Battle of Tanga

In November 1914 a British expedition sailed from India to seize Tanga, the harbour at the end of a railway into German East Africa. The landing was slow and poorly concealed, giving Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck time to bring reinforcements down the line. When the Indian troops, many of them inexperienced and worn out by weeks at sea, advanced through plantations toward the town, they were checked by a much smaller German-led force of African askari. After days of confused fighting the British re-embarked, leaving behind rifles, machine guns and ammunition. The defeat opened Lettow-Vorbeck's four year campaign in East Africa, which kept him in the field until after the armistice in Europe.

Tanga became a byword for failures of planning in the Indian Army's overseas expeditions, and the British official history and later writers blamed poor intelligence, the choice of untested troops and the warning the town was given before the landing. The African askari who did most of the fighting on the German side, and the carriers who served both armies in vast numbers during the East African campaign, were long reduced to background in European accounts, and recovering their experience is a major strand of recent work. Lettow-Vorbeck's reputation as an undefeated commander was built up in Germany between the wars and has since been reassessed in light of the campaign's heavy cost to East African civilians. A Commonwealth war cemetery at Tanga holds some of the dead.