According to Robert Gaudi, "In Mein Leben von Lettow writes nostalgically of his decade as a junior officer in the Kaiser's Imperial Army: there were Dawn inspections in the biting cold, regimental maneuvers, glimpses of the luminaries of the day – the Kaiser, Crown Prince Friedrich, the "Man of Gold" Field Marshal Count von Moltke, who was Germany's greatest military strategist, and others.

[9] Although Lettow-Vorbeck was fascinated by the ancient history and elaborate courtesy of Chinese culture, he intensely disliked fighting against guerrillas and considered the war detrimental to the discipline of the German Army.

When [Hottentot guerrilla leader] Samuel Isaak was captured and brought in for questioning, it was von Lettow who conducted the interrogations... His questions were how to live off a country which offers no apparent sustenance, how to run in conditions when most men barely have the strength to walk, how to condition the body to go without food or water, and most important of all, how to become so much a part, so absorbed into an unfriendly wilderness that survival is possible as the snakes and land crabs and lizards survive".

Before he could assume this command, however, his orders were changed and he was posted — with effect from 13 April 1914 — to German East Africa (Tanganyika, the mainland territory of present-day Tanzania).

"[27]The historian Michael von Herff says the loyalty of Askaris during the campaign was due to them having formed a military caste within the colonial structure, which had largely separated itself from its members' tribal roots.

The cruiser had a capable crew under commander Max Looff, and its artillery pieces, converted to land use, became the largest standard guns used in the East African Theatre.

On its first day across the river, the column attacked the newly replenished Portuguese garrison of Ngomano and solved its supply problems for the foreseeable future.

The governor regarded war as the worst possible calamity to befall German East Africa, "[undoing] everything his social and economic reforms had accomplished.

He had thus established food depots along his intended line of march from Neu Moshi to the Uluguru Mountains, writing off famine in neighboring villages as a misfortune of war.

On 14 April 1915, the freighter Kronborg arrived off Tanga at Manza Bay after a two-month journey from Wilhelmshaven, and was promptly attacked by the British cruiser HMS Hyacinth.

Fortunately for the Germans, Kronborg was scuttled by her captain to avoid a coal fire after repeated hits were scored by the British cruiser, and the ship settled in shallow water.

The airship reached the Sudan, in a single uninterrupted flight from Bulgaria, where it received a message from the German Admiralty that its planned landing area in East Africa was no longer in Lettow-Vorbeck's hands.

By late September 1916, all of coastal German East Africa, including Dar es Salaam and the Central Railway, was under British control.

[42] Lettow-Vorbeck and his caravan of Europeans, Askaris, porters, women, and children marched on, deliberately bypassing the tribal homelands of the native soldiers in an effort to prevent desertions.

"Swamps and jungles ... what a dismal prospect there is in front of me," stated the Allied commander in pursuit, General Jan Smuts, whose new approach was subsequently not to fight the Schutztruppe at all, but to go after their food supply.

His actions were described as "a campaign of supreme ruthlessness where a small, well trained force extorted supplies from civilians to whom it felt no responsibility...it was the climax of Africa's exploitation".

[44] Lettow-Vorbeck's tactics led to a famine that killed thousands of Africans and weakened the population, leaving it vulnerable to the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1919.

In a book published in 1919, Ludwig Deppe, a doctor of medicine who campaigned with Lettow-Vorbeck and who had formerly headed the hospital at Tanga, lamented the tragedy that German forces had imposed on East Africa in their war with the Allies: "Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation.

We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundered and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years' War.

[47] In the field when rations had to be reduced and supplies dwindled,"It was a measure of the Askaris' loyalty to their commander that they accepted the cuts and did not desert en masse.

When he reached the Chambeshi River on the morning of 14 November, the British magistrate Hector Croad appeared under a white flag and delivered a message from South African General Jacob van Deventer, informing Lettow-Vorbeck of the Armistice.

[62] Three years later, Lettow-Vorbeck accepted an invitation to London where he met face-to-face for the first time Jan Smuts;[63] the two men formed a lasting friendship.

He intensely "distrusted Hitler and his movement,"[64] and approached his relative Hans-Jürgen von Blumenthal with an idea to form a coalition with Der Stahlhelm against the Nazis.

One of Lettow-Vorbeck's junior officers, Theodor von Hippel, used his experiences in East Africa to form the Brandenburgers, the commando unit of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service during the Second World War.

As there had been violence against the White population in the former colony of German East Africa, Lettow-Vorbeck later recalled that he gave one of them, who later became a government official in independent Tanzania, " ..a good talking to.

[71] Several officers of the Bundeswehr were assigned as an honour guard, and West Germany's Minister of Defence, Kai-Uwe von Hassel, gave the eulogy, saying that the deceased, "was truly undefeated in the field".

The former Hamburg-Jenfeld barracks houses the "Tanzania Park", a group of large terracotta relief sculptures of Lettow-Vorbeck and his Askari soldiers, now closed to the public.

Determined to destroy a Schutztruppe armoured train, Indiana takes General von Lettow-Vorbeck (played by Tom Bell) hostage and attempts to return with him behind Allied lines.

Lettow-Vorbeck is the protagonist of The Ghosts of Africa, a 1980 historical novel by Anglo-Canadian novelist William Stevenson about the East African Campaign which highlighted the long-distance resupply mission of the German rigid airship L 59.

The many bureaucratic absurdities of the British campaign against General von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa are satirized in William Boyd's 1983 anti-war novel An Ice-Cream War.