West Africa Campaign (World War I)

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Date	August 3, 1914 – February, 1915
Location	Kamerun, Togoland
Result	Treaty of Versailles

Combatants

Great Britain, France, Belgium

Germany

The West Africa Campaign of World War I consisted of two small and fairly short military operations to capture the German colonies in West Africa: Togoland and Kamerun.

1 Overview
2 Togoland
3 Kamerun
4 Reference

[edit] Overview

Great Britain, with near total command of the world's oceans, had the power and resources to conquer the German colonies when the Great War started.

The two German colonies in West Africa were recent, and not well defended. They were also surrounded on all sides by African colonies that belonged to enemy great powers: Great Britain and France.

[edit] Togoland

This small colony was almost immediately conquered by a military force from the British Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) and a small force from French Dahomey (modern-day Benin). Fighting was over by August 27. John Keegan identifies the two military forces as the West African Rifles and the Tirailleurs senegalais (Keegan, "World War I", pg. 206).

[edit] Kamerun

Kamerun (modern-day Cameroon as well as a part of modern-day Nigeria) had a garrison of about 1,000 German soldiers supported by about 3,000 African soldiers. This tiny force was in charge of defending a territory the size of Texas. The British attacked out of Nigeria following three different routes east into Kamerun. However, all three columns were defeated by a combination of terrain, rough trails, and ambushes by the Germans. The French attacked south from Chad and captured Kusseri. Early in September, a Belgian-French force (mostly from the Belgian Congo) captured Limbe on the coast. With the aid of four British and French cruisers acting as mobile artillery, this force then captured the colonial capital of Douala on September 27, 1914.

The only major center of German resistance was now Yaounda (modern-day Yaounde). The Belgian-French troops followed the German-built railroad inland, beating off German counter-attacks along the way. By November, Yaounde was captured. Most of the surviving German soldiers retreated into Spanish Guinea (modern-day Equatorial Guinea which was neutral territory. The last German fort in Kamerun surrendered in February, 1916 (Keegan "World War I", pg. 207).

[edit] Reference

Togoland and the Cameroons 1914-1916 by Brigadier-General F. J. Moberly (1931, HMSO, official history)

Theatres of World War I
European (Balkans – Western Front – Eastern Front – Italian Front) – Middle Eastern (Caucasus – Mesopotamia – Sinai and Palestine – Gallipoli – Aden – Persia) – African (South-West Africa – West Africa – East Africa) – Asian and Pacific (German Samoa and New Guinea – Tsingtao) – Other (Atlantic Ocean – Mediterranean – Naval – Aerial)