BAD NEWS FROM LONDON

Since the great war had broken out in August 1914, the officials of the German Colonial Office had led a mixed life of pride, frustration and secret embarassment. The source of their pride was the resistance which the German colonial troops in East Africa were continuing to offer to a vastly superior enemy and their frustration stemmed from their increasing inability to help these soldiers in their struggles or even to communicate with them. The very success which this small colonial army was achieving was also a source of the embarassment of the Colonial Office. In 1913, it had turned down the commander of the African troops, Colonel Lettow - Vorbeck, as unfit for that post.

The Colonial Office was located in the government center of Berlin at Wilhelmstrasse 62. The Wilhelmstrasse was the address of a seat of world power, as were No. 10 Downing Street or the Quai d'Orsay. The street bespoke opulence, power and rank. The west side of the Wilhelmstrasse, where the buildings enjoyed an unobstructed view over the spacious "Tiergarten" park, was occupied by such senior institutions as the Ministry of the Royal House of Prussia, the Foreign Office and the Chancellory. The Colonial Office, as a more junior ministry, shared the less fashionable side of the street with the Ministry of Justice and the Emperor's Civil Cabinet.

In 1917, however, the Colonial Office was a ministry without anything to administer. In the first days of the war, Germany's overseas possessions had quickly fallen into enemy hands. The exception was German East Africa where Colonel Lettow-Vorbeck's troops were still holding out.

The Colonial Office was especially proud of the accomplishments of these troops. They were, after all, its particular responsibility, its own private army. The "Schutztruppe" (Protectorate Troops) answered only to the Colonial Office, not to the army or navy.

In public the Colonial Office joined in the Hosannahs to Lettow - it is hard to quarrel with success. Within the walls of 62 Wilhelmstrasse, however, his success was something of an embarassment. In 1913, the Colonial Office had turned him down as unfit to command the East African troops. The rejection must have surprised many. The man had excellent credentials. He was the son of a Pommeranian family which for generations had supplied the Prussian army with officers. In 1881, when Lettow was eleven, his father, also an officer, enrolled him in the select Corps of Cadets at Potsdam. He graduated with academic honors and was commissioned a lieutenant in the foot guards. Training at the elite War Academy followed. He volunteered for service with an expeditionary corps sent to quell the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900 and again for service with the force sent to German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) to suppress the Hottentot and Herero revolts in 1904 and 1905. A field command there gave him practical experience in bush warfare although a rock fragment kicked up by a bullet cost him the sight of an eye. In 1909, the army, which furnished the personnel for the German Marine Corps, appointed him commander of the 2nd Marine Battalion. The next step in the regular ladder of promotion would have been Commandant of the garrison of the Tsingtao colony in China. This promotion was not forthcoming. The reasons for this are not clear. There were stories that Lettow fell into disfavor by refusing to marry the daughter of a prominent officer. Lettow denied this. There may have been an affair with a married woman, Perhaps he simply had irritated the wrong person, possibly the Commander of the Wilhelmshaven garrison where the 2nd Marines were stationed. The Commander had invited the station's officers to a reception, asking also the wives of the senior officers but not those of the junior grades. Lettow openly protested this discrimination although he himself was a bachelor.

Denied the promotion he considered his due, Lettow applied to the Colonial Office for the post of commander of the East African troops. The colonial troops tended to attract the restless and ambitious. Chances for advancement were better than in the regular army and the pay was higher. The Colonial Office rejected Lettow's application. In a strange turn about, Emperor Wilhelm II, not otherwise known as a keen judge of good officers, overruled the Colonial Office and appointed him to the position.

With characteristic energy, Lettow at once started to study Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa. He arrived in Dar-es-Salaam in January 1914. A company of "Askaris", native soldiers, was drawn up to greet him. Accompanied by his new adjutant, Lt. Carl Ernst Göring, he inspected the troops and with a hearty shout of "Jambo Askari" (Greetings, soldiers), he assumed command.

