2

Groundwork

GOING INTO SOUTH-WEST AFRICA was a formidable undertaking for the South Africans. In 1914 the Germans had only surveyed parts of their colony and consequently there was a dearth of reliable maps. According to Brigadier General J.J. Collyer, who became Botha’s chief of staff at the end of September 1914, the invading soldiers were forced to rely on verbal information from local guides and traders, a fair dose of instinct and a good deal of luck.¹ Unlike the German forces, who knew the lie of the land intimately, the South Africans were essentially entering terra incognita.

Even today, the Namibian map has a lot of blank spaces. The sheer size of the landscape makes for a great natural fortress against anyone wishing to invade. The entire length of Namibia’s west coast consists of a 100-kilometre-wide belt of one of the earth’s most inhospitable deserts, the Namib. Little grows except for the 1 000-year-old Welwitschia mirabilis plant that somehow manages to extract what little moisture there is in the air to survive. Here and there, bisecting the dunes, are ephemeral river courses that the local Herero call omurambas, ghost rivers. These, like the Swakop River that ‘flows’ into the frigid Atlantic just north of Walvis Bay, are almost always dry apart from the odd waterhole and small green oasis. There are only two natural seaports along the entire 1 000-kilometre coastline – Lüderitz in the south and Walvis Bay in the centre. Both are forlorn and bleak places and are often shrouded in a dense ocean fog that, apart from keeping the coastal belt relatively cool in comparison to the inferno a few kilometres inland, gives the impression of something sinister.

In 1914 Walvis Bay was a British enclave. It had been in existence as a British port long before the Germans occupied the surrounding territory. Requiring a port of their own, the Germans were forced to create an artificial one further up the coast. They built a wooden jetty in 1898 at the mouth of the Tsoakhaub River. The chosen site was the next best thing to a natural port, having offshore geological features that kept the bay placid and a good supply of underground, albeit brackish, water. Tsoakhaub is a Nama word meaning ‘excrement opening’ and described the dirty river in flood spilling into the ocean. The Germans mispronounced it as ‘Swakop’ and in 1896, when the district was officially proclaimed, the settlement was named Swakopmund. By 1914 a steel jetty was under construction.

Beyond the Namib Desert, the country is protected by a series of craggy mountain ranges, the most dominant being the Khomas Hochland escarpment that acts like a gigantic buttress protecting the capital, Windhoek, which lies on the fertile plateau further inland in roughly the centre of the country. Directly north of the capital, endless dry bushveld and scattered mountain ranges sweep up past the giant Etosha saltpan all the way to the Kunene River, which forms the border with Angola. Back in 1914, Angola, or Portuguese West Africa as it was known, was a Portuguese colony on paper only. In practice, the Portuguese had very little control over the huge territory, save for the ports and the odd inland fort. Most of it was de facto independent of Portugal.

Interestingly, in 1914 the Portuguese had a controversial presence on the Caprivi Strip. Germany’s acquisition of the Caprivi, an anomalous 400-kilometre-long narrow strip that plunges like an arrow into the heart of the subcontinent, in an 1890 exchange with Britain was an example of characteristic nineteenth-century colonial posturing. The German chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi, and the kaiser had a grand notion to link South-West Africa with their colony in East Africa via the Zambezi River. It was thought to be so strategic a move that the Germans willingly gave over Zanzibar to the British in order to annex the strip. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister at the time, was a shrewd negotiator, however, and duped von Caprivi in the fine print. The Germans were unaware that Cecil John Rhodes, as part of his own grand scheme, had already privately claimed the land north of the Zambezi, effectively driving a permanent wedge between the two German colonies. Furthermore, the river itself proved unnavigable. The strip thus came to an inglorious end at the confluence of the Zambezi and Chobe rivers, just above the Victoria Falls.

Too late, the Germans also discovered that it was virtually impossible to travel along the strip from west to east. After the Okavango River, there is an almost impassable tract of waterless dune belt before a series of miasmic swamps at its eastern-most point. To all intents and purposes, the annexation of the strip to German South-West Africa was an entirely futile enterprise. An imperial resident, for his sins, was housed near the apex of the strip, on the south bank of the Zambezi, in a malarial and isolated outpost called Schuckmannsburg.

Southern Africa at the outbreak of war in 1914

At the hilt of the strip named after Chancellor von Caprivi, the Portuguese constructed a mud-walled fort in 1911. Called Mucasso, the fort was controversial from its inception, as it was built just inside German territory. At the time, the Germans were not too concerned about this far-flung violation, until sometime later that year when rumours began circulating that the Portuguese garrison there had gone on a rampage against the local tribes, who were in effect German citizens. That in itself was not cause enough for the German colonial governor to react, but then news reached him that the German imperial resident at Mucasso had been killed in a skirmish with the Portuguese while trying to protect the locals. This immediately caused a stir, souring relations between Germany and Portugal.

The commanding officer of the Schütztruppe, Major Joachim von Heydebreck, was dispatched to the Caprivi with a large force to punish the garrison at Mucasso, but, on arriving, he found the imperial resident very much alive. His superiors in Windhoek, meanwhile, had done an about-face, deciding that the matter of the fort should be handed over for international arbitration. Von Heydebreck was recalled, but not before he showed the Portuguese a display of German military prowess that kept them well ensconced behind their mud walls until the outbreak of war three years later.²

Schuckmannsburg, or Luhonono as it is now called, has the honour of being the first German base to be taken by the Allies in the Great War, albeit without a shot being fired.³ In theory, the whole of the Caprivi Strip was under British control even before the main South African advance in late September 1914. The desperately lonely German imperial resident, Lieutenant Victor von Frankenberg, had apparently got wind of the outbreak of war from a missionary posted in Andara on the Okavango River on the western end of the strip. The concerned missionary had sent a couple of runners across the difficult terrain to warn von Frankenberg,⁴ but it is conceivable that the imperial resident already knew. He was on cordial terms with his British counterpart, the district commissioner in Northern Rhodesia, who was based at Sesheke, a village just upriver on the north bank of the Zambezi. Unlike Schuckmannsburg, Sesheke was adequately connected to the small town of Livingstone, which in turn was linked to South Africa via the rail system. The district commissioner surely must have heard as soon as war was declared and passed the information on to von Frankenberg.

The two men were practically the only Europeans stationed along that stretch of the Zambezi, except for von Frankenberg’s assistant, Sergeant Fischer, and possibly a secretary or two working for the British district commissioner. To quell their repressive loneliness, they must have sometimes met to share notes, hunt and enjoy formal dinners. They would have discussed the impending war and would have been under no illusions as to their respective courses of action once it broke out. Besides a tiny contingent of native irregulars, von Frankenberg had no military presence, while his opposite number could quickly dispatch mounted Rhodesian police units with ammunition and heavy machine guns from Livingstone and Bulawayo.

The details of surrender had probably been discussed weeks before the event, so when the Rhodesian police did appear on the opposite bank of the river on 21 September 1914, von Frankenberg initiated a well-rehearsed exhibition of formal surrender. As the British crossed over, a bugle sounded and von Frankenberg’s irregulars stood to attention on the muddy parade ground, guns (if they had any) slung across their backs. The German flag was lowered, the Union Jack raised, and the imperial resident, in full regalia, and his secretary were taken to Livingstone, where they remained as prisoners, or rather as guests, until the end of the war. Von Frankenberg’s natives were simply sent home. The last German imperial resident of the Caprivi had even taken the trouble beforehand to inform the local chief of a forthcoming, although temporary, change in sovereignty, and expressed the hope that they would see each other soon after Germany won the war.⁵

Today there is nothing left of von Frankenberg’s lonely house. The South Africans were initially even more uninterested in the incongruous strip than the Germans. After the war, they handed it over to the British authorities in Bechuanaland, hoping that it would be fully assimilated into that protectorate to save them having to contend with the obvious difficulties of administrating it from Windhoek. For some inexplicable reason, the Caprivi was handed back to the South Africans in 1929, but even then it was not completely under the ambit of the South West African administration. The eastern sector of the strip, with the outpost at Schuckmannsburg, fell under the direct jurisdiction of Pretoria.⁶ Sometime in the 1930s, the South Africans destroyed the imperial residence, preferring an administrative base on higher ground at Katima Mulilo, just opposite Sesheke.

These days the Caprivi is as incongruous a place as ever, despite the arrow-straight highway from Grootfontein that now links it to the rest of the country. The strip falls under the administration of the eastern Zambezi and western Kavango East regions of Namibia.

