enemies. To the south was Portuguese East Africa and the British territories of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia; to the west was the Belgian Congo; to the north, British East Africa and Uganda. The cricketing metaphor of Paice's title refers to a risky, highly annoying but attritionally effective style of defensive play — and that is exactly the way von Lettow-Vorbeck conducted his war. He saw it as his role to scamper round the vast acres of the colony, making himself extremely hard to catch, harrying the enemy where he could, and in general being the sort of nuisance that would divert as much in the way of men and materiel from the European theatre as possible.
Among his own ranks and those who opposed him were some characters of real colour. We encounter the daredevil adventurer Ewart 'Cape-to-Cairo' Grogan (subject of Paice's previous book). We watch the maverick commander of the Schutztruppe in Ruanda, Max Winkins' Wintgens, run rings round the British in the west. We regard with some alarm Colonel Sheppard, known as 'Ha Ha Splendid' because of his catchphrase, 'Ha ha, splendid! Lots of fighting and lots of fun!' We meet the fearless Michael Tighe, 'who had himself experienced being shot through his trousers'. And we learn how Brigadier-General Edward Northey acceded to his command 'after the unfortunate demise of a less than popular previous commander when giving a demonstration of how to throw grenades that went disastrously wrong'.
The campaign saw some spectacular setpiece incidents of derring-do, and some spectacular cock-ups. Among the latter is the exchange that opened hostilities proper — the botched British landing at Tanga in November 1914, where a failure to gather proper intelligence and the too rapid advance of exhausted, seasick troops saw the Brits routed and the effective donation of a huge dump of materiel to the enemy. Not least of the problems that bedevilled the battle were the attacking swarms of angry bees that, as Paice notes drily, 'displayed no differentiation between British and German units', stinging some soldiers more than 100 times.
That was a foretaste of a war that, as we are constantly reminded, was fought at least as much against the landscape as against the enemy. The lists of privations suffered, the scything of dysentery and malaria through the fighting forces, and the insane logistical difficulties are all enumerated in shocking detail. The campaign's successes — perhaps chief among them the achievements of Geoffrey SpicerSimson's 'Tanganyika Tits' in getting two gunboats from Cape Town to Lake Tanganyika overland — are the more extraordinary for it. Comic relief of a sort is provided, intermittently, by the heroic uselessness of the Portuguese. Marinated in saudade and patriotism, and at any given time on their fifth government of the year, they seemed incapable of taking to the field without suffering disaster and then presenting it as a glorious victory. (Though this is a book of military history, it's more than the history of a campaign. Paice is alive to, and describes with exemplary clarity, the political situations underpinning manoeuvrings on the continent: Belgian territorial brinksmanship; Boer unrest in South Africa; Portugal's domestic instability.) As a feat of synthesis and co-ordination of sources, Tip and Run is amazing. There is so much detail here — nary a round of ammunition or captured gun goes uncounted; nary a single malarial soldier unmentioned; nary a position on the battlefield unmarked — that it can cause the eyes to water and the mind to cloud, at least among those of us with less of an appetite for enfilades and flanking movements and the other apparatus of hardcore military history. But it's proper the detail should be there, and it is testament to Paice's lucidity of writing and the generosity of his apparatus (maps, glossaries, appendices, lists of units and dramatis personae) that with patience, and a few fingers tucked in between pages here and there, one can always figure out pretty much what was going on. It's quite a story.
The German commander is the undoubted star of the book. Ton Lettow Fallback', as he became known, was a tactician of brilliance and a leader of indefatigable determination, as well as having, on three or four occasions, the luck of the very devil. The enemy held him in high regard; when he was awarded the Pour la _Write by the Kaiser, Jan Smuts (then the Commander-in-Chief of the British and South African forces) wrote to him, 'May I hope that, though we are unfortunately compelled to oppose each other, an expression of my sincere congratulations on your richly deserved distinction may not be distasteful to you.' That sort of thing also plays, of course, to the cricketing metaphor — there's a flavour here of the last gasp of an old Boy's Own view of war as a game played by gentlemen.
The treatment of the native carriers and local populations by all sides, however, was definitely not cricket. And, as Paice writes with real indignation, the heart of the tragedy his title describes is in the effect of the war on the native populations. That it went untold — and remains, in large part, untellable — is down to the then attitudes of the colonial powers. Dead blacks didn't count. They were pressed into service for a pittance, effectively as slaves, and marched more or less to death. Their fates were sealed by the diabolical mathematics of the supply chains: the sheer number of carriers needed to supply the askari. The longer the supply chains grew, the more exponentially these numbers increased. 'Almost every able-bodied African male civilian in the British territories bordering German East Africa, and in German East Africa itself, got involved in the conflict.' One in seven of the total native population of German East Africa, Paice calculates, had died by the end of 1917 from famine caused by the war.
The story has an almost impossibly dark epilogue. Paice estimates the total 'butcher's bill' as upwards of 100,000 souls by the time the war ended. Then, in October 1918, Spanish 'flu swept through sub-Saharan Africa. The death toll in British East Africa alone was around 200,000.
Previous page
