2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (7 page)

The town was beautifully situated in the shadow of Table Mountain and since the War it had become a busy naval base. It was the headquarters of the British Admiral charged with keeping the crucial trade routes of the Indian Ocean free from German attack. Most of the German Navy was concentrated in the North Sea and the Pacific, but there was one serious threat in the African theatre. Further up the coast, past the South African city of Durban and the coast of neutral Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), lay German East Africa or Tanganyika as it was sometimes known.

Near the Tanganyikan capital Dar es Salaam, the speedy, three-funnelled German cruiser
Königsberg
was still hiding out in the swamps of the Rufiji delta. The ship’s exact position had been spied out by a South African ivory hunter, Major Pieter Pretorius, who knew the Rufiji well. Disguised as an Arab trader, he had paddled up one of the delta’s channels with an African assistant. Reaching the German cruiser, they boarded it with a basket of chickens for barter. As the exchange took place, they discovered that the ship’s torpedoes had been sent ashore. Having disembarked, Pretorius spent a month taking readings of the tide and sounding the channel depths so that the
Severn
and the
Mersey
would have a clear passage.

The next few days would see the
Königsberg
attacked by the flotilla of British boats which was assembling near Mafia Island—a kind of mini version of Zanzibar off the German-held coast, all palm trees and Arab traders. From Mafia Island, with the help of some aircraft, an attack would be launched into the mangrove-choked channels of the Rufiji River where the
Königsberg
had been hiding for months. The mouth of the river, once the largest waterway on earth, formed an enormous delta about 500 square miles in extent. With mangrove trees occupying the greater portion of the coastline and sand filling up the channels, the Rufiji could only properly be navigated by light-draught ships, such as were assembling at Mafia Island.

It was this operation that preoccupied the British Navy down in Cape Town and not the arrival of Spicer’s expedition. Consequently, there was nobody there to greet them after their 17-day, 6,000-mile voyage. Tyrer stepped down the gangplank, squinting through his monocle, followed by Tait and Mollison in their kilts and all the officers carrying cutlasses and wearing the special grey uniform of the Naval Africa Expedition. Spicer made them parade on the quay once more, as the African stevedores carried off the ship’s cargo.
Mimi
and
Toutou
were lifted off the
Llanstephen Castle
by crane, their mahogany hulls swaying in the freshening wind, the so-called ‘Cape Doctor’, which blew down from the north.

Spicer informed his officers that their hotel was on Adderley Street—a long, slightly rackety thoroughfare that stretched from the lower slopes of Table Mountain down towards the sea; nearby were some formal gardens laid out by the colony’s Dutch founders. Spicer then told ‘Tubby’ Eastwood, his round-faced confidential clerk, to find cheaper lodgings in the town for the ordinary sailors. He drew Dr Hanschell to one side. They would be staying at the Mount Nelson, the town’s most salubrious establishment.

Spicer and the doctor took a hansom cab up there from the docks. An African guard in a solar topi let them through the gate, above which the glorious mountain towered with its ‘table-cloth’ of cloud. The cab horse trotted up Mount Nelson’s cobbled driveway, which was lined on either side by majestic, thick-trunked Royal palms. Another guard in a sun-helmet opened the door of the cab and Dr Hanschell stepped out and stood before one of the grandest hotels he had ever seen. Surrounded by lush gardens and painted a creamy buff, it was a kind of Gothic folly: the last bastion of European sophistication on the southernmost tip of Africa.↓

≡ The hotel, which still exists, was painted pink in the 1920
s
, probably because this colour reminded the Mount Nelson’s Italian manager of the villas of his homeland.

This pillared palace had a history, too. A young journalist called Winston Churchill had stayed there while covering the Anglo-Boer War, which had ended a mere 13 years before. Were it not for the Gallipoli debacle, Churchill would have been Spicer’s ultimate superior, as head of the Navy.

