World War I: The African Front

The definitive and dramatic history of World War I’s forgotten front.

On August 7, 1914, Britain fired its first shots of World War I not in Europe but in the German colony of Togo. The campaign to eliminate the threat at sea posed by German naval bases in Africa would soon be won, but in the land war, especially in East Africa, British troops would meet far fiercer resistance from German colonial forces that had fully mastered the tactics of bush warfare. Its costs were immense, its butchery staggering: well over 100,000 Allied troops died, as did hundred of thousands of civilians. Imperialism had run calamitously amok.

This eye-opening account of the Great War in East Africa recounts in full the daily horrors of an ill-fated campaign alongside tales of extraordinary courage and the kind of adventure that inspired C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, William Boyd’s An Ice-Cream War, and Wilbur Smith’s Shout at the Devil. 40 b&w illustrations