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10.5cm SMS Königsberg Gun at Pretoria, South Africa
Photo © MC Heunis

INTRODUCTION TO THE MYSTERY OF THE TEN MISSING GUNS
by Chris Dale

Back in 2006, I was contacted by a South African researcher named MC Heunis who had recently worked on a restoration project on an old German naval gun. It had originally been onboard the SMS Königsberg in the East African campaign of the First World War. He sent me some photographs of the restored gun outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria with a plaque stating that the gun had been captured by South African forces at Kahe in March 1916.

It was a widely documented fact that all ten 10.5cm guns salvaged from the wreck of the German naval cruiser SMS Königsberg in 1915 were converted to land use and fought in the East African campaign until one by one they were all destroyed or captured by the successful allied offensives of 1916-17. This much was reported in most general histories of the First World War in East Africa.

When I briefly looked into the subject, I saw that most sources (such as Kevin Patience's very helpful book, 'Königsberg- An East African Raider') said that two of the guns had survived into the modern age, the one in Pretoria and another in Mombasa, Kenya. Patience said the Mombasa gun was captured at Bagamoyo in August 1916. A Google search quickly showed me photos of this gun on display at Fort Jesus in Mombasa. The plaque next to the Mombasa gun said that these naval guns were mounted on improvised gun carriages made in Dar Es Salaam for use on land.

10.5cm SMS Königsberg Gun at Mombasa, Kenya
Photo by Kiselev D at WikiCommons

At that point I thought the story of the guns was fairly straight ahead and simple: there had been ten guns, eight of them were now lost, while the two that were captured at Kahe and Bagamoyo were now on display in Pretoria and Mombasa, respectively. I posted a short section on my website at GermanColonialUniforms.co.uk and sat back.

Soon afterwards I found that this was not such a simple open and shut case.

The first hint of a problem arose when MC Heunis mentioned to me that the plaque on the Pretoria gun claiming it to have been captured at Kahe was probably wrong as the actual gun captured at Kahe in 1916 was blown up by the Germans and the gun now in Pretoria is relatively intact. This was an interesting aside but it didn't strike me as too curious at the time. After all small identification mistakes can easily be made between ten identical guns, or so I thought.

A few months after I first posted the Pretoria photos on my website I received an interesting email from Bob Wagner, a retired US army officer. He had found and photographed a third Königsberg gun at Jinja, Uganda back in 1998. That was excellent news and I added his photo to my website alongside the known Pretoria and Mombasa guns. Again I rested back but Bob didn't stop there.

Bob Wagner with the 10.5cm SMS Königsberg Gun at Jinja, Uganda
Photo © Bob Wagner

Bob had researched further into the subject of these Königsberg guns and came come up with three further previously unknown major facts that contradicted my previously known histories of the guns.

Firstly he had seemingly proven that the gun on display at Mombasa was not captured at Bagamoyo as previously reported. He had evidence to show that the gun from Bagamoyo went elsewhere.

Secondly, with his keen military eye, he had noticed that the gun carriages for the guns at Pretoria and Mombasa did not match each other and were of different origins. The one at Mombasa was most likely German made from its construction and the carriage in Pretoria was improvised from differently sourced parts. Other wartime photographs of the Königsberg guns showed a different gun carriage design entirely. They were not all made in Dar Es Salaam as the Mombasa plaque had said. Bob had also spotted other ways to identify the different guns from each other in wartime photographs. Bob is very observant.

The third and perhaps most interesting piece of information was that he had found old  photographs proving that at least two more guns survived the First World War, one in the former Belgian Congo and the other in my hometown of London, England!

10.5cm SMS Königsberg Gun in London, England 1924
Photo © Imperial War Museum

Now I had to sit up, we had a few real mysteries on our hands. How many of the ten guns had in fact survived the war? Certainly far more than the two recorded in Pretoria and Mombasa. Was there really one in England? What were the true wartime histories of all ten individual guns? And back to the start, could we find the real origins of the guns now on display in Mombasa and Pretoria?