This wasn’t the fallen minister’s only connection to the battle getting under way in East Africa. In 1914, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had sent a glowing message to the crew of two of the light-draught ships now assembled at Mafia Island, HMS
Severn
and HMS
Mersey
. These ‘unseaworthy steel boxes’ (originally intended as river barges for the Brazilian Navy) carried very little fuel, but earlier in the War they had played an important role supporting the Belgian Army off Calais and Boulogne. It was for this reason Churchill congratulated their crew, who, like Spicer’s men, were mainly volunteers and reservists. They would have joined the Gallipoli fleet, but, pulled by tugs from Britain to Malta, they had been too slow to get there in time. Then it was decided they should be sent to East Africa to resolve the
Königsberg
problem, so they were tugged a further 5,000 miles to Mafia Island and the Tanganyikan coast. As it turned out, their fate was intimately connected with that of
Mimi
and
Toutou
, which had a no less curious journey ahead of them.

Once off the
Llanstephen Castle
, the two motor boats were put on to goods trucks in a railway siding, ready for travel. The special cradles that had held them on the deck of the boat were simply lifted on to the flat beds of the railway wagons and bolted down again.

After a comfortable night at the Mount Nelson, Spicer spent the following morning making a series of official visits to navy and government officials in the town. He took with him as his aide-de-camp Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, complete with monocle and cutlass and canary-yellow hair. Meanwhile, Dr Hanschell and ‘Tubby’ Eastwood went to Lennard’s the pharmacist to supplement the expedition’s inadequate medical supplies.

Mr Lennard supplied zinc-lined boxes to keep the medicines safe from rain and insects. He also advised not putting all of the painkillers in one box, all the quinine in another, and so on. It was always better to split up the supplies, he said, in case a box went astray. The old chemist, who had fitted out many safaris in his time, also counselled taking plenty of laxative pills. These, he informed them, would be in constant demand from the African tribes they would encounter on the way.

While further preparations were made for their journey up to the Congo, Spicer had time to ponder a report he had received that John Lee, whose idea the whole thing had been, was a drunkard and had been ‘blabbing’ about their top-secret mission. In fact, many people knew about the expedition and the big-game hunter was probably innocent. However, the German commander Zimmer’s memoirs make clear that his intelligence about the arrival of the expedition came around the same time that Lee appeared in the Congo in late May.

Lee had worked hard blazing the trail up in the Congo, if his companion Magee is to be believed. Four years after the War he described Lee’s work in the
National Geographic
:

While preparations were being pushed in England, Lee and I left for Africa on 22 May 1915, going ahead of the main body to select a route across the African bush from the point where the boats would be taken off the train. It was important that a route be free as possible from hills, gorges, etc, yet close to water, should be chosen, as our boats were to be taken over this trail intact, each drawn by a traction engine.

Great difficulty was experienced in finding a suitable route over which to make our road, owing to the hilly nature of the country, as well as to the long stretches of marshland, the breeding ground of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But at last a route was selected and thousands of natives were recruited from the adjacent villages and set to work under white supervision literally to carve a passage through the bush.

Spicer refused to accept any of this as true, even though Lee had been sending back reports of his own. He had to investigate, so on Tuesday 6 July Spicer left Cape Town by train for Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe) to meet the British authorities there.

That same day the saga of the
Königsberg
came to a head in the east, on Tanganyika’s Indian Ocean coast. Since October 1914 the German ship had been skulking in one of the Rufiji’s channels and guns and troops had been put ashore for further protection. The British knew where she was: an officer had noticed that some coconut palms were moving above the tree level near the river mouth. They were tied to the
Königsberg
’s masthead as a primitive camouflage. But it was only with the arrival of shallow-bottomed boats like HMS
Severn
and HMS
Mersey
that she could be successfully attacked.

At about 5.30
AM
one of the
Königsberg
’s officers saw two shadowy ships appear through the morning mist. They looked ungainly craft, but they were armed and clearly meant business. The German inshore guns began to fire—47 mm field guns and small arms—but the
Severn
and the
Mersey
returned the compliment in heavier kind. A torpedo was launched against them from a tube on the shore, but it was blown up in the water by a shell from the
Severn
. Shortly afterwards, a British seaplane dropped bombs on the
Königsberg
—but missed, hitting some nearby mangrove trees. German troops were still firing on the
Severn
and the
Mersey
from the banks—a continuous hail of rifle and machine-gun fire—but the steel boxes made it through, the plates on their hulls rattling with a deafening din.

