I thought Britain would be more willing to ally with Germany, seeing as how Germany had industrial and military (at least insofar as defeating France) superiority in Europe.
Yes but for all their military might, as two world wars demonstrated, they just couldn't cause Britain that much trouble. France was much closer obviously, but a war between France and Britain would have been a genuinely global war. France would threaten British Colonies and maritime trade all over the globe, Germany could...make some vague trouble in Africa and some brief problems in the far east.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and more yes. Similarly, Russia could potentially threaten India, which regularly induced heart attacks in Whitehall.
On the subject of colonial wars in WWI, did Germany actually think they stood a chance at holding any of the colonies or were they pretty much expected to be taken? I'm aware that the East African Campaign went on an absurd amount of time given the size of the armies and importance of the theater, but was this more through actual planning or just the good leadership of Lettow-Vorbeck and a lot of luck?
Did Germany have any sort of plan for things even more far flung, like the far east possessions in the event of a Great War?
The Germans never seriously believed that the colonies could hold out forever. Ideally, though, they wouldn't need to: the army in Europe would have defeated France and ruined Russia's armies, and perhaps have forced Britain to the negotiating table within a few months. But they
did think in terms of a long war (the General Staff was weird like this; they planned everything around a short war and then in certain loosely connected areas also planned for a long one...). The General Staff's opinion was that the colonial military forces should work to tie as many British and French soldiers down as possible, thus making life easier for the German troops on the Continent. Colonial administrators - who were the ones actually in command of the police and the
Schütztruppen, the potential armed forces for the colonies in event of war - generally thought in different terms, wanting to try for general neutrality in Africa. (Some Germans - the colonial-administrator types, not the General Staff types - in Africa proposed such a neutrality agreement in 1914 under the terms of the Final Act of the Berlin Congress, which theoretically demilitarized the Congo and much of central and southern Africa. This was brushed aside by everybody else, including the Belgians.)
In the event, the administrators didn't get the choice, and the German colonies were faced with war. Going down the list:
Africa
Togoland, at the outbreak of war, was commanded by one Major von Döring, since the governor was on leave. He had, at his disposal, about 150 paramilitary guards, 400 police and 125 border-patrolmen, armed with the model-1871 rifle and four machine guns. He immediately proposed neutrality and was ignored. He then elected to abandon most of the colony, ignoring orders to hold as much of Togoland as was possible against the British (which deployed the Gold Coast Regiment against the Germans) and instead focused on defending the key wireless station at Kamina for as long as possible before his "troops" started to suffer casualties. Even Kamina was not held that long; Döring elected to place the needs of colonial administration for peaceful continuity over the needs of the German General Staff for tying down the entente's troops.
The defence of Kamerun was based on a somewhat similar pretension. Ebermaier, the governor, and Zimmerman, the military commander, planned to maintain control of the interior of the colony long enough to retain possession that could be brought up at the peace conference to end the war and keep a plausible claim to the colony. Again, this had nothing to do with tying down entente forces, and everything to do with colonialism-as-end-in-itself; the possession of the colony was what mattered, and if it could be accomplished without fighting, so much the better. Zimmerman's defense of Kamerun easily equaled the feat accomplished by Lettow-Vorbeck in Ostafrika - Lettow-Vorbeck had the luxury of waiting until 1916 before the entente powers made any serious attempts to attack his colony, whereas Zimmerman had to deal with Anglo-French attacks from 6 August 1914, and managed to last until 1916.
Südwest-Afrika contained 2,000 troops (plus about 3,000 reservists), a sad comparison to 1904-7, during the Herero uprising, when Lothar von Trotha could mass 21,000. But again, defense plans were organized with a view towards maintenance of possession as an end in itself - insofar as there were any plans at all. Heydebreck, the German commander, was killed by a misfiring rifle grenade in the fall of 1914, his successor was killed on the Oranje River in raiding and counter-raiding, and the eventual commander, one Viktor Franke, was a veteran of a brief antsy encounter with the Portuguese in southern Angola, who the Germans had mistakenly believed were building up troops to attack. (In reality, the buildup was to try to suppress rebellions.) With so much confusion at the top, a coherent strategy didn't exist. Franke was a skilled tactician and fighting soldier, but planning for the defense of the colony as a whole was probably beyond him. German troops failed to take advantage of the South African rebellion in the fall of 1914 and were subsequently buried under an avalanche of Boer troops, some 75,000 strong.
