East African Campaign (World War I) - Assessments

Assessments

• In this campaign, disease killed or incapacitated 30 men for every man killed in battle on the British side.

• In one capacity or another, nearly 400,000 Allied soldiers, sailors, merchant marine crews, builders, bureaucrats, and support personnel participated in the East Africa campaign. They were assisted in the field by an additional 600,000 African bearers. The Allies employed nearly 1 million people in their fruitless pursuit of Lettow-Vorbeck and his handful of warriors.

• Lettow-Vorbeck was effectively cut off from meaningful support. He could entertain no hope of a decisive victory. His aim was purely to keep as many British forces diverted to his pursuit for as long as possible and to make the British expend the largest possible resources in men, shipping, and supplies to his pursuit. Although succeeding in diverting in excess of 200,000 Indian and South African troops to pursue his forces and garrison German East Africa in his wake, he failed to divert additional Allied manpower from the European Theater after 1916. While some shipping was diverted to the African theater, it was not enough to inflict significant difficulties on the Allied fleets.

• In retrospect, the East African campaign came to look like a 'sideshow' of the First World War. As memory focused on the vast slaughter of the Western Front, the Indians, Africans and British who had borne the pains of that 'poisonous country' were all but forgotten. Even today, it is only possible to give approximations of the total fatalities. The British Commonwealth forces lost over 10,000 men, ⅔ of them from disease. German losses were about 2,000. But the black people of East Africa suffered far more as carriers who died from disease, exhaustion and military action. One modern estimate is 100,000 dead on all sides. Black civilians also suffered dreadfully. War devastated many localities, bringing hunger, disease and death in its train. Thousands of Africans perished in the outbreak of influenza that swept over their continent at the end of the war.