7

Eastern Force and McKenzie’s pursuit

WHILE THE ACTION was unfolding in the centre of the German colony, Berrangé’s Eastern Force was slowly making its way across the hitherto impassable Kalahari Desert from Kuruman in the northern Cape, to attack from the east.

Little is known about Lieutenant Colonel Christian Anthony Lawson Berrangé, other than that his name constantly appears in broad descriptions of the campaign in German South-West Africa. Almost every piece of literature on the subject treats him as an aside, and not one gives his full name. (It appears in The Anglo-African Who’s Who and Biographical Sketchbook of 1907, when he was still a major.¹) He could have belonged to the Natal colonial forces under McKenzie or, more likely, the Cape Mounted Infantry under Lukin. There is no reference anywhere to his character and no photographs, despite the fact that he pulled off the near-impossible feat of traversing 600 kilometres across the Kalahari with 1 200 mounted riflemen and a section of 12-pounder artillery.

Information regarding the crossing itself and exactly why it was undertaken is equally scant. It is doubtful that it was Botha’s idea, since it was, for all the effort, a relatively futile exploit, even as a diversionary measure. More likely it was Smuts’s design from the start. At this stage of his life, the general’s military mind paled in comparison to his friend’s. The reversal at Sandfontein was largely his error of judgement, as was issuing martial law, the act that ultimately sparked the 1914 rebellion. Smuts’s military endeavours had become crude and hasty, and ordering four regiments of mounted riflemen to trek from Kuruman to Keetmanshoop would not have been beyond him.

In December 1914, Sir Thomas Cullinan, owner of the prodigious Premier Diamond Mine near Pretoria, offered to reconnoitre a route through the Kalahari Desert for the purposes of invasion. He surveyed 400 kilometres of desert between Kuruman and the border, locating water and drilling holes.²

Sir Thomas is renowned for giving his name to the Cullinan diamond, the largest diamond ever discovered. The 3106.75-carat stone was found in 1905 at Premier Mine. Cullinan gave it to Botha, who was then prime minister of the self-governing Transvaal colony, as a gift. Botha suggested that the diamond be presented to King Edward VII as a token of loyalty and a vote was staged to help the Transvaal government decide. Oddly enough, the Boer majority voted in favour of presenting the king with the diamond, while the English settlers voted against it. The British prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, decided to leave the decision of whether to accept the diamond up to the king, who was himself undecided. The Boers had only just been defeated and the monarch was still unsure whether to treat them as friend or foe. It was Winston Churchill as undersecretary of state for the colonies who finally persuaded the hesitant king to accept.

On 4 January 1915, Berrangé was in Kuruman preparing for his epic trek. In a stroke of pure innovative genius, he had commissioned a fleet of about forty modified water lorries to supply his troops along the dry riverbed between Kuruman and Rietfontein, the Baster town on the border. Cullinan was appointed to his general staff as a major on ‘special service’ and was charged with supervising the opening of wells, the drilling of boreholes and the construction of special water storage tanks for the lorries.³

Each lorry (they were apparently all Fords⁴) carried about sixty gallons, or 272 litres, of water. Each driver was responsible for filling and emptying the tanks on his lorry, but the vehicles worked in pairs, driving between the wells and boreholes that were sometimes 100 kilometres apart. It was a colossal enterprise, as the lorries themselves required fuel and truckloads of spare parts, especially wheels and tyres. They were forever getting flat tyres, which could only be repaired by shoving bundles of grass into the tubes. This hardly ever solved the problem, but it at least kept them going for a while before the rims buckled beyond repair and the entire wheel had to be replaced.

On 19 March, Berrangé’s advance column, consisting of a single squadron under Captain van Vuuren, arrived at Rietfontein and attacked the Schütztruppe, who were fielding twice their number. Nevertheless, the Germans quickly retired, leaving their transport and supplies, as well as four dead and twenty wounded.

While Eastern Force gathered at Rietfontein and prepared to push into the colony, Southern Force under Jaap van Deventer was closing in on Keetmanshoop in a two-prong drive from bases at Raman’s Drift and Kakamas. They had captured Warmbad and the southern railway terminus of Kalkfontein, and easily took Nabas with its wagons and supplies left behind by a hastily retreating enemy. At the end of March they surprised Platbeen, where they again captured all transport and supplies, as well as a few prisoners and some wounded.⁵

It was around this time, with most Schütztruppe units now in the north, that Botha combined McKenzie’s Central Force with Van Deventer’s Southern Force and Berrangé’s Eastern Force into what became known as the Southern Army. Placed under the overall command of General Smuts, the combined force numbered over 14 000 mounted men. When he took command in early April, one of the first things Smuts did was determine to go after the Germans retreating before Central Force. Botha had come to realise that McKenzie was at his most brilliant when leading a charge of flying horsemen, the highly mobile mounted commandos; he was not cut out for set military manoeuvres on entrenched positions. So once they had taken Aus, the prime minister advised Smuts to use McKenzie exclusively for mounted flying-commando attacks. Smuts accordingly ordered McKenzie to go after von Kleist with three mounted brigades.

The railway line from Aus ran due east for about 100 kilometres to the junction of the north–south line at Seeheim. By the time McKenzie started his pursuit, the Germans had already passed Seeheim and were making steady progress north, leaving just a few units to face Berrangé and Van Deventer as they converged on Keetmanshoop from the east and south respectively. With Smuts moving up the line from Aus, having landed at Lüderitz a few weeks earlier to take command of the Southern Army, McKenzie took a shortcut to the north-east in an attempt to cut off the Germans before they reached Rehoboth. It was an ambitious move; even today the unpaved overland route from Aus is difficult to negotiate as it passes over craggy mountainous terrain. Somehow McKenzie and his mounted brigades covered 200 kilometres in just twelve days.

On 16 April, while McKenzie raced to catch up with his prey, Berrangé attacked Kiries West. The enemy force there had the added advantage of field artillery, yet once again the South Africans drove them off, killing another four soldiers and capturing eight. Unfortunately, the German gunners managed to escape with the bigger guns.

A few days after the action at Kiries West, and according to plan, Berrangé linked up with Jaap van Deventer’s brother, Dirk. Together they attacked the small hamlet of Koës on 20 April, killing two German soldiers and capturing sixteen, as well as a few hundred head of cattle.⁶ This opened the way to Keetmanshoop.

At about the same time, after traversing hundreds of kilometres of desert and driving the Germans back from one position to the next, Southern Force achieved its objective of occupying Keetmanshoop. The honour fell to Colonel Bouwer, another staunch Botha ally and one of the men who had relentlessly chased Kemp across the country during the rebellion. Bouwer, moving in from Raman’s Drift, took the town without a shot being fired.

As planned, the Eastern and Southern forces merged at Keetmanshoop and immediately attacked a detachment of Schütztruppe at a training camp called Kabus, about thirteen kilometres south-east of the main railway line. Von Kleist himself was at the nearby station of Itsawisis, where he was at that moment organising the general retreat with von Hadeln, the Iron Cross recipient who had been part of Ritter’s abortive attack on Kakamas.⁷ Luckily for von Kleist, the South Africans were too exhausted to give pursuit, so he was able to escape north, albeit in a rather lackadaisical fashion.

But on 26 April, McKenzie successfully caught up with the retreating Germans at the small station town of Gibeon, about 150 kilometres short of Rehoboth. Perhaps because of his near encounter with the exhausted men of Eastern Force and Southern Force, von Kleist was caught completely unawares by these new arrivals on their fresh mounts. He must have thought he had plenty of time before the South Africans caught up with him, because he had a fully laden train lying idly at the station and was still busy loading the last troops, whose dust the pursuers could plainly see as they moved quietly towards the station from the south. McKenzie’s scouts managed to tap a cable line and discovered that von Kleist planned on spending the night at Gibeon before steaming off early the next morning. McKenzie therefore wasted no time.

Collyer provides a detailed record of events as they unfolded. At 8 p.m. McKenzie dispatched a demolition party to destroy the railway line to the north of the station to prevent the train from leaving. The saboteurs were followed by a mounted brigade and an additional regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Royston, who was instructed to make a wide arc around the station and position his men on the line further north in order to cut off any attempt at an overland retreat. At 10 p.m. McKenzie and the remainder of the force silently moved in from the south to within three kilometres of Gibeon, where they halted until dawn. At 11 p.m. the demolition party blew up the line and evaded capture, returning safely to the main body. It was the first time the Germans became aware of the South African presence.

In the meantime, Royston had moved into position, but in the darkness he had bivouacked in an exposed location. In the early hours of the morning, his force was discovered by German sentries, who alerted the main German body of their position. Royston’s men were thoroughly enfiladed by machine-gun fire and sustained a number of casualties: three officers and twenty-one other ranks were killed and forty-nine were wounded. Royston was forced to order a general retirement almost five kilometres further up the track. He left behind seventy-two men, who were compelled to surrender at dawn when they found themselves surrounded.