Ostafrika is perhaps the most famous case. It was also a deviation from the norm. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was one of those General Staff types who wanted to launch offensives and tie down entente troops that could be used on the Western Front. (In reality, the overwhelming majority of the soldiers that Lettow-Vorbeck's men fought would never have ended up in France. Most of them were South African or Indian; a few were of the British and Belgian African colonial regiments.) In 1914 and 1915, aided by the breathing space afforded by incompetent British commanders and the ongoing defense of Kamerun, Lettow-Vorbeck mounted several raids into Kenya and sparred with the Belgians in Ruanda and Urundi.
In 1916, Jan Smuts moved in with a huge new South African army, fresh from the Namibian campaign, and pulled the same trick he did in Südwest-Afrika, swarming the Germans with incompetently led and poorly supplied troops that suffered ridiculous casualties but still managed to struggle to the central railroad and cut it, forcing the Germans to retreat first behind the Ruaha and then into Northern Rhodesia. The ultimate result of the Ostafrikan campaign was ironic: Lettow-Vorbeck had wanted to tie down enemy troops first and foremost, and fight battles of annihilation (not the guerrilla-style tactics for which he was lauded, which he considered to be inefficient), while the other German colonial administrators in Africa wanted simply to maintain possession to use as a bargaining chip at the peace conferences. But it was Lettow-Vorbeck's army that remained in 1918, to have been used as a negotiating chip if the Germans had ever been included in the negotiations. (Which, of course, they weren't.)
Pacific Islands
Qingdao, while not, strictly speaking, a Pacific island, was the base for the German East Asiatic cruiser squadron; Graf Spee, as is well known, abandoned it in the summer of 1914 and went on a
guerre de course in the Pacific, eventually annihilating a British squadron at Coronel and then suffering the same fate at the Falklands during the winter of 1914-5. Qingdao itself was the focus of an attempt by the German foreign ministry to secure a neutrality agreement that embraced the entire Pacific Ocean, to be underwritten by the United States - an absurdity, since the East Asiatic Squadron was, at the same time, blowing up wireless stations in Polynesia. (If anybody wanted more proof that the German foreign ministry's dialogue with the military was somewhere between sucky and nonexistent...) Even so, the Germans had a reasonable prospect of defending Qingdao: nobody was equipped to do amphibious landings in the teeth of the port's guns in the Far East, and the British at neighboring Weihaiwei lacked the troops to attack the place. (The governor, Meyer-Waldeck, again saw his goals as possession as an end in itself, perhaps chiefly because, with a total of slightly over 4,500 men, he lacked the ability to do anything but defend.) The Japanese circumvented these issues by violating Chinese neutrality, landing at Longkou, and marching overland to attack Qingdao, which resisted until November in the face of well over ten times its number.
None of the Pacific Islands had any real garrison outside of scattered police and a few small units of
Schütztruppen; none of them resisted longer than 1915, with the exception of an extremely small (like, less than a hundred total) number of fanatics who took to the hills to continue the war. As such, there was no real plan to use these places to do anything in the teeth of entente attacks.
Anyway. Pulling it all together: in most cases, Berlin wanted some kind of concerted effort to resist for a long time, and a few colonies - Kamerun and Ostafrika, mainly, and Qingdao to a lesser extent - were expected to manage this (and did). They weren't expected to be able to keep fighting for four years, though, because the Germans didn't think that a war would last four years. And the colonial administrators who actually ran most of these places ignored the General Staff's injunctions and tried to maintain possession by any means necessary, including neutrality.
The short answer is this: No. Germany had no plans to really accomplish much of anything with their colonies. They abandoned Tsingtao almost immediately, and only held onto GEA through the skill of their man on the ground. The colonies were only ever intended to serve as diversions for British effort, while the ships in those colonies were dispersed to do as much damage to Britain's commerce as possible. Germany's goals for the war were purely on the Continent - which is not to say they wouldn't have demanded some colonies of France if they'd defeated her - and her war plans were drawn up accordingly.
I think that the relatively anemic German efforts in most of the colonies was due to a lack of resources in the colonies with which to sustain a military effort, not due to a conscious decision to say "hey we'll ignore the colonies and let the Brits snap most of them up because we don't care". They clearly did care, but there was no actual way of improving the colonies' ability to resist in most cases.
Well then you come up with a better explanation. I can't seem to find any other reason other than bat-crazy suicide.
Well, the usual reason people give is that the Romanians saw the impressive initial successes of the Brusilov offensive and the almost total lack of Austro-Hungarian troops in Transylvania and figured that they might as well get in while the getting was good. Same reasoning as Bulgaria, really, except with obviously different specifics.
) as a woman she surely didn't know squat about military matters, but then others should have.
