10

Counterattack

BY THE END of March 1915, Louis Botha had secured the Swakop River as far as Riet and had occupied and set up advanced posts at Modderfontein and Salem, and at Jakkalswater along the old railway. He considered linking the main railway line at Rössing with this old one in order to speed up supplies to his front lines, but was advised against it because of the difficulty of the operation. The railway was mostly intact, however, and after a personal site inspection Botha gave the go-ahead to repair it.

Of more importance was the discovery of official German documents left behind at Modderfontein when the Schütztruppe reserve hurried from the base to deal with Collins at Jakkalswater.¹ The documents, along with a considerable amount of supplies and wagons, would have been destroyed were it not for the speed of Alberts’ attack and Collins’s sudden appearance on their flank. The documents confirmed once and for all that the bulk of the German army was at Karibib awaiting Botha’s advance up the main railway line. Of equal importance, they revealed the layout and whereabouts of landmines, which had already caused a few casualties among the South African scouting parties. The documents also confirmed that the wells had been purposefully poisoned, or intended to be poisoned, with sheep dip, but as before the South Africans easily solved this problem by digging parallel wells.²

A reconnaissance patrol at Modderfontein also intercepted a train coming from Karibib, its occupants unaware that their countrymen had been routed. It turned out to be a hospital train and, true to his nature, Botha instructed his men to return it to enemy lines.

With his front secure and the process of resupplying for a continued advance in place, it was around this time that Botha sailed to Lüderitz to put a firecracker under McKenzie at Garub (see Chapter 6). As we have seen, McKenzie finally responded only to find that the Germans had already vacated Aus. The order for the Aus defenders to fall back was a direct result of the actions along the Swakop, when Franke realised he was going to need every available soldier in the north to be able to contend with Botha.

On his arrival back in Swakopmund on 1 April 1915, Botha met with a Namibian Baster chief by the name of Captain Cornelius van Wyk. Until now, Namibians of colour had taken little direct part in the war, other than as labourers or stretcher-bearers.³ When the war broke out, Governor Seitz and Lieutenant Colonel von Heydebreck, aware of their own limited means of defence and obviously well informed of the military force that South Africa could muster against them, had determined to keep the invading forces occupied as long as possible, hoping for a German victory in Europe. To achieve this, they decided to conscript non-German citizens for military service.⁴ People of colour were forbidden to bear arms, however, and both Seitz and Botha had made it clear publicly that it was a white man’s war. Any rumour that either side had drafted coloured or black fighters was regarded with the same seriousness as the use of chemicals or the wanton execution of civilians.

The Basters were opposed to any involvement in the war and consequently sent a delegation to visit Seitz with the request that they remain neutral. The governor, however, assured them that it was a conflict between whites and that they would only be used for police service behind the front.⁵

In February 1915, a number of German non-commissioned officers and Baster conscripts under the command of Lieutenant Hunoldt set up a prisoner-of-war camp at Uitdraai (situated on the railway line about twenty-five kilometres south-east of Rehoboth), intended for 120 South Africans captured at Sandfontein. When a group of forty-six Basters were ordered to remain and guard the prisoners, there was an outcry. The Basters were upset because this went against the agreement that they would not be involved in the war. Interestingly, their German captain, von Gaertringen, protested too, because he was worried that the Basters, who were more closely linked to the South Africans in terms of blood and language, might help their prisoners escape.⁶

The Baster guards raised their objections to the Baster Council, which in turn protested to the German government, without success. They could not be replaced because of a shortage of manpower.⁷ The increasing involvement of the Baster soldiers in the German war effort caused great concern within the Baster community. The Baster Council, therefore, decided that Captain van Wyk should explain their position to the South African military authorities as soon as possible. In March 1915, Van Wyk obtained permission to visit the game reserve in the Kuiseb-Swakopmund region, under the pretext that he wanted to look for bushtea and salt. In actual fact, he travelled through the barren area that makes up today’s NamibRand Nature Reserve to establish contact with the South Africans.⁸

Van Wyk told Botha that they were willing to cooperate with him in the fight against the Germans from their base near Rehoboth. Botha replied that under no circumstances were the Basters to get involved, but they ignored his directive and openly rebelled. They killed three settlers, seized weapons and raided the railway line and Rehoboth itself. German forces attacked Rehoboth in an attempt to quell the Baster threat, committing atrocities against Baster civilians and attacking refugees encamped in the mountains. The Basters retaliated, and by mid-April three German companies were tied up in Rehoboth.⁹

Botha sent a message to Van Wyk urging him to exercise restraint, particularly if he was to be treated well after the South African occupation. Van Wyk acquiesced. In any case, despite repeated attacks using superior weaponry, the Germans were unable to destroy the Basters’ position. The Germans retreated and Rehoboth’s Baster community was given a reprieve.

