Fairy lights, bonfires, strange flags, and domestic linens (bedsheets, shirts) fluttering pale against the dark bush followed HMS Chatham’s progress for miles down the Swahili Coast. Drury-Lowe, Chatham’s grimly determined captain, was reminded of a feu de joie (a parade-ground display of military pyrotechnics) as he watched this mysterious display from the bridge of his ship. Though to him, its meaning held no mystery: German spotters, hiding in the bush, were using an arcane signaling system to relay the relative position of Chatham and her sister ships in the Destroy Königsberg Squadron to wireless stations inland and thence to Loof aboard Königsberg. The squadron now included HMS Dartmouth and Weymouth—the first detached from a vital role as a troop-ship escort, the second seconded from the British Mediterranean Fleet—as well as a small flotilla of colliers and fast steam cutters designed to navigate shallow estuaries.
Drury-Lowe was sure Königsberg lurked in a secluded inlet somewhere nearby, between Dar es Salaam and the border of Portuguese East Africa. He knew the German cruiser’s relatively shallow draft allowed her passage up rivers and tidal backwaters where the heavier British battleships could not follow. This slice of the Swahili Coast was Chatham’s beat. Dartmouth and Weymouth now patrolled the 1,000-mile-long run of the Mozambique Channel. Between the three of them, surely, Königsberg could not escape detection. The “feu de joie,” however, indicated to Drury-Lowe that now Königsberg wasn’t far off. All signs seemed to point to a hiding place between Lindi, German East Africa’s southernmost port, and Mafia Island, opposite the mouths of the Rufiji River.
The Rufiji Delta—a swampy green hell of intense heat, crocodiles, mosquitoes, more mosquitoes, tiny fanged monkeys, snakes, and other unpleasant creatures—was thought to be more or less unnavigable to a battleship of Königsberg’s size—but maybe not. The British Admiralty didn’t know the Rufiji well. It had just been charted by the German survey ship Möwe, in the months before the outbreak of war. The new German charts—making use of Möwe’s data—taken off the Präsident had finally been examined by Chatham’s naval intelligence officers and compared with the diary of the captured German spotter: The Präsident had apparently been loading lighters with coal and supplies and sending them to a place called Salale, five miles up the Rufiji. Accurately described as a “forbidding cesspool,” the Rufiji Delta divided itself into four main channels—Kikunja, Simba-Uranga, Sumninga, and Kiomali—all interconnected by a labyrinth of creeks and rivulets and debouching into the sea opposite Mafia Island, itself separated from the mainland by a skirt of smaller islands, uncharted coral reefs, and shoals. The perfect hideout for a shallow-draft battleship seeking to avoid detection.
But Drury-Lowe had to be sure before he summoned the rest of his squadron from patrol farther south. Meanwhile, dozens of false Königsberg sightings kept pouring in, some of them planted by von Lettow’s agents in Zanzibar: She had been seen skulking about the distant Comoros; she had fired rockets off Dar es Salaam, making bright, provocative splashes in the night sky; she had filled her bunkers at dusk in Jeddah on the Yemeni coast and the next day basked in the sunlight a few miles out from Porto Amelia, Portuguese East Africa. Her searchlights, like the eyes of a giant sea monster, had been spotted hunting for prey off Mombasa after midnight. Drury-Lowe, a hardheaded and thoughtful officer, chose to disbelieve these fantastical rumors.
He followed his feu de joie display to the Rufiji and anchored Chatham five miles offshore in the lee of Mafia Island, held by a small garrison of German troops. Drury-Lowe anticipated British occupation of this island soon—it would make a nice land base for naval operations—but not yet. Now he launched his steam cutters through the reefy shallows to a wide beach at the mouth of the Simba-Uranga. From here a landing party cut through the thick bush until they came to a fishermen’s village. There, the men convinced the village jumbee, or headman, and his associates at gunpoint to accompany them back to Chatham.
