In the winter and spring of 1980-81 I was living in Oxford, busy writing and researching my second novel, An Ice-Cream War, which had as its setting the first world war in East Africa, or, more precisely, the long inter-colonial conflict between British East Africa (today’s Kenya) and German East Africa (Tanzania). How I would have welcomed Edward Paice’s superb history of that strange and calamitous war. Sidelined by the greater carnage and momentous events of the European theatre, the war in Africa had produced few definitive books. There were a couple of popular histories, the odd novel, long out of print, but I remember searching the catalogues of the Bodleian library and Rhodes House for anything that would throw real light on the campaign. Even the multi-volumed official history of the great war Great Warwas deficient. Of the two volumes meant to be devoted to the African campaign only one had been published, its author dying before volume two could be completed.
But now we have in Tip and Run a detailed and fully authoritative account of the 1914-18 African war, meticulously researched and written with tremendous lucidity and brio. One feels that this forgotten episode of the Great Wargreat war has now, finally, its own literary-historical monument — in the future, everyone will start with Edward Paice.
However, as a novelist, I was drawn to the war precisely because it was so little known, hidden corners of familiar history representing a cherished mother-lode to the fiction writer. I was dimly aware of the war’s most documented and celebrated episode, the blockade and sinking of the German cruiser Königsberg in the Rufiji delta in 1914 (later the subject of a novel by Wilbur Smith and a Hollywood film), movie)but everything else I read about it was completely, shockingly fresh. The war in East Africa hadlasted two weeks longer than the war in Europe (the German forces , the Schutztruppe,surrendered on November 25, th1918); the area of conflict was on a scale unimaginable to soldiers on the western front — one army chasing another for years over territory five times the size of Germany. Everything seemed extraordinary. And indeed the more one learns about the great war in East Africa the more one’s clichéd images of 1914-18 dissolve, leaving one with a sense of a conflict so bizarre and surreal that it seems almost without precedent. Hence the title of my novel and hence also the title of Paice’s history. For the war became one long pursuit, effectively, once the British and colonial armies invaded German East Africa in 1916. A succession of British and South African commanders vainly followed (over thousands of miles, in hostile bush, in appalling heat and rain, and afflicted with unending disease) a small, tenacious and elusive German army under the command of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, one of the most brilliant and lucky of World War Ifirst-world-war military leaders, Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,a diminutive, ferociously tough Prussian whom Paice brings vividly to life, and who, in 1918, having led the British a perilous and merry dance through German East Africa and into Portuguese East Africa and then on to northern Rhodesia, was called to a halt only by the armistice in Europe and Germany’s surrender. At the war’s end Lettow-Vorbeck had by no means given up: he was planning to push on westward across Africa with his remaining askaris and their porters until he reached the Atlantic.
The war the empire forces fought against Lettow-Vorbeck was more akin to modern wars against guerilla armies. Raids, ambushes, sudden counter-attacks — small, confused, intense bouts of fighting between a few hundred soldiers andwho then moved on again. In 1918, one of the British pursuing columns calculated that they had chased Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe through Portuguese East Africa for overmore than 1,600 miles, crossing 29 large rivers and fighting 32 engagements with the enemy. This was a far cry from the war in Europe.
Yet in some ways the African war’s most memorable battle occurred right at its opening, in 1914. The war in Africa might have ended there and then had not the British Imperial Army fought one of its most disastrous engagements in the annals of its long history. The Battle of Tanga is still studied in staff colleges as an example of what not to do — of how massivehuge superiority of numbers can still lead to dismal, shameful defeat. A large British expeditionary force from India was landed at Tanga, a port in German East Africa and also the terminus for the country’sregion’s main railway. Had Tanga been captured and the railway line north with it, the German forces, all concentrated up country around Kilimanjaro, might easily have surrendered. However, a combination of grotesque British over-confidence, catastrophic errors of judgement, seasick troops, swarms of hostile bees ,and feckless leadership contrived to allow 1,500 German troops to defeat an invading British army 10 times its size and backed up by battleships and destroyers. After two days of confusion, mayhem and spirited German resistance the British withdrew to their ships (leaving behind vast quantities of stores and weapons) behind)and sailed back to Mombasa. German East Africa had been saved.
But only for a while. A new imperial army was gathered together, equipped and trained, plans were made and the German colony was eventually invaded, from the north, under the command of General Jan Smuts. And thus began Lettow-Vorbeck’s infuriating, costly two-year spree of cat and mouse, of tip and run. The war in East Africa did become a forgotten conflict because, to put it bluntly, it was almost impossible to know where the competing armies were as they tramped and fought their way across great swathes of virgin, unmapped Africa.
It became, also, as disease took its toll of European and white South African troops, a war between African armies: German askaris v British askaris. The presence of European officers can’t disguise this fact. Hundreds of thousands of East Africans were involved in fighting this war, whether voluntarily or under duress. One of the great merits of Paice’s book is to remind us of this salient fact and to attempt to calculate the human cost of the conflict. British and German casualties, by Western Front standards, were modest (British casualties were approximately 22,000 dead and missing, for example). But Paice also tries to enumerate the “butcher’s bill” for the forgotten Africans. Hundreds of thousands of carriers and porters were needed for both armies even to function, and Paice reckons that the death toll among this supporting force in East Africa was at least 100,000. As he points out, tellingly, this figure is almost double the number of Australian, Canadian or Indian troops who gave up their lives in the Great War. Given the nature of East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century and the modest size of its indigenous population, this loss of able-bodied young men is unprecedented and shocking. Not since the rapacities of Arab traders in the 19th century had East Africanthe region’s tribes been so wantonly depleted. This is the forgotten, untold tragedy of the Ggreat War in Africa — and the one that gives Paice his subtitle.
This exceptional history can stand as their in memoriam.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Another story that needs to be told is that of the British West Indian Regiments, made up mostly of Jamaicans but comprising men from all of Britain's caribbean colonies, who fought in the Great War. Officially they were all volunteers, but in fact a proportion of them had been press-ganged into the Army. Transported arcoss the wintertime North Atlantic in freighters in unheated bunks with inadequate clothes and blankets, quite a number died of hypothermia, or lost limbs to frostbite before reaching Britain. It battle, notably at Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Paschendale and Galipoli, believing they had something to prove, they fought with astonishing ferocity and bravery, taking heavy casualties and winning numerous medals. Yet in most standard accounts of the Great War, they are not mentioned and their participation not recognized. This is more than shameful. It is dishounarable.
C. Alexander Brown, Rockcliffe Park, , Canada