Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (27 page)

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Von Lettow’s offensive was launched when he crossed the Rovuma River that marked the border between German East Africa and Portugal’s Mozambique colony with the small number of fighters he still had left. At Ngomano they came upon a detachment of about fifteen hundred Portuguese troops, stationed there at British urging to act as a blocking force against his movements. Instead of bypassing them in the bush, von Lettow decided to attack in the hope he would gain supplies and enough ammunition to restock his force. He was right, as the British had been landing huge amounts of arms to strengthen the Portuguese. But what the British could not give them was the ability to fight off von Lettow’s
SCHUTZTRUPPE
which, in his words, was so tired, hungry, and irritated by the long pursuit that, at this point they acted toward the enemy with “absolute callousness.”
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This phrasing was somewhat euphemistic, as what really happened at Ngomano came closer to a massacre. Von Lettow restored order only with great difficulty. The situation was not dissimilar to the one Nathan Bedford Forrest faced at Fort Pillow during the American Civil War.

Resupplied with arms, food, and medicine, von Lettow continued the offensive in Mozambique, where the native population hated the Portuguese and often welcomed him and his forces, reprovisioning them regularly. Thus von Lettow’s Allied pursuers found themselves arriving at places he had just left—where the people were in no position to resupply them, for they had already given all they could to the Germans. So it went throughout much of 1918. Eventually the noose began to tighten on the
SCHUTZTRUPPE
once more, and this was the moment von Lettow chose to shift his offensive back northward into German East Africa. From there he planned also to menace northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Once again, just as the British thought the campaign was ending, von Lettow brought it back to life.

Von Lettow kept up the pressure right until the end of the war in November 1918. When the British finally convinced him that the peace had really come, it turned out that the force to which he “surrendered” was near-starving, so he shared with them supplies he had just plundered from a British depot. At that moment, roughly 150,000 Allied troops were chasing him, supported by hundreds of thousands more porters, as most of the campaign was fought far from roads and railheads.

Overall von Lettow’s campaign had cost the Allies combat casualties well above twenty thousand, and more than a hundred thousand of their porters died out of the million that had been mustered to the cause. Thus, in addition to the great diversion of military forces, the campaign against von Lettow had caused a massive manpower shortage in several of the colonies, all of whose economic output suffered dramatically from this loss. As Edward Paice has observed, as early as August 1917 “the Acting governor of British East Africa had to inform van Deventer that the country’s manpower resources were exhausted.”
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Not all this exhaustion came from chasing the
SCHUTZTRUPPE
, as there was also a lively war for quite some time on Lake Tanganyika, where the Germans enjoyed the initial advantage. To offset this, the British went to staggering lengths to fabricate vessels appropriate for lake fighting, then to haul them up over mountains and through jungles, building some two hundred bridges along the way.
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The labor required to do all this was staggering—far greater than the struggles of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in the film version of C. S. Forester’s novel about this aspect of the war,
THE AFRICAN QUEEN
.

Beyond the material drain he imposed on the Allies, perhaps von Lettow’s greatest service was in shoring up morale in Germany, where he was a popular hero to such a degree as would not be seen again until Field Marshal Erwin Rommel emerged during World War II. Like von Lettow, Rommel too had an appeal that crossed the lines of war. Both men were much admired by their enemies.

Upon his return to Germany early in 1919, von Lettow was placed in command of the
FREIKORPS
militia that was used to suppress the Spartacist revolt, a Communist-inspired uprising. In this he succeeded admirably; but what followed in 1920 were less felicitous developments. Von Lettow became involved with a plot to install a military regime in Germany, the so-called Kapp
PUTSCH
, named after the radical journalist who fomented this attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. The
PUTSCH
failed, due in large part to the unwillingness of many in the
FREIKORPS
to support it and the willingness of vast numbers of ordinary Germans to risk their lives protesting it.

In the wake of the Kapp episode, von Lettow, now fifty, retired from the army. He went on to serve briefly in the legislature but soon retired from public life to spend more time with his family. After the war he had married the woman to whom he had been engaged in August 1914, and who had waited four years for his return. Now he devoted himself to raising his two sons and his daughter. When the Nazis came to power—his old nemesis, Governor Schnee, was a rabid fascist—von Lettow was invited to become the German ambassador to Britain. He declined the offer and was soon under Nazi surveillance. Nothing came of it, as he was still far too respected a figure to mistreat.

Von Lettow’s sons went on to serve their country during World War II. Both were killed. His daughter survived. He lived on as well, into his nineties, along the way developing a friendship with Smuts and rekindling his acquaintanceship with Isak Dinesen. He never forgot his remarkable campaign in East Africa, nor his beloved Askaris, devoting much time and effort to seeing that they received proper pensions. Upon von Lettow’s death in 1964, the Bundestag determined to pay the IOUs he had given his Askaris nearly half a century earlier. They sent a banker to find and pay the survivors. As Byron Farwell recounts: “The canny banker, an old soldier himself, hit upon an infallible identification. He gave each applicant a broom and put him through the manual of arms. No Askari ever forgot the German words of command or the drill.”
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Perhaps this was the greatest tribute of all.

