page_title: East African campaign (World War I)
section_title: Casualties
hierarchical_section_title: East African campaign (World War I) / Aftermath / Casualties
caption_attribution_description: English: Ministry of Information First World War Official Collection German East African Campaign. No. 10 Workshop Unit moving forward on Line of Communication in Portuguese Nyasaland - about to trek a small part of their journey through a swamp, transport other than porters being impossible.
context_page_description: The East African campaign in World War I was a series of battles and guerrilla actions, which started in German East Africa and spread to portions of Portuguese Mozambique, Northern Rhodesia, British East Africa, the Uganda Protectorate, and the Belgian Congo. The campaign all but ended in German East Africa in November 1917 when the Germans entered Portuguese Mozambique and continued the campaign living off Portuguese supplies.
  The strategy of the German colonial forces, led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, was to divert Allied forces from the Western Front to Africa. His strategy achieved only mixed results after 1916 when he was driven out of GEA and Allied forces became composed almost entirely of South African, Indian, and other colonial troops. Black South African troops were not considered for European service as a matter of policy, while all Indian units had been withdrawn from the Western Front by the end of 1915. The campaign in Africa consumed considerable amounts of money and war material that could have gone to other fronts.
  The Germans in East Africa fought for the whole of the war, receiving word of the armistice on 14 November 1918 at 07:30 hours.
context_section_description: In 2001, Hew Strachan estimated that British losses in the East African campaign were 3,443 killed in action, 6,558 died of disease and c. 90,000 African porters dead. In 2007, Paice recorded c. 22,000 British casualties in the East African campaign, of whom 11,189 died, 9 percent of the 126,972 troops in the campaign. By 1917, the conscription of c. 1,000,000 Africans as carriers, depopulated many districts and c. 95,000 porters had died, among them 20 percent of the Carrier Corps in East Africa. Of the porters who died, 45,000 were Kenyan and 13 percent of the male population. The campaign cost the British Empire £70 million, close to the British war budget in 1914. A Colonial Office official wrote that the East African campaign had not become a scandal only "... because the people who suffered most were the carriers - and after all, who cares about native carriers?". The Belgian record of 5,000 casualties includes 2,620 soldiers killed in action or died of disease but excludes 15,650 porter deaths. Portuguese casualties in Africa were 5,533 soldiers killed, 5,640 troops missing or captured and an unknown but significant number wounded.
  In the German colonies, no records of the number of people conscripted or casualties were kept but in Der Weltkrieg, the German official history, Ludwig Boell (1951) wrote "... of the loss of levies, carriers, and boys (sic) [we could] make no overall count due to the absence of detailed sickness records". Paice wrote of a 1989 estimate of 350,000 casualties and a death rate of 1-in-7 people. Carriers were rarely paid and food and cattle were requisitioned from civilians; a famine caused by the subsequent food shortage and poor rains in 1917 led to another 300,000 civilian deaths in German East Africa. The conscription of farm labour in British East Africa and the failure of the 1917–1918 rains, led to famine and in September the 1918 flu pandemic reached sub-Saharan Africa. In British East Africa 160,000–200,000 people died, in South Africa there were 250,000–350,000 deaths and in German East Africa 10–20 percent of the population died of famine and disease; in sub-Saharan Africa, 1,500,000–2,000,000 people died in the flu epidemic.
caption: African porters in British service suffered high casualties from disease
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