Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa

Imagine a country three times the size of Germany, mostly covered by dense bush, with no roads and only two railways, and either sweltering under a tropical sun or swept by torrential rain which makes the friable soil impassable to wheeled traffic; a country with occasional wide and swampy areas interspersed with arid areas where water is more precious than gold; in which man rots with malaria and suffers torments from insect pests; in which animals die wholesale from the ravages of the tse-tse fly; where crocodiles and lions seize unwary porters, giraffes destroy telegraph lines, elephants damage tracks, hippopotami destroy boats, rhinoceroses charge troops on the march, and bees put whole battalions to flight. Such was German East Africa in 1914-18.

H. L. Pritchard, Ed.
History of the Royal Corps of Engineers, Vol. VII, p. 107

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Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa is a history of the East African campaign by Edward Pearce, first published in 2007. This took place in German East Africa - now Tanzania and Rwanda. German East Africa was utterly surrounded by British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies at the beginning of the war, isolated and outnumbered. Yet German commanders held out until 1918, giving us an extensive look at this form of war and its effects. (The other German Africa colonies were rolled up fairly swiftly, but they do receive a mention.)

So, why talk about this here? Not my usual material. Well, the intersection of the tools of industrial warfare with the less-developed wilderness of East Africa leads to a series of interesting situations to consider.

Firstly, the sheer dearth of Europeans. It should not be a surprise that colonists were outnumbered by natives, but it leads the strange workings where a modern European war must be fought (at first) by levies: 1914 sees British settlers summoned into Nairobi to learn about the emergency and to be organised into military units. Some of these endure to become formal units - see the splendidly named Legion of Frontiersman. Police units are also pushed into paramilitary roles - notably the Northern Rhodesia Police. A European colonial civilian lived in a state of emergency, for at least the early war.

East Africans were both recruited in high numbers to serve in colonial armies (generally referred to as 'Askari' - though this has connotations of irregular soldiery, which would not be true for all African troops). However, this is a conflict with the tools of industrial war that were hear so much of on the Western Front, but without the extensive roads, rail links and factories that allow that to take place. German East Africa was blockaded very early on, and suffered shortages that were frequently mitigated by looting supplies from elsewhere.

Notably, vast numbers of Africans were recruited as porters. With only a few railways and navigable rivers, supplies of food, ammunition and medicine had to be carried. They suffered the same privations as the soldiery, as supply lines extended perilously far and the rains fell. Disease was rife, food was short. Casualties mounted so high that

British forces drew from the resources of Empire as well: Indian regiments and Australians fought in East Africa, as well as forces raised in West Africa and (notably) South Africa. Given the recent Second Boer War, these last had a cloud of suspicion over them that Jan Smuts was keen to dispel by eagerly committing to the fight against Germany. Colonial politics made the war in Africa a political football as often as matter of survival.  Belgian forces were fighting on the last unoccupied Belgian soil in the Congo (no longer King Leopold's personal domain), and thus their success had a unique significance. Portuguese efforts look small beer compared to the rest of Europe, but their colonial possessions brought them into play no matter what, even though they lacked the resources or talent necessary to wage war effectively.

The mismatch of wilderness and modern warfare lead to some astounding developments. Thus we see the haphazard deployment of early aircraft to hunt down German ships, operating in wholly unfamiliar conditions for the pilots. The battle of Lake Tanganyika was settled by hauling two motor launches (HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou) overland, a journey of many miles and much toil. If this seems odd, remember that Lake Tanganyika has a surface area of 12,700 square miles. Even more unlikely, if less successful was the 1917 German attempt to resupply their East African forces by zeppelin, the L59.

By 1917, the German forces under von Lettow-Vorbeck were on the run, stretching a long trail of pursuers and looted villages behind them. Supply lines stretched, and the terrain made bringing him to bear difficult; it's a little reminiscent of the great 18th century campaigns. By this stage, von Lettow-Vorbeck felt no need to hold much ground - there was no sacred German soil to possess or cities to defend, nor did the civilian administration of German East Africa mean much at this time. Despite being broken, his army survived undefeated until the Armistice.

I've not mentioned half of the history this book covers (hunting a battleship in a muddy river delta, the Propaganda War, imperial concerns about an Islamic uprising, the effect of Spanish Flu on a post-war Africa), but suffice it to say that this is an arresting area of First World War history.

There's a lot that could be put towards a tabletop game or setting: two great powers warring over the player's land (like a less perilous Qelong), a caravan game with a zeppelin full of supplies (think Ultraviolet Grasslands), a perilous environment with devastating seasonal changes. I wish I'd read this book before I picked up the Vorrh trilogy.

I'll round off this post with a few flavourful quotes from Tip & Run.

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' "The campaign had degenerated into something like searching for a needle in a haystack, with a handful of Germans hidden in thousands of square miles of bush. They had made a splendid stand, but they were not the real enemy. The real enemy was the deadly climate, the wild regions, and the swamps and forests, and scrub." ' (Deneys Retz, Trekking On, 1933)

'On the Rufiji front the German askari subsisted for months on half-rations and were often forced to succumb to the same desperate measures as British troops eating roots and hippo meat; while the death rate among carriers was as high as one in five.'

'In many areas the bush was so thick that, as the commander of one of th Kilwa columns put it, "large bodies of troops [could] pass each other within a mile distance without being aware of the passage of the other"; maps were rudimentary with place names usually referring to an area of twenty square miles or more; violent bush fires frequently raged across the steppeland; and, as ever, it was the terrain and disease that were to prove even more formidable enemies than the German askari.'

[On the Portuguese East Africa border] 'Pouring rain turned the black cotton soil into a quagmire, and elephant grass taller than a man often restricted vision to a matter of yards.'

'When the death toll among British troops was added to that of the carriers the official "butcher's bill" in the East Africa campaign exceeded 100,000 souls. The true figure was undoubtedly much higher.....Even 100,000 deaths is a sobering enough figure. It is almost double the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War; indeed it is equivalent to the combined casualties - the dead and wounded - sustained by Indian troops. '