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KAPUTALA

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The Diary of Arthur Beagle
& The East Africa Campaign 1916–1918

Introduced & edited Alan Rutherford
Hand Over Fist Press: June 2001: £10
ISBN 0-9540517-0-X

INTRODUCTION

World War 1 was, as its title implies, a war which was fought worldwide and although the horrific slaughter in the trenches of Europe have been given top billing in historical accounts, other theatres of this war were no less barbaric. This book is based on a diary from November 1915 to August 1919 kept by my grandfather, Arthur Beagle, and covers his involvement in the East African campaign. In the diary place names have dubious spellings, his accounts are brief and he gradually slips into a spiral of fever attacks, but it contains interesting insights into this overlooked campaign, and confirms the tragic waste of life and the futility of warfare.

In the dying, glowing embers of the British Empire it would seem the greatest virtue of a soldier in 1914 was blind obedience; sadly human life was subordinate to God and King, and their accompanying jingoism.The ‘Empire’ was portrayed as a symbol of all that was most worthy of a man’s sacrifice. The very notion of ‘Empire’ was still a magnificent facade of power that hypnotized both its subjects and its enemies – the map of the world was red from end to end even though much of that Empire had no idea how it came to be ruled by arrogant white men in baggy shorts. But being a part of it, it was said, ‘distilled a kind of glory in the very beer of the average man’.

Reasons for a world war in 1914 can be summarized and credited to the spreading of competing industrialist nations across the globe. Original capitalist states such as Britain, USA and France were joined by others – Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia – in their hunt for gold and slaves, oil and opium, colonies and cheap labour, markets and strategic advantage. The competition between them gave us the First World War. The same development of industry which led to these imperialist rivalries ensured this war was the most bloody which had ever been fought. Weapons of mass destruction, unimaginable before the development of industry, were now in the hands of jostling gangsters and thieves – poised to kill millions. Tanks and machine guns, gas and aircraft made this the first war in which the majority of dead were the victims of other soldiers, not of disease. The British alone lost 20,000 dead in a single day on the Somme and one million killed in the four years of war. And if capitalist industry caused the war it also had to keep the war going. Directed labour, censorship, conscription and the bombing of towns made this the first total war, a war fought at home as well as on the battlefield.

And so in 1914, because of this imperialist rivalry; that facade of Empire, loyalty to the Crown, was about to be tested – 450 million people of every race and tribe, by a single declaration of the King, were at war with Germany. Unbelievably, banners and patrotic fervour burst forth in a spirit of willing sacrifice impossible to comprehend or even describe today.

In the days that followed that declaration, white men in far-flung colonies of Britain and Germany, which had coexisted, sometimes as intimate neighbours, eyed each other with newly found suspicion and then prepared to annihilate each other. South African forces were enlisted to capture German South West Africa and destroy the powerful wireless transmitters there. But before joining the war on the British side, South Africa’s Premier Botha, and Major-General Smuts, both former Boer War generals, had to put down an open rebellion in South Africa by units of their armed forces and some influential veterans of the Boer War who were totally opposed to anything ‘British’. With the atrocities of South Africa’s Boer War still fresh in the minds of the Afrikaans speaking population (Boers) some opted, quite understandably, to support Germany. The mutiny quickly dealt with, Premier Botha (once Commander-in-Chief of the Boer Army) returned to the field as General and led the South African and British forces, supported by Smuts, in a campaign which forced the surrender of the German forces in South-West Africa (now Namibia) in July 1915.

In East Africa, at the start of World War 1, the British controlled Zanzibar, Uganda, and what were to become Malawi, Zambia and Kenya; German East Africa (comprising present-day Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania) was effectively surrounded and her troops outnumbered. The outcome should have been swift, but from the outset the British were thwarted by the inspirational leadership and military genius of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German Commander-in-Chief, and the quality of the local Askaris (European-trained African troops).

Lettow-Vorbeck's philosophy was simple – by using hit-and-run tactics he would tie down huge numbers of British troops in East Africa and so prevent them from joining the fighting in Europe. Prussian officers, contrary to the popular stereotype of rigid disciplinarians, were often quite the opposite, in fact some were extremely flexible and Lettow-Vorbeck was a marvellous example.

In East Africa for six to seven months each year the land remains parched and brown, starved for the moisture of the long rains which arrive in summer (November). Conditions were appalling; with temperatures often over 90°F, continuous rain for months on end and many poisonous insects and dangerous animals.

