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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.
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The British Empire, 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 recently acquired and not well defended. They were also surrounded on all sides by African colonies that belonged to their enemies, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France.
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).
The colony had no military forces, only a police force. The radio station at Kamina was attacked on August 22, 1914, and as the Allies converged on it the local German commander surrendered four days later, after first having ordered and overseen the destruction of the vital station. All operations were over by 27 August, with no German European casualties.[4] John Keegan identifies the two military forces as the West African Rifles and the Tirailleurs senegalais.[6]
Kamerun (modern-day Cameroon and parts of what is now eastern Nigeria) had a garrison of about 1,000 German soldiers supported by about 3,000 African soldiers. 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 27 September 1914. The German garrison at Garoua fell to the British in June 1915.
The only major center of German resistance was now Yaounda (modern-day Yaoundé). The Belgian-French forces followed the German-built railroad inland, beating off German counter-attacks along the way. By November, Yaoundé was captured. Most of the surviving German soldiers retreated into Spanish Guinea (modern-day Equatorial Guinea), which was neutral territory. There the Spanish interned them for the duration of the war. The last German fort in Kamerun surrendered in February 1916.[7]
The 1976 film Black and White in Color, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud gave a fictionalized view of the campaign. Savagely anti-militarist, it showed peaceful French and German traders shooting each other just because they were expected to. Eventually Indian troops under British officers arrive and take the spoils.
Media related to [//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:West_Africa_Campaign_(World_War_I) West Africa Campaign (World War I)] at Wikimedia Commons