German East Africa had become a German protectorate, the current euphemism for colony, in 1891. It consisted mainly of Tanganyika (before it merged with Zanzibar to become Tanzania) and the present Republics of Ruwanda and Burundi. It was the most promising of Germany's late acquired and somewhat ramshackle colonial empire. The Berlin Convention of 1884 had made the Congo'Basin neutral soil and German East Africa was considered to be part of that basin. The colonial powers did not anticipate that Africa would become an important theatre of war. Maintenance of internal security, rather than offensive warfare was the policy which Berlin had laid down for German East Africa in case of war. England had organized her African forces along the same lines. As a result, cel Einar side was prepared to wage war in Africa in 1914 when hostilities began in Europe. The German troops consisted of about 200 white commissioned and non-commissioned officers and 2,400 Askaris. The troops were thoroughly trained and disciplined and well supplied with machine guns which had been found to be effective in suppressing native uprisings. They had no artillery, however, nor did they have up-to-date rifles. Although the German smokeless Mauser rifle had proved itself the queen of the battlefield in the Boer War of 1899 - 1902, the Askaris were still equipped with obsolete, black powder rifles which produced a cloud of smoke when fired and gave away the position of the rifleman. A militarized police force and whatever reservists could be drawn from the 4,000 white settlers backed the Schutztruppe. The German regular forces slightly outnumbered the neighboring British troops which, were widely scattered over Kenya, Uganda, Nyasaland and Zanzibar. Neither side had local facilities for producing arms, ammunition or any other accoutrements of war.

The purely defensive policies laid down by Berlin, and the insistence of the Governor of German East Africa that Lettow follow them, were not to his liking. Lettow was an aggressive man, middle sized, compactly built with piercing blue eyes and a hardbitten mouth. He was physically tough, leading his men in every weather and terrain. He set a rapid marching pace and in addition, was in the habit of personally coursing up and down his columns to keep them closed up. As Lettow was fond of telling, he once elicited the anguished outcry from one of his men: "That guy must have descended from a long line of rural mailcarriers!" He loved a good fight. He had volunteered for duty on the two occasions during peacetime when opportunities for combat offered themselves — the Boxer and the Hottentot rebellions, though only in the latter was he able to get away from staff duty. But Lettow's combativeness manifested itself in many ways; one has the feeling that for him, almost any fight would do. He did not speak to his father for many years for reasons that he never disclosed. After his arrival in Africa, he told his superior, Governor Schnee, that he had no intention of obeying any order to declare Dar-es-Salaam an open city. This is what Schnee had planned to do in case of war, consistent with with Berlin's policy, and Lettow's insubordination engendered a lifelong, bitter enmity between the two men. When he returned to Germany after the war, he ordered his troops to fire on strikers and, though most of the German generals had advised against it, Lettow took part in the 1919 Kapp Putsch, a right wing - military plot against the infant Weimar Republic, engineered by Ludendorff. Lettow was forced to resign from the army for participating in this abortive venture. He quarreled with the Nazis over slights he received at the hands of a local satrap,but took pains in his autobiography to mention how many good friends he had among the Nazis biography, a boast of questionable taste in 1957.

So it was that when war broke out in 1914, Lettow, with cocky selfassurance, took the offensive and carried the war into Kenya. He raided the Uganda railroad and mounted an ambitious, but unsuccessful attempt to capture Mombasa, Kenya's main port. In November, he repulsed a lackadaisical attempt of a much larger British-Indian army corps to land at Tanga. A swarm of wild bees rallied to the German side in this battle when a British company blundered into their nests, giving rise to the report of a new, perfidious secret weapon - trained bees!

After the defeat at Tanga, the task of clearing the Germans out of East Africa was assumed by the South African army. It was immediately diverted from its goal by a domestic rebellion. Some 12,000 Boers rose in armed protest against the Treaty of Vereeninging which, at the end of the Boer War in 1902, had ended Boer independence and had merged the Boer states into the Union of South Africa. By February 1915, the Boer rebels were subdued. The South African army then moved against neighboring German Southwest Africa lest the Germans there instigate further Boer unrest or other military diversions. In July, the Germans surrendered.

The Germans in East Africa made good use of the breathing space which the Boer uprising provided them to build up their army. Three thousand whites and eleven thousand black soldiers were brought under arms. There were parades; officers still brandished sabers, saber tassels and polished leather leggings. Pride and hope were still bright in East Africa.

When the rainy season ended in February 1916, the South African campaign against the Germans began in earnest. An operation around the flanks of Mount Kilimanjaro broke the German hold on the northern part of the colony. The South Africans continued their advance south but marched through the interior highlands of the Protectorate to avoid the fevers rampant in the hot, humid coastal areas. This forced them to move through covered, broken terrain which was supplied by few roads. It greatly hampered their campaign. Tse-tse flies, deadly to animals not native to the area, made the use of draft or pack animals impossible and it was difficult to keep motor transport moving over the dusty, rockstrewn paths which passed for roads. Even though the interior was healthier than the coastal area, malaria still took a serious toll among the white South Africans. By the end of 1916, their ranks had been so thinned by the disease that they had to be withdrawn and replaced by African troops.