The landing of ill-prepared troops from India at Tanga was repelled with ignominy by the Germans in November 1914. Initially the British forces in East Africa were convinced that they would make short work of the Germans in Africa, but an underestimation of the enemy combined with very poor British command, and they were soon disillusioned. At Tanga, for instance, the Royal Navy had previously made a truce with the Germans and, chivalrously, they insisted that the Germans must be told if this truce were to be broken, thus telling the Germans that an attack on Tanga was imminent – so at one stroke, a major strategy of war, surprise, was sacrificed and in the battle that ensued the mould for future engagements under Generals Aitken and Stewart were set. Here simple principles of warfare were disregarded: intelligence diligently gathered by intelligence officers like Captain Meinertzhagen, one of the few British officers who had experience of East Africa, were haughtily ignored; the failure to make a reconnaissance dismissed as irrelevant. The lack of cooperation between the navy and the army leading to the lack of surprise – and the use of troops of questionable ability all gave victory to the Germans who were outnumbered eight to one. The ill-prepared Indian troops sent against them, were reduced, in the uncharitable words of one of their British officers, to ‘jibbering idiots, muttering prayers to their heathen gods, hiding behind bushes and palm trees...their rifles lying useless beside them’. The battle was unique in that at one point a swarm of angry bees caused both sides to retreat in confusion.

For many, warfare in Africa was proving to be an unsettling experience, and worse was still to come. Although on the whole it was characterized by a relic of nineteenth century military etiquette, a ridiculous ‘gentleman’ code which never extended itself to the lower ranks. So that in Byron Farwell’s book, The Great War in Africa, ‘after the Battle of Tanga the officers of the German victors and British vanquished met under a white flag with a bottle of brandy to compare opinions of the battle and discuss the care of the wounded. Both sides exchanged autographed photos, shared an excellent supper, and parted like gentlemen’.

One of the more fascinating episodes of the war in Africa was that surrounding the German cruiser, the Königsberg. One of the German Navy’s most modern and powerful ships, it was captained by Max Loof, who continued to fight on land after his ship had been destroyed. The Königsberg captured the first British ship to be taken in the war, and sank the warship ‘Pegasus’ within twenty minutes with 200 direct hits. Arthur Beagle mentions the wreck of the ‘Pegasus’ in his diary noting that ‘this was the cruiser which was shelled…whilst cleaning out boilers and doing repairs.’

Ironically British ships finally pinned down the Königsberg well inland in the Rufiji Delta, where it had gone for overhauling and repairs: its engine had to be hauled to a machine-shop in Dar-es-Salaam, and back again, by thousands of African labourers. P. J. Pretorius, a famous Afrikaner hunter, was engaged to scout the network of rivers of the Rufiji and locate the warship. The story of this dangerous mission is told in his book, Jungle Man. Locating and destroying the Königsberg was one of the most protracted naval engagements in history. In the steaming hot delta, the Germans, ravaged by disease, managed to evade and fight off the pursuing British forces for 255 days. It took a total of twenty-seven ships to destroy the German cruiser in a series of running battles on both land and water, and even then the German sailors escaped capture, taking the ship's 105mm guns with them.

In February 1916, at around the same time as Arthur Beagle began his diary, a new commander arrived in East Africa to pit his wits against the Germans: Jan Smuts, now Lieutenant-General Smuts. He tried to add new impetus to the British effort, immediately going on the offensive. He commanded a mixture of men and races from all over the Empire. A massive invasion from the north, comprising British and colonial troops under Smuts, was launched immediately, to be coordinated with a Belgian invasion from the west and with an independent British one from Nyasaland in the south.

The British and Germans employed African labour as ‘support personnel’ for battles in East Africa. In these overtly racist times ‘support personnel’ was a euphemism for exploitation; black people were treated like animals. Since campaigns here were fought in remote territory, military supplies were carried for long distances on the heads of hundreds of African porters to armies in the field. From an entire ship, dismantled, carried from the coast to Lake Tanganiyka, and there reassembled – to dismantled trucks, everything had to be carried. The deaths of many African carriers or porters, as well as fighting men, resulted from overwork and exposure to new disease environments, in fact deaths were so numerous, and recruitment to replace them so severe that a revolt occurred in Nyasaland in protest. Conditions for Africans were desperate, they were the fodder, to be used up and discarded.

