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African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa, 1914-1918 by [Robert Gaudi]

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Robert Gaudi

African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa, 1914-1918 Kindle Edition

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The incredible true account of World War I in Africa and General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the last undefeated German commander.

“Let me say straight out that if all military histories were as thrilling and well written as Robert Gaudi’s African Kaiser, I might give up reading fiction and literary biography… Gaudi writes with the flair of a latter-day Macaulay. He sets his scenes carefully and describes naval and military action like a novelist.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

As World War I ravaged the European continent, a completely different theater of war was being contested in Africa. And from this very different kind of war, there emerged a very different kind of military leader....

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the continent of Africa was a hotbed of international trade, colonialism, and political gamesmanship. So when World War I broke out, the European powers were forced to contend with one another not just in the bloody trenches, but in the treacherous jungle. And it was in that unforgiving land that General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck would make history.

With the now-legendary Schutztruppe (Defensive Force), von Lettow-Vorbeck and a small cadre of hardened German officers fought alongside their fanatically devoted native African allies as equals, creating the first truly integrated army of the modern age.

African Kaiser is the fascinating story of a forgotten guerrilla campaign in a remote corner of Equatorial Africa in World War I; of a small army of ultraloyal African troops led by a smaller cadre of rugged German officers—of white men and black who fought side by side. But mostly it is the story of von Lettow-Vorbeck—the only undefeated German commmander in the field during World War I and the last to surrender his arms.

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January 31, 2017
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Editorial Reviews

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Praise for African Kaiser

“Let me say straight out that if all military histories were as thrilling and well written as Robert Gaudi’s African Kaiser, I might give up reading fiction and literary biography...Gaudi writes with the flair of a latter-day Macaulay. He sets his scenes carefully and describes naval and military action like a novelist. His sentences are models of clarity and vivacity, sometimes further enlivened with wry authorial comments.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Robert Gaudi combines a researcher’s meticulous precision with a novelist’s consummate storytelling skill to piece together a thousand shards of forgotten history into this astonishing and irresistible confection.”—Madison Smartt Bell

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Zeppelins of the China Show

A thick, billowing fog bank concealed the rocky shore of the Baltic island of Odensholm off the Estonian coast before dawn in the early morning of August 26, 1914. Odensholm-desolate, beautiful home to a small ethnic Swedish population of farmers and fishermen since Viking times-was also, according to legend, the final resting place of Odin, chief god of the Norse pantheon, patron of death, battles, frenzy, poetry, and a few other things. No one on Odensholm could say exactly where the god was buried, whether beneath this barrow or that mound; some insisted the island itself was his tomb, its cliffs and stony beaches the monument raised above his massive divine corpse.

But such mythological nonsense did not figure among the matters weighing on the mind of Korvettenkapitan Richard Habenicht of SMS Magdeburg as he threaded his warship through the shallow waters at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland in the last dark hours of the night. Magdeburg, one of the newest and fastest cruisers in the Kaiserlich Marine, 455 feet long, propelled by two powerful AEG Vulcan steam turbines, could make 27.5 knots fully loaded with all arms and ordnance and carrying its complement of 355 officers and men. Her twelve 10.5cm guns could blast an enemy vessel out of the water from 41,700 feet-nearly eight miles-away, as long as atmospheric conditions permitted lookouts to see that far. Part of the Kaiser's newly constituted Baltic Squadron under the command of Rear Admiral Behring, Magdeburg had been sent to harass Russian naval bases and warships in the Gulf of Finland. She had participated, along with SMS Augsburg, three destroyers, and the minelayer Deutschland, in the bombardment of the Russian port of Libau on August 2, the opening naval action of the Baltic Campaign.

Then, on the morning of August 17, these German warships came into contact with a more powerful Russian squadron, including the Admiral Makaroff, Gumboi, Bogatyr, and Pallada. In naval warfare of the era, the captain of an outgunned ship presented with the choice between fight or flight would automatically choose the latter. Korvettenkapitan Habenicht ordered evasive maneuvers and soon put the slower, heavily armed Russians in his wake. A week later, skimming the Estonian coast on reconnaissance duty, Magdeburg came into contact with Bogatyr and Pallada for the second time. Still outgunned, she again showed them her stern; this time the Russian warships gave chase.

Night fell. SMS Magdeburg, with Bogatyr and Pallada somewhere close behind, ran into the fog bank near Odensholm at fifteen knots. Suddenly, a deep shudder ran the length of the ship, followed by a metallic shrieking sound. Every man aboard, from captain to cook, knew the worst had happened: Magdeburg had run aground. Korvettenkapitan Habenicht immediately ordered "full stop," but for a long minute the massive turbines throbbed forward, driving the ship farther out of the water. He then ordered "full speed reverse." No use. The metallic shrieking only intensified and Magdeburg wouldn't budge. "Full stop" again. Magdeburg, the Kaiser's fastest ship, was stuck hard on the rocks beneath Lighthouse Cliff at the northeast tip of Odensholm; she had been called by Odin's ghost to her doom.

Presently, Magdeburg's escort destroyer, known only by its call letters, V.26, approached gingerly through the fog. Tow cables fixed, she attempted to pull the larger ship free, to no avail. Magdeburg was stuck for good, with the Russians lurking somewhere just over the edge of the horizon. Korvettenkapitan Habenicht then gave the order to abandon ship, two words that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The fog complicated matters, but V.26 managed to evacuate most of Magdeburg's crew. A remnant, including the captain, remained aboard to perform a few last duties-most important, the destruction of the codebooks and cipher keys known as the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM), of which Magdeburg had been issued several copies. These critical documents allowed the Germans-heavily reliant on radio communication-to talk to one another without the enemy being able to eavesdrop.

Signal books destroyed, the unfortunate cruiser would be scuttled by charges set in the forward magazine. This sort of operation-fogbound, at night, in choppy seas, beneath a rocky cliff-dangerous at best, was doubly dangerous in wartime. A sailor fell into the cold waters of the Baltic and drowned as the scuttling charges were hostily set; several more died a few minutes later when they detonated prematurely.

At last, the fog lifted and morning sun lit the scene of Korvettenkapitan Habenicht's nightmare: There, between the bright Estonian coast seven miles off and Odensholm's stony cliff, stood Bogatyr and Pallada. The Russian ships began firing immediately, their big guns booming across the gulf. A dozen sailors died in the bombardment, vaporized by exploding shells. Forty-five more, still aboard Magdeburg, saved themselves by jumping overboard and swimming to the island. The bombardment quickly came to an end; Magdeburg, unable to offer any resistance, was a dead ship.

Korvettenkapitan Habenicht retired to his cabin, determined not to outlast the destruction of the ship he'd stupidly run aground on Odensholm. What had happened? A navigational error, a mistake in dead reckoning in a fog bank at night, had put them closer to the island than he'd suspected. One could blame the navigator, but ultimately the responsibility rested with the captain alone. He sat down behind his desk and tried not to think about the pistol in the drawer. An hour later, a Russian naval officer of English extraction, Lieutenant M. Hamilton, found Korvettenkapitan Habenicht still sitting there, head in his hands.

The captain looked up, all fight gone from his pale blue eyes, as Hamilton entered the cabin. The Russian gestured out the porthole to his torpedo boat, the Boukaroff, just come alongside. He tried Russian, French, and English, but Korvettenkapitan Habenicht didn't understand these languages. Then, in halting German, Hamilton managed, "Wollen sie nach torpedo gehen?" and again gestured to the Boukaroff. At last, the captain nodded.

He rose and strode about the cabin, agitated, picked up a few personal items, put them down, opened his desk drawer, closed it. In the end, he took nothing-then his eyes fell upon his sword hanging on a hook on the wall. He took it down and offered it to Lieutenant Hamilton, who refused politely and handed it back. It was not right, Hamilton later said, to take a captain's sword aboard his own ship. Korvettenkapitan Habenicht, overwhelmed by this small kindness, shook the young officer's hand and with that gesture became a prisoner of the tsar. He would remain so until his escape during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution in 1918.

The wreck of his ship, the SMS Magdeburg, scrapped by the Russians and still visible at low tide off Lighthouse Cliff on Odensholm, is today a popular spot for Baltic Sea sport divers.

The fate of a single German cruiser and the capture of her captain, no matter how keenly felt at the time, remain minor incidents in a major war and would be all but forgotten now except for a single significant oversight: Unfortunately for the German war effort, the destruction of the MagdeburgÕs naval codebooks had been interrupted by the premature explosion of the scuttling charges, then overlooked during the tumult of evacuation and bombardment.

The Russians, upon searching the ship, discovered two copies of the codebooks, one at the bottom of a storage locker aft, another-along with the cipher key and secret charts of the Baltic-in the wheelhouse. A third copy, dredged up by Russian divers from the rocky seabed, had been weighted with lead and tossed overboard. This copy, SKM 151, was offered by the Russians to their British allies. The Admiralty dispatched HMS Theseus to Alexandrovsk on the Arctic Circle to fetch SKM 151 to London; First Sea Lord Winston Churchill examined it in his office on October 30, 1914.

"At the beginning of September 1914, the German light cruiser Magdeburg was wrecked in the Baltic," recalled Churchill, getting his dates wrong and, characteristically, sacrificing accuracy for drama. "The body of a drowned German under-officer was picked up by the Russians a few hours later. Clasped in his bosom by arms rigid in death were the cipher and signal books of the German Navy. . . .

"Late on an October afternoon . . . I received from the hands of our loyal allies these sea-stained, priceless documents. We set on foot at once an organization for the study of the German wireless and for the translating of the messages taken in. The work was of great complexity as, of course, the cipher is only one element in the means of preserving a message. But gradually our officers succeeded in translating intelligible portions of various German naval messages."

The organization Churchill and others set afoot became the legendary Room 40, a secret cabal of cryptographers, mathematicians, philosophers, linguists, scholars, and similar useless types-the "best brains in the country." These eccentrics worked in a hidden warren of rooms at the Admiralty in the Old Building, then, as now, presided over by the statue of Nelson in his whitewashed niche. Twice a day, a superannuated functionary called simply Old Maskell, like a character out of Dickens, carried a black box containing deciphered German military communications from Room 40's puzzle-solvers to the strategic thinkers at British Naval Intelligence. These intercepted messages came in from every corner of the empire and from every front where Britain and her allies fought Kaiser Wilhelm II and his "Huns."

All through the first years of the war, the most eagerly awaited-and dreaded-German messages received in Room 40 pertained to the deadly Zeppelin raids on London. During this period, the great city endured her first ÒblitzÓ-a relentless series of air attacks perpetrated on civilian targets by the massive, unwieldy airships, attacks lent an extra punch by their very newness: For the first time in history, a civilian population was being bombed from the skies. The Kaiser, GermanyÕs ultimate ÒWar Chief,Ó initially opposed the Zeppelin raids as unsportsmanlike. He also didnÕt want to bomb his royal cousins in Buckingham Palace. But as the British naval blockade tightened its grip on Germany and the German people felt the hunger pangs of food shortages, his resistance weakened and the Zeppelins began their reign of terror.

"People stand gazing into the sky from the darkened streets," wrote American journalist William Shepherd, describing an early Zeppelin attack on the British capital. "Among the autumn stars floats a long, gaunt Zeppelin; it is dull yellow, the color of a harvest moon. . . . Great booming sounds shake the city. They are Zeppelin bombs-falling-killing-burning. . . . Suddenly, you realize the biggest city in the world has become the night battlefield on which seven million harmless men, women, and children live."

It's hard for us now, living in the faint afterglow of the Apollo missions, to understand the visceral impact of the Zeppelin Luftschiff (airship) on the world of 1914. They had been developed over several decades and through many spectacular disasters by the eccentric, monomaniacal Saxon count Ferdinand von Zeppelin-inspired after going aloft in a Union Army observation balloon at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, during the American Civil War.