However coerced, once aboard, the Africans were treated royally, well-fed on navy beans and salt pork and gotten drunk on navy grog. At last, the ship’s intelligence officers settled in for the interrogation, conducted in pidgin Swahili and sign language—but it didn’t take long. The jumbee and his men, living in the almost total isolation of the Rufiji, couldn’t see much difference between Germans and Englishmen and readily answered all questions put to them: Yes, the “manowari na bomba tatu” was now up the Rufiji, at a place called Salale, along with a smaller ship—the collier Somali, as it turned out—and several small tenders. For Drury-Lowe, this news was both good and bad: He had probably found the Königsberg. But Salale could not be reached by Chatham—not only because the river wouldn’t permit the passage of so large a ship, but also because the Germans had fortified every approach with machine gun posts, rifle pits, and gun emplacements for Königsberg’s secondary 47mm artillery. All of this, hung with field telephone wires, was joined by a system of trenches manned by “Delta Force,” a small, determined army of marines and sailors off the battle cruiser, and a contingent of Schutztruppe officers and underofficers. Any British incursion up the Simba-Uranga would run into a bitter storm of expertly coordinated fire.
The jumbee and his men were thanked for the information they provided and sent back to their village. But their testimony was still not the definitive proof Drury-Lowe had hoped for. After all, a native drunk on navy grog was apt to say anything. Chatham lingered uncertainly in the lee of Mafia Island for a few more days while Drury-Lowe considered his options. At last, taking advantage of the monthly high tide, he ran his ship as close as he dared to the mangrove-fringed shore to give his lookouts a better view of the delta, though Chatham couldn’t come any closer than two miles before scraping bottom. A lookout then climbed her highest mast with powerful binoculars. He saw nothing for long minutes, then noticed something odd: One of the tallest trees in the jungle seemed to be moving. After intense scrutiny, the lookout was able to descry Königsberg’s masts about five miles away, artfully camouflaged with jungle greenery.
At last, the German cruiser had been caught, trapped like a rat in a cesspool. Drury-Lowe, it is to be imagined, cut a small jig on the bridge when apprised of the news. He now hoped to sink the trapped Königsberg with shells from his six-inch naval guns—revenge for the incapacitated Pegasus sunk at Zanzibar. His elation, however, soon darkened: Königsberg lay at least 14,800 yards away, up a sinuous and winding creek, protected by a dense tangle of wilderness and the entrenched Maxims of Delta Force. Chatham’s big guns could only reach a target at 14,500 yards, 300 yards short; still, Drury-Lowe decided to try. He ordered all ship’s ballast shifted in the hold—an operation that took half a day—until Chatham listed at five degrees. This, he reasoned, might give her guns a higher trajectory and thus a longer range. With the lookout in the masthead acting as an artillery spotter, Chatham let go with her first salvo—a huge boom, the ensuing concussion, the ship rocking back dangerously—to no avail. Chatham’s shells fell short, doing rather more damage to British objectives than to the Germans, destroying a few trees and the element of surprise.
Another salvo. The explosion echoed through the jungle; palm trees, flung in the air by the blast, crashed down as if cut by a giant scythe; chunks of wood the size of men shattered over the creeks and byways of the delta. Loof and his crew, though comfortably beyond the reach of Chatham’s shells, now knew they had been found by the enemy. It was November 4, 1914. That very day 100 miles or so to the north, unbeknownst to both Drury-Lowe and Loof, von Lettow was winning his lopsided victory at Tanga.
—
For Captain Loof, discovery by the British couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Königsberg, it will be recalled, had been forced into the torpid maw of the Rufiji by her dangerously furred boilers and a critical lack of coal. This necessary refuge had been chosen in lieu of a shipyard in which they might refuel and make repairs—the nearest, Dar es Salaam, rendered inaccessible by blockading British warships and the sunken floating dock. In the weeks leading up to her discovery, Königsberg’s bunkers had been filled by the Somali and other vessels bringing supplies over the bar and by teams of porters converging on her hiding place from points inland. But the furry boilers remained a problem. They were so badly coked up from the use of inferior Natal coal as to be completely useless. Only disassembly, repair, and refitment could render them—and the Königsberg—serviceable again.