On board the
Königsberg
was Job Rosenthal, an Ober-leutnant zur See. Along with other members of the crew he was eating breakfast on deck when the British attacked at 6.40
AM
The alarm went up with the shout: ‘Clear ship for action!’
Severn
and
Mersey
’s guns began pounding them, their fire directed by spotter aircraft overhead. Smoke drifted across the water as the British fired shell after shell into the mangroves. They fell just short of the
Königsberg
, hitting a bank and throwing up a fountain of mud and bushes; or hitting the river and creating waterspouts. One of Rosenthal’s colleagues shot himself out of fear, but the others fought back fiercely, dodging the moaning shells as they came. The suicide, a former merchant navy officer called Jaeger, took some time to die.

In the first hour of the battle, four men from a British gun-crew on the
Mersey
were killed when a German shell hit their casement. However, at about 7.50
AM
a British shell hit the
Königsberg
, killing a sailor. Shortly afterwards another projectile tore off the foot of one of Rosenthal’s colleagues, Richard Wenig. The
Königsberg
fired back, its shells landing perilously close to the British ships.

The day grew hotter, as did the fighting, which continued for hours. By about 3.30
PM
the
Severn
and the
Mersey
had together fired 635 shells. The Germans kept returning fire, despite being hit four times. If a single German shell had struck one of the ungainly barges below the waterline they would have been done for. But none of the German salvos found its mark, except for the one which had killed the four men on the
Mersey
. At 3.45
PM
the British commander, seeing that his men were tiring and the guns overheating, decided to withdraw from the delta to the relative safety of the open sea. The
Königsberg
had been damaged and wasn’t going anywhere. Refuelled and rearmed, the
Severn
and the
Mersey
could return again soon enough.

Rosenthal and the other Germans on the ship knew this. After burying their four dead and sending away 35 wounded by paddle boat, they spent the next few days trying to repair the damaged ship, whose bunkers were beginning to fill with water. All combustible material was removed, along with any secret documents. Extra spotters were put up in the palm trees to watch for the return of the British. A telephone line was run from the lookouts to the ship. But the truth was that after eight hours of incessant firing, not to mention months of fever in the sweltering delta, German morale had been shot to pieces.

Away to the south-west, at a dinner table in Salisbury, skullduggery was afoot. Over the weekend of 10–11 July, Spicer stayed with General Edwards, the senior British officer in Rhodesia. Spicer persuaded the General that if the reports about Lee’s drunkenness and loose talk were true, the Belgians should be asked to arrest him. If this sounds like an over-reaction to what was, after all, an unconfirmed report, the answer may lie in the fact that the report came from Sub-Lieutenant Douglas Hope, the Spicer appointee sent to the Congo in Lee’s wake. Hope never even met with the big-game hunter and it seems likely that Spicer had planned all along to get Lee out of the picture. It was to be his expedition, not Lee’s.

At about noon that Sunday, 11 July, the
Severn
and the
Mersey
returned to the delta to finish the job. There could be no surprise this time. Two British spotter planes flew above the ship with impunity: it was the first time in the War that planes were used to pass back messages about the accuracy of shooting, though the practice of range-finding by other means was well established.

Alerted by her own spotters in trees and on hills, the
Königsberg
fired salvo after salvo as the two barges approached—and fired with great accuracy. But the seamen on board the barges had learned how to control their flat-bottomed craft. They kept slipping moorings and edging out of range of the German guns.

At about 12.30 a shell from the
Severn
hit one of the
Königsberg
’s three funnels. It made a fearsome sound as it was shot away, the shell piercing the funnel casing and exploding. Up above, a British spotter biplane piloted by Flight Lieutenant John Cull swooped over, taking considerable small-arms fire. Cull’s observer, Flight Sub-Lieutenant Arnold, radioed the
Severn
and told her the shot was on target. The British fired more rounds and seven hits were recorded in the next ten minutes.