Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck
Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck held East Africa against several hundred thousand Allied troops for the whole of the First World War and never surrendered in the field. Born in 1870 into a Prussian military family, he served in the Boxer expedition in China and then in German South-West Africa, where he took part in the campaign against the Herero and Nama — a war generally recognised as a genocide, in which the survivors were driven into the desert and into camps, and which is the part of his record his admirers pass over. He was given the Schutztruppe in what is now Tanzania in 1914, with about 2,500 men. His judgement was that the colony could not be defended and did not need to be. What it could do was tie down Allied resources that would otherwise be used in Europe, and he set out to be pursued rather than to hold ground. He beat a British landing at Tanga in November 1914 with a force a fraction of its size, helped by bees disturbed in the fighting. He then fought a four-year retreat across Tanzania, Mozambique and Northern Rhodesia, living off what he captured, recruiting African askari who stayed with him, and never being caught by forces that eventually numbered around 300,000. He learned of the armistice from a captured British dispatch rider and surrendered in Northern Rhodesia on 25 November 1918, a fortnight after the war ended, with about 1,500 men. He refused an ambassadorship from Hitler in 1935. He died in 1964.
- Lived: 1870 CE – 1964 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: colonial_commander, guerrilla_strategist