The latest iterations, cigar-shaped and long as ocean liners, were ultracombustible monsters, kept aloft by canvas bags full of a highly explosive hydrogen/oxygen mixture fixed to a rigid duralumin frame covered by a weatherproofed canvas skin. Five aviation engines suspended from aluminum scaffolding beneath their vast bellies provided forward push; a complex system of wheels, weights, and cables in two separate gondolas allowed for directional control. Their capacious, largely empty interiors, crisscrossed by catwalks and cargo platforms, could carry a payload of thousands of tons of bombs.

Once airborne, the Zeppelin emitted a steady drone, like the buzzing of some giant, destructive insect. In 1915, London Air Defense, casting about for a Zeppelin early-warning detection system, recruited blind volunteers to listen for this drone. Deprived of sight, the hearing of the blind must be that much more acute-so Air Defense reasoned. They thought the blind would be able to hear the Zeppelins coming before anyone else, thus allowing squadrons of B.E.2c fighters more time to scramble from aerodromes hidden around the city. (It took one of these slow, rickety planes an hour to screw up to the Zeppelin cruising altitude, above 10,000 feet.) And so dozens of blind volunteers stood with their ears pressed to giant sound amplification cones all through the London nights they could not see, as if listening for the voice of God. This system, despite its unintended poetry, didn't work very well; apparently the blind hear no better than anyone else.

"England is no longer an island," crowed the editorial writers of Leipzig's Neueste Nachrichten. "The city of London, the heart which pumps the life blood into the arteries of the brutal huckster nation, has been sown with bombs by German airships. . . . At last, the long yearned for punishment has fallen on England, this people of liars and hypocrites-their punishment for the overflowing measure of sins of years past. . . ."

Etc.

Less than eighteen months later, the Zeppelins had become a military redundancy. They exploded into flowers of flame with sickening, predictable regularity in the night skies over London. They fell slowly, dripping bright, fiery tendrils into the black water of the English Channel. To save weight and increase bomb-carrying capacity, Zeppelin crews were not allowed parachutes and so plummeted in their hundreds to the darkened earth and destruction. Once feared airborne predators, the Zeppelins had now become slow, lumbering prey-ridiculed by a no longer fearful British public as harmless airborne Ògas bags.Ó They had been rendered obsolete for offensive purposes by the invention of incendiary bullets that could ignite hydrogen gas with ease, by an increasingly efficient early-warning system that had nothing to do with superhearing blind people and was instead based on Room 40Õs deciphered messages, and by advances in aircraft design that allowed fighters to reach ever-higher altitudes. British pilots could now attain those rarefied stratums of the atmosphere where, like giant defecating birds, the Zeppelins did their business.

But, in the fall of 1916, Room 40's puzzle-solvers caught wind of something new and ominous-the faint echoes of an emerging threat, referred to in German coded messages as "China Show." The only thing they knew for sure about China Show was that it had to do with Zeppelins. Did this mean the Germans had developed more powerful airships, somehow impervious to incendiary bullets? Or larger and more destructive bombs for the Zeppelins to drop on London? Or were they planning a new offensive to recover their lost territories in the Far East? Oddly, several of the messages referring to China Show had been intercepted by the listening post atop the Great Pyramid in British-held Egypt. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01E4WAG6M
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dutton Caliber (January 31, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 31, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 10258 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 445 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #576,199 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #113 in History of East Africa
- #158 in Biographies of World War I
- #221 in East Africa History

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Thrilling and well written

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2017

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I agree with every word of the review that let me to read this book, by Michael Dirda of The Washington Post on March 15, 2017:
The Washington Post
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‘African Kaiser’: A sweeping military history that reads like a novel
By Michael Dirda March 15

Let me say straight out that if all military histories were as thrilling and well written as Robert Gaudi’s “African Kaiser,” I might give up reading fiction and literary biography.

Anyone interested in 20th-century culture is bound to spend some time thinking about World War I. Yet while most of us are aware of the horrors of trench combat and the thousands lying dead in Flanders fields where poppies blow, what about the war outside Europe? What about German East Africa? Until I read Gaudi’s book, almost all I knew was that Lord Greystoke fought “Huns” in “Tarzan the Untamed” and that the sinking of an enemy warship provided the climax for the movie “The African Queen.”

Still, the war in Africa was more than a sideshow. A brilliant guerrilla strategist, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck forged his fanatically loyal Schutztruppe — a small colonial infantry consisting of largely black soldiers — into “a highly efficient fighting force, aggressive and completely self-supporting,” and one that was “the first racially integrated army in modern history.” As von Lettow bluntly said, “Here in Africa we are all equal. The better man will always outwit the inferior and the color of his skin does not matter.” These words were not mere lip service, either: His actions show that he genuinely believed them.

On his very first page Gaudi reveals his own awe of what von Lettow and his men accomplished:

“Cut off from the world by the British blockade in what remained of Germany’s last colony . . . they marched through bush and jungle and swamp and thorn scrub pori. They clambered up mountains and across arid, rocky plateaus, mostly without shoes. Their rifles were ancient or captured from the enemy; their artillery a few naval guns scavenged off a gutted battleship in the fetid sluice of the Rufiji [River]. They attacked, retreated, advanced, attacked, retreated to fight again. And though vastly outnumbered by British, South African, Belgian, and Portuguese armies, they could not be caught or beaten.”

“African Kaiser,” however, doesn’t just focus on these ragtag troops and their general. Gaudi tells us about Room 40 — center for British cryptography — and the history of zeppelins. We are given a brief account of the colonial wars in southern Africa. We learn myriad odd facts, such as the widespread belief that drinking sweet vermouth offered protection from malaria. Periodically, Gaudi veers off to recount the daring exploits of con artists, great white hunters and battleship commanders.

To illustrate his hero’s character he even retells the story of Gylippus from Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War.” Under attack and blockade by the Athenians, Syracuse called on its ally Sparta for help. But the Spartans were themselves hard-pressed and could spare only one man, Gylippus. But that one man “by sheer force of personality and military skill” reorganized Syracuse’s army and “choosing the right moment to attack, turned the tide of the war against the Athenians.” As Gaudi points out and von Lettow’s operations repeatedly demonstrated, “in battle, numbers don’t matter as much as resolve.”

Described only as a freelance writer living in Virginia, Gaudi writes with the flair of a latter-day Macaulay. He sets his scenes carefully and describes naval and military action like a novelist. His sentences are models of clarity and vivacity, sometimes further enlivened with wry authorial comments. The academically inclined, however, may fault his decision to eschew source notes. Caught up by Gaudi’s skillful storytelling, most readers aren’t likely to care.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck came from a long line of soldiers. He was brought up with Prussian discipline, attended the military academy at Kassel, enjoyed reading philosophy and literature, mastered English, French and several African languages, and tasted first blood in China during mop-up operations following the Boxer Rebellion.

After his service in Asia, von Lettow was assigned to German South West Africa during fierce uprisings by the Herero and Hottentots. In 1906, an exploding shell cost him the use of his left eye. But his experiences taught him that Africans “fought with the country rather than against it; they generally eschewed pitched battles and were extremely mobile, drawing heavily laden, plodding German soldiers on long, exhausting marches through waterless bush tangled with thorn scrub where German firepower could not be used with effectiveness.” He would later apply these lessons against the British.

Back in Germany because of his eye injury, von Lettow worried that his career as a field officer was over. Eventually, though, he was given command of the 2nd Sea Battalion on the North Sea. Four years later, by now in his mid-40s, he was finally ordered to lead the small Schutztruppe in German East Africa, a colony that had earned the allegiance of its indigenous people through respectfulness and education. Typically, von Lettow immediately began to learn Swahili. En route to Dar es Salaam, he encountered a charming young Danish woman named Karen Blixen, with whom he shared a shipboard romance. Later during the war, Blixen — better known as Isak Dinesen, author of “Out of Africa”— used her admirer’s inscribed picture as a talisman against violence by German partisans.

The second half of “African Kaiser” follows von Lettow’s guerrilla operations, as he outfoxes the British time and again. His aim was almost always tactical — through his commando raids he could assist the Fatherland’s larger war effort by compelling Britain to divert men and material to Africa. In the end, he would be the only undefeated German general of World War I and a recipient of his nation’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor. Amazingly, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck lived on to oppose Hitler, survive another world war and die in 1964, just short of his 95th birthday.

