In the Namib Desert in German South West Africa on the morning of March 8, 1915, temperatures reached 132 degrees by ten a.m. Scalding winds blew down the bivouacs of the British Imperial troops. The Namib is one of the most fearsome places on earth, a parched, empty wasteland that receives an average of 0.55 inches of water per year.
As the sun rose and the extreme heat broiled and shimmered in the distance, horrified South African soldiers watched the desert floor crack and heave, and all at once millions of beetles emerged from cavities hidden deep underground, called to brief life by the hot, relentless winds. These dreadful burrowing insects, Stenocara gracilipes, the fogstand beetle, are scary-looking things, black and white with long spiderlike legs. All through late winter and early spring, in the Namib, they squat on these long appendages, angled at forty-five degrees to the ground fog, waiting for the seasonal winds to blow condensation down their waxy exoskeletons and into their open mandibles. They are a fascinating example of adaptability in an extreme environment, beloved by entomologists, and, despite their looks, essentially harmless. But to the men of General Botha’s Northern Army chasing the retreating Germans through the desert and crunching across endless carpets of beetles in forced marches, this plague of Stenocara gracilipes must have seemed a vision from hell.
“It was one of the most awful scenes of desolation to be found on the face of the globe,” said Major H. F. Trew, who served as one of General Botha’s security officers during the campaign. “For miles and miles, the desert stretches, an expanse of grey plain with a thin, sandy crust covered with small pebbles.”
And beetles, he might have added. Millions of them.
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Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, both vigorous South African Boers, had fought hard against the British during the brutal Second Boer War of 1899–1902, but changed sides for the war against Germany just twelve years later. They had beaten back a fratricidal revolt of anti-British Boers—among whose ranks fought friends and family members—and joined themselves once and for all to the British cause. Now they led a raffish mixture of South Africans, British regular army troops, Rhodesian commandos, soldiers of fortune, Australians, and adventurers from every corner of the empire, all in the service of the king. As a captured German Baroness later commented, casting a gimlet eye on this heterogeneous force: “We Germans seem to be fighting the whole damn world.”
The opposing Germans, under Colonel Victor Franke, didn’t put up much of a resistance. Franke, known as the “Hero of Omaruru” for a bygone exploit during the colony’s dreadful Herero Rebellion of 1904–05, was now probably a morphine addict—as suggested by clues in his war diaries. Alternately befuddled and brave to the point of self-annihilation, but indecisive as a commander, Franke had long ago lost the will to prevail in a hard fight.
German South West Africa—modern-day Namibia—while not Germany’s largest African colony and arguably its least beautiful, was nonetheless the most populous, prized, and dearly won. GSWA’s flat brown, wide-open spaces were well suited to cattle ranching. About 12,000 German colonizers lived a kind of Texas life on isolated ranches, in cow towns and small cities with names like Swakopmund, Grootfontein, and Windhoek, the colonial capital, which boasted substantial half-timbered German-style buildings, beer halls, modern sanitation, electric lights. Windhoek’s powerful Telefunken wireless transmitter facility, which enabled High Command in Berlin to communicate with their commerce raiders and U-boats at sea, was the main British strategic objective in the war in GSWA.
“Coming out of the desert, Windhoek was a revelation, and a great tribute to German colonization,” commented Major Trew, when Windhoek was taken. “The government buildings are most ornate and would have done credit to any city in the world.” The town itself was dominated by an absurd replica of a traditional German castle.
Victorious British Imperial troops also found comfort in the arms of the lonely German women of Windhoek—after the manner of conquering armies from time immemorial. A charming, susslich Viennese beauty known only as Regina ran a private club for officers of the German General Staff that now, suddenly, catered to their British counterparts: Regina remained a German patriot, she insisted—never mind the fortunes of war that at the moment dictated otherwise. And she invited a bevy of similarly patriotic friends for evening dances with British officers to the music of a gramophone. They tangoed, they waltzed. Whatever else they did remains unmentioned. In exchange, Regina and her friends enjoyed the dubious benefits of British military rations and polished off their regimental champagne reserves.
After the fall of Windhoek, the rest of German South West Africa quickly succumbed to a fast-moving campaign described by the Cambridge Military History of World War One as “one of the neatest and most successful . . . of the Great War.” The Germans experienced GSWA’s loss as a painful diminishment of national pride: First because, as historian Edward Paice puts it in his monumental study, World War I: The African Front, “Africa mattered to the European powers at the beginning of the twentieth century.” And second, the British victory rendered worthless the colony’s vicious and hard-won pacification by German forces less than a decade earlier. The high cost of that pacification had been spiritual as well as physical: General Lothar von Trotha’s merciless suppression of the native Hereros would be labeled genocide by later generations—the first such charge laid at the feet of the German people in the bloody century just dawning.