Loof had pondered Königsberg’s predicament throughout the long, humid jungle nights. The stagnant air around the stranded ship pressed close, thick with the sounds of a million insects, as the British gradually closed in. Loof knew about Chatham’s approach, kept well-informed by his spotters and their system of bedsheet codes. He knew Königsberg would be found sooner or later and bottled up in her dank, malarial hideout. His goal was to join the Kreuzerkrieg—Germany’s overarching naval strategy—which directed squadrons of fast, heavily armed cruisers like Königsberg in predatory hit-and-run attacks on Allied shipping all over the world. Loof wanted to get in on this action. To him, and to every other German military strategist, the struggle in East Africa seemed a minor distraction. (In late 1914 perhaps only von Lettow understood the African war’s potential as a significant drain on Allied men and resources.)
But to join the greater war, Loof needed to repair his ailing boilers, an operation beyond the capacity of Salale’s simple jungle workshops. For a few weeks, as Loof’s men attempted the repairs, and swabbed the decks and reswabbed them and polished everything that needed polishing and did it all over again, it seemed Königsberg might rot in her fetid anchorage. Malaria, a far deadlier enemy than the British, had already attacked the crew, with over fifty cases. Accidents also took their toll: One sailor, suspended over the side to paint the hull, was attacked by a crocodile. Leg bitten off at the knee, he soon died from the unanticipated amputation. How long could Königsberg linger in this green hell? Her crew, though kept active by Loof’s regime of spit-and-polish maintenance, soon began to feel the effects of sagging morale and monotonous diet. Hunting parties were organized for diversion and fresh meat. Loof himself brought down a hippopotamus—prized for the pleasant taste of its lard—with the new 9mm rifle he’d had specially made in Germany for African big game hunting. To his chagrin, he discovered the hippo, a nursing mother, had left a calf behind. He had the tiny hippo brought aboard Königsberg, and though the men made a pet of it and fed it as best they could on beer and canned milk, the sad little creature soon died.
At last, one of Loof’s subordinates, Lieutenant Commander Werner Schönfeld, proposed a solution to Königsberg’s predicament. If the ship couldn’t come to the shipyard in Dar es Salaam, perhaps her boilers might be dismantled and brought overland to the capital. There, they could be repaired carefully before being hauled back again and reinstalled. The sheer labor required by such an operation at first seemed insurmountable. Dar es Salaam lay more than 100 miles away, through trackless forest and swamp and over numerous rivers uncrossed by any bridge.
But Schönfeld had managed plantations in the Rufiji District before the war, knew its terrain, and still had many friends among local German planters. He now applied to these for the labor and timber to build two giant sledges that were then hauled by 1,000 Africans to Salale. Here the Königsberg’s damaged boilers, having been disassembled into their component parts (giant steel plates each weighing several tons), were lifted from the hold by brute force and lowered onto the sledges. Then the African laborers hauled the sledges off into the jungle in the general direction of Dar es Salaam. Was it thus, Korvettenkapitan Loof wondered, watching his ship’s precious viscera disappear into the greenery, that slaves had hauled the building blocks of the pyramids across the Egyptian desert 4,000 years ago? For nearly an hour afterward, the rhythmic, throaty chanting of the Africans—“Harambee!” (Heave!) “Harambee!”—could be heard echoing through the still, hot afternoon.
The laborers, forced to hack a new road through the jungle, had a hell of a time going: Tow ropes often snapped with a sound alarmingly like a rifle shot; at this, everyone hit the ground with shouts of alarm. The sledges sank with wearying regularity into the soft muck of the delta; saplings had to be felled to pry them loose again. On downward slopes they often went awry, crashing uncontrollably into the underbrush. Primitive bridges thrown over the many streams between Salale and Dar es Salaam nearly collapsed as the sledges groaned over them. Though the going got a little easier when the laborers left the jungle behind, the dry landscape wasn’t much easier on them, with potable water difficult to find and the sun burning overhead. Even here the sledges moved along at an insect’s crawl.
At last, after three weeks of Herculean toil, the boilers bumped the final few feet into the Dar es Salaam shipyards, beneath the scrutiny of amazed crowds of bystanders. Work began immediately, and proceeded day and night for several days. The laborers, barely recuperated from their efforts on the outward journey, too soon picked up the ropes again for the journey back. This, over a track already hacked out of the bush, took half as much time—all in vain. The sledges bearing Königsberg’s private parts arrived at Salale just two days too late: Chatham’s lookout spotted Königsberg’s camouflaged masts the day after her boilers had been reinstalled. Tested, they were found to be running like new, but Loof’s hopes for a quick escape down the Simba-Uranga channel, over the bar, and thence back to Germany to join the commerce raiders of the Kreuzerkreig fell to pieces in the moments after Chatham fired her first salvo.
