The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign, 1914-1918 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign, 1914–1918 James R. Brennan The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign, 1914–1918. By Ross Anderson. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2004. ISBN 0-7524-2344-4. Pp. 351. £25.00. Fought over a forbidding terrain larger than Western Europe, the scope and character of the Great War's East African theater has been better conveyed by popular historians such as Brian Gardner and Charles Miller, and by novelists such as William Boyd, than it has by academic historians. Ross Anderson's book marks a turning point in this state of affairs by offering the first sustained academic treatment of the East African conflict based on a wide and meticulous reading of primary sources. The book's archival ambitions alone are extraordinary—not only does Anderson consult an enormous amount of British and German official records and memoirs, he also investigates hitherto overlooked state archival records in Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa, with great profit. Anderson moves skilfully between analyses of metropolitan policymaking and narratives of local military operations, the latter constituting the bulk of the book. The story that emerges is a definitive operational and diplomatic account of the East African campaign, but also one that tightly reflects the perspectives and limitations of official sources. The broad outline of the East African conflict is little changed here. British overconfidence at the war's beginning vanished with a series of stunning German victories. By 1915–16, a war of attrition had emerged, shaped primarily by German guerrilla tactics that forced London to divert resources to this essentially marginal theater for the fruitless chase of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's small but evasive force. Anderson offers a number of important revisions over the course of his study. The tragic decision by the British to commit to a ground war of territorial conquest rather than a simple naval blockade was made, in what retrospectively appears as a fit of absence of mind, by a relatively minor general in the India Office, and for no sound reason. In contrast to the common wisdom that tends to celebrate Lettow-Vorbeck's genius and scorn Governor Heinrich Schnee's civilian interference, Anderson shows that, particularly in the early days of the conflict, Schnee was wise to exercise restraint over Lettow-Vorbeck's sometimes rash decisions. Jan Smuts's rise to military leadership in East Africa was driven mainly by South African political considerations. His subsequent prosecution of the war was also essentially political, exaggerating victories and suppressing [End Page 1231] bad news to the point where Whitehall incorrectly concluded that East Africa required no additional resources by late 1916. The most important revelations concern diplomatic wrangling among allies. Belgium was a distant and somewhat opportunistic ally whom the British Foreign Office welcomed but Colonial Office loathed. Belgian troops were kept at arms length at critical moments in the conflict to prevent any significant territorial redistribution in the future. Most poignant is Anderson's description of the Portuguese, who proved worse than useless to their British allies by unwittingly providing German troops with desperately needed resources but no resistance when the conflict entered Portuguese territory. Indeed, this dynamic was instrumental to the painful prolongation of the conflict. While Anderson's book will serve as the authoritative work on the operational and political-diplomatic history of the East African theater for the foreseeable future, further research remains to be done. The book does not offer, and does not claim to offer, any social history or African voices from the war, and future researchers will have to address this enormous lacuna. In particular, the storied aptitude and loyalty of the Schutztruppe's African askari need research to shed greater light on the military successes, limitations, and tactics of German forces during the war. In general, there is a great need to situate the military history of the conflict more closely to the region's history. Anderson's work would have benefited from a closer regional familiarity, which would have directed him to use standard spellings for town names such as Mwanza and Moshi. Finally, the maps are generally useful, but some suffer from poor resolution, which can make the...