At 5 a.m. on 27 April, McKenzie attacked with vigour from the south and pushed the Germans north-west, away from the railway line. Although unprepared, von Kleist managed to fight a dogged rearguard making use of the rough ground to the north-west for effective cover. Nonetheless, the speed of the attack and the firing accuracy of McKenzie’s men and artillery forced the German commander to abandon his position, along with his artillery and machine guns, and retreat on horseback to the open plains due north. The Germans just managed to evade Royston, who, thanks to his earlier retirement, had left enough space for them to break through. Von Kleist managed to escape with most of his men, but left eleven dead, thirty wounded and 188 to be taken prisoner on the field, plus a train, two field guns, four machine guns, a sizeable quantity of ammunition, wagons, livestock and the seventy-two South Africans he had just captured.⁸ The larger guns were the very ones that the German gunners had made off with when Berrangé and Eastern Force attacked Kiries West ten days earlier.⁹

McKenzie’s surprise attack on Gibeon Station

Although McKenzie failed to capture the whole force, it was still a significant victory and a testament to the general’s mad-dash qualities of old. In addition, the valuable equipment that von Kleist had abandoned was necessary to prolong the campaign, and any hope Franke had of defending the capital from the south was now as good as quashed. With Botha charging up the Swakop River with equal gusto, however, this was the least of the German commander’s concerns. At one point Franke exclaimed, ‘This is not a war; this is a hippodrome!’¹⁰

The route to Windhoek was being pried open from both directions, and it appeared that von Kleist was prudently giving it a wide berth. In light of this, its German citizens began the ominous task of preparing to welcome the South Africans into their capital city.

Smuts, in the meantime, was approaching Keetmanshoop. He had no idea where McKenzie had got to, so he sent Reitz and another member of his staff to find him. Following the detritus of dead mules and information from local Nama villages and mission stations, the pair caught up with McKenzie at Gibeon.¹¹ The general was awaiting further orders to advance, but, as it turned out, the Gibeon skirmish was to be the end of his role in South-West Africa.

While Reitz was still with McKenzie in Gibeon, he and two others were given a couple of motor cars with instructions to reconnoitre north towards Windhoek after rumours reached the South Africans that von Kleist was not preparing to make a stand to save the capital. The road back then was just a wagon track and not designed for motor cars. It was, Reitz says, the first time cars had ever ventured in that part of the world. It was a trying journey as they bounced and bumped along in the blazing heat. Before long, the primitive radiators overheated.

By nightfall the three men had used up all their drinking water topping up the radiators. To make matters worse, the retreating Germans had dynamited every well, station tank and borehole along the route. The men managed to find a few tsamma melons, a hydrating fruit similar to watermelon and typical of the desert, which the wild game and Baster herders often used to satiate their thirsts. But when the cars eventually overheated for the last time, Reitz and his companions were in a serious predicament.

They abandoned the vehicles and began walking with parched throats and swollen tongues towards Rehoboth, which they reckoned could not be too far north. Soon afterwards they were lucky enough to come across the wreckage of a train at the bottom of a dynamited bridge. The Germans had run the trains over to prevent them being used by the South Africans. This train’s boilers, however, still contained enough water for the men and their thirsty machines to make it to Rehoboth.

There they were able to confirm von Kleist’s abandonment of Windhoek by the columns of dust north-east of the settlement, indicating that the German leader was giving both Rehoboth and the capital a wide berth in an effort to link up with his commander, who by that stage had been cut off from his line of retreat to the capital by Botha’s rapid advance.¹²

By now the campaign no longer required the combined force of the Southern Army, as the Schütztruppe had abandoned the entire south and the focus had shifted north. Smuts’s army was thus disbanded and sent home. Much of McKenzie’s force had taken to the field with Beves eight months earlier, and although they had only participated in one major battle in all that time, it was a decisive one because it spelt the beginning of the end for the Germans. The Natal men of Central Force would go home to a rapturous welcome.

It was later discovered that the three forces together had faced no more than 700 German soldiers scattered about in small units over a vast area (the largest, at Rietfontein, consisted of 200).¹³ No wonder the Germans retreated so hastily – they were facing a numerically superior enemy. The question as to why the South Africans were deployed in the first place remains unanswered. Too late it became clear to Botha that the oversized Southern Army had unnecessarily soaked up much-needed resources, despite the heroic exploits of men like McKenzie, Van Deventer and Berrangé.

There is not much going on in Gibeon these days, not that there ever was. The town, a little to the west of the station, is run down and occupied by the mixed-race Baster people, who can trace their ancestry to the districts in and around Cape Town. They have resided in this area since the mid-1800s, having trekked from the oppression of slavery in the Cape, and have been marginalised and sidelined by successive rulers, from the Nama and Herero to the Germans and South Africans. Today Gibeon is racked with poverty, the roads are dusty, and the people, ignored by the current government (in which they will probably never enjoy any real representation), look dispirited. The train station is just as forlorn, although someone has tried to brighten it up by painting the old colonial building pink. On the other side of the tracks, neatly laid out with a fence around them, are more Commonwealth war graves, the only evidence of the events of the morning of 27 April 1915.