A Short History of World War I by Stokesbury James L

Author:Stokesbury, James L. [Stokesbury, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

That left only German East Africa, and here was played out one of those epic little affairs that attract attention far beyond their importance to the larger scene. The colony was one of the great prizes of imperialism, covering the area between the coast on the east, Lake Victoria on the north, Lake Tanganyika on the west, and Lake Nyasa on the south, the modern country of Tanzania. Not only was it valuable territory in its own right, but its possession by Germany had spoiled Cecil Rhodes’ dream of an all-British Cape-to-Cairo railway. In 1914 the colony had a population of about 8 million, 5,500 of them European. The German garrison was under the command of a colonel, later general, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, and consisted at its peak strength of about 3,500 white and 12,000 native troops.

The war here got off to a slow start, as there were few enemy troops for the Germans to fight. Von Lettow-Vorbeck raided into Rhodesia to the southwest and made threatening gestures toward the British rail lines. The Royal Navy sent landing parties ashore to destroy the docking and wireless facilities at Dar es Salaam. Meanwhile, the British were deciding to do the job right, and they assigned the task to the government of India; the colony was, after all, more readily accessible from India than from Europe, and the Indian Army was a very respectable force, with a mystique and aura all its own.

Unhappily, mystique and aura were no more a substitute for efficiency in Africa than they were on the fields of France, and the troops slated to overrun German East Africa quickly stubbed their toes. In October a mixed force of about 8,000 men, a tenth or one battalion of them British, sailed from India and stopped at Mombasa, up the coast in British East Africa. From there they moved to the little German port of Tanga. The British force commander, General Aitken, wanted to sail in and land at the jetty, but the Royal Navy refused to do so because they were afraid of mines, even though their ships had been visiting the harbor under a flag of truce ever since the war began. Aitken therefore agreed to make a landing on a peninsula south of town.

The peninsula turned out to be a swamp; the soldiers, who had been confined aboard their troopships for a month, were forced to wade ashore through breast-high water with full kits. When they finally got organized and advanced in line into the swamp, it took them two hours to go a thousand yards. They then met Germans, one whole company, which forced several of the Indian battalions to break under machine-gun fire. The two units that did get into the town were driven out again by their own supporting fire from the navy offshore, which managed to hit only the British and the local hospital. The Germans finally gave up the town, but the British, not knowing that, gave it up, too. They reembarked and sailed back to Mombasa, where the troops were off-loaded.

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