Battle of Tanga

Battle of Tanga

Part of: First World War

Battle painting by Martin Frost

date	November 2. bis 4. November 1914
place	At Tanga , German East Africa (now Tanzania )
output	German victory

Parties to the conflict
German Empire German East Africa	United Kingdom  British India
Commander
Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck	Arthur Aitken
Troop strength
1,100 soldiers	8,000 soldiers
losses
69 dead 81 wounded	800 dead 500 wounded

First World War outside Europe

The Battle of Tanga was a military conflict between Great Britain and the German Empire during the First World War . It took place between November 2nd and 4th, 1914 near the East African port city of Tanga (now in Tanzania ).

background

The state of war between Germany and Great Britain had existed since the beginning of August and, despite the neutrality provisions of the Congo Act, extended to the colonies. The hostilities between the colonial forces in Kenya and German East Africa were limited to minor border battles, as both sides were militarily weak. Shock troops from the protection force for German East Africa repeatedly pushed as far as the Uganda railway line and destroyed the tracks. On August 15, 1914, German forces occupied the Kenyan border town of Taveta .

The British reacted to this by bringing in reinforcements from India . As of September 1, 4,000 Indian soldiers arrived in Mombasa under the command of General James Marshall Stewart . In October, another 8,000 men were transferred to East Africa by ship under Major General Arthur Aitken . The plan was to crush the German forces in the north of the German colony with a pincer movement. Stewart was supposed to penetrate from Kilimanjaro , while Aitken was supposed to form a bridgehead in Tanga from the sea and from there to carry out the other part of the pincer movement.

The battle

In the run-up to the British landing, the protected cruiser HMS Fox reached the port of Tanga. Its commander, FW Cauldfield, went ashore to terminate a previously concluded ceasefire agreement, where he met the District Administrator Auracher. Under the pretext of having to consult higher superiors, Auracher hurriedly left Tanga and informed the commandant of the protection force, Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck , of the imminent landing. In addition, he suggested to Cauldfield that the harbor was mined and thus caused the Anglo-Indian Corps, led by General Arthur Aitken , to go ashore in a swampy mangrove area about three miles away from Tanga. Aitken failed to clear up the area.

Postcard from Tanga, 1914

The troops consisted of the British North Lancashire Regiment and eight Indian regiments (Kashmir Rifles), a total of 8,000 men. The Indian regiments, however, were poorly trained reserve units. Their condition and morale were also reduced by the fact that they had to spend a full 16 days on the ships before Bombay due to delays in departure and were not allowed to go ashore on arrival in Mombasa for reasons of confidentiality. At the time of the landing in Tanga, the British were facing only a few platoons of the German protection force . Some associations from the interior of the country as well as the voluntary rifle corps from Usambara rushed to the aid of the German defenders until evening. The majority of the German troops with 950 soldiers under Lettow-Vorbeck were moved by train from the Neu Moschi railway station from the northern border of the German colony over 350 kilometers to Tanga and reached the city in the night of November 4th.

The British battalion of Loyal North Lancashire penetrated Tanga on the afternoon of November 4th and pushed the protection force back. In contrast, the Indian troops on the left wing advanced in an uncoordinated manner in unclear terrain.

Dead Indian soldiers on the beach at Tanga

At 4 p.m. Lettow-Vorbeck, who commanded the German troops in the front line, ordered the 16th field company to attack the unsecured flank of the left wing of the Indian troops with three machine guns. The Askari , trained in handling machine guns, killed and wounded numerous Indian soldiers on the left wing, which at the time of the attack was in practically uncovered terrain. In the panic that followed, the entire left wing fled and in the ensuing chaos, no more defensive lines could be built. At 6 p.m. the right wing also gave up its positions and retreated to the coast. The British were also also very aggressive bees harassed whose poles were located near the British positions, so that the battle in the English language as a "battle of the bees" (dt .: "Bees Battle" ) has been known.

The German company commanders were satisfied with the enemy’s retreat and did not pursue him. Apparently most of the German officers did not yet trust the efficiency of their black Askaris. Lettow-Vorbeck rebuked the failure to pursue the opponent in retrospect. On November 5, both sides agreed a truce to rescue and care for the wounded and to bury the dead. The wounded captured British officers were handed over to the British troops. These officers only had to give their word of honor not to fight against German troops any more. During the armistice, the British were able to embark their troops undisturbed, but large quantities of weapons, ammunition and equipment had to be left behind. The Battle of Tanga had become "one of the most notable failures in British military history" according to official British history of the First World War.

