East African Campaign
A German force of never more than 14,000 men tied down some 300,000 Allied troops in East Africa for the entire First World War and surrendered two weeks after the armistice. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck commanded the Schutztruppe in German East Africa, mostly African askari with German officers, and understood from the start that he could not win locally. His object was to draw as many British, Indian, South African, Belgian and Portuguese troops away from Europe as possible. The British attempt to take Tanga by sea in November 1914 failed with heavy losses, partly to a disturbed swarm of bees. Thereafter he raided the Uganda railway, fought a series of delaying actions, and retreated south and then into Portuguese Mozambique and Northern Rhodesia, supplying himself entirely by capture, making his own quinine, and living off the country. That is the part usually left out of the admiring accounts. Living off the country meant conscripting porters in enormous numbers on both sides — perhaps a million Africans carried loads in this campaign — and the death rate among them from disease, exhaustion and hunger was appalling. Estimates of African civilian deaths from famine and disease across the region run to several hundred thousand. Lettow-Vorbeck was undefeated in the field, learned of the armistice from a captured British despatch, and surrendered at Abercorn on 25 November 1918. He was given a triumph in Berlin, and Germany lost the colony to Britain and Belgium as mandates. His askari were paid their arrears by the West German government in 1964, some fifty years late, and those without documents were asked to demonstrate the manual of arms. Most could.
- Year: 1914 CE
- Category: Military
