2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (23 page)

Mimi
and
Toutou
were tiny by comparison. And with their wooden hulls made on the Thames, they were far less sturdy than the steel-plated monster constructed on the Ems. The British boats were at the tail-end of a marine-craft tradition in wood; the German ship was a modern industrial product, riveted together—in some haste, admittedly, because Meyer and his team had less than a year in which to complete the contract.

The new German ship was to be called the
Graf von Götzen
after the colony’s former military governor, Count Adolf von Götzen. It was the largest order that had ever come into the Papenburg shipyard, where the Meyer family had been building boats for generations. They asked for payment in five instalments, the first payable immediately and the last on delivery of the ship to the port of Hamburg. The total cost was 406,000 Deutschmarks, the equivalent of about £20,000 in those days.

The order had been placed at the instigation of none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, following information received from his government surveyor in 1910. The surveyor’s agents in East Africa had pointed out that the Belgians had only smallish craft on Lake Tanganyika and the British just a few tramp steamers on Lake Victoria and Lake Nyasa. A proper ship on one of the great African inland seas would be a considerable commercial asset to Germany and an important factor in the balance of power in the territory.

Purchased through the Kaiser’s East African Railway Company, the
Götzen
was not originally envisaged as a troopship, but as a commercial venture with military possibilities. The likely advent of war with Britain changed all that, however. By the time the order was sent to the Meyer shipyard in January 1913, the Kaiser and his advisers knew the
Götzen
might be used to carry troops. The pressures of the approaching war are evident in a telegram sent eleven months later by Dr Heinrich Schnee, Götzen’s successor as Governor of German East Africa:

Accelerate by all means sending slips, shipyard equipment, for
Götzen
with the latest mounting instruments. Send with 20 skilled ship-builders, if possible employees of the Railway. Economic interests and prestige demand urgency.

At Papenburg, work on the
Götzen
went on apace, even though the yard’s owners and workers were pretty much in the dark as to the Government’s plans for the ship. The order stated it had to be built so that it could be transported to an inland lake and that was all the information they had to go on.

‘They knew that the ship had to get there by land somehow,’ recalled Hermann Wendt, when interviewed for a German television documentary broadcast in 2001. His father (also called Hermann) had been a shipwright in the Meyer yard and had worked on the
Götzen
. ‘After a lot of thinking about the best way to do it, they built the ship in Papenburg, but all the parts were just screwed together. Everything was only provisionally fixed.’

Hermann Wendt senior, along with two other shipwrights from Meyer’s—Anton Ruter and Rudolf Tellmann—were requested to deliver the
Götzen
in person to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was proposed that the ship be broken down into its constituent parts for transport and that the shipwrights would reassemble it in Africa. They were to be well paid for their work, and as Wendt’s son observed: ‘They went away to become rich. The three of them wanted to make money.’

The shipwrights’ contracts of employment provided for large cash bonuses if the operation was successful and it is no coincidence that they were signed in early November 1913, the period of phony engagement, a little over nine months before the start of the First World War. The two great powers, Germany and Britain, were already in a breathless arms race in which naval power was a key factor. The
Graf von Götzen
would be a crucial part of the German war machine.

By the end of November, the loose-bolted ship was ready. Her wood-burning steam engine was fired up to see if it worked properly. Then the steel pieces of the hull and superstructure were unscrewed and taken apart. In total, the ship broke down into hundreds of thousands of individual pieces, each of which was given a code number. Packed in 5,000 numbered crates, they were sent by train to Hamburg and loaded aboard four freighters.

On 19 December 1913 the cargo ships
Admiral
and
Feldmarschall
left Hamburg for Dar es Salaam, German East Africa. They carried the hull, bulkheads, deck pillars and beams for the reconstruction of the
Götzen
in Africa—and the scaffolding upon which this would take place, once it had been erected in Kigoma harbour on the lake. They also carried all of the rivets, which on a project this size amounted to a considerable cargo in itself.

