ABSTRACT

IN the first World War the colonial campaigns were dismissed as 'side-shows', while it was the Western Front in France and Belgium that claimed popular attention. The historians of the war of 1914 have on the whole neglected the operations in Mrica and the Pacific which resulted in the Allied conquest of the German colonies. These campaigns are relegated to a footnote in Cruttwell's standard History of the Great War (1934). Only the operations in West Mrica and the first part of the campaign in East Mrica are fully described in the British official history of the war of 1914. Yet the conquest of the German colonial empire was accomplished by operations which called forth the highest military and personal qualities of the British and Allied forces, for they were conducted against a determined and resourceful enemy in face of great climatic and other natural difficulties.