The German Lion of Africa

What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on this book’s cover:

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 bio-graphy… Gaudi writes with the flair of a latter-day Macaulay. He sets his scenes carefully and describes naval and military action like a novelist.

Leaving aside the extraordinary comparison with Macaulay for the moment, most naval and military novels that I’ve read get the historical detail right. Robert Gaudi’s book is so error-strewn that it would fail to qualify even as historical fiction.

His subject is a promising one. Oberstleutnant (later Generalmajor) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was sent to German East Africa (now part of Tanzania) just before the outbreak of the first world war to take command of the Schutztruppe — defence forces — comprising German officers, NCOs and African levies — ‘askaris’ (‘soldiers’, from the Arabic). In November 1914, Lettow and his men gave a bloody nose to a scratch expeditionary force sent from India, and then for the next four years proceeded to lead all comers — British, South African and Portuguese — a merry dance until ordered by Berlin to surrender after the Armistice in 1918. Lettow and his 200-odd officers and NCOs, as an ‘undefeated army’ (which never numbered more than 11,000, including camp-followers), were accorded the privilege of parading along the Unter den Linden the following year.

Without intending to, he therefore served the myth of the ‘stab in the back’ — the notion that the German army had not been defeated (specifically in France) but prevented from continuing the war because of unpatriotic, socialist defeatism at home.