The Germans exploited the situation well. The slow retreat into which they had been forced permitted them to select the positions from which they chose to meet the enemy. The broken ground over which they were fighting favored the defenders and made concealment easy. When the British soldiers met the Germans, they deployed and laboriously began to outflank the Germans but before they could complete their maneuver, the Schutztruppe had disappeared into the bush again to fight somewhere else. The German formations were small enough to rely on native bearers to carry their supplies which gave them far greater mobility than the British could attain until they, too, began to use native supply bearers. Time and again, the Germans were able to escape the British attempts to encircle them. Nevertheless, casualties, disease and lack of supplies took a steady toll among the Germans and forced them to withdraw deeper and deeper into the colony. This did not matter to Lettow-Vorbeck,. His paramount aim was to tie down as many of the enemy troops as he could and to keep them away from the decisive European struggles. Battlefield victories and territory were of no account. Continuous diversion of enemy forces was. To that aim, all other considerations —- military, political, human and personal ~ were subordinated. Lettow fully succeeded. In 1917, the Colonial Office estimated that a force of 1,400 white soldiers, "besides colored" as the Colonial Office chose to refer to the cutting edge of the Schutztruppe, still held 46,000 square miles of territory and engaged the attention of 100,00 to 120,000 enemy troops.

The assesment was quite accurate. After the war, the Allies counted the troops engaged in Africa on their side at 130,000 men and the cost of the campaign at £72,000,000.

Ironically, the Colonial Office in the Wilhelmstrasse had little first hand knowledge of it successes in Africa. The most reliable way of communicating with places overseas in those days was the submarine telegraph cable. However, the Germans had not laid such cables to their colonies. They would have had to be run through the English Channel, where they would be vulnerable to the English and French navies in the event of war. Indeed, within a day after England entered the war against Germany, midnight on August 4, 1914, all the German overseas telegraph cables had been pulled up from the Channel floor and cut. In peacetime, news was sent to German East Africa through the British cable running to South Africa. At Zanzibar, a branch cable took the messages to the capital of the German protectorate, Dar-es-Salaam. The Dar-es-Salaam line had gone dead even before war was formally declared.

Rather than laying submarine cables to get messages to their colonies, the Germans had begun to build a network of radio stations. Germany was a leader in the infant art of radio telegraphy and had given particular attention to the development of long range radios. In 1905, it began work on an overseas radio network with the construction of a powerful long distance station at Nauen, near Berlin. The second link in the chain was a station at Kamina in Germanland. In turn, it could reach stations in Dar-es-Salaam, at Duala in the Cameroons and at Windhoek in German Southwest Africa. The network, however, was slow in developing. Kamina was not completed until 1914 and the equipment for a new radio station, to be erected at Tabora in German East Africa, was still on the high seas when war broke out.

The English plan of operations against the German colonies aimed firsat at the destruction of these radio stations. On August 8th, two English cruisers appeared before Dar-es-Salaam and threatened to bombard the radio station there. To avoid useless bloodshed, Governor Schnee declared Dar-es-Salaam an open city, ignoring Lettow's opposition. The radio station was then dismantled. On the west coast of Africa, the Gold Coast Regiment began an energetic push into Togoland and the Germans blew up Kamina just before they surrendered on August 25th. Duala suffered the same fate on September 27th. The now isolated and useless Windhoek station was spared until May 1915. A few local stations remained in German East Africa. Under favorable weather conditions they could hear Nauen but they were far too weak to send messages to Germany. Berlin was now cut off from all regular communications with its colonies.

To keep itself informed the Colonial Office had to seek information about Africa in newspapers collected in neutral countries, in an occasional intelligence report and by listening to foreign radio broadcasts. The best source of news about Africa were the war communiques which Radio London broadcast at 11 o'clock every night. They were, of course, biased and often premature. A year earlier, headlines in London had already read: "The end of East Africa is near!" But whatever faults the English reports had, there was an inexorable logic and consistency about them. Place names appeared in the news, they became the focal point of fighting, they were reported captured and disappeared from the news again, to be replaced by new names further south on the map. Occasionally, reports of heavy British losses or the prolonged lack of forward moves by the enemy hinted at German tactical successes. There were suggestions of detachments which had escaped encirclement or of miscalculations by the Allies, but, generally, since the end of the rainy season of 1917, the officials of the Colonial Office had had only bad news from Radio London.