Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck - East African War and The Population

East African War and The Population

The British and Belgian invasions of German East Africa set off a chain of events with devastating ramifications for the natives and their German overlords. The invasions caused interruptions throughout the colony so that the land no longer "basked in a climate of plenty."

As military commander, Lieutenant Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck's first obligation was to his army, over the objections of Governor Heinrich Schnee: the governor regarded war as the worst possible calamity that could befall German East Africa; it would "undo everything his social and economic reforms had accomplished." Von Lettow-Vorbeck knew he would have to give ground and escape confrontations with Allied forces. He thus established food depots along his intended line of march from Neu Moshi to the Uluguru Mountains, and if the neighboring villages were near starvation, that was a misfortune of war.

Scarcely any aid from Germany could penetrate the British blockade to alleviate the enormous supply deficiencies, and only two blockade runners succeeded in reaching the colony. On April 14, 1915, the freighter Kronborg arrived off Tanga at Manza Bay after a two months' journey from Wilhelmshaven, and was promptly attacked by the British cruiser Hyacinth. Fortunately for the Germans, Kronborg had been scuttled by her captain to avoid a coal fire after repeated hits by the British cruiser and the ship settled in shallow water; nearly her entire cargo could be salvaged. But when the steamer Marie von Stettin arrived south of Lindi on March 17, 1916, her precious cargo of 1,500 tons was of only very modest help. An attempt in November, 1917, to resupply German forces by Zeppelin airship failed. By late September, 1916, all of coastal German East Africa, including Dar es Salaam and the Central Railway, was under British control, with the west occupied by Belgians. Then, in December, 1917, the German colony was officially declared an Allied protectorate.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck and his caravan of Europeans, Askaris, porters, women, and children marched on, deliberately bypassing the tribal home lands of the native soldiers in an effort to forestall desertions. They traversed difficult territory: "swamps and jungles . . . what a dismal prospect there is in front of me", stated the Allied commander, General J. C. Smuts. But Smuts did not flinch. His new approach and objective was not to fight the Schutztruppe at all, but to go after their food supply. The end eventually came, with Smuts in London and Gen. J. L. van Deventer in command in East Africa.

In a book published in 1919, Ludwig Deppe, a medical doctor who campaigned with von Lettow-Vorbeck and formerly headed the hospital at Tanga, looked back in rue and lamented the tragedy which German forces imposed on East Africa in their war with the invading Allies: "Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years' War."

While there was German harshness, the new British or Belgian masters in German East Africa were by no means benevolent, either. They assumed no responsibility for African welfare and provided little assistance to the malnourished native population; indeed, when food ran short for the Allied formations, "the British askaris fell back on the practice of attacking and looting villages." When the worldwide Spanish influenza epidemic swept into eastern Africa in 1918–1919, it struck down thousands with impartiality, native and European alike. The weakened state of many natives made them especially susceptible; this included the caged Askaris and porters of the German Schutztruppe, who had been herded into prisoner-of-war camps at Tabora.