The Baster rebellion was timeous as it roughly coincided with Botha’s thrust inland, as well as the advances of both the Southern and Central forces. Von Kleist’s retreat from Gibeon wisely went far to the east of Rehoboth, a besieged settlement being an undesirable location to take up a defensive position. His beleaguered men were in no mood to deal with mutinous locals after their recent mauling. The Basters thus divided the stretched German defences even further and hastened both their retirement to the north and their abandonment of the capital. Botha, after denying the Basters permission to fight, would remain oblivious to their strategic involvement and its favourable outcome.

In the meantime, Botha’s front continued to prepare for the next advance. Although South African ships regularly steamed into Walvis Bay with fresh supplies, these still had to be carted by mules and oxen up to the front in the blistering summer heat. Repairs to the old Khan railway line had begun, but completion was still weeks away. The main line had only made it as far as Trekkoppies Station, roughly midway between Swakopmund and Usakos. To make matters worse, the infantrymen were stultifying in the desert, sitting alongside the hot, dusty railway line observing the engineers monotonously replacing and repairing the tracks.

Namib daytime summer temperatures can reach fifty degrees Celsius. Today travellers can scurry into the air-conditioned comfort of their 4 × 4s. For the men on the railway in 1915, however, there was no such luxury. They worked under extreme difficulties, and were always short of materials and rations because Botha needed every available horse, mule and victual for his commandos. Since mules were in short supply, the wagons often got stuck in the sand dunes. When the wind picked up, the sand made cooking and eating impossible. In some places the dunes had to be covered with canvas to prevent the sand from shifting onto the railway lines.

In early April, it was reported that the troops were getting ‘crummy’, as they had no change of clothing and were unable to wash what they were wearing.¹⁰ One day there was such a severe dry thunderstorm that the men saw a blue flame of lightning run along the ridge of a sand dune. It is recorded that a trooper lit a cigarette attached to the muzzle of his rifle from the flame.¹¹

The torpor was occasionally broken by the aerial forays of Lieutenant von Scheele. At the beginning of April he made a couple of sorties on the train station at Arandis, just behind Trekkoppies, where there was always a South African detachment to be bombed. Then, after the evacuation of Aus, Lieutenant Fiedler joined him and together they dropped a few more incendiaries on Arandis, Trekkoppies and the occasional train chugging its way somewhere in between. Once, they even reconnoitred as far as Rössing before returning to Karibib down the Khan–Jakkalswater railway, at the time an epic flight of over three hours. The pair did not inflict much damage other than providing much-needed distraction for the South African troops on the ground.

The German pilots, however, did prompt South Africa’s first ever deployment of an anti-aircraft gun. Their antics over Steinkopf before the battle at Sandfontein, and their later bombing raids at Garub and Tsaukaib, hastened the conversion of a 15-pounder Armstrong breech-loading cannon at the army ordinance workshop in Woodstock, Cape Town. The Armstrong was the standard heavy-artillery piece used by the Union Defence Force at the time. Although relatively mobile for its size and devastatingly effective at long range, the gun could only manage an elevation of sixteen degrees when a much greater elevation was required to shoot down overhead aircraft. Heightening the angle of the barrel any further would cause the recoiling breech to slam into the ground with enough force to destroy the gun and injure the operators. The Armstrong therefore had to be modified.

Captain C.L. Gransden was put in charge of the conversion. He had to design a carriage capable of elevating the gun far beyond its maximum, as well as devise a mechanism to withstand the recoil. Gransden managed to refashion the gun so it could be elevated over sixty degrees and attached heavy-duty springs to the barrel and frame to arrest the recoil. After initial trials in Cape Town overseen by Botha’s wife, the gun was shipped to Walvis Bay mounted prominently on the forecastle of the ship in the unlikely event that an enemy aeroplane should appear over the Atlantic – or, rather, in the hopeful event, as the Royal Navy gunners were itching to try out the new design.¹²

After being reassembled on carriage wheels at Walvis Bay, the gun was rushed up the railway line to Colonel Skinner, who by now was at Trekkoppies with his Irish and Rhodesian regiments. Possibly due to the giraffe-like vertical positioning of the barrel or in honour of their commander, or both, the troops affectionately nicknamed the new gun ‘Skinny Liz’. Testing her piqued the interest of the brigade’s stagnated psyche, although the tests were not very successful. The springs preventing the recoil broke each time a shot was fired and had to be replaced before the gun could fire again.¹³ Skinny Liz was also a bit of an unwieldy girl, being quite a bit heavier on her modified carriage than the regular 15-pounders.