Now Königsberg would have to fight her way out, 10.5cm heavy guns blasting all the way. But, even in top shape and with every shell hitting its mark, she would have a poor chance against the combined firepower of Chatham, Dartmouth, and Weymouth, the latter two warships summoned from points south to join the death watch on the Rufiji. In fact, Chatham’s salvo had sounded the beginning of the longest naval battle in military history, between Drury-Lowe’s Destroy Königsberg Squadron—later commandeered by Admiral King-Hall—and Königsberg and Delta Force, with Loof in command. Eight and a half months would pass between first and last shots fired—255 days filled with schemes and counterschemes, countless minor skirmishes, and the use of an amazing new technology: the airplane.
—
Captain Drury-Lowe, frustrated by Chatham’s inability to engage the enemy, wired GHQ in Nairobi for backup. The navy alone couldn’t capture or sink Königsberg, he argued, and proposed a joint army-navy sea-land operation: Troops would be put ashore on the delta while fast steam cutters would forge up the channels; between them, they would destroy Königsberg in her secret lair—though now even her camouflaged masts had disappeared from view. She had no doubt burrowed even farther up the inaccessible reaches of the Rufiji.
Brigadier General Wapshare quickly vetoed this plan. Following the disaster at Tanga, Wapshare had been put in charge of the land war in East Africa. Major General Aitken, rightfully deemed the architect of Britain’s humiliating loss, had been sacked by an irate Lord Kitchener, England’s chief warlord. Only Aitken’s brother’s influence spared the erstwhile major general—reduced in rank to colonel and placed on half pay—the disgrace of a court-martial. Tanga now colored every aspect of British military strategy. Wapshare wasn’t about to sanction any operation using the raw, poorly trained Indian troops at his disposal. He had learned at Tanga, to his sorrow, that von Lettow’s Schutztruppe had become one of the most disciplined and expertly led armies in Africa.
“I am decidedly of the opinion that the project of cutting out the Königsberg from the sea is impracticable from a military point of view,” Wapshare wrote to Drury-Lowe. “The ship is twelve to fifteen miles up the river, the delta is most intricate with many islands and swamps and with roads known only to the enemy. There is sea-water right up to her—drinking water is only obtainable from wells, situation unknown, which could be easily damaged. . . . The climate is very bad. The foreshore is strongly held with many Maxims. . . . Whilst owing to the reefs, the warships cannot materially support a landing; and surprise is impossible. The water approaches may be mined and the whole area is covered by Königsberg’s guns. The operation would probably last a considerable time, and the Germans can be heavily reinforced from the Central Railway in four or five days. . . . I consider that were this proposal to cut out the Königsberg attempted, it would probably end in failure, if not worse.”
In other words, Drury-Lowe could expect no help from the army in his personal vendetta against Königsberg. This vendetta, shared by Admiral King-Hall—who had let Königsberg escape from Dar es Salaam in the first place back in July—had also been taken up by the brass at the Admiralty back in London. First Sea Lord Winston Churchill, particularly obsessed, now deemed her destruction “a matter of the highest importance.” Churchill decided that if they could not yet devise a way to kill Königsberg with a British battleship, they still might “block her in” completely. To this end, an ancient merchantman, the Newbridge, was found in the harbor at Zanzibar, loaded down with rocks and dynamite, and towed 150 nautical miles to the Rufiji. There she would be sunk in the Simba-Uranga Channel, down which—Drury-Lowe had rightly guessed—lay Königsberg’s most likely route to freedom on the high seas. This operation, so dangerous as to be nearly suicidal, would be attempted in the face of withering cross fire from Delta Force, occupying both banks of the channel. But when Drury-Lowe called for volunteers, Chatham’s entire crew offered to make the sacrifice. From among these brave men, Drury-Lowe chose fourteen, whom, he admitted, he “hardly ever expected to see again.”
