The Battle of the Bees:

The Battle of the Bees: The East Africa Campaign of WWI

            World War I is the perfect example of the old truism "war is hell".  It is also an excellent example of "war is boring".  The war is engrained into our minds as a mess of mud, barbed wire, and pointless attacks resulting in millions of deaths.  With no decisive victories, idiotic generals, and a complete lack of movement, WWI has bored military history nerds for decades.  However, while the main event may be mind numbingly boring, the sideshows are not.  One such sideshow was the wildly successful guerrilla campaign of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.

            German East Africa (now Tanzania) was one of those regions that can be described as utterly worthless.  In fact, despite the building of railways, plantations, and ports the colony never once turned a profit.  As such, when World War I broke out the British decided to attack it.  Opposing them were 2,700 troops under the command of General von Lettow-Vorbeck.

German East Africa

            Apart from Vorbeck himself, Germany's one advantage lay in the makeup of their forces.  When fighting in Africa, the most potent killers tended to be tropical diseases and bug bites.  The Schutztruppe (the German forces in Africa) was made up of European officers with academy training commanding African troops who knew the terrain and had immunities to most of the local diseases.  The British, meanwhile, relied on South African colonists and Indians.  It wasn’t until near the end of the war that the British finally relented and started recruiting Africans into their forces.

A Schutztruppe column

            Despite this, the British still heavily outnumbered the Germans.  British commander Aitken quickly drew up plans to conduct a massive pincer movement with a small force attacking around Kilimanjaro while the main force landed at the port of Tanga.  All seemed jolly as the British launched 8,000 troops to crush von Lettow-Vorbeck's 1,000 man army defending the town.

            The attack was somewhat botched from the start.  Several weeks before the attack a British ship stopped at the port and officially declared that the British were planning to attack.  This gave Vorbeck plenty of time to reinforce the city.  On November 2^nd Aitken's forces landed just south of the port.  The next day they then marched straight into town without bothering to check if there were any Germans there.  It was at this point that the British forces were inexplicable attacked by a massive swarm of bees.  African bees tend to be larger and more aggressive than the ones the British were used to and the swarm put their front lines in disarray.  The combination of this and a counter attack by Vorbeck's outnumbered forces led to the British retreating back to their boats.  British propaganda later claimed that the bees were in fact an insidious German plot to foil the invasion.  However, the bees attacked both armies making the claim questionable at best.

The Battle of the Bees

            After routing the British in the north, Vorbeck attacked into Kenya in the one invasion of British Imperial soil in WWI.  Later, when the British finally gained a foothold in German territory, Vorbeck ran rings around them in the bush for several years.  During this time he not only staved off defeat, but also attacked outward into Portuguese East Africa and later the Belgian Congo.  Still undefeated in the field Vorbeck didn't hear about the armistice until two days after it was signed.  The von Lettow-Vorbeck Memorial in what is now northern Zambia marks the place where the general finally surrendered, ending WWI.

Pictures from:
            homepage.mac.com
            alexcapus.de
            futilitycloset.com