Black South Africans were rightly wary and cautious of being involved in another ‘white man’s war’ with the Boer War still a fresh memory, but they were coerced to enlist by officials desperate for African labour. So, for example, in the Mahlabatini and Harding districts of Natal the magistrates threatened to arrest and fine headmen who failed to produce a certain quota of recruits. Indeed, some recruiting agents became so desperate that, to the annoyance of the military authorities in East Africa, even children aged fifteen and sixteen and physically infirm Africans were signed up. Africans constituted almost one-third of the total number of South Africans (161,000 men) involved in the South West and East African campaigns. In terms of manpower it certainly was a significant contribution – one which received no recognition at the time and has subsequently remained largely ignored in South African history.

Despite his enthusiasm and eagerness to get to grips with what at times must have seemed a phantom enemy, Smuts met with little success.

Smuts' envelopment strategy was repeated time and time again – and always with the same result. His campaign in East Africa was a series of frustrating attempts to surround Lettow-Vorbeck's main force and bring him to a decisive battle. He never succeeded, each time the Germans eluded them, always retreating in the face of overwhelming force, but not before it was necessary. Smuts, and the commanders-in-chief who followed him, captured territory, but none succeeded in defeating the Germans.

Smuts, unhappy with the staff he had inherited, brought in two tough South African generals, ‘Jaap’ Van Deventer and ‘Coen’ Brits, both had fought the British in the Boer War. Upon being summoned to East Africa Brits cabled Smuts:

Mobilization complete. Who must I fight?
The English or the Germans?

Chasing Lettow-Vorbeck proved to be an agony of endurance for the Allied forces – and, unlike the European battlegrounds, here disease took a heavier toll than the enemy, and the conditions under which the troops marched and fought took them to the limits of human endurance. According to Byron Farwell, on one march 1,639 horses and mules died from the tsetse flies that swarmed in the bush, leaving a putrefying corpse every 100 yards of the route. The starving soldiers lived on paw-paws and groundnuts, struggling to move vehicles through the ever present mud, and often ended up lying helplessly in the mud ‘retching from the stench of dead animals and watching the rats crawl over us...’

They suffered from ticks which caused fever, flies, dysentery, blackwater fever and ‘guinea worms’ whose millions of larvae spread through a human body to produce abcesses in the genitals, lungs and heart. It was impossible to remove the worms until they came to the skin surface, after which they could be pulled out, a few centimetres each day, taking care not to break them and release more larvae into the bloodstream. Jigger fleas, which burrowed into the troops' feet, caused agony and could only be removed with a needle or knife point. Every day the soldiers had to go through the ritual of removing them, on average twelve to forty per day. Some soldiers lost all their toes as the jiggers fed on the infected flesh of their feet.

Diseases like malaria and blackwater fever were rife, and disease made no distinction between Allied or German troops, or between black and white. All the troops in East Africa suffered from malaria, but blacks and whites did not suffer equally. Lieutenant-Colonel Watkins, director of the labour bureau for all military labour in East Africa stated at the end of the war, ‘Where a Medical Officer had to deal with white and with black patients in times of stress, the latter suffered. In a word, the condition of the patient was apt to be a consideration subordinate to his colour...’

During the first four months of 1917, 1,600 of 2,000 men quartered along the coast in an area heavily infested with malaria succumbed to the disease, those that survived were often broken in health for the remainder of their lives and the fatalities did not end in East Africa either; of the 700 maleria cases on board the ship Aragon, 135 died before it reached Durban.

Aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) were used for reconnaissance, and to ‘bomb’ the enemy on the few occasions that the pilots could find them. The bombing, however, was not very accurate. Characters like ‘Karamojo’ Bell, an elephant hunter, refused to fly with an observer because a second man in the plane would have blocked his view as he swooped down to blast away at the enemy with his elephant gun… .

Lieutenant-General Hoskins took over as Commander -in-Chief in January 1917 when Smuts was appointed a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in London. Smuts’ farewell comments were less than helpful and incorrect when he stated that with most of the German colony in Allied hands, the Germans had been defeated and all that remained was a little clearing up. In October 1917 the last big battle, and by far the bloodiest, was fought at Mahiwa – it was a set piece battle resembling those on the European front. Again the Germans managed to outwit the British, losing only ninety-five killed, whereas the British lost more than half their men – 2,700 out of a total of 4,900 men. Lettow-Vorbeck was forced to withdraw as his forces had by then been reduced to less than a thousand men.