The chronology was sensible, the planning exact. This first consignment of newly forged steel would include ‘all the pieces necessary to set the ship in ribs’, according to a letter from the East African Company’s Berlin HQ to Dar es Salaam. The freighters
Windhoek
and
Adolf Woermann
left Hamburg early in the new year, carrying further cargoes. In the
Windhoek
were stowed the masts, boilers and engine. The third consignment, on the
Adolf Woermann
, consisted of all the interior fittings: the panelling for the cabins, the installations and furniture. It also carried the deck houses and the upper works—the capstans, winches and cranes—as well as the lifeboats and funnels.

Despite war being in the air, indeed being actively prepared for by Britain and Germany, all these parts and equipment were insured by British companies. At a premium of a half per cent for a total insurance of £25,000, twelve British companies around the world participated in the risk. Lloyds of London shouldered the bulk of it, taking on £8,500. The rest was spread out between different companies in chunks of less than £2,000. That was the figure for which the Canton Insurance Office and the firm of British Dominions were responsible. The Thames and Mersey Marine Insurance Company took on £1,000. The New Zealand Insurance Company took on £500. Their policies covered ‘all risks including fire, while under construction and⁄or fitting out…Also all risks of trial trips.’

At a total cost of £125 to the Germans in premiums, it must have seemed like a good deal. But Lloyds and its associates took no chances. The policies were also issued on the basis that the
Götzen
was ‘warranted free of capture, seizure and detention, and the consequences thereof or any attempt thereat, piracy excepted, and also from all consequences of hostilities or warlike operations whether before or after declaration of war’.

After a journey that had taken in the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, the shipwrights Wendt, Ruter and Tellmann arrived in Dar es Salaam in early 1914. German East Africa was a world away from Papenburg—a world about to be shaken to its core. In under six months war would be declared. Dar es Salaam means ‘Haven of Peace’ in Arabic. By the time the War was over, the three shipwrights would appreciate the irony of this. For the time being, they supervised the unloading and warehousing of the 5,000 crates containing the
Götzen
.

They also acclimatised to being in Africa. ‘At first they were scared,’ Rudolf Tellmann’s daughter explained in the 2001 documentary. ‘They came from here [Germany] and hadn’t been anywhere else in their lives, and suddenly they were surrounded by Africans. They were frightened. Later, though, my father said blacks were willing people, they would have done anything for them.’

No doubt the famous Klub Dar es Salaam, which served German beer, provided a refuge for the shipwrights. In truth, the capital of Tanzania was hardly ‘darkest Africa’ even then and they had no reason to be frightened. Once a small, mosquito-ridden village, Dar es Salaam had been transformed by the Germans into one of the most modern cities in East Africa, with new roads and docks and buildings. One of these was the Klub, founded in 1903 when Governor Götzen, returning from furlough, brought back with him 25,000 marks to found a social club. The money had been donated by a number of industrialists ‘bent on the expansion of German interests in their colonies generally’, as an early member of the Klub put it.

The Klub’s articles of association state that one in three members of the managing committee must be a ‘commercial’, i.e. not a military officer or government official. This was in order to diminish the ‘spirit of caste’: the rigid hierarchy that beset German (and British) colonial life. In his correspondence with the Imperial Government, Count Götzen stressed that this evil spirit did not exist, while accepting that the rule was very desirable. This was the social world in which the three shipbuilders from Papenburg found themselves. They may have glimpsed across the room the figure of Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the dashing commander of German troops in East Africa. But it is unlikely they would have been given an opportunity to talk to him.

Once African stevedores had loaded 5,000 crates on to a train in Dar es Salaam, the three shipwrights were ready to start the 700-mile journey to Lake Tanganyika. They had not gone far when a fire broke out in the wagons, damaging the rigging and bending the
Götzen
’s propeller shaft. ‘All risks, including fire,’ said their British insurers, but the Germans never got the chance to make a claim.