Unlike the South Africans, who were reluctant aggressors, the Portuguese of 1914 were somewhat understandably itching to pick a fight with the Germans, especially after they got wind of Germany’s ambitious plans to annex both Portuguese West and East Africa for their own super-colony. According to historian Hew Strachan, Portugal’s eagerness to engage the German colony was a liability to Britain.⁷ Portugal’s armed forces had been in a state of chaos since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1910, and an offensive against the Germans in Africa was likely to strengthen the German hold if they retaliated and took over the Portuguese colonies complete with half a dozen working ports and stashes of extra arms and ammunition. If that happened, the region would require a greater British presence, sapping much-needed resources from the home front. Unlike with the South Africans, Britain had requested Portugal not to rattle the hornet’s nest by going on the offensive, asking them instead to focus on quietly defending their own ports.

Portuguese pride, however, overruled British desire and the colony was put on a war footing. Lisbon shipped a force of about 7 000 troops on the pretext of suppressing an Ovambo rebellion in the south, but it was clear they were preparing to invade the German territory. The German colonial governor, Dr Theodor Seitz, kept a wary lookout on Portuguese troop movements amassing on the northern border of South-West Africa.⁸ It was not so much the threat of a military attack that worried the Germans, since the northern sector of the territory was vast enough to stretch the resources of an invading force beyond practicality, but rather the hope of keeping an open corridor through southern Angola to the weakly guarded southern desert port of Moçâmedes (present-day Namibe). The Germans wanted to establish a secret supply route from their ships docked at Moçâmedes, via Humbe, through the Angolan border town of Naulila to the railhead at Tsumeb, a supply line deemed vital in the likely event of Swakopmund being blockaded by the Royal Navy.⁹ If the Portuguese were in southern Angola, the German-controlled port would be compromised. It was therefore essential for Governor Seitz to nullify the Portuguese on their northern flank.

The Germans had nothing to fear from the east, protected as they were by an equally inhospitable desert, the Kalahari. Invading troops from the east would have to cross over 1 000 kilometres of waterless terrain, and still be able to fight on the other side. Trans-Kalahari treks had been attempted before with catastrophic consequences, the most renowned being a series of journeys beginning in 1874 by bands of disgruntled South African Boers who were evading what they regarded as overly stringent British rule. Most of the trekkers perished while trying to cross from east to west; only a few made it safely to their destination in Portuguese West Africa. The bleached bones of the unfortunate majority lay scattered in the desert sands for decades afterwards, marking the path of their failed journey.

Then, in 1906, the Germans deliberately drove the Herero into the Kalahari knowing full well that the chances of them reaching the waters of the Okavango Delta in British Bechuanaland were next to nil. A handful, including their chief, Samuel Maharero, did eventually make it across, but they left tens of thousands of corpses in the desert behind them.

The German military command therefore knew that the only effective land attack would come from the south, and even that would be an arduous and risky undertaking. South Africa is split from Namibia by the meandering channel of the Orange River. Compared to other African rivers like the Zambezi, Niger, Congo and Nile, the Orange is a mere trickle and, except for those rare occasions when it floods, the river provides ample fords or ‘drifts’ on which to take an army across. But it is the nature of the surrounding landscape, not the river, that provides an effective barrier. On both banks, the Orange slices through a steep, mountainous, lunar-like landscape. There is virtually no drinkable water, vegetation or shelter.

Apart from the Namib and Kalahari deserts, this area, called Greater Namaqualand, is the most sparsely populated region on the subcontinent. The nearest town of any size is Upington, a few hundred kilometres downriver from the border. In 1914, Upington was completely isolated from the rest of South Africa. The nearest railway to the lonely town was a branch breaking off from the main Cape Town–Pretoria line at De Aar, which terminated at Prieska. This was still a good few hundred kilometres of barren, featureless terrain from Upington. Furthermore, any force posted at Upington had to trek another hundred kilometres to the border, and then a few hundred more just to get to the nearest German stronghold at Keetmanshoop. That exercise alone would be a near-impossible undertaking for an invasion force. Combined with a highly trained enemy easily tracking and harassing your movements, it would be out of the question.

There was, however, another option. A single narrow-gauge railway on the north-west coast of South Africa snaked up from Port Nolloth to a cluster of Namaqualand copper-mining hamlets called Springbok, O’okiep (present-day Okiep), Concordia and Nababeep. The Port Nolloth railhead stopped just to the north of these towns at a small mission station called Steinkopf, which still exists today. If a force could march from here in combination with another mustered at Upington, an invasion of German South-West Africa, although still difficult, was reasonably feasible.

Steinkopf was still over fifty kilometres south of the border. The immediate border area between the two countries was uninhabited, save for the odd Nama goat-herder. There were no proper roads either. To move against the German South West would require a sea passage from Cape Town to Port Nolloth, followed by a train journey to Steinkopf, and then a severe overland march to the river. From there, the forces would be confined to leapfrogging between the established waterholes and wells, which were few and far between. They would have to halt for a time at each well in order to replenish and rest before making the next hop. It was a tough ask for any army, let alone one as inexperienced and disorganised as the fledgling Union Defence Force.

As with the Upington route, any advance would be ponderously slow and predictable. But these were the only two options available to defence minister Smuts and his generals.

In 1914, O’okiep, just south of Steinkopf, was one of the richest copper mines in the world. The early Dutch settlers learnt of the rich copper deposits in the mid to late 1600s through reports from Nama traders visiting the Cape settlement. As a result, the Dutch governor accompanied an expedition north to locate the fabled ‘copper mountain’ that the Nama called U-gieb, meaning ‘great brackish place’. They found U-gieb, but, after sinking a few shafts and checking the coastline for a suitable harbour, they deemed it unfeasible to mine. Then, in the 1860s, Cornish miners with their technological nous were sent in to sink deeper, well-ventilated shafts and, most importantly, to build a railway line from the marginally workable deep-water bay at Port Nolloth. Mules pulled the train carriages from the harbour until they were replaced by steam engines just before the hostilities of the Anglo-Boer War began. Deneys Reitz fought in the area towards the end of the war as a member of Smuts’s staff. O’okiep saw some of the last skirmishes of that brutal three-year conflict and Reitz himself eventually took the train from Steinkopf to Port Nolloth on his way to Vereeniging, where he would take part in the peace conference held there in April 1902.

Today, the Okiep Country Hotel, with its lush palm trees and colonial broekie-lace façade, greets one like an oasis in the dusty town. Inside is a collection of interesting historical photographs. Those from the Boer War are dominated by a portrait of Lieutenant Colonel Salomon Gerhardus ‘Manie’ Maritz, a veggeneraal (fighting general) with the Boer forces in these parts. He led a mounted commando attached to Smuts’s main force, but his command was semi-autonomous as he was a northern Cape local and knew the lie of the land better than anyone else. He successfully besieged the British garrison in O’okiep until the cessation of hostilities. Maritz was a powerfully built man with a domineering personality. He harboured fantastical delusions of self-worth and believed himself to be the chosen one to free his people from their foreign yoke, a latterday Moses. Maritz was consumed by a deep hatred for everything British. Long after Britain ceased to be a dominant factor in South African life and just before the Second World War, he unsurprisingly transferred his hatred onto the Jews.¹⁰

Reitz relates a story from the Boer War that emphasises Maritz’s vengeful nature. On their way to attack the British garrison at O’okiep, Reitz and Smuts stopped at the Leliefontein mission station to the south of the copper cluster. On arriving, they found the place sacked and gutted. The corpses of the entire population lay rotting among the rocks and burnt-out houses ‘still clutching their muzzle-loaders’. They knew it was the work of Maritz, who, after being fired upon by frightened Nama, had exacted a terrible revenge by massacring the entire settlement. The otherwise steely Smuts was visibly livid and could not conceal his rancour, while the other soldiers, despite being battle-hardened from three years of war, were sickened by what they found and felt that Maritz had gone too far.¹¹

Still, Maritz was a more than capable guerrilla fighter, which made him invaluable in the war. When general hostilities ceased shortly after this incident, Maritz fled the country and eventually joined Reitz in exile in Madagascar. Here he made himself unpopular with the locals with his frequent and exceptionally violent outbursts and racial slurs. He refused to allow anyone of colour to enter his house and would not even shake their hands. At one point during a fit of anger, he picked up a stubborn ox with his great strength and hurled it down an embankment to its death, much to the terror of the Malagasy herders.¹²

