![]() However, he had failed to bring the German Schutztruppe to battle and it remained a powerful and well-motivated force. By September 1916, the British forces, commanded by Smuts, had occupied the bulk of German East Africa with all the railways, towns and ports in their possession. The British wanted to keep any potential spoils for themselves, but were also strongly influenced by the expansionist policies of South Africa, largely propounded by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. The East African campaign evolved haphazardly from neutralising German wireless communications and naval facilities to a wildly over-ambitious plan to conquer the whole of the colony with scant forces. Although the colonies possessed little strategic value in themselves, the dynamics of imperial rivalry quickly generated armed conflict. At the outbreak of war, the imperial powers in East Africa were unprepared for a major campaign. Nevertheless, a great deal of valuable primary material exists in various archives and it is the aim of this dissertation to describe and analyse the military operations of this period. Scholarly works have been greatly outnumbered by popular accounts and the final two years, 1916 to 1918, remain vague and contradictory. Despite this, the campaign lasted from August 1914 to November 1918 and covered a large portion of East Africa as well as drawing in the majority of its population. Strategically unimportant to the main war effort, East Africa has remained in the shadows of the much better known Western, Mesopotamian and Palestine Fronts. The campaign in East Africa is one of the lesser-known and understood theatres of the First World War.
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