The dustjacket heralds Edward Paice's new book as the ‘first’ proper history of the Great War in Africa. Certainly the fighting in Africa in 1914–18 was long neglected by historians – until recently that is. One of the chief merits of Hew Strachan's brilliant First World War: To Arms (2002) was the way it underlined the truly global nature of the Great War by emphasising the importance of the non-European campaigns in Africa and elsewhere. He followed this up in 2004 with The First World War in Africa, while that same year saw the publication of Ross Anderson's The Forgotten Front 1914–18: The East African Campaign.

Yet Tip & Run is undoubtedly the most comprehensive of these recent histories. Paice has visited no fewer than seventeen archives in eight different countries, and covers all aspects of the fighting in sub-Saharan Africa from South Africa's easy conquest of German South West Africa (modern Namibia) to Belgium's impressive