With a series of skirmishes and ambushes, Lettow-Vorbeck led the British by the nose into Mozambique, where the Germans easily routed a numerically superior Portuguese force with contempt, and finally sneaking into Northern Rhodesia. Cut off from their supply lines the Germans lived off the land, using captured weapons and ammunition obtained along the way from well-stocked Portuguese supply dumps, and in spite of the hardship the morale of the German force was exceptionally high. Marching through strange lands far from home, often living under the most primitive conditions, without letters or news of any sort, isolated from any support, fighting and constantly retreating, with only a faint hope of final victory, they all soldiered on. The morale of the British was, surprisingly, no less than that of the enemy as they struggled along behind.

Crossing into Northern Rhodesia Lettow-Vorbeck faced a force made up of Rhodesian police and civilian volunteers. It seemed likely that he would make his way South but, having captured Kasama, word reached him on 13 November 1918 that the armistice had already been signed and agreed in Europe. On 25 November, after confirmation that the war was indeed over, he surrendered, and his men laid down their arms.

The British officers, at last had the chance to meet the legendary general who had for so long managed to thwart their efforts to defeat the German army in Africa. Some openly admitted that they ‘had more esteem and affection for him than for our own leaders’. The war, it was claimed, had been fought in a gentlemanly fashion throughout, and Lettow-Vorbeck was not imprisoned, but given the use of a car and invited to dinner by Van Deventer.

With a force that never exceeded around 14,000 (3,000 Germans and 11,000 Askaris) Lettow-Vorbeck held in check a much larger force (estimates range from 130,000 to 300,000) of British, South African, Nigerian and West African, Indian, Rhodesian, West Indian, Belgian and Portuguese troops.

The aftermath of the war in Africa was more than just a matter of the jubilant victors and the honourably vanquished. The East African campaign left the country ravaged. More than 100,000 troops and tribespeople died as a result of the conflict, either during the fighting or from the subsequent famine. In Dodoma, for instance, reckless appropriation of the villages' grain supplies and cattle by both the Germans and British eventually led to the death of 30,000 Africans. Two words were coined by the stricken people during those years: mutunya and kaputala. Mutunya, meaning scramble, refers to the frenzy of the starving crowd whenever a supply train passed through. Kaputala refers to the shorts worn by the British troops. It was these soldiers, according to the local Gogo tribespeople, who were responsible for their plight.

In Dar es Salaam, surrounded by flowerbeds, is the Askari Monument. It bears the words of Lettow-Vorbeck:

‘In memory of native African troops who fought,
To the carriers who were the feet and hands of the army,
And to all other men who served and
died in German East Africa 1914–1918,
Your sons will remember your name.’

The East Africa Campaign does at times, read like fiction – with warships doing battle inland, hundreds of miles away from the sea, zeppelins attempting to fly the 3,600 miles from Germany to East Africa with supplies, and a colourful mixture of brilliant soldiers, big-game hunters, frontiersmen, killer bees and tsetse flies all battling, for king or kaiser (and quite inexplicably), for possession of a vast tract of one of the most inhospitable parts of Africa.

Editors note
It may appear that certain sections within this introduction and the concluding ‘The East Africa Campaign, 1916–1918’ give an impression of blasé ‘matter of factness’ and that writing on particular campaigns may seem to revel in the militaristic jargon of the source matter, however it is not my intention to make light of war’s wretchedness and definitely not to promote militarism, in fact quite the opposite. I hope all who read this account will find war abhorent and feel a great sympathy for those, black and white, forced, coerced or duped into the ranks, for whatever reason – be it straightforward intimidation or the sickly-sweet lure of drum-thumping jingoism. Cutting away all the bullshit, no matter how ‘gentlemanly’ the conduct of some officers, a lot of people died horrible deaths because the greed of competing capitalisms could not coexist on the same planet.

I cannot guarantee that Arthur Beagle would have agreed with the anti-war slant of this book, but by all accounts he was a kind and good man and I sincerely hope he would have.

Alan Rutherford, 2001

Sources & Further Reading

I would like to acknowledge the help and assistance of Renzo Giani, who made these books available, and my sister Anne Meilhon, who copied and posted them to me.
I also acknowledge that the books below were sources of information used in this book.

Tanganyikan guerrilla: East African campaign 1914–18, Major J. R. Sibley, Pan/Ballantine Illustrated History of First World War, 1973.
Jungle Man: the Autobiography of Major P. J. Pretorious, George G. Harrap and Company Ltd, 1947.
They Fought for King and Kaiser, James Ambrose Brown, South Africans at War Series, Ashanti Publishing (Pty) Ltd, 1991.
Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World War, Albert Grundlingh, Ravan Press.
The Great War in Africa, Byron Farwell, Allport Books.

