Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #177639 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Review
"[Paice] brillaintly chronicles a conflict as gruelling in its different way as that in Gallipoli or France" SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "A fascinating account of a largely forgotten episode" -- Simon Shaw MAIL ON SUNDAY "superb... [Paice] explains in vivid, relentless detail much of what makes Africa what it is today" Daily Telegraph

Review
'Edward Paice's superb history ... meticulously researched and written with tremendous lucidity and brio. One feels that this forgotten episode of the great war has now, finally, its own literary-historical monument - in the future, everyone will start with Paice ... This exceptional history can stand as their [East Africans'] in memoriam.' (William Boyd THE SUNDAY TIMES )

'This marvellous book enthrallingly narrates... Edward Paice's admirable achievement is to have put solid factual flesh on the bones of Boyd's and Forester's fiction, and write the definitive history of that war... Minutely detailed yet entirely engrossing, Paice has done his astounding story justice.... It has never before been told so exhaustively, nor so well.' (THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

'gripping... I wholeheartedly recommend this fascinating book.' (Sara Wheeler DAILY TELEGRAPH )

'a masterful, damning, definitive account...' (Christopher Hudson DAILY MAIL )

'extraordinary, admirably researched history... exemplary clarity... as a feat of synthesis and co-ordination of sources, Tip and Run is amazing.' (Sam Leith SPECTATOR )

'there has been no comprehensive history of this shocking episode of warfare until now.' (THE HERALD (Glasgow) )

'engrossing... a story of the nightmare shaped by European fantasies and lethally visited on African societies.' (THE GUARDIAN )

'marvellous ... Minutely detailed yet entirely engrossing, Paice has done his astounding story justice.' (THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

'Paice's fine book is a worthy tribute... Exhaustively researched, well written and admirably balanced' (Saul David LITERARY REVIEW )

'Edward Paice's superb history ... meticulously researched and written with tremendous lucidity and brio. ' (William Boyd SUNDAY TIMES )

'very well written and researched, and, with a wealth of detail and good maps, it is certainly a good read.' (Gary Sheffield BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE )

'a comprehensive, detailed, scholarly and above all readable account... of warfare and political history of the African continent.' (PENNANT )

THE HERALD (Glasgow)
'there has been no comprehensive history of this shocking episode of warfare until now.'

Customer Reviews

Campaign in East Africa
For those of us who tend to focus our attention on the Western Front this exposition of one of the African fronts is quite an eye opener, and it will probably become the core reference for the East African front in the Great War.

It explains in detail the political dynamics and the military responses over four years of battle.
The book is very well researched and written in an informative, authoritative but most readable style. The characters emerge as people dealing with the realities of fighting as a `sideshow' to the main events in Europe, but no less important in terms of the global impact.

The index, sources and bibliography are excellent and encourage careful reading. Also it is blessed with good maps, particularly of the individual battlefields.

As seems to be the case in wars in Africa, the campaign in East Africa left only one major loser; the Africans. The point is well made in this book which is recommended.


Mike McCarthy
Editor, "The Battle Guide"
Guild of Battlefield Guides

WW1 in Africa
Of all the various campaigns and theatres from WW1, I have always found the "sideshows" in Africa and the Middle East the most fascinating and manoeuvrist, and of those the African campaigns the most interesting. I have read a number of books on the campaign in East Africa, and this is by far the best researched and most flowing and well written yet. It goes into just the right levels of detail without becoming dry and turgid, as some accounts do.

I have only two complaints with this book. For a start, for a campaign covering so much ground and with small forces so widely dispersed, I felt the supporting maps could have provided a lot more clarity; which they did not. The second point is the misnomer within the title, reference the "Untold Tragedy of the War in Africa" bit. This book was fundamentally about the campaign in East Africa, and within the covers does not even create the pretence of being concerned with German SWA, rebellion in SA, the Cameroons etc. This is a pity, as I am still looking for a book written in the style of Tip and Run which covers the whole of Africa in WW1, and the title here is misleading.

Having said all that, it is an excellent and highly recommended read, and but for these two points I would have scored it 5 stars.

forgotten war
In Britain the campaign was given little importance except for the need to crush the German naval bases in Africa. To other powers with frustrated colonial ambitions in there it was different. Two weeks after the Armistice was signed in Europe British and German troops were still fighting in Africa after four years of what one campaign historian described as 'a war of extermination and attrition without parallel in modern times'.
The expense of the campaign to the British Empire was immense, the Allied and German 'butchers bills' even greater. But the most tragic consequence of the two sides' deadly game was the devastation of an area five times the size of Germany, and civilian suffering on a scale unimaginable in Europe. Such was the cost of 'The White Man's Palaver', the final phase of the European conquest of Africa. See the film The African Queen (memorably filmed with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn)