East African Campaign (World War I)
|
|
The East African Campaign was a series of battles and guerrilla actions which started in German East Africa and ultimately affected portions of Mozambique, Northern Rhodesia, British East Africa, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo. The campaign was effectively ended in November 1917. However, the Germans entered Portuguese East Africa and continued the campaign living off Portuguese supplies.
The strategy of the German colonial forces, led by Lieutenant Colonel (later Generalmajor) Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, was to drain and divert forces from the Western Front to Africa. His strategy failed to achieve these results after 1916, as mainly Indian and South African forces, which were prevented by colonial policy from deploying to Europe, conducted the rest of the campaign. Nevertheless, the Germans fought for the whole of World War I, receiving word of the armistice on 14 November 1918 at 7:30 a.m. Both sides waited for confirmation, and the Germans formally surrendered on 25 November. German East Africa ultimately became two League of Nations Class B Mandates, Tanganyika Territory of the United Kingdom and Ruanda-Urundi of Belgium, while the Kionga Triangle became a mandate of Portugal.
Read more about East African Campaign (World War I): Background, Assessments
Famous quotes containing the words east, african and/or campaign:
“A puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out the still nightthe first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.... The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.”
—Joseph Conrad (18571924)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
—Mario Cuomo (b. 1932)