The Turkish armies were in effect destroyed, for on the eastern side of Jordan the Arab cavalry of the Emir Feisul had turned the line of retreat there, and had cut the Hejaz railway running to Damascus. In less than a week the Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies were wiped out, and 10,000 of the Fourth Army surrendered at Rabboth Amman (29th Sept.). Haifa and Acre on the coast fell as fast as the Imperial cavalry could reach them. Damascus was entered by the Australians on 1st Oct. Beirut fell a few days later, and by the end of October General Allenby had reached Aleppo. The Turkish Cabinet immediately entered into negotiations, Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha having been replaced. An armistice was signed on 30th Oct. at Mudros, and Turkey was out of the war. It may be added that Talaat Pasha, who was responsible for the massacres of the Armenians, was killed in Berlin by an Armenian student in 1921.
The War in Germany's Colonies
Within a few weeks of the outbreak of hostilities the war had been carried to all the scattered possessions of Germany in Africa, the Pacific, and the Far East. Among the first to fall were German Samoa (occupied by the New Zealand troops on 29th Aug.); the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and German New Guinea (occupied by the Australians on 11th-13th Sept.); and the more northerly islands of the Pacific, surrendered at the beginning of October to a Japanese squadron. These last were at once handed over by Japan to Australia. Japan, faithful to her alliance with Great Britain, had declared war against Germany on 23rd Aug., and attacked the formidable German post of Kiao-Chau, 'the key to Northern China', which had been seized by Germany on the flimsiest pretext in 1898. Japan invested Kiao-Chau—garrisoned by 6000 well-armed men, with powerful defences—with a force of 23,000 troops under General Kamio, supported by a small British contingent of South Wales Borderers and Sikhs under General Bernardiston. After a six weeks' siege, and a preliminary bombardment preparatory to launching a final assault, the garrison capitulated (7th Nov.).[[3]]
The remainder of Germany's colonies were in
Africa, where the campaigns resulting in their conquest varied from a few weeks to the whole length of the war. The shortest was in Togoland, which surrendered unconditionally to a Franco-British force under Colonel Bryant on 27th Aug., 1914, after a brisk little campaign lasting just three weeks. The Cameroons, larger than the Fatherland, took much longer to subdue, and the operations were of a more arduous nature. A false start was made from Nigeria with insufficient forces, which met with disaster towards the end of August. A more adequate expedition was then organized under General C. M. Dobell, in co-operation with French forces under General Aymerich. Duala, the capital, was occupied on 27th Sept., but it was only after desultory fighting for a year and a half that the Germans, realizing the hopelessness of further resistance, left the colony to its fate by retreating into the neighbouring Spanish territory of Rio Muni.
The campaign in German South-West Africa was held up at first by the revolt in South Africa, which had to be crushed before General Botha was free to give his undivided attention to the task which he had offered to undertake in proof of the Union's loyalty. A preliminary move had been made in September by the occupation of the coastal harbours, Luderitz Bay and Swakopmund, from which the Germans retired to concentrate in Windhoek, their capital inland. A 'regrettable incident' occurred on 26th Sept., 1914, when a British patrol was attacked at Sandfontein and a small relief force compelled to surrender. This was followed by news of the revolt of Maritz, who had been partly responsible for the reverse at Sandfontein; and the small civil war which followed in South Africa, though nipped in the bud by the sterling loyalty of most South Africans, served to postpone the conquest of German South-West Africa until the following year.
When the campaign began in earnest in the spring of 1915, the whole south-eastern part of the German colony had already been cleared by Colonel van Deventer, whose desert march with three separate columns in these preliminary operations was one of the outstanding achievements of the campaign. In the great converging march which followed, led in the south by General Smuts, and in the north by General Botha, with columns consisting largely of mounted burghers from the Transvaal and Orange Free State, the Germans were outfought and outmanœuvred throughout. The advance began on 27th April, and by 5th May Botha, building a light railway with supplies behind him, entered Karibib without opposition, and Windhoek a week later, the Germans, 5000 strong but greatly outnumbered, withdrawing the bulk of their forces to the north. Twice they proposed an armistice, offering terms, but the only terms that Botha would agree to implied unconditional surrender. Having rested and refitted his men after this trying trek across country from Swakopmund, he proceeded to enforce these terms by a series of remarkable marching feats, with his own columns in the centre and those of Brits and Myburgh to left and right respectively, starting on 18th June. In less than a week Botha's force had covered 100 miles and captured Otyiwarango; on 1st July, after a brief rest, his infantry were in touch with the enemy's main force, entrenched from Otavi to Tsumeb, with Brits and Myburgh sweeping round on either side. On 8th July all resistance collapsed with the total surrender of the Germans under Colonel Franks, the military commandant. The whole campaign in South-West Africa did not cost us more than 140 lives, and total casualties amounting to 1200.
The conquest of German East Africa was a very different affair. It was opposed by a force which, at its maximum, could muster 25,000 well-drilled troops—2000 of them Europeans—with 60 guns and machine-guns, and sufficient supplies of ammunition; the whole commanded by von Lettow-Vorbeck, a leader of resource and inflexible determination. When, at the outbreak of war, the British cruisers Astræa and Pegasus bombarded Dar-es-Salaam and destroyed the wireless station, the Germans retaliated by crippling the Pegasus, then lying at Mombasa, with their fast cruiser Königsberg, which had fled to East Africa after escaping the fate of the rest of von Spee's squadron off the Falkland Islands. They also raided the Uganda railway, occupied Taveta on the British East African border, and threatened an advance on Mombasa along the coast. This was checked by the arrival of British reinforcements, naval and military, the naval units of which forced the Königsberg to seek the shelter of the Rufigi River, where, as already stated, she was afterwards destroyed.
A second expeditionary force under General Aitken was brought from India in the closing months of the year, and ordered to land at the northern German port of Tanga, with the object of cutting off the enemy troops operating on the British border. The magnitude of the task had been gravely under-estimated. Landing on 4th Nov. in difficult bush country—familiar enough to the defenders, but an impenetrable maze to the landing force—the attempt ended in disaster, costing some 800 casualties before the expedition re-embarked. Another blow was dealt by von Lettow-Vorbeck early in 1915 (19th Jan.) when he recaptured Jassin, gallantly held to the last by Indian troops under Colonel Ragbir Singh; but in the same month he lost
one of his chief ports on Victoria Nyanza; in the following May other British forces captured Sphinxhaven after an action by armed steamers; and a blockade was declared of the German East African coast, where the Island of Mafia, off the mouth of the Rufigi River, was also seized. Several blockade-runners succeeded in getting through to von Lettow-Vorbeck with much-needed supplies of ammunition; and with Britain's hands full to overflowing with other campaigns, the main German forces in East Africa had perforce to be left until Botha had completed the conquest of South-West Africa, and the Union was free to lend a hand in expelling the Germans from the last and most valuable of their colonies.