THE EAST AFRICAN FORCE 1915-1919

This is an unofficial record of the campaign in E Africa, based partly on a diary kept by the author and written up at irregular intervals but by far the greater part has been written entirely from memory. The author saw no actual fighting and so he has not tried to describe it, and the opinions expressed and the comments made are his own, derived from what he saw and heard; much of what he heard came to him unofficially. This gives an account of the creation of the E African Force and its fighting career, together with some account of the civil and military administrative conditions in E Africa before and during the war. There is an Official History, by Lt Col C.Hordern, which was planned as a two-volume work, but only Vol I was published, in 1941, covering the period August 1914-Sep1916. This is the campaign in which the German commander, Paul von Lettow Vorbeck, outwitted British forces many times his strength and finally emerged from the bush undefeated in the field at the end of the war. It was a campaign that started disastrously for the Briish with their attempted landing at Tanga, and which brought to the fore the one-time Boer commanders Louis Botha, Louis van Deventer and, most famously, Jan Christian Smuts, now fighting for the British Empire.