Bob and I set to work to solve these mysteries and very quickly noticed that we were not the only detectives on the trail. Two German historians, Holger Kotthaus and Oliver Eicke were also looking into the history of the ten Königsberg guns. They had done some incredible work trawling through German archives to find every available eyewitness account and reference to the guns in German, French and English, including many unpublished diaries of veterans of the campaign in East Africa. Through this they were largely able to trace the wartime histories of the individual guns.

Bob and I were very impressed. Oliver and Holger were equally curious to know about the other existing guns and further information that Bob and I had been able to find. Together, we pooled our resources and along with a worldwide team of online helpers (mainly via the Axis History Forum) each providing small clues along the way we set off to solve the mysteries of the ten missing guns.

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As we slowly unravelled the full story of the guns both in wartime and in the later episodes of African history that they took an incidental part in, the simple story of ten missing guns proved to be far more interesting and educational to me than I had ever imagined. The story took us back a century and across several continents from the Baltic Sea to the Indian Ocean and from the Great Lakes of East Africa (where the threat of a Königsberg gun inspired the later novel and film 'African Queen') to the beachfront of a seaside resort in England.

It showed us that recorded history in text books, diaries, museums and war monuments is not always as factually accurate as it might first appear. It also showed us that while there is sometimes chivalry and even at times humour between enemy armies, the horrific irony of this episode of the First World War is that it is that more African porters probably died transporting these guns for the Germans than enemy combatant soldiers were put out of action by their fire in battle.

SMS Königsberg off German East Africa, 1914
Photo by Walther Dobbertin © Frankfurt University Koloniales Bildarchiv

The story of the SMS Königsberg and her guns all began with the arms race leading up to the First World War, the greedy scramble for Africa by the European powers and their parallel struggle for maritime supremacy. After the SMS Konigsbergg's short radiding career and her successful attack on HMS Pegasus at Zanazibar in 1914, she wa sunk by British naval monitors in the Rufiji Delta and yet her guns lived on.

The guns were salvaged by the Germans and fought later on land on several fronts of the East African campaign as part of the German colonial army or Schutztruppe. As they fell one by one, we saw a chronological history of the East African campaign unfold before us, from Jan Smut's first offensive into German East Africa up until von Lettow-Vorbeck's undefeated German forces finally left their colony to invade Portuguese territory in November 1917.

The Railway Gun at Kahe was an early victim to Smut's successful South African and British invasion of German East Africa from the north in March 1916. Big Bertha was put of of action in May 1916 at the Battle of Kondoa-Irangi as von Lettow-Vorbeck temporarily held back van Deventer's South African advance on the German Central Railway during the annual rainy season.

The Gun at Mwanza was captured in July 1916 when British and Belgian forces invaded German East Africa from the north-west thus seizing control of Lake Victoria. As the South African and British offensive bore down on the Central Railway from the North the Germans sent a Gun to Bagamoyo, suspecting that the British might attempt a landing there, which they successfully did in August 1916. Another gun had been deployed to the Schutztruppe's retreating Northern Front and fought in several delaying actions until the Gun was destroyed near Mkyuni in August 1916 as it was too heavy to make it across a wooden river bridge.

Meanwhile on the Western Front bordering the Belgian Congo one Gun served aboard the SS Goetzen a German steamer on Lake Tanganyika, making her the most powerful ship on the lake and another had been fitted in an emplacement on the Elephant's Foot Peninsular at Kigoma overlooking Lake Tanganyika. Between them, these guns gave the Germans the upper hand in the Battle of the Lakes, until they were both moved inland and fell fighting in September 1916, against the Belgian overland advance from the north-west.

Over towards the coast Smut's offensive had captured the German capital at Dar Es Salaam and taken the Central Railway but not managed to defeat von Lettow-Vorbeck decisively. Van Deventer took command of the South African and British force and advanced towards the Rufiji where he captured another Gun Near Kibata. The Germans were now forced into the south-eastern part of their colony, one gun helped defeat a Portuguese invasion at Newala and was then destroyed at the Battle of Mahiwa against the advancing British in October 1917. A day later the Last Gun at Masasi was destroyed, as von Lettow-Vorbeck slimmed down his force into a more mobile unit to leave German territory and invade the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.

