A Short History of the Great WarPollard, A. F. (Albert Frederick)
History
A Short History of the Great War
Pollard, A. F. (Albert Frederick)
World War, 1914-1918
strike with the second division from Moschi towards Kondoa Irangi and
thence at the German central railway, while the first and third
cleared the Pare and Usambara mountains and the coast, and then
marched on Handeni and threatened the central railway on a parallel
line to Van Deventer's attack. Van Deventer's second division marched
with almost incredible speed. He started from Aruscha on 1 April, and
by the 19th had driven the Germans from Kondoa Irangi, more than a
hundred miles away. In May and June the other divisions cleared the
Pave and Usambara mountains, reached Handeni and Kangata, and with
naval assistance occupied Tanga, Pangani, Sadani Bay, and Bagamoyo in
July and August almost without opposition. Von Lettow-Vorbeck had
transferred the bulk of his troops south and then westwards up the
central railway to bar Van Deventer's progress; and in the process he
had been forced to abandon the north-eastern quarter of the colony. No
small part of the north-western province of Ruanda had been lost as
well: the Belgians had occupied Kigali and the British had driven the
Germans from their shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
The rapidity and divergence of these attacks, which were admirably
timed, distracted Von Lettow-Vorbeck's strategy, and in spite of his
interior lines he was unable to offer successful resistance. No sooner
did he send troops to bar Smuts' advance from Kangata into the Nguru
hills than Van Deventer struck west, south, and south-east from Kondoa
Irangi. To the west he took Singida, thus getting behind the Germans
on Lake Tanganyika; to the south and south-east he got astride the
central railway by 14 July and pushed down it eastwards to Kilossa,
which he reached on 22 August. He was now almost due south the Nguru
hills, whence Smuts, attacking from the north, had driven the Germans
before the middle of August. This converging advance made Mrogoro the
only line of retreat, and Smuts planned a complicated outflanking
movement to intercept it. They escaped by a track unknown to our
forces on the 26th, and prepared to stand south of the central railway
in the Ulunguru hills. Smuts was too quick for them, but they repelled
a badly-timed attack at Kissaki on 6 September. Their retreat had,
however, made the coast untenable: on 3 September the capital
Dar-es-Salaam surrendered, and all the remaining ports before the end
of the month. Van Deventer, too, had pressed south to the Ruaha on the
10th, the Belgians occupied Tabora on the 19th, and General Northey,
advancing from Nyasa in the south-west, had reached Iringa before the
end of August, while some Portuguese troops crossed the Rovuma river,
the frontier between German East Africa and Mozambique, and made a
pretence of marching north. By the end of September the great German
colony had been conquered save for the unhealthy south-eastern corner,
where only the Mahenge plateau provided a decent habitation for white
troops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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