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My Reminiscences of East Africa (Battery Classics Series)
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My Reminiscences of East Africa (Battery Classics Series) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Remarkable insights into the Great War in Africa by it's most important participant
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General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was the commander of the Imperial German armed forces in East Africa during WWI. At the outbreak of hostilities he realized that he could not possible hope to defeat the combined military might of Britain, France, and Belgium in Africa so he chose to use his small force to threaten British interests in Africa and tie down a much larger number troops that might have been used more profitably at the decisive Western front. Almost completely isolated from Germany (he only received additional supplies a few times, and never after 1916), he nevertheless tied down more than 100,000 British (and allied) troops and led them around East Africa, inflicting several crushing defeats, and never being defeated himself. He initially defended the borders and threatened English colonies, later as the English manpower grew he evaded a pitched battle and fought a guerilla war surrendering several days after the armistice on the Western front.
This book is Gen. Lettow-Vorbeck's memoirs of the events of the Great War in Africa. This book contains a wealth of information about the military details of the campaign, but there is so much more. There are several points (beyond the strictly military) that may be of interest to potential readers. First, Gen. Lettow-Vorbeck is constantly concerned about the supply situation. Particularly later in the war, the German army is often on the move and cannot easily maintain and defend fixed supply depots, so one of the primary concerns about maneuver has to be the availability of food in the new district. It is said that amateur generals talk about tactics, real generals talk about logistics, a point brought home in this book. Reading through this book, I constantly thought about the campaigns of the Napoleonic wars in which the armies lived off the land. I don't know of any other military campaign in which growing crops and big game hunting played a critical role! Second, the General presents a can-do, duty first attitude throughout this book that is as relevent today as it was in 1914. The German soldiers were far from home in a backwater, but General Lettow-Vorbeck was determined that they would do their utmost for their cause and maintain a positive attitude at the same time. The General's sense of duty and positive spirit are written on every page. Third, this book presents an interesting slice of life into colonial Africa of the early 20th century and what life was like under German colonial rule. Americans often view the British as the most enlightened of the colonial rulers, but in fact the locals were probably much better off under the Germans (or French). There are some interesting insights into the relationships between the colonial government, the German immigrants, and the natives.
The reasons that I give this book only four stars are three-fold. First, the writing is extremely dry, and the maps are entirely inadequate and some are nearly illegible. I've read a great many dry military histories in my time (see my other reviews), but this one took some discipline and effort on my part to get through. There is an enormous amount of detail about Lt. Such-and-such being sent here, and Capt. So-and-so being sent there without any discussion of the higher level picture. Many of the places can't be found on the maps in the book, and many of the names of the towns have changed so that it is difficult to follow with a modern atlas. Second, the price is rather steep at $32 for a paperback. This is not a book that one will return to again and again and unless you are a hard-core aficiando of the Great War, this book is probably not worth spending that kind of money on (borrow it from the library). Third, you really need to already know a fair amount about the Great War in Africa to put this work into context. Do not read this as an intro. I knew very little about the events of the war in Africa before approaching this book, and I've now bought Farwell's work to fill in the gaps, but I feel that I would have been much better off having read Farwell (or a similar text) first. You should read this book to learn about Gen. Lettow-Vorbeck's view of his role in the campaign, not to learn about the campaign itself.
The bottom line is that this is an absolute must read for any serious student of the Great War in Africa, you cannot possibly claim to be well read about this era without having read von Lettow-Vorbeck's memoirs. However, I would not strongly recommend this book for the more casual reader, as I've described in detail above. The short five-star reviews given to this book do not, in my view, adequately describe this work. |
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