2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth Read Free Page A

not?
    Fate answered this question with a resounding Yes.
    Yes, from the window of the hotel bar Spicer could see Niger as the Germans torpedoed her. He could watch her sink, too, in just 20 minutes. And going down with her, he could see his hopes of advancement to the highest echelon of the Navy disappear beneath the waves.
    Such was the state of Spicer’s fortunes on 21 April 1915 when a big-game hunter called John Lee arrived at the Admiralty with an appointment to see the new First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Jackson. Lee had great experience of Lake Tanganyika. He also had a scheme to bring it under British control. Britain had no ships on the lake and it was not an area Sir Henry knew anything about, so he was happy to listen to Lee’s plan and called for a map.
    How did the War stand in April 1915 on the ‘forgotten front’? The conflict on the plains, lakes and mountains of Central and East Africa had almost slipped from the mind of the British authorities. On a wooden chart table at the offices of the First Sea Lord at Admiralty House, Whitehall, Lee showed Sir Henry the lie of the land…
    Here was German East Africa, comprising the present territory of Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Here were Kenya and Uganda, under British control. So too were the Rhodesias Northern and Southern (now Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively). Further down was South Africa, which was British—though some of the Boers with whom Britain had fought a war between 1899 and 1902 could not be trusted. The South Africans had invaded German South-west Africa (now Namibia) at the start of the War. Superior in numbers, by September 1914 the British South Africans had more or less overrun the South-west German territory, though a pro-German rebellion by Boer officers rumbled on until February 1915.
    The Germans had more success in East Africa, mainly thanks to their force of Schütztruppen . These highly trained units of German officers and African askaris respected their commander, a military genius called Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. In November 1914 he had repelled a British landing of troops from India at the northern Tanganyikan port of Tanga. This was ‘a major setback for British ambitions in east Africa’, as Ross Anderson notes in his 2002 study of the battle—and it left many British guns and other supplies in von Lettow’s hands. Another problem was the continuing existence of a big German cruiser called the Königsberg , which was hidden in the swamps of the Rufiji delta further south near Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa. If we compare the German army marching into Belgium at the start of the War with the African experience a year or so later, we get a sense of how utterly different were the two theatres of conflict. Here is journalist Richard Harding Davis describing the Germans entering Brussels, mesmerised by their massed grey uniforms:
It is a grey-green…the grey of the hour just before daybreak, the grey of unpolished steel, of mist among green trees. I saw it first in the Grande Place in front of the Hotel de Ville. It was impossible to tell if in that noble square there was a regiment or a brigade. You saw only a fog that melted into the stones, blended with the ancient house fronts, that shifted and drifted, but left nothing at which you could point.
    It was, Davis adds, ‘typical of the German staff striving for efficiency to leave nothing to chance’.
    In Africa, by contrast, von Lettow’s Schütztruppen —cut off by British naval power from German supply lines—quickly became a raggedy, make-do outfit that depended on chance and thrived on opportunism. Motor fuel was improvised from cocoa; quinine was brewed from the barks of trees; ammunition was captured from the British. Hippopotamus were shot for their meat and fat, the latter being used to make candles and soap. As Hew Strachan points out (in The First World War , 2001), the most important difference between the two theatres was that the individual was not