20 people found this helpful

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Susana M. Smith

but he drew some pretty famous names into his wake of his story

Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2017

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Gaudi has found a forgotten war within a war we are forgetting—and brought it vividly to life. In this bizarro campaign of the First World War you find yourself rooting for the racially tolerant and adaptive Germans against the racist and hierarchical Brits. In what one might consider one of the most backward campaigns Gaudi identifies a number of “firsts”: first intercontinental flight (by zeppelin!), first bombardment by air of a naval vessel. I hadn’t heard of von Lettow-Vorbeck—only undefeated German general of WWI—before reading African Kaiser, but he drew some pretty famous names into his wake of his story: Churchill of course, but also Isak Dinesen (did they or didn’t they?), Botha, Jan Smuts, Lord Beaverbrooke (the model, as Gaudi reminds us, for Lord Cooper in Waugh’s Scoop), Herman Goring’s father, Hitler himself (who did not make a good impression on von Lettow). The fact that this story is so obscure makes it fascinating, but Gaudi’s knack for telling it makes it hugely enjoyable, a page turner, and well-worth reading in these centennial years of that war which, Gaudi makes us realize, is in many ways rather contemporary.

30 people found this helpful

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Excellent biography and history of WWI in Africa

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2017

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Robert Gaudi has written a very readable popular biography of General Paul von Lettow, the German commander who led his colonial forces against a British colonial army in Africa during World War I. Using guerrilla tactics von Lettow tied up tens of thousands of British forces that could have otherwise been used, or at least supported, British war efforts in Europe of the Middle East.

Like many books about important military men, the book is as much a biography as it is a historical account of the battles in which von Lettow fought. The book begins by examining von Lettow’s upbringing and his early military experience in Germany, against the Boxers in China, and against the Herero in German South West Africa. In many ways these experiences laid the groundwork for his later success in German East Africa where his background in logistics, unconventional warfare, and his ability to understand other cultures allowed him to fight the British for four years with minimal outside support.

After reviewing von Lettow’s peace time career and life in between the time he left South West Africa until the beginning of World War I, the rest of the book covers the key events of the African theater of war. This includes his initial success at Tanga, the capture of the Konigsberg and his use of its former crew and guns to reinforce his land war, his guerrilla war against Britain’s colonial railway system in Kenya, his long fighting retreat into Africa’s interior until war’s end. Of interest is the friction between the German colony’s governor, who wanted to keep the colony neutral and out of the war, and von Lettow who believed the best way to serve Germany’s war efforts was to tie down as many British resources as possible in Africa; obviously von Lettow won that argument.

The only issue I have with the book, keeping in mind the author is a freelance writer, is he sometimes is more interested in telling the story than he is in getting the facts straight. For example, he refers to the November 11, 1918 armistice as an unconditional surrender by Germany which magnifies his follow on phrase that von Lettow’s world, that he had loved, and his “astonishing” military career were gone forever. Also, at one point in the book Gaudi speculates that von Lettow had created a false report about the Konigsberg, but two pages later this speculation becomes a fact and the reason von Lettow’s ploy had worked. More interesting is the author’s use of Richard Meinertzhagen, a British officer, as a source periodically throughout the book, especially since Gaudi refers to him as “a colossal fraud” and spends time noting that Meinertzhagen has been discredited as a historical source. But Meinertzhagen had the ability to turn a colorful phrase, which obviously appealed to Gaudi.

Having said that, I still recommend the book. It’s an enjoyable read, adds biographical information about von Lettow to the narrative, which is often overlooked in histories of his African efforts, and provides a good review of the war in Africa, particularly from the German perspective. This is an author who believes he's discovered something new, and his enthusiasm is evident in the book.

8 people found this helpful

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J. Blakemore

A new perspective

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2019

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Having bought the audio book on MP3 I can thoroughly recommend this interesting and riveting telling of a relatively unknown period in WWI history. Everything from Zeppelin raids and epic cross-continent aerial journeys to naval warfare and hand to hand fighting on the steamy continent of Africa. The colourful cast of characters could have come straight from the most engrossing fiction, but they are so much more enticing for having been real. Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

What a story!

Reviewed in Germany on May 30, 2020

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General von Lettow-Vorbeck deserves a much better reputation than today's generation allows him - where historical context is too often ignored. His story is told well enough by Gaudi, though is sometimes let down by rather unnecessary colloquial Americanisms which a decent editor should have picked up. This aside, anyone with an interest in twentieth century history, military history or African history should read von Lettow Vorbeck's story; a remarkable man, who one can't help think that had he been on the winning side or a different nationality, would today still be a household name and schoolboy's hero (The issue of colonialism and empires etc aside).

2 people found this helpful

R. Benoit

La Grande Guerre méconnue

Reviewed in France on November 1, 2018

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La Grande Guerre ne se limite pas au front de l’Ouest, dont les fameuses batailles -la Marne, Verdun, la Somme, Saint-Mihiel- sont passées à la postérité… Outre les autres champs de batailles européens et du Moyen-Orient, les opérations menées dans les colonies africaines sont méconnues. L’ouvrage de Gaudi est une biographie de Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, le maître de la guérilla pendant la guerre de 1914-1918, au même titre (et peut-être davantage) que le célèbre Lawrence d’Arabie. L’auteur nous fait découvrir le temps de l’ère coloniale avec les missions menées par Lettow-Vorbeck dans sa jeunesse au Sud-Ouest africain allemand (avec le fameux génocide des Héréros) ainsi qu’en Chine, à l’occasion de la révolte de Boxers de 1900. Si d’autres ouvrages ont traité des colonies allemandes et de la guerre en Afrique orientale allemande, notamment en Français (je recommande plutôt l’excellent La conquête des colonies allemandes signé Rémy Porte plutôt que celui de Lugan, auteur plus sulfureux, quoique son récit de l’Afrique allemande ne soit pas sans intérêt).

L’ouvrage de Gaudi ne fait pas double-emploi avec les autres livres consacrés à l’incroyable odyssée des troupes coloniales allemandes de l’Est africain allemand pendant la Grande Guerre. La dextérité tactique et stratégique de Lettow-Vorbeck perce dans ce récit, mais aussi son humanité, puisque le livre abonde en marque de chevalerie d’un autre âge, ainsi que de déférence envers les Africains, illustrant sans ambages combien Lettow-Vorbeck n’a rien d’un raciste, bien au contraire (n’en déplaise à certains), ainsi que le montre son hostilité à Hitler et ses déclarations en faveur de ses soldats noirs (qui combattent aux côtés des Allemands, voire peuvent les commander…).

On apprécie certains éléments plus rarement abordés comme les chapitres consacrés aux opérations menées par le croiseur Königsberg ou encore l’incroyable aventure du Zeppelin envoyé d’Allemagne vers l’Afrique orientale… Gaudi nous dresse également une galerie de portraits très intéressants, dont la fameuse Karen Blixen (l’auteure de Out of Africa) avec laquelle l’officier allemand aurait eu une idylle.

Certes, l’auteur commet des erreurs quand il fait allusion à d’autres fronts (Lawrence n’est pas intervenu au Yemen; Gaudi confond tués et pertes; il confond Palestine et Mésopotamie ; etc), mais c’est un bon livre qui permet de découvrir autrement un épisode exaltant et trop méconnu de la Grande Guerre.

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Paul

It recounts his life both as a regular human being and also as a brilliant soldier and tactician

Reviewed in Canada on August 10, 2017

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Absolutely superb! Both very informative and somewhat entertaining. It is about time a modern history was written about this very interesting man. It recounts his life both as a regular human being and also as a brilliant soldier and tactician.It is a piece of history that is not talked about much as he was on the loosing side and made absolute fools of the British, South African, Portugese and Belgian militaries by using guerilla tactics. He was the only German that did not surrender and also the only German to invade British territory, Uganda and Kenya (British East Africa).

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Federico Hanhausen

Muy bueno

Reviewed in Mexico on May 8, 2021

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Muy intrresante y me encanta la forma en la que esta narrado

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