Along the way, the story included a host of interesting characters most notably the individual gun commanders. Some of these had previously served as officers aboard the SMS Königsberg. Others were merchant naval officers or local plantation owners with varying degrees of previous naval artillery experience.

By the end of the war in 1918, two of the remaining SMS Königsberg officers were still fighting the war with von Lettow-Vorbeck's Schutztruppe when news arrived several days late of the armistice in Europe which had taken place as of 11 November. They finally laid down their arms on 25 November 1918.

After the war the surviving gun commanders and Konigsberg crew gradually returned to Germany, some remained in naval service but most returned to civilian life. One former Königsberg officer and gun commander became a keen supporter of Adolf Hitler, another's family became a victims of the Nazi regime.

Other characters and events of interest we met during the research of this website included the family and business scandals of the guns' designers, the resourceful German commanders in their isolated colony, the conflicting and often eccentric British, South African, Belgian and Portuguese commanders within the allied camp and several of the soldiers, sailors, mercenaries, explorers, pilots, bounty hunters and authors that came into contact with the guns during the war, each with their own short story to tell. Eventually the search led us into the late twentieth century and contact with the dictators of Uganda and the Congo, alongside modern day salvage divers, scrap merchants, pirates, racing car drivers and an Oscar winning Hollywood film star.

It is a journey and a story that we as a team, were certainly not expecting from the start.

It should be stressed that we were assisted in our searches by many historians, professionals and enthusiasts from all over the globe. This was a truly international effort and our thanks go out to all those who helped and are credited on the Thanks, Sources and Links Page.

Chris Dale 2016

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Notes

Conflicting Information
Inevitably through the research for this book we have come across conflicting information from various sources. Where this has happened we have listed the differing sources and tried to determine the most likely truths behind each event, where possible trusting eyewitness or photographic evidence over re-told histories. Logic and deduction have been our greatest allies in dispelling several myths about the histories of these guns.

Translation Notes
In translating German sources for this project, it has at times been necessary to change the word order and phrasing of sentences. Not all nouns and adjectives are directly translatable from German and very few idioms are. In these translations it has always been our intention to keep the meaning of the original writer the same as intended while at the same time making the story readable in English.

German Naval Ranks
The basic officer ranks of the Imperial German navy were: Leutnant zur See, Oberleutnant zur See, Kapitänleutnant, Korvettenkapitän, Fregattenkapitän and Kapitän zur See. The title zur See, or at sea is often abbreviated to the letters z.S. Other letters will sometimes also been seen after German naval officers ranks during this study. Former naval officers that were now out of service, or außer Dienst had the letters a.D. after their rank. For an example, the officer that commanded the gun destroyed at Mkuyuni was titled as Leutnant z.S.a.D. von Eucken-Addenhausen. Former naval officers that were now on the reserve lists had d.R. after their rank for der Reserve, while officers from the naval artillery (Matrosen Artillerie) had the letters d. Matr. Art. after their titles. A good example of these mixed titles was held by the commander of the Konigsberg gun at Bagamoyo Leutnant d.R. d.Matr.Art. Dr. Paul Friedrich. Also note that as Paul Friedrich has a civilian doctorate (not exclusive to medical doctors) he retains the Dr. in his military title.

Naming the Guns
The guns had serial numbers 360-369 when they were made in the Krupp factory in Essen. They also would have had titles relating to their position on board the SMS Konigsberg, Port foredeck, Starboard midships, etc. But there is no record in eyewitness accounts of the guns having a numbered system to denote them from each other in use by the Germans during the war. In veterans' memoirs the different guns are simply referred to by by where they were based or abandoned, their commander's name or sometimes nicknames. We have kept these names in our annotation, mainly based around where they were based or captured.