The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

Alongside the men, animals and, consequently, transport were powerfully afflicted. Throughout East Africa men and animals continually passed through belts of tsetse fly; as a rule the men managed to avoid infection with sleeping sickness, but mules and horses did not, and they died by the thousands, delaying transport and clogging the roads with their rotting bodies.

Eventually, animal sickness became so widespread and so problematic that it seriously disrupted supply, particularly the supply of food and medicine, and this in turn caused the general health of the army to deteriorate further. By war’s end, animals were being replaced by porters, and there was fairly general agreement that trying to use beasts for tropical transport had been a mistake.

In Burma both Wingate and Merrill placed heavy emphasis on animal transport, and while the animals were prized and even loved, the rigours of the tropical climate exacted a staggering toll. Injury, the enemy, and finally disease felled the mules right and left. Charles Ogburn Jr, for example, recalled that leeches plagued Galahad’s mules more consistently than Galahad’s men: ‘Their fetlocks were generally red and slimy with blood. In addition, eggs deposited in their lesions by a kind of fly hatched out into screw worms.’

As Wingate and Merrill’s campaigns wore on, more and more animals went down, and with each animal’s death the fighting efficiency of its parent unit was reduced.

Too frequently, the impact of raw nature manifesting itself through disease was brought on by, or compounded through, serious problems with the food supply. And even when sickness was not an immediate result, obtaining food adequate to keep up one’s strength remained a consistent difficulty through both campaigns. Owing to breakdowns and slowdowns in motor and animal transport, Francis Brett Young’s narrative of the march down the Pangani is the record of a march made continually on half rations.

Frank J. Magee RNVR, helping in 1915 to drag the gunboats Mimi and Tou-Tou north from South Africa so as to sweep the Germans from Lake Tanganyika, reports having to hunt frequently in order to keep up the meat supply and having to shoot crocodiles in order to provide food for the expedition’s porters.

Captain Shorthose often had to live off the country, and some of the most difficult fighting that he saw came in 1917 when he was hard pressed for food and fighting the Germans for the possession of native grain fields.

In 1916 Deneys Reitz reports several times being hungry: ‘Meanwhile we were living under famine conditions. There was little or no game in the forest, nor any cattle in this tsetse-haunted region [near Kissaki], and the millet fields lay mostly reaped… and for the next few weeks we lived on very spare diet.’

Buchanan, who fought against food shortages daily, eventually purchased a hen so as to guarantee himself a steady supply of eggs; the system worked well for several months until the hen ‘was stolen by someone whose hunger overcame his scruples’.

Arnold Weinholt recalled some of his porters going so far as to eat some ‘awful-looking red and yellow toadstools’ to satisfy their hunger; the result was not fatal, but it came close.

For the Germans in East Africa, conditions were not much better, but resourceful improvisation often came to their aid. Of necessity, General von Lettow-Vorbeck had to rely on carriers for his transport, so in most cases this kept his food supplies abreast of his army. Invariably, von Lettow reports that he foraged, the supreme guerrilla tactician living off the land. Mtama, a kind of millet, was pounded into a native flour, which, when mixed with stocks of European flour, made excellent bread, the staple of the askari’s diet.

Watching flocks of birds gave von Lettow the idea that maize crops could be harvested and used before they were ripe, experiment soon showing him that the grain could be artificially dried before being made into very good meal.

Fruits were collected by primitive gathering techniques in the bush, water was often collected from inside coconuts and bamboo, and meat was derived from both hunting and native herds. Finally, hippos were used as a source of fat: ‘The quantity varies: a well-fed beast provides two bucketfuls,’

providing that an expert was present who knew where to find it. These measures notwithstanding, food remained a persistent problem for the Germans, and on 27 November 1917, while Smuts’s famous scout, Major P. J. Pretorius, watched from the top of a gorge, Captain Tafel marched to within one mile of von Lettow’s approaching column before turning away and altogether missing their intended rendezvous. On the following day, ignorant of the fact that he had come so close, near starvation but unable to replenish his stocks of food, Tafel surrendered ‘3,400 askaris, nineteen officers, a hundred Europeans, and a thousand porters.’

In Burma, for the men engaged, food often proved as much of a problem as it had been in East Africa, and the lack of it proved equally debilitating. During Wingate’s first raid, David Halley recalled how the Burma Riflemen of his intelligence section helped the regulars to supplement their diet by catching small sprat-like fish with their mosquito nets: ‘Then they impaled five or six of them on a bamboo splinter, stuck their splinters into the ground beside a fire, turned it round once or twice, and they were ready for eating,’ bones and all.

Later, during the walkout, when his own party faced starvation, Halley attempted to quell his hunger by swallowing a small piece of soap, while, ‘Our two Burmese plucked little bamboo shoots and the tenderest and greenest pieces of grass they could find and made themselves a sort of stew.’