First World War: Bizarre is the right word to describe this entertaining account of warfare on the miniature scale of Tweedledum and Tweedledee's. On the offbeat fringe of the first World War, the preparations for the battle to control east Africa's inland sea, Lake Tanganyika, were even more bizarre than the battle itself.
A British leader with a fondness for being tattooed and wearing a skirt assembled a small, higgledy-piggledy expeditionary force to overcome immense logistical difficulties and achieve an astonishing, heroic victory. Truth really can be weirder than fiction, and Giles Foden presents the extraordinary details of this true story very well indeed, while somehow managing to keep a straight face.
Lake Tanganyika measures 420 miles from north to south, with an average width of 31 miles, "large enough", Foden points out, "to attract the attention of the moon and produce tides". It was a 13,000-square-mile barrier between British and Belgian colonial territories west of the lake and German-held territory to the east. Though Allied chiefs in Europe paid scant attention to this African sideshow, apparently there was a vague anxiety in London that the Germans, if unchecked, might send countless thousands of African conscripts to serve as cannon fodder on the Western Front, though it is hard to imagine how such a mass movement could have been accomplished.
The Tanganyikan problem was that the Germans had armed steamers patrolling the lake but Britain had nothing there at all. However, an English big-game hunter who knew Tanganyika, one John Lee, applied to the Admiralty in 1915 to suggest a plan. In summary, as Foden explains, "if two British motor boats could be sent to South Africa, up the railway to the Belgian Congo, and dragged through mountains and bush to the lake, they could then sink or disable" the German ships. "Taking control of Lake Tanganyika in this manner would allow Belgian forces from the Congo and British forces from Kenya and Northern Rhodesia to drive the Germans back to the eastern seaboard."
How carelessly the Royal Navy regarded the proposed Naval Africa Expedition was shown in the appointment of its leader. Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson, at the age of 39, was the oldest Lt Commander in the navy. Since joining the service at 14, his career had been disastrous. He ran one ship aground on a beach and was court- martialled for a collision that cost a life. He spent the first eight months of the war confined to a small office in Whitehall with nothing much to do. Even so, he was "boastful and vainglorious", swaggered and told lies, and was avoided whenever possible by fellow officers. Worst of all, he had cigarettes specially hand-made and inscribed with his name. Perhaps he was selected to command the expedition because no other officer of his rank was immediately available. With the big-game hunter as his second in command, Spicer-Simson haphazardly recruited his team, "an outlandish lot", in Foden's words. They included a navy ex- aviator in his 50s who was addicted to drinking Worcestershire sauce, wore a monocle and addressed everyone as "dear boy"; "a half-scalliwag Fleet Street adventurer", according to the expedition doctor, a specialist in tropical medicine who suffered from amoebic dysentery; a rating whose previous nautical experience was fishing in Donegal; a former Grand Prix racing driver, now called a chief engineer, "though he actually knew almost nothing about the workings of the internal combustion engine"; and two kilted Scottish lance-corporals who had played rugby for their regiment and heard about the secret mission in a West End bar.
Spicer-Simson was provided with two top-heavily-armed 40-foot boats, which he wanted to call Miaow and Bow-Wow. The Admiralty vetoed those undignified names but allowed them when translated into French, Mimi and Toutou.
Travel by sea from London to Cape Town and train to the Congo was not too bad, but the rest of the journey overland was horrendous, over "some of the most difficult terrain in the world", beset by lions, hyenas and disease-carrying insects. There was much emergency bridge-building and haulage by tractors and African labourers through jungle and over mountains up to 6,000 feet. Seven months after leaving London, the boats were launched from the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, ready to go forth and fight.
In admirably realistic and colourful prose, Foden tells how Spicer-Simson's men sank the German steamer, Hedwig Von Wissmann, and caused the Graf Von Götzen to be scuttled, and how the Kingani, the first German warship to be captured and transferred to the Royal Navy, was renamed HMS Fifi. After those successes, the dominant local tribe, the Holo-holo, worshipped Spicer- Simson as a god, Britain awarded him the Distinguished Service Order, Belgium awarded him the Croix de Guerre and named him Commander of the Order of the Crown, and, eventually, John Huston was inspired to make that wonderfully bizarre romantic melodrama, The African Queen. The book is embellished with useful maps and decorative drawings by the author's wife, Matilda Hunt.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden Michael Joseph, 320pp. £16.99