These volunteers manned Newbridge, her wheelhouse now shielded in inch-thick steel plate. Just before dawn on November 10, 1914, followed at a distance by the armed tug, Duplex, and several small, fast steam cutters, she nosed her way up the mouth of the Simba-Uranga. Of course, the sailors and marines of Delta Force were not caught napping: They opened up from the shore with a pitiless barrage of Maxim fire, supported by Königsberg’s small artillery, well concealed in the bush. Waterspouts caused by the expenditure of all this ordnance nearly hid Newbridge from view as her temporary captain, Commander Raymond Fitzmaurice, maneuvered to an anchorage astride the main channel. He calmly ordered “Stop engines” and dropped anchor as if Newbridge were coming home to a cozy berth in some placid English port. But his next order—“Abandon ship!”—sent Newbridge’s skeleton crew scrambling for the Duplex hove-to alongside. The Duplex withdrew, zigzagging across open water beneath a storm of steel from the German guns—but not before Fitzmaurice had a chance to remote-detonate the charges in Newbridge’s hold. The merchantman shook with a muffled explosion, burped up a giant bubble of oily water, and sank nicely in the middle of the channel.
Newbridge’s heroic crew made it back aboard Chatham with two killed by German shrapnel and nine badly cut up. Drury-Lowe, who had been expecting a far higher body count, pronounced the operation a complete success. He radioed the outcome back to the Admiralty in London, who then issued an overly optimistic communiqué describing the action, extolling the sacrifice of the sailors off Chatham, and stating with certainty that Königsberg “was now imprisoned and unable to do more damage.” They were wrong. The operation had been a failure. The Simba-Uranga Channel was wider and deeper than supposed and Newbridge’s corpse had failed to block the main channel at all. At high tide, Königsberg would still be able to slip out of the river and head out to sea. But, distracted by events elsewhere, Drury-Lowe and his masters in London discounted this possibility. News of German Admiral von Spee’s victory over the British fleet at Coronel off the coast of Chile on All Souls’ Day had just reached the Admiralty and once again Dartmouth and Weymouth, detached from the Destroy Königsberg Squadron, steamed south to join Admiral King-Hall’s Cape Squadron, now momentarily expecting an attack from von Spee. Von Spee’s East Asia Squadron of five battle cruisers and three supply ships had been spotted heading around the Horn, their goal, reportedly, to engage King-Hall’s ships and bombard Cape Town. But King-Hall waited for an attack that never came. Not long after Coronel, von Spee was surprised in the middle of an attack on the Falklands Naval Station by eight heavy British battle cruisers under Vice Admiral Sir Frederick Sturdee. A vicious naval battle ensued on December 8, 1914. Outgunned and outmaneuvered, von Spee’s entire squadron went down, including his flagship, SMS Scharnhorst, lost with all hands. The admiral’s two sons, serving aboard sister ships, also perished, alongside 1,871 German sailors.
With this extinguishment of the German naval threat on the high seas, Admiral King-Hall once again turned his attention back to Königsberg. After the Newbridge incident, Drury-Lowe seemed to be sitting on his thumbs. For all he knew, the Rufiji’s other major channels might be navigable by Königsberg; the German battle cruiser could still break out of her hiding place and must be destroyed once and for all. To this end, King-Hall conferred with Drury-Lowe and came up with a solution, daring in its novelty: If they could not reach Königsberg by land or by sea, perhaps they could reach her by air. Bombs dropped from an airplane might actually sink the German beast; they just needed to find her first. Thus was born Equatorial Africa’s first Naval Air Service, though it lacked, as yet, the one essential component for such a service—an airplane. In fact, as far as anyone knew, none existed in all of Africa.