As an anti-aircraft gun she was not very accurate, but she did manage to fire a few rounds at von Scheele when he made his next appearance. The gun caused no damage to the aeroplane, but she successfully foiled a bewildered von Scheele and forced him to abandon his raid. He returned to Karibib with his bombs still attached to the fuselage, much to Skinner’s amusement.

A Scottish regiment made up of expatriate miners from Johannesburg joined Skinner’s brigade and on 24 April a Royal Navy armoured car division under Lieutenant Commander W. Whittall was added. The vehicles, on loan from the British, were modified Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts with Vickers machine guns mounted in revolving turrets.¹⁴ Together with the Royal Navy heavy-artillery units manning Skinny Liz, the modified cars were another first for the South African army. Skinner’s Rhodesians were by now positioned in the rear at Arandis.

It was at Trekkoppies that Franke finally took some attacking initiative. After a reconnaissance flight on 25 April, von Scheele reported to Franke that there were no more than 400 soldiers at Trekkoppies. He was correct, to a point. Skinner had left the station with three squadrons of the Imperial Light Horse and a detachment of Transvaal Scottish, and was reconnoitring some thirty-two kilometres further up the track.¹⁵ The pilot had somehow overlooked them.

Taking advantage of Botha’s inability to press home his advantage at Riet, Franke ordered 2 000 horsemen to march on Trekkoppies and the positions at Riet and Salem that same night.

Skinner, sitting in his forward position in the early hours of 26 April, timeously detected the dust kicked up by Franke’s mounted troops. Although unable to tell the size of the enemy, he was able to fall back on Trekkoppies to take up defensive positions. He left two companies in the rear to cover his retreat, but the Germans failed to notice their presence and were therefore unaware that their hope of surprising the South Africans at Trekkoppies was lost.¹⁶

For Skinner’s infantry brigade squatting on the line, the German attack was a most welcome respite from the interminable boredom of months of sitting around. But, apart from Skinny Liz, Skinner had no artillery guns. All had been reassigned to Botha’s field operations on the Swakop. Luckily he had the armoured cars, and he could call up the Rhodesian regiment in reserve at Arandis to Trekkoppies to bolster the defensive lines.

At 5:45 on the morning of the 26th, the Germans blew up the railway line with the intention of blocking any rapid deployment from the rear or an equally rapid retreat. Unfortunately for them, they blew up the line on the wrong side of Trekkoppies. The pre-dawn darkness had confused the saboteurs as to their exact whereabouts. Despite this setback, the Germans persevered and at 7:40 their artillery opened fire at a range of about four kilometres from the hills to the north-west of Trekkoppies. At the same time, the Schütztruppe moved in with a dismounted attack from the north and west where there was good cover.¹⁷

According to Captain F.E. Jackson, Skinner’s brigade signals officer, the ‘firing continued for four hours; by that time there was not a line of shelters or bivouacs in the whole camp that was not riddled with holes’.¹⁸ The Germans’ aim was excellent on this occasion and every square inch was enfiladed by searching rifle and artillery shell fire. Jackson writes that Skinner was ‘a brick under the protracted fire, riding about the whole time, personally supervising and giving orders and somehow escaping with dozens of miraculous misses’.¹⁹ The situation became so precarious at one point that it seemed the entire camp at Trekkoppies would be overrun. Were it not for the Vickers machine guns firing from their revolving turrets on the armoured vehicles and the odd heavy shell from Skinny Liz that effectively checked the Germans to within 200 metres of the South African defences (more with its roar of fire than anything else), Botha may have had to rethink his entire campaign.

By 10:30 a.m. the German offensive had run out of steam. With the umbilical railway line still open to Skinner for further reinforcements (a train had already been dispatched from Swakopmund by Botha, who was in continuous telephonic contact with Trekkoppies during the skirmish), Franke ordered his men to retire. Skinner ordered the Kimberley and Transvaal Scottish regiments to counterattack, but they were checked by the German artillery, who provided an excellent cover for the retreating Schütztruppe. Although Jackson describes the attack as ‘the hottest corner I have been in’, only nine South African and seven German soldiers were killed.²⁰ The dead included a sixty-two-year-old South African heliograph signaller by the name of Reid. Jackson, as signals officer, made a point of honouring the old soldier, saying that it was ‘such a pity that old men should be out fighting, while so many young, single fellows sat tight at home, living on the fat of the land, enjoying themselves’.²¹ It was a pointed reference to those rebels who had refused to volunteer for the war.

In the context of the campaign, the Trekkoppies affair was nothing but a trifling altercation. Yet it was the last time the Schütztruppe went on the offensive in South-West Africa. The parallel offensive unleashed on Riet and Salem on the same day was, to all intents and purposes, a non-event.²² The positions were briefly attacked, but the Schütztruppe scurried away as soon as the South Africans fired their first return volley.