Relatively few books have been written on the subject of the African campaigns of World War 1 and even these do not remain in print very long. Most of them are written from a militaristic, matter of fact and unquestioning point of view which glorifies war and makes heroes of strategists. Farwell's book covers the fighting in Togoland, the Cameroons, SWA and East Africa. They Fought for King and Kaiser is full of anecdotes and quotes from participants, but also some patronising material. Tanganyikan guerrilla: East African campaign 1914–18 is the account I found most complete. The general impression of the Great War as a largely static war in which massive armies faced each other in trenches and slogged it out for months on end does not apply to the African theatres, these were campaigns of manoeuvre and guerrilla tactics, fought in bush, jungle and swamps.

Some other books currently still available on the East Africa campaign of World War 1 include Military Operations, East Africa by Hordern, a reprint of the HMSO official history, and My Reminiscences of East Africa by von Lettow-Vorbeck, a translation of the German general's memoirs. An excellent account, I’m told, now out-of-print and scarce, is Battle for the Bundu by Charles Miller. Also worth looking for is E. P. Hoyf’s Guerrilla, a book from the German perspective. Finally, A History of the Kings African Rifles by Malcolm Page.

Also,
grateful thanks to James Paul for information at
http://british-forces.com

This book is dedicated
to the memory of my mother,
Mary Valerie Rutherford,
and my brother,
Brian David Rutherford.

© Alan Rutherford

Arthur Beagle (1887–1957)
My grandfather, Arthur Beagle, came from Hull, Yorkshire, where his father was a printer. He was one of seven children... . My grandmother’s family, with the surname Guy, came from Keyingham near Hull, where her father was a carpenter. Jessica was one of fifteen children and twice a year her mother would take the whole family to Hull to be outfitted for summer or winter clothing. Ivy, their eldest daughter, thinks it might have been on one of these visits to Hull that Arthur and Jessie met.

Arthur worked on outfitting the Titanic as a wheelright and carpenter before going on to work on the construction of a flour mill in Hull. From there he managed to get a contract to work on the building of another flour mill – this time in Senekal in the Orange Free State, South Africa. While working in South Africa World War 1 broke out and he enlisted in the Mechanical Transport and then with South African Horse 1st Mounted Brigade.

The Diary

1915
Nov 15 Enlisted in Mechanical Transport as driver and was sent into fitting shop as mechanic in the U.D.F. shops. Reg no 353.

1916
Feb 11 Discharged through demobilization of the unit.
Feb 17 Re-enlisted in the South African Horse 1st Mounted Brigade. Reg no 2492.
April 15 Transferred to the 2nd Mounted Train South African Horse as Wheeler on Mule convoy. Reg no 1491.
April 25 Left Roberts Heights1 for British East Africa via Durban.
April 29 Left Durban for Mombasa on the St Egbert (which was captured by the German raider Emden and after a few days of captivity was set free with the crews of condemned ships). On this ship we carried 950 horses and mules for the front.
May 6 Arrived off Kilindini, 3 miles from Mombasa. We landed the animals after 3 days hard work transferring to lighters by slings. Had very narrow escape of being kicked overboard by a mule.
May 9 Left Kilindini in cattle trucks for the depot, proceeding through country covered with bush and jungle.
May 10 Arrived at Machoto and got the first glimpse of Kilimin-jaro, the largest mountain in Africa. It is 19,700 ft high and it was around here that the North Lancs suffered heavy losses which resulted in the recalling of a General. We remained here four days and I was told off on grazing guard I had a good opportunity of getting into the bush where the game was plentiful although very difficult to shoot on account of the density of the bush. At night time the lions roamed round the camp quite near, within a hundred yards in fact.
May 15 Arrived M’bununi, the big base camp where all kinds of troops were gathered. On the first day I walked over to the camp of the 38th Howitzer Brigade which was formerly on Hedon race course. As nearly all the men were from Hull and only out from home three months I was very pleased to have a chat with them. Here I met the Roydhouses from Key. We have 18 aeroplanes here with no opposition against them as the Germans supply of petrol has been exhausted. News came through that Van de Venter, the commander of the 1st Brigade has been surrounded and reinforcements are proceeding. Next day after six hours trek they came back, have lost their way. An airman fell today and was killed, this making the fourth smash.
May 20 Railway line at Voi which is behind us has been blown up so it is evident the enemy has been through our lines. This would not be difficult as the bush is so thick round here.
May 29 Killed deadly snake in the tent. This camp is infested with all sorts of creeping and flying insects such as...