Admiral King-Hall, something of a homunculus at just over five feet tall and the self-described “ugliest man in the British Navy,” was also one of its most determined. He began his search in the Cape Colony and soon found an aviator, complete with his own machine: an adventurous, affable barnstorming aviator named Herbert Dennis Cutler, who happened to be in possession of the Royal Flying Club’s 189th-issued pilot’s license and an airplane. King-Hall tracked down Cutler in Durban. The aviator earned a meager living making exhibition flights with his single-engine, American-made Curtis “flying boat” hydroplane—probably the primitive Model D, little more than a motorized kite with fabric-covered wings stiffened by wire struts. The pilot sat in a wicker seat fixed at the edge of the bottom wing with his feet practically dangling in the water and directly in front of the single rear engine, which “pushed” the plane through the air. Pontoons, substituted for wheels, transformed this entirely unsuitable aircraft into a “seaplane.”
King-Hall bought Cutler’s Curtis and offered him a commission in the Royal Navy Reserve. Cutler, tired of living on peanuts and tips, readily agreed. They loaded the Curtis aboard the Kinfauns Castle, a supply ship quickly refitted as a hydroplane tender, and headed north to the Rufiji Delta to join the war effort. No one at the time realized they were making military history: Never before had an aircraft been used in such an action against a naval vessel.
Cutler went up on his first mission a couple of weeks before Christmas 1914—though the homemade gelatin bombs he had brought along proved too heavy for the flight and had to be discarded. His main orders were to find Königsberg and return unscathed, but even minus the excess weight of the bombs, the underpowered Curtis could barely climb above the trees. Suddenly, her radiator sprang a leak and after flailing about in a cloud bank for a while, Cutler put down near a small islet, fortunately beyond the reach of German guns. A rescue party in steam launches found him there, calmly getting in a swim. He appeared undisturbed by his near brush with death. Drury-Lowe commented that Cutler, though “an entire novice at observation work,” was nevertheless “a good pilot and absolutely without fear.”
But Cutler’s Curtis, with its radiator busted and unfixable, was now out of commission—rendering, for the moment, Africa’s first Naval Air Service a failure. Then a sailor named Gallehawk remembered having seen a Ford truck on the streets of Mombasa. The Curtis hydroplane and the Ford truck shared certain mechanical components (Henry Ford and aviation pioneer David Curtis had been acquaintances), and the sailor speculated that the radiators might be a match. HMS Fox, recovering from her ignominious role in the non-bombardment of Tanga and idling in the harbor at Mombasa, received orders via wireless to locate the truck and requisition the radiator. Captain Caulfield dispatched a shore party; truck quickly found, radiator removed, and brought aboard Fox, she steamed south to join the Destroy Königsberg Squadron. The Ford radiator, though not an exact fit, was easily adapted. Cutler went aloft again in the Curtis—nicknamed “Cuckoo” by the sailors aboard King-Hall’s flagship, Hyacinth, now leading the action on the Rufiji.
Cutler made three more flights in his winged death trap—later described by aviation historian H. A. Jones as one of the most “striking incidents in the history of naval aircraft in the war; there are few which, for quiet gallantry, can beat this story of an underpowered flying boat, patched and repatched . . . operating in monsoon weather from the beach of a tropical island over jungle swamp.” On his third attempt, Cutler flew straight up the delta and, banking, spied Königsberg basking in a remote bend of the Simba-Uranga, her deck awnings up to shield her busy crew from the deleterious effects of the tropical sun. He turned back to the British flotilla, now assembled off Mafia Island opposite the mouths of the Rufiji. But something happened—a strut snapped or he ran out of gas, or the radiator crapped out again—and Cutler, dropping out of the sky, hit the choppy water at a sharp angle. The Curtis broke up on impact. Cutler himself, using up another one of his nine lives, swam to safety and clambered, grinning, aboard Hyacinth.
King-Hall, pleased at the success of Cutler’s flight—they had located Königsberg at last!—would not be dismayed by the loss of “Cuckoo.” Another Curtis hydroplane—this one, most likely the more powerful Model F—turned up in Durban, apparently a hotbed of early African aviation. This second Curtis was supposedly capable of taking two people aloft, a pilot and an observer—though once again, Cutler found added weight diminished the Curtis’s performance to the point where it couldn’t rise above the tree line. He made several more flights in this contraption, often under fire from Loof’s Delta Force. Each time, he observed the Königsberg moving farther upstream. On his last flight, the Curtis’s overheated, overtaxed engine quit—the hydroplane, designed for the clear lakes of Upstate New York, suffered under tropical conditions. Cutler plummeted toward the jungle, crash-landing in the mouth of the Kikunja Channel. The ubiquitous Lieutenant Charlewood of the much-shot-up tug Helmuth ran his resurrected vessel up the channel beneath a shower of German lead to Cutler’s rescue. He managed to get a tow rope on the Curtis, still afloat, and pulled it to safety, but Cutler was not aboard.
