Four-War Boer by Colin Heaton

Author:Colin Heaton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War I
ISBN: 9781612001760
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2014-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

Soon many locals were recruited to tan cow and horsehides. Any animal butchered or killed in battle was to be salvaged. Leatherworking was the order of the day due to the limited availability of leather for boots and other necessities. Krueler’s knowledge in these areas saw him taken off combat operations. In between managing the hide collection and processing operation, he also started a training camp.

Krueler’s training camp was not just for new soldiers, indigenous or German and Austrian arrivals. It was also a refresher course to teach the officers and NCOs how to fight, live, operate and survive in the bush. Once these men were qualified they would then return to their own respective units and teach their men. The method of exponential force multiplication would prove a masterstroke, and would become the doctrine of special operations forces that would follow in the decades to come.429

Lettow-Vorbeck wrote, “To some extent the companies were allowed to train their own recruits; but the bulk of Askari reinforcements came from the Recruit Depots established in the populous districts of Tabora, Muansa and the Northern Railway, which also provided local security and order.”430 Krueler was the pathfinder of these in-house training methods, and his school turned out hundreds of instructors who then passed on their knowledge to new soldiers.

Krueler also took charge of the meat-processing operation, with beef, some pork, and game being turned into sausages and ground meat. The problem was keeping the meat from spoiling, which meant that the food had to be processed and eaten within a day, given the heat. The only alternative was to salt pack the meat, and salt was a rare commodity. Groups of men collected sea salt, but that was a time-consuming venture, and the effort was less than effective given the numbers of men and the amount of meat being processed.431

Another problem that Krueler became aware of was the limited amount of quinine available for the troops. As stated by Lettow-Vorbeck, “It was to be anticipated that quinine, which was so important for the health of the Europeans, would soon become exhausted, and that our requirements could not be met by capture alone. So it was a matter of great importance that we succeeded in producing good quinine tablets at the Amani Biological Institute in Usambara out of bark obtained in the North.”432

Professor Hew Strachans The First World War in Africa provides the following regarding the quinine:

The Germans used 1,000 kilograms of the drug during the war, and only half that supply represented pre-war stocks or wartime deliveries. Cultivation of Peruvian bark from which quinine is derived had begun in the north of the colony before the war, and from January 1915, the research stations [at the Amani Biological Institute in the Usambara region, under Dr. Moritz Taute, and the processing point at Mpwapwa] were able to manufacture their own quinine.

When the Germans were driven south of their laboratories on the central railway, they could no longer take medicine in pills, but had to boil the bark.

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