Lake Poelela

By January the 14th of 1900, the multinational allied forces of Lord Horatio Kitchener were arrayed in a line of battle, just south of the Mozambique village of Inharrime. Kitchener had moved the bulk of his troops south from Inhambane in order to take advantage of the terrain. He had been given plenty of warning that a large Boer Commando was approaching the coast but, he still had no idea about the disposition of the enemy force. Kitchener’s one saving grace was that his enemies were just as ignorant of what he had.

At least the direction of the attack was of no great secret. The terrain and lack of infrastructure in the colony meant that any substantial force was limited in their movements and here, in Mozambique, the Boers were as restricted by this as was Kitchener. The terrain was harsh, semi arid, and vegetated by quite useless scrub and small trees. The only fodder for the Boer horses was whatever they brought with them.

The lack of water was also a serious problem and it weighed more heavily on the Boer forces than those of Kitchener. Their cavalry required far more than the infantry heavy force of Kitchener. It forced a battle sooner rather than later and this is what Kitchener was hoping for. He chose a his lines to take advantage the inland lake system around the large body of water known as Lagos Poelela. The lake was not for drinking though. It’s water was quite brackish and useless for that. 

What Kitchener and Tirpitz hoped for was to be able to bring at least some of their smaller ships into the lake. They had been told that there was a channel that could support such a move but, Tirpitz was still looking for it when the battle was finished. The allied naval force would not play a part in the fight.

Poelela still offered Kitchener another significant advantage as an obstacle to the enemy. He did not oppose the Boer crossings but, they were limited as to where they could get across the inland waterway and, in fact, there was only one real place that they could. The quantity and quality of vessels that the Boers needed did not exist at the lake. As a result, most of the Boers would march into battle on foot and their horses would sit on the southern banks of the lake, as useless as the allied gunboats. Boer tactical mobility would be as reduced as their strategic mobility had been.

When the Boer army arrived the men were already tired. They had been riding hard for two weeks. Now they were forced to abandon their horses as they found they had no choice but to attack an enemy of unknown size. What little drinking water, that had made it to the north shore, was quickly consumed once the battle began. The rapid fire weapons, that the Boers had come to love, also became a liability as the commando’s quickly began to exhaust their ammunition supply. Re-supply from the baggage train, still stuck on the south shore, was complicated, once again, by an inadequate number of boats.  Boer artillery was also neutralized before the battle even began and for the exact same reason as the supply problem.

Kitchener’s troops had been sitting on the same ground for three days at this point. They had been busy, cutting away brush, digging rifle pits, and preparing a defense but, they were far more rested than their opponents. They did not have a great deal of food and water but, their stocks were adequate as was their ammunition. Winston Churchill reported that the Boers made one “magnificent charge” after another. He further stated that each time the Boers moved forward, “they put great faith in their weapons which produced the highest volume of fire.”

What Churchill was seeing was something that Confederate soldiers in North America had already seen. The Winchester and Colt rifles could not only fire quickly but, they were very good for moving and shooting as well. The Boers had seen, from very early on, that if you kept shooting and moving, the sheer volume of fire would normally break any line of human flesh. What they did not realize was that most of the troops that they had encountered up till now were largely locally raised militia from Natal and the Cape. They had encountered only a few British regulars and most of that was under siege conditions. The troops they were facing now were not just professional soldiers but, most of them were from elite units. They did not break and run.

The allied force also had the ability to turn out their own high volumes of fire. German and British troops had, water cooled, maximum machineguns and they were well placed in protected fixed positions. All evidence indicates that these weapons did most of the killing on this day. Rank after rank of Boer commando’s simply evaporated in the dust that was kicked up by an almost continuous stream of machinegun bullets that were raking the Boer’s with interlocking fields of fire. Most of that fire began long before the Boer’s could bring their superior small arms within range of the enemy lines.

The battle proved to be both short and one sided. Kitchener pushed his advantage because he was not content with just a simple victory. He needed this to be a catastrophic defeat for the Boer’s and, so, when he could have easily sat behind his defenses and let the attack peter out, Kitchener went over to the offensive.

The Boers were not ready for an enemy attack. The allied force rolled through their already shattered lines and while many groups of Boers made stubborn last stands they were still last stands. The bulk of the Confederate Naval Brigade, along with a sprinkling of Gurkha’s, made it to the lake crossing first. They effectively cut off the retreat of any surviving Boer force and what was left of the Commando, surrendered not long after.

The next morning Kitchener was prepared to cross the lake, with his own army, and finish off what was left of the Boers. When the sun rose it was obvious this would no longer be necessary. The surviving Boers, most of whom had never crossed the lake, had abandoned their logistical trains, their field artillery, everything but the horses they needed to ride, and had fled south back towards the Transvaal. Kitchener assumed, and probably rightly so, that he would never catch them. In reality, he did not need too because the damage that he wished to inflict on the Boer war effort was already done.

The Boer defeat at Lake Poelela was dramatic but, even if this was not immediately obvious, it was still not critical. Not long after, before the end of February, Kitchener would pack up his army, his prisoners, and his booty and sail north for Egypt. While the damage to the port of Inhambane was severe it was not permanent. Within a month of Kitchener’s departure, the French would repair much of what had been destroyed and not only were they shipping supplies to the Boers once again, the volume of those supplies increased dramatically.

The short term effects of the campaign were the relief of the Boer sieges on the British border settlements. Even Robert Baden-Powell recorded in his journal that they were on the verge of collapse. He was of the opinion that Kitchener’s invasion of Mozambique, “could not have been better timed.” It is clear that Kitchener had single handedly saved Natal and Cape Colonies from capitulation. This combined with his very dramatic victory at Poelela was probably what spared him a Court Martial.

Despite all of this, the simple fact remained that the South African front was still a stalemate. The British military was no longer under siege but, they were also in no condition to launch an offensive. Baden-Powell made that perfectly clear in his writings. The trickle of supplies and reinforcements, that were reaching South Africa, were simply not enough to replace the losses that the British had already taken. More importantly, while the Boer’s had been seriously wounded the bulk of their forces were still largely in tact. There were also some added and unseen benefits for the Boers.

Morale of the Boer nations improved once the Commando’s were no longer fighting on the frontier. Many of their troops began to make regular visits to their farms and their was a slight increase in food production. It was not much but, it was enough to hold off a famine that was surely coming. The French and US also began to pay more attention to the theater as witnessed by the restoration and improvements to the Mozambique supply system. Despite their losses, the Boers were far from defeated.