German East Africa

As there is currently no official Blood and Valor range for the German East Africa force, I had to pick and choose from a couple of different ranges. The three I looked most closely at were Askari Miniatures, Brigade Games and Pulp Figures, all in 28mm.

Blood and Valor uses a fairly straight forward unit organization. There’s a HQ consisting of an officer with a pistol and two riflemen. The rifle squads are the core of the force and the three rifle squads are Schutztruppe, Askari and Sailors. Schutztruppe and Salior squads can have a single light machine gun attached. You can add heavy machine gun teams consisting of three men or single snipers and a specialist close combat squad.   That’s it. Nothing super difficult to find. Except …

No one makes a light machine gun for German East Africa  Now, some people will say they weren’t used and it’s true, the Germans had none at the start of the war. But more on this later.

All three ranges can give you the Schutztruppe HQ and heavy machine gun teams. However Pulp Figures has no Askari or German sailors. They do have Seebattalion but those are specialist Marine equivalents and there was no large formation present in East Africa. Now, I do fudge things a bit and include a few individuals, but no formations. The Pulp Figures Schutztruppe all wear high leather boots which were worn but were not that common.

Brigade Games can cover all the core units and has several uniform variations so you can have some variety. One of the best things they have is a Schutztruppe MG team, an Askari MG team and a Naval MG team. You could buy all three and mix and match your teams. All figures are in the low cut boots and putees  common to the period.

Askari Miniatures has all of the above plus light field guns, cavalry and camels!  Cavalry wasn’t present in large numbers in East Africa but Southwest Africa had a large cavalry force and some troops mounted on imported camels. There were a small number of mounted troops in East Africa but not a lot and mostly only played a mounted infantry role in the early part of the campaign.

The big difference between the ranges is the scale. All three advertise themselves as 28mm. And they are.

But it depends on how you measure them.

Brigade Games and Pulp Figures measure 28mm from foot to eye. Askari miniatures measures 25mm foot to eye. If you measure to top of head, then you get 28mm.  You could make an argument that the difference is minimal and just reflects normal human variations but everything is scaled to the figure so weapons, canteens, bread bags, etc look smaller compared to figures from the other two ranges.

Ulitmately I limited myself to Brigade Games and Pulp Figures

When the light cruiser SMS Koningsberg was scuttled her crew joined the Schutztruppe as both artillery men using the big guns removed from the cruiser as well as infantry.

Each German colony had its own Schutztruppe and while independent from each other, their activities were coordinated by the Schutztruppe staff officers assigned to the German general staff. However, in practice, each colony was largely on it’s own once the war started.

The East African force started with 14 Feldkompanien of roughly 160 to 200 men under arms. An additional 250 man contingent of unarmed porters was assigned to each company. As the war progressed, this was expanded to a total of 30 companies plus another 8 Schutzenkompagnies (rifle companies) made up of white settlers, hunting and rifle clubs, plantation managers or trading company employees.

The prewar units were mixed race units of roughly one European soldier to eight African soldiers known as Askari, an Arabic word meaning soldier. Each company also had machine gun teams attached. There was a limited amount of light artillery available. While German soldiers had a version of the 1898 Mauser, the Askari were mostly armed with 1871 Mausers, a single shot rifle firing a black powder cartridge that created huge plumes of smoke.

Lettow-Vorbeck was the commander of the German East Africa Schutztruppe (translates roughly as “protection force”) from 1914 to 1918. Even though the entirety of German East Africa was occupied by the Allied powers, and being outnumbered by a factor of 21 to 1, he remained undefeated throughout the war and carried out the only successful incursion onto British territory of the war. He surrendered after the armistice because he didn’t know the war was over and had to have news of the armistice to be confirmed by the British. His success in tying down some 300,000 allied troops is largely due to his use of guerrilla warfare. He is sometimes referred to as the first guerrilla but at the time was called The Lion of Africa.

The Great War YouTube channel is an absolutely fascinating and monumental work covering the First World War in one week segments, for the entire four years of the war. There are also specials on various personalities, weapons and tours of historic locations. Even just casually interested viewer’s will find themselves watching just more and more videos. Well worth checking out.