The entire squadron mourned Cutler’s loss. Speculation had it that the intrepid aviator had fallen from the plane in its spiral toward the Kikunja Channel, or had been eaten by crocodiles, or had been shot out of the cockpit by the sharpshooters of Delta Force. In fact, Cutler had wrestled his Curtis to a relatively gentle landing, swum ashore, and been captured by the Germans. He suffered through the next three years in a German POW camp in the bush. For years, nothing concrete was known about his fate; according to historian Byron Farwell: “his subsequent history, like his prior history, is unknown. He was one of those people who sometimes appear from no one knows where, play their bit part in momentous events, and then return to obscurity.”
Not quite. Cutler was a Londoner who had served in the balloon corps in England before the war. Freed in 1917 along with other POWs the Germans could no longer manage to feed, he returned to England and finished the war as a flight instructor. Although not much is known of his private life, he settled in his native London, surviving both the blitz and the birth of rock ’n’ roll. He surrendered the last of his lives in 1963; whether he recalled the green hell of the Rufiji and the precarious hours spent aloft searching for Königsberg in his final moments is known only to God. His last Curtis, the tattered, exhausted wreck hauled by the Helmuth from the murky waters of the Kikunja Channel, could still be seen, until quite recently, in an aviation museum in Durban.
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To Admiral King-Hall, Cutler had served his purpose. Cutler’s observations had shown that Königsberg now lay at the confluence of the Simba-Uranga and Kikunja channels, down either of which she might decide to make her escape. Such an attempt, urged upon Loof by von Lettow, was, however, refused by the latter. Why the doughty sea captain would not make the attempt has long baffled historians of the war, as it did von Lettow himself:
“She had aboard her pilots expert in the ways of the Simba-Uranga, who would have guided Korvettenkapitan Loof past the sunken Newbridge,” von Lettow later commented. “It is also true that she was short of coal, but she could have replenished her bunkers from the coal brought in by the Rubens.”
The Rubens was a German blockade runner—officially designated Sperrbrecher A (Blockade Runner A) but disguised as the Danish merchantman SS Krönborg—that had recently made a heroic 1,400-mile journey from Germany, around the Hebrides to the Swahili Coast through radio silence and bad weather all the way. At the last minute, Rubens had been caught and sunk by Admiral King-Hall and HMS Hyacinth in the shallow waters of Suva Bay, GEA. Thinking Rubens finished, Admiral King-Hall steamed away—in what turned out to be one of the greatest mistakes of the war: Rubens’s crew, mostly Danes from South Jutland, swam ashore with no casualties and would serve for the duration with the Schutztruppe. Meanwhile, salvage operations began almost immediately. Hundreds of rifles, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, machine guns, and tons of top-quality coal were brought up by divers in an operation that became the “talk of the coast”—all accomplished right under the noses of the British Royal Navy. Nis Kock, author of Blockade and Jungle, one of the best memoirs of the East African campaign, was a sailor aboard the Rubens.
Now von Lettow offered to bring Rubens’s salvaged coal to Königsberg using a train of native porters, but Loof again demurred. It is about this time that the strong-willed Loof and the stronger-willed von Lettow came to dislike each other. The Oberstleutnant suspected Loof’s military judgment if not his personal courage. Also, Loof was a good friend and supporter of Governor Heinrich Schnee’s, which automatically opposed him to von Lettow. This association colored Loof’s view of the military commander, whom he deemed a glory hound. But Loof knew—as von Lettow did not—the near impossibility of maneuvering Königsberg down the delta without being found out and destroyed by the blockading British squadron. Such a run would depend on the exact right moment—at dark of moon, at the highest of spring high tides, between the hours of midnight and three a.m.—and also on the British seriously neglecting their duties. Loof, a canny calculator of odds, knew that such a moment—barring impossibly miraculous circumstances—would never come.