The British had 800 killed, 500 wounded and 250 missing. The German losses amounted to 69 men, including 54 Askari. 16 British machine guns , 600,000 rounds of ammunition and extensive other equipment were captured by the Germans.

The skillful leadership by Lettow-Vorbeck and the good training and discipline of the Askari were decisive for the victory.

Aftermath

In early November, General Steward's brigade was also repulsed at Longido on Kilimanjaro.

A subsequent attempt by the British to secure their borderland with the occupation of Jassini on the border river Umba ended in January 1915 with another defeat in the Battle of Jassini . This series of setbacks led to the decision to build up a significant superiority in Kenya with South African troops. This gave the German colony - apart from the ongoing border fighting and the fighting on the lakes - a break until the start of the allied major offensive in 1916.

General Aitken was recalled to England, demoted to colonel and retired on half pay.

Culture of remembrance

In memory of the Battle of Tanga, streets in various German cities were named after Tanga, for example in Berlin ( 1927 ), Munich (1933), Cologne (1935), Oldenburg (1936), where the federal headquarters of " Miss Germany " in Tangastraße resides, Hamburg (1937 at the Estorff barracks , renamed Kelloggstraße and Wilsonstraße in 1947 ) and Gelsenkirchen (1939). Many of these street names date from 1933 to 1945 and belong in the context of plans by the National Socialists to reclaim the German colonies in Africa. In 1939, the German Navy put a speedboat escort named Tanga into service.

Cinematic implementation

In the second episode of the ZDF three-part series Africa, mon amour (first broadcast in 2007), the battle of Tanga is a highlight.

See also

• First World War outside Europe
• Protection force for German East Africa

literature

• Ross Anderson: The battle of Tanga 1914. Tempus, Stroud et al. a. 2002, ISBN 0-7524-2349-5 .
• Edwin Palmer Hoyt: Guerrilla. Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany's East African Empire. Macmillan et al. a., New York 1981, ISBN 0-02-555210-4 .
• Mark Godefroy: The Battle of Tanga Bay . In: The Army Doctrine and Training Bulletin. Vol. 3, No. 3, autumn 2000 (PDF file; 337 kB).
• Eckard Michels : "The hero of German East Africa" ​​- Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. A Prussian colonial officer. Schöningh, Paderborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-76370-9 .
• Michael Pesek : The end of a colonial empire. Frankfurt a. M./New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-593-39184-7
• Geoffrey Regan: Fools, Nulpen, Niedermacher. zu Klampen, Lüneburg 1998, ISBN 3-924245-66-5 , p. 10ff.

Web links

Commons : Battle of Tanga  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Information in the Munich city portal , accessed in 2019.
2. ↑ Information in Nippes-Wiki , accessed 2019.
3. ↑ Dietmar von Reeken , Malte Thießen, Claas Neumann, Peter Rassek, Ingo Harms ( University of Osnabrück ): Scientific study of the street names of the city of Oldenburg (PDF; 2.2 MB). Publicly made available on October 26, 2013 by the City of Oldenburg, pp. 277, 280.
4. ↑ Short tribute to Sankara. In: Die Tageszeitung , January 4, 2011, accessed on December 15, 2019.
5. ↑ Jon Knolle: About dry rabbits and lingerie. In: Nordwest-Zeitung , September 15, 2018, accessed on December 15, 2019.
6. ^ Judith Luig: The man from Tangastraße. In: Die Welt , September 15, 2013, accessed on December 15, 2019.
7. ^ Lettow-Vorbeck barracks . Information in the Veteranenwiki of Panzergrenadierbrigade 17 , retrieved in 2019.
8. ↑ AB-SEK-I- Strasseennamen -Projekt (PDF; 716 KB), according to information from afrika-hamburg.de, as of July 7, 2017, accessed in 2019.
9. ↑ state archive Hamburg , inventory signature 422-8 Property Office Wandsbek, 1871-1984 (stock) , retrieval of 2019.
10. ↑ Information in the Heimatwiki Gelsenkirchener Histories , accessed in 2019.
11. ↑ Rita Bake : A Memory of the City. Volume 1 (PDF; 8.1 MB). State Center for Civic Education Hamburg , Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-929728-90-3 , p. 137.