Chasing the Lion: The First World War in East Africa

Robert Fleming, the National Army Museum’s Templar Study Centre Manager, discusses the end of the First World War in East Africa. Fighting during the First World War reached many of Europe’s far-flung colonies, such as those in East Africa. The fighting there was brutal, but the environment even more deadly. Soldiers marched across hundreds of miles of plains, swamps and jungles, and faced constant threats from heat, tropical diseases and parasitic bugs such as the tsetse fly, as well as ambush and combat. Britain committed £200 million and over half a million men to capturing and defeating General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s well-trained Askaris, but he led the Allies on a merry game of cat and mouse for the duration of the war, avoiding defeat to the very end.