Still, von Lettow griped: “It is a waste of manpower and seapower that the last of the German cruisers should allow herself to be immured in the cemetery at Rufiji,” he wrote, “when she should be fighting for the Fatherland on the high seas.”
For now Loof was content to wait. And in his waiting the stubborn sea captain employed a strategy very much like von Lettow’s own: As long as Königsberg remained up the Rufiji, the British Navy would be obliged to position several battleships on the Delta Station to prevent her escape. Battleships that might serve the British war effort more profitably elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Admiral King-Hall, harried by hectoring, bellicose cables from First Sea Lord Churchill, grew only more determined to smoke Königsberg out of her lair. Cutler’s excursions in his Curtis hydroplanes had convinced the gnomish admiral of the value of airpower in a naval operation. Perhaps the right sort of airplane, something more airworthy than Cutler’s motorized kites, could move beyond simple reconnaissance to a more offensive role. A more powerful machine might carry bombs of sufficient size that, dropped on Königsberg, might actually sink her into the muck of the delta. He appealed to the Admiralty for the machines and men to fly and maintain them, and was promised an “air wing” of the newly formed Royal Navy Air Service. They were on their way.
—
And so the last days of 1914 dragged slowly out. Christmas—by which both sides had predicted the war would be over—dawned on the steamy delta of the Rufiji. Aboard Königsberg, the sailors made the best of the holiday, though many, bitten by malarial mosquitoes, rolled sweating with fever in their narrow bunks. Quinine supplies, so necessary for the survival of white men in the tropics, were running perilously low. The destruction of Admiral von Spee’s East Asia Squadron meant that no succor would be had from that quarter. On Christmas Day, those men off the Königsberg not seconded to Delta Force played soccer ashore on a makeshift field cut out of a jungle clearing. Later they knocked back extra rations of schnapps. In the officers’ mess, after dinner, a few bottles of champagne were opened to toast the Kaiser’s health.
The British aboard the various ships of the Destroy Königsberg Squadron no doubt dreamed of plum pudding and snowy Christmases at home. A waggish radio operator sent a Christmas poem to his German counterpart, Radio Officer Neimyer, in the all-clear:
“Kony, we wish you the best of good cheer / But blame you for stopping our Christmas beer.”
One of the British ships’ carpenters emphasized the veiled threat implied by these lines with a macabre gesture: He carved a number of tiny coffins; rolled up in each, slips of paper on which were written darker provocations in something resembling dried blood: “Try our Christmas pudding,” read one of them. “Large size six inch, small size four point seven”—referring to the caliber of the British naval guns. It’s unlikely that any of these reached Königsberg, concealed in her backwater, though one or two of them were probably retrieved by the vigilant sailors of Delta Force. One can imagine them floating by a carefully camouflaged Maxim emplacement: a bobbing flotilla of rat-sized coffins, each containing its tiny bomb of sarcasm.
—
On New Year’s Day 1915, Weymouth returned from patrol duty elsewhere, relieved Drury-Lowe’s Chatham, and sent another radio message to Königsberg:
“We wish you a happy new year and hope to be seeing you soon.”
Radio Operator Neimyer, with Loof’s permission, broke radio silence with the luxury of a response:
“Thank you for the message. If you want to see us, we’re always home.”
—
Oberstleutnant von Lettow-Vorbeck, now directing operations against the British Uganda Railway from his HQ in Neu Moshi, had spent Christmas on an increasingly rare bit of sport—a hunting expedition with officers of his staff. Rations low, they ate everything they shot: “For variety of game, the country provided more than one would be likely to find anywhere in Europe,” he wrote. “Hare, various dwarf antelopes, guinea-fowl, several relatives of the partridge, duck, bush-buck, water-buck, lynx, several kinds of wild boar, small kudu, jackal, and many other kinds of game abounded. Once, I remember, to my astonishment, a lion silently appeared fifteen paces in front of me. Unfortunately, before I could bring up my rifle he had silently disappeared.”
This stealthy, vanishing lion seemed a sign from von Lettow’s personal deity, the God of Battles. And perhaps—as he later put it—a harbinger of “decisive events” to come.