About 20 miles from Kigoma the railway tailed off, unfinished. The unwieldy crates were unloaded from the train. They would be carried on African shoulders the rest of the way. This part of the journey, which took almost three months and involved thousands of porters, was nothing less than a forced march. The porters were whipped when unwilling or unable to continue. The three shipwrights were carried on a litter, an experience that at home would be reserved for the Kaiser and few others. In German East, it was the norm for white men to travel like this.

Reaching the half-built port of Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the shipwrights found many of their countrymen there. It almost seemed like a provincial German town, except that most provincial German towns do not have a small palace. The Kaiserhof, as it was known, had been built in case Wilhelm II should come to visit his remotest colony.

The Africans servicing the new town lived in shacks on the fringes of Kigoma. Some of the original porters stayed, but most were laid off. New labour was hired, both African and European, for there were a lot of Germans hanging around Kigoma with nothing to do, colonial adventurers hoping to make their fortune.

Anton Ruter, the foreman from Papenburg, supervised the unloading of the crates. In a makeshift shipyard by the lake, the numbered boxes were counted, then unpacked. Each piece of sheet metal or other item that emerged was checked against the foreman’s original lists. Except for two crates of deck bolts left behind in Dar es Salaam, everything was there.

Painstakingly, the
Graf von Götzen
was rebuilt piece by piece. The pattern of the dress rehearsal on the Ems River, back in Germany, was followed to the letter. During the rebuilding the three shipwrights lived in huts next to the shipyard, each engaging his own personal staff. For all that, it was not a luxurious life. At one point they even ran out of shoes.

Around this time the
Götzen
was officially transferred from the German East African Railway Company to the military authorities; its value at this point is stated in German documents as 750,000 marks—approximately £36,765. The rise from the book cost of £20,000 was due to the cost of transport to and reconstruction at Kigoma.

War broke out in Europe on 4 August 1914. On 26 August von Lettow sent Kapitan zur See Gustav Zimmer to Lake Tanganyika to take charge of the German naval contingent: his fleet would consist of the
Kingani
, the
Hedwig
and the emerging star of the show, the
Grajvon Götzen
. By the end of 1914, ‘the ship that came by train’, as it was known, looked like a ship again. An armed ship: the two guns from the disabled
Königsberg
having been installed and tested.

On 1 June 1915 the
Götzen
was launched, making a 50-hour journey to Bismarckburg (now Kasanga), a German-held town at the south end of the lake. In his report on this trial run, Zimmer mentioned that the British-made steering mechanism connecting the wheel to the rudder was defective, causing the ship to roll and list, but this had been rectified. A related issue was the draught (how deep in the water she sat), which was too shallow. Zimmer recommended it be increased by adding two metres to the length of the funnel.

Eight months later, the day after the sinking of the
Hedwig
, the
Götzen
steamed past the British camp at Albertville looking for her sister ship. Hearing shouting, Dr Hansch-ell and Odebrecht left the breakfast table and went out on to the ‘quarterdeck’ in front of Spicer’s hut. They gazed at the giant steamer, the noise of her propellers clearly audible for many miles as they chomped the water.

The Iron Cross fluttered as the
Götzen
moved slowly along the horizon, spreading the foaming, twinfold ribbon of its wake over the surface of the lake. Her charcoal-burning furnace left a curlicue of black smoke above the blue water. On deck, next to bulkheads fore and aft, clusters of seamen stood round the big guns, watching and waiting for the order to fire. It was an oceangoing-sized ship, all screws and steel plate below, steel rigging and swinging derricks aloft. How had the Germans cast and hammered all that metal out here in the bush, then fitted it all together?

The doctor and Odebrecht watched as Wainwright and the crews of
Mimi
and
Fifi
ran down to the harbour (
Toutou
was still out of commission). They heard
Mimi
’s engines start up and saw smoke begin to rise out of
Fifi
’s funnel as Lament and Fundi stirred her banked-up fires. Meanwhile, Dudley’s whippet-thin figure ran to Spicer’s hut to tell him that battle must be joined again. The
Götzen
draw parallel with the camp, at which point Byron Farwell takes up the story: