*Includes pictures
*Includes accounts of the campaign
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." - German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
World War I, also known in its time as the "Great War" or the "War to End all Wars", was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict that demonstrated man's capacity to kill each other on a heretofore unprecedented scale, and as always, such a war brought about technological innovation at a rate that made the boom of the Industrial Revolution seem stagnant. World War I was the first truly industrial war, and it created a paradigm which reached its zenith with World War II and towards which virtually all equipment, innovation and training were dedicated throughout the Cold War and the remainder of the 20th century. To this day, modern warfare remains synonymous with tanks and mass infantry battles, although a confrontation of this nature has not occurred (except briefly during Operation Desert Storm) since World War II.
The enduring image of World War I is of men stuck in muddy trenches, and of vast armies deadlocked in a fight neither could win. It was a war of barbed wire, poison gas, and horrific losses as officers led their troops on mass charges across No Man's Land and into a hail of bullets. While these impressions are all too true, they hide the fact that trench warfare was dynamic and constantly evolving throughout the war as all armies struggled to find a way to break through the opposing lines. Most books and documentaries about the war focus on the carnage of the trenches, depicting the ceaseless bombardment and sniping, and the assaults and counterattacks that took millions of lives. This was the experience of most frontline soldiers during that great conflict, but it was not the only experience, even as people immediately think of the Western Front when World War I springs to mind.
As it turned out, the East African Campaign would be the longest campaign of the war, lasting from its outbreak in mid-1914 to the Armistice in late 1918. The campaign was fought in three phases. The first took the form of an under-strength British colonial force defending the infrastructural assets of Kenya, Uganda, and Nyasaland against attacks from an aggressive German garrison operating from within German East Africa. This encompassed the period from the outbreak of war until early 1916, during which time neither the British Imperial Government nor South Africa was in a position to effectively intervene. The second phase began upon the arrival of a substantial imperial force in the wake of the Allied victory in South West Africa, which allowed the allies to claim the initiative and put the Germans on the run. The third phase, beginning in early 1917, saw a lapse into guerrilla tactics by a remnant German colonial force, operating under no particular illusion of victory and with no higher purpose than to tie up large deployments of Allied manpower.
The East African Campaign of World War I: The History and Legacy of the Allied Victory over Germany in East Africa examines one of the most unique campaigns of the Great War. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about World War I's East African Campaign like never before.