Abandoned German settlements, half buried in sand, their thick plaster and brick walls pockmarked with bullet holes, can be seen in Namibia to this day, bizarrely preserved by the super-arid climate. At Riet and Pforte, Jakkalswater and Trekhopf, rust-free relics of the battles of more than 100 years ago still lie strewn across the brittle surface of the desert.
The German defeat in GSWA in 1915 had followed hard on the heels of lesser but equally painful disasters in German Togoland and the Cameroons.
In those places, malarial hellholes of steaming jungle and equatorial swamp, valued strategically only for their wireless transmission towers, British and French victories came with a comparatively low “butcher’s bill.” In the Cameroons, for example, the British lost 1,668 men, the French 2,567—in both cases almost all from tropical diseases. As always, the Carrier Corps suffered the heaviest losses. These were the native porters impressed into service by both sides to haul supplies and munitions through the bush. Without them, no war could be fought in Africa, where roads were nonexistent and pack animals—vulnerable to the tse-tse fly, which could kill a strong horse or mule within days—could not survive.
Here, as elsewhere, during all the campaigns in Africa, Carrier Corps deaths were not deemed worth recording.
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Today, a bronze historical marker in Belgium memorializes the first British shot of World War One and the first death in battle involving British troops. According to this marker, the opening round of uncountable millions was fired by Corporal Ernest Thomas of C Squadron, 4th Royal Irish Dragoons on August 22, 1914, in a cavalry action near the town of Casteau, Belgium. The first combatant killed, a German uhlan (mounted infantryman), is credited to Captain Charles B. Hornby in that same action. Captain Hornby pierced the unfortunate uhlan’s heart by saber thrust—an ironically old-fashioned death (on horseback, with a sword) in what was to become a decidedly modern war (mechanized, faceless), its human toll exceeding 14,000,000. But the markers’ assertions do not stand historical scrutiny; their authors disregard earlier campaigns in far-off Africa.
The first British shot of the war actually occurred on August 5, fired off by Regimental Sergeant Major Alhaji Grunshi, a black African soldier serving with British Imperial forces a few miles north of Lomé, in German Togoland. The first recorded British death in battle, one Lieutenant G. M. Thompson of the Gold Coast Regiment, took place sometime over the night of August 21–22, also in Togoland: Lieutenant Thompson, given command of a company of Senegalese Tirailleurs, fought it out with German askaris in a confused action in the thick bush on the banks of the river Chra. His comrades found him in the morning, lying dead and covered with insects in the midst of his slaughtered command. They buried them that way; the Senegalese arranged around Lieutenant Thompson’s grave like a loyal pack of hounds around the tomb of a Paleolithic chief.
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After less than a year of war, the German Overseas Empire—one of the main catalysts for the war in the first place—seemed nearly at an end.
In China, on the other side of the globe, the small German garrison holding the Kiao-Chow Concession found itself besieged by a Japanese Army 23,000 strong, supported by a small contingent of the 2nd Battalion of South Wales Borderers. The Concession—a 400-square-mile territory centered in the fortified port city of Tsingtao on the Yellow Sea—had been ceded to Germany in 1897 as compensation for the murder of two German Catholic priests by anti-Christian Chinese mobs. Tsingtao’s commandant, Kapitän zur See Meyer-Waldeck, held out against the siege behind the city’s thick walls for two months, under continual bombardment from land and sea as Japanese Infantry assault trenches pushed relentlessly forward. Realizing the pointlessness of further struggle against the combined might of the Japanese Army and Navy, Meyer-Waldeck surrendered his garrison of 3,000 German marines and sundry volunteers at last on November 16, 1914. It came as a surprise to him that the Japanese and the British were fighting together against Germany—they had signed a secret mutual defense treaty in 1902, only now bearing fruit.
Meanwhile, Australian, New Zealand, and Japanese forces easily captured German possessions in the South Pacific. These included the Bismarck Archipelago, the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, Palau, New Caledonia, and Samoa—where the Kaiser’s barefoot native soldiers sported fetching red sarongs beneath their formal German military tunics—and Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, now the northeastern part of Papua New Guinea. Here one intrepid German officer, a certain Hauptmann Herman Detzner, who had been off exploring the unknown interior with a contingent of native police, refused to surrender and remained on the loose in the wilderness for the duration of the war. He turned himself in to the occupying Australians on January 5, 1919, wearing his carefully preserved and outdated Imperial German uniform—a kind of German Rip van Winkle who had been asleep in the jungle while the world changed irrevocably around him.
By July 1915, of Germany’s prewar colonial possessions, only German East Africa remained.