EMIR DYNAMITE:
T. E. LAWRENCE

© Bettmann/Corbis

The idea of sending off a handful of one’s own soldiers to train, guide, and sometimes lead far off but friendly forces into battle is both relatively new and quite old. This advisory concept lies at the heart of the U.S. Army Special Forces, which were created in the early 1950s to guide guerrilla groups fighting behind the lines in the wake of an envisioned Soviet invasion of Western Europe. That war never came, but the Green Berets were soon employed in leading Montagnard, Meo, and Hmong tribesmen in tip-and-run fighting against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army. More recently Special Forces have played pivotal roles in the terror war, notably in working with Afghan and Iraqi tribes in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates. But the roots of this particular approach to military affairs go far back, at least as far as the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.), when the Spartans sent an adviser named Gylippus to Sicily to help the Syracusans defeat a large Athenian expeditionary force. His success in turning that campaign around spoke—and still speaks—to the powerful possibility of achieving major results with a minimal investment in resources and manpower.

Yet for all the obvious value of seeking this sort of military “leverage,” there have been few notable instances of the practice in conflicts during the more than two millennia that have passed between the fight against the Athenians and the campaigns against al Qaeda. In his biography of Nicias, the general whom Gylippus defeated, Plutarch noted that the Spartan adviser “showed what it is to be a man of experience; for with the same arms, the same horses, and on the same spot of ground, only employing them otherwise [than the Syracusans had], he overcame the Athenians.”
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Similarly, in the fall of 2001 commanders of just eleven U.S. Special Forces “A-teams” led the very same Northern Alliance fighters who had recently lost 95 percent of Afghan territory to the Taliban and al Qaeda to a resounding victory over them.
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But where are the military advisers between Gylippus and the Special Forces groups?

For many long centuries there were precious few. The phenomenon of military advisory begins to reemerge from its dormancy only after the Enlightenment. A case can be made that the Frenchmen who goaded some of the Native American tribes to mount terror raids on English settlements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and who sometimes accompanied them—were acting as advisers. But the fact is that the Indians had little need of advice from the French on waging wilderness warfare. What they received was therefore not military but rather hortatory in nature.

Denis Davydov, who suggested mounting a behind-the-lines campaign of deep strikes against Napoleon’s supply lines in Russia, looks a bit more like an adviser in that he offered guidance to villagers looking to resist the French. But after Davydov another gap opens up, as it is a full century from his field operations to those of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck who, with a very small number of Germans, led a force of Africans in a protracted guerrilla war against the British.

Interestingly, another adviser-driven irregular campaign was going on at the same time as von Lettow’s: the Arab Revolt against the repressive rule of the Ottoman Turks. But where the great German guerrilla fighter’s goal was to defend one of his kaiser’s best overseas colonies, the Allied strategic aim in southwest Asia was to foment a rebellion among the Arabs that would help dismantle the Ottoman Empire. In pursuit of this desired end, the British fielded conventional armies that operated out of Egypt and Mesopotamia; but they also supported the rising of the Arab tribes in their own right, which the French did as well. Thus a kind of “third front” opened up against the Turks.

It was a much needed one, as Turkish forces—themselves the beneficiaries of a German advisory mission as well as much German war matériel—fought like lions. First, at Gallipoli, they defeated an allied amphibious invasion, the brainchild of Winston Churchill, in furious fighting that lasted from April 1915 to January 1916. Next the Turks completely stymied the advance of British forces coming out of Egypt. Then in Mesopotamia, where the British were trying to advance to the northwest, the Turks trapped and captured an expedition of about ten thousand British troops at Kut—just four months after Gallipoli.

Only the Arabs under Sherif Husein seemed to be getting any traction against the Turks in the summer of 1916, capturing Mecca from them and later, with help from the Royal Navy, the ports of Jeddah and Yenbo. But in October the Arabs suffered a bloody repulse in their attempt to liberate Medina, and it seemed that the Turks were preparing to resume the offensive in this theater.

At this point, late in 1916, a young British intelligence officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence—just recently turned twenty-eight, but with solid Arabic language skills and much experience with Middle Eastern archaeological digs—devised a concept of operations that, in his view, offered great promise. His basic idea was to wage irregular warfare, avoiding pitched battles with the Turks and striking at their many vulnerable points along the eight hundred mile long railroad line between Medina and Damascus.

Lawrence’s proximate military goal was to mount continual raids that would make it difficult—but not so difficult as to prompt a retreat—for the Turks to supply their large force in Medina. He believed that the Arab advantage in camel-based mobility would force the Turks to disperse ever more forces along the extensive railroad line, creating a whole range of easy targets for the tribesmen. And, given the vast distances involved, he knew there would never be enough enemy troops to constrain Arab movements and protect all that needed protecting. The Arab army would be “a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas.”
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The Arabs’ ease of movement aside, there was also the matter of munitions favorable to irregular fighting becoming more available, in particular Alfred Nobel’s dynamite. Much more stable—thus more usable in the field—than nitroglycerin, this high explosive posed the prospect that even quite small raiding teams could possess great destructive power. One of the first things Lawrence learned to do, on his journey from intelligence analyst to military adviser, was to blow things up. He proved an especially apt pupil, so much so that during the course of the campaign he would personally dynamite more than twenty trains. The Arabs came to call him “Emir Dynamite.”
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