Twelve years later, on the eve of the outbreak of the war with Germany, Maritz’s considerable fighting skills and knowledge of the terrain were once again called upon. Even though he had been in exile for the past decade and had refused to pledge allegiance to the newly formed Union on his return to South Africa, after some sustained persuasion from Commandant General Beyers at a war council of senior officers on 14 August, Smuts had reluctantly made Maritz a lieutenant colonel in the Active Citizen Force and given him command in his old theatre of operations. He was entrusted with 1 000 mounted riflemen who made up ‘B Force’, one of the three army groups earmarked to invade the colony in a three-prong attack.

His geographical knowledge aside, Maritz’s posting as the district staff officer to the northern Cape was no coincidence. The German colony next door was also well known to him. After the secession of fighting in 1902, Maritz had fled first to South-West Africa, where, it was said, he eagerly assisted the Germans in 1905 in their quest to wipe the Herero off the face of the planet. Ironically, Maritz’s time in the German colony made him indispensible to defence headquarters in Pretoria. He knew the area and the Germans better than anyone else in the entire Union Defence Force. The drawback, apart from his questionable personality, was that Maritz was on extremely cordial terms with the Schütztruppe and knew most of the resident imperial command personally.

Maritz’s brief was to concentrate his men at the river towns of Upington and Kakamas, and prepare to time his march on the German frontier with ‘A Force’, which was essentially the Permanent Force under Brigadier General Lukin. Lukin had 1 800 rifles and eight artillery guns coming up from Steinkopf, thus trebling the number of South Africans moving on the border. The third army group, ‘C Force’ under Colonel Percival Scott Beves, with a further 1 200 rifles plus six artillery guns, would land at the German port of Lüderitz after a bombardment by the Royal Navy.¹³ Beves’s job was to push the Germans eastwards up the Lüderitz railway line and converge with A and B Forces at Keetmanshoop, where a large portion of the German army and military supplies were known to be held. Together, they were to get astride the railway line running directly north to Windhoek and the all-important radio mast.

The initial South African plan of attack was to attack the German colony from the south, with three columns situated 1 000 kilometres apart

The total South African expeditionary force, therefore, consisted of 4 000 rifles, plus auxiliaries of roughly the same number, and fourteen artillery guns. Split into three widely separated columns of independent, autonomous commands, the force was to cover a front of almost 1 000 kilometres, facing a concentrated enemy with some obvious advantages.

With over 7 000 rifles, the Schütztruppe was almost double the size of the expeditionary force. Plus it could rely on a citizen reserve force of a further 1 000 to 2 000. The Germans possessed better and more artillery pieces, and operated behind considerable natural barriers under the single, undivided command of wily Major von Heydebreck, a man cut from the same cloth as his East African counterpart, von Lettow-Vorbeck.¹⁴

Another glaring difference between the two forces was their respective lines of communication. Good and secure lines of communication are crucial for any military endeavour in that they ensure that the front lines are adequately supplied with reinforcements, ammunition, food and transport. The Germans enjoyed excellent lines of communication thanks to a railway network that ran down the spine of the country from Tsumeb in the north to Kalkfontein in the south, through Windhoek, and with branches to Lüderitz and Swakopmund. It meant any retreat would only improve their ability to rapidly supply their front lines and create an environment for a devastating counterattack.

The South Africans had overly stretched lines of communication even before they crossed the border. The Germans could effectively fall back on their supplies, whereas the more the South Africans advanced, the longer and thinner their supply and communication lines became. From the outset, with the three forces 1 000 kilometres apart and defence headquarters another 1 000 kilometres away in Pretoria, the lines were already ineffective. Smuts, who had considerable military nous, ought to have better addressed this issue.

Furthermore, the Germans, thanks to their rail system, could rapidly deploy their entire force where it was needed most. This meant that the timing of the advance by the three separate South African columns was key if they were to successfully split the Germans, but given the lengthened and inefficient lines of communication, plus a volatile Maritz who was already digging in his heels over supplies and men, accurate timing would be unlikely. Judging the situation, Botha must have watched the launch of the military campaign in September 1914 with a sense of foreboding.