East African Campaign (World War I)

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[edit] Introduction

German East Africa (modern-day Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda) was a large territory with complex geography (including the massive Rift Valley and Lake Victoria). The land is fertile and receives a moderate rain throughout the year.

At the start of the war, the German colony administrator, von Schnee, ordered that no hostile action was to be taken. To the north, the British Governor of Kenya stated that Kenya "had no interest in the present war" (Keegan, "World War I", pg. 210). The reason for this was, in part, neither colony had many troops. But the commander of the tiny German army in East Africa, Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck, ignored von Schnee and assembled his army for battle. At the start of the war, the German forces were about 200 officers, and 2,500 Askari.

[edit] The war begins, 1914-1915

Main article: Paul_Erich_von_Lettow-Vorbeck#World_War_I_career

The fighting in German East Africa began in September of 1914. The Germans staged raids into neighboring Kenya and Uganda. Lettow-Vorbek also created a tiny navy and his boats sailed on Lake Victoria, causing minor damage but a great deal of news. The British created some gun-boats in England and sent them in pieces via railroad to Lake Victoria to take control over the lake. The British also sent two brigades from India to deal with the German army. The British tried to land the troops at Tanga on November 2, 1914 but the Germans completely disrupted the landing.

Main article: Battle_of_Tanga

Heavy and accurate fire prevented the British from moving off the beaches and finally forced the Anglo-Indian brigades to re-embark three days later. The supplies left behind on the beaches kept Lettow-Vorbeck's tiny army equipped for the next year (Keegan, "World War I", pg 211).

[edit] The arrival of General Smuts, 1916

In 1916, General Jan Smuts was given the task of defeating Lettow-Vorbeck. Smuts had a large army (for the area), some 13,000 Boers, English, and Rhodesian as well as 7,000 Indian and African soldiers. Also, not under his direct command but fighting on his side, was a small Belgian force and a larger but totally ineffective group of Portuguese military units based in Mozambique. Despite all these troops from different countries, this was essentially a South African operation under Smuts control. During the previous year, Lettow-Vorbeck had also gained troops and his army was now 3,500 Germans and some 12,000 askaris.

Smuts army attacked from several directions, the main attack was from the north out of Kenya, while substantial forces from Belgian Congo advanced from the west in two columns, over Lake Victoria and into the Rift Valley. Another force advanced over Lake Nyasa (modern-day Lake Malawi) from the south-east. All these forces failed to catch Lettow-Vorbeck and they all suffered terribly from disease along the march. One unit (9th South African Infantry) started at a strength of 1,135 in February and by October was down to 116 men, without doing much fighting at all (Cyril Falls, "The Great War" pg. 253). However, the Germans nearly always retreated from the larger British forces, and by September of 1916, the German railway from the coast at Dar-es-Salaam to Ujiji was fully under British control. The Belgian force, under General Tombeur, captured Tabora, the capital of German East Africa. Fearing Belgian claims on the German colony, Smuts quickly sent Belgian forces back to Congo, leaving them as occupying forces and Ruanda-Urundi.

At this point, with Lettow-Vorbeck's forces confined to the southern part of German East Africa, Smuts began to withdraw his South-African, Rhodesian, and Indian troops and replace them with African soldiers. By the start of 1917 more than half the British army was composed of African soldiers, and by the end of the war, it was nearly all African troops. Smuts himself left the area in January of 1917 to go to London to join the Imperial War Cabinet. The British Army was forced to call Belgian-Congolese troops to help for a second time in 1917

[edit] Last years, 1917-1918

Despite continued efforts to capture or destroy Lettow-Vorbeck's army, the British failed to end the German resistance. First General Hoskins (of the King's African Rifles) took over, then another South African General van Deventer was given the command. Deventer launched an offensive in July 1917. Lettow-Voorbeck's forces were three locations and two of the groups managed to escape the offensive but the third, some 5,000 men under Tafel, was forced to surrender.

The German army was able to tie down large British forces and even defeat them upon occasion. For example, the Germans beat the British at a battle near Mahiwa in October 1917. They lost 100 men and the British lost 1600.

Never-the-less, the British troops were closing in on the Germans and so on November 23, 1917, Lettow-Vorbeck crossed south into Portuguese Mozambique. He hoped by so doing to gain recruits and supplies by capturing small Portuguese garrisons. He marched through Mozambique for the next nine months, avoiding capture but unable to gain much strength. Then the German army crossed into Northern Rhodesia in August 1918. The German army won its last victory at the city of Kasama on November 13, two days after the Armistice was signed in Europe. Lettow-Vorbeck finally surrendered his undefeated army at Abercorn in present-day Zambia on November 23.

[edit] Assessment

In this campaign, disease killed or incapacitated 30 men for every man killed in battle (on the British side) (John Keegan "World War I", pg. 300).

As Cyril Falls writes

Historian Fred Reid's assessment was that 'In retrospect, the East African campaign came to look like a 'sideshow' of the First World War. As memory focused on the vast slaughter of the Western Front, the Indians, Africans and British who had borne the pains of that 'poisonous country' were all but forgotten. Even today, it is only possible to give approximations of the total fatalities. The British forces lost over ten thousand men, two thirds of them from disease. German losses were about 2,000. But the black people of East Africa suffered far more as carriers who died from disease, exhaustion and military action. No one bothered to record their fate. One modern estimate is 100,000 dead on all sides. Black civilians also suffered dreadfully. War devastated many localities, bringing hunger, disease and death in its train. Thousands of Africans perished in the outbreak of influenza that swept over their continent at the end of the war. To some Africans at least, long stigmatised as 'savages' by Europeans, it was plain that there was often a savage behind the white man's mask of civilisation.' Fred Reid, In Search of Willie Patterson: A Scottish Soldier in the Age of Imperialism. p.121. (2002).