East African campaign (World War II)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 13th of June 1940, Italian aircraft raided the RAF base at Wajir in Kenya. That raid opened the East African campaign, also known as the Abyssinian campaign. It was fought across Kenya, Sudan, Somaliland, Eritrea and Ethiopia, pitting an Allied coalition drawn mainly from the British Empire against Italy and its colony of Italian East Africa.

  The coalition was strikingly mixed. Soldiers came from the United Kingdom, South Africa, British India, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, West Africa and the Rhodesias. They were joined by the Force Publique of the Belgian Congo, by Ethiopian resistance fighters known as the Arbegnoch, and by a small unit of Free French troops.

  Their opponents included about 250,000 soldiers of the Royal Corps of Colonial Troops, led by Italian officers and NCOs. Those men were cut off from home almost as soon as the shooting began. The remnants surrendered after the Battle of Gondar in November 1941. Small groups still fought a guerrilla war in Ethiopia until the Armistice of Cassibile in September 1943.

  How did such a large force end up beaten? Why do historians call this the first Allied strategic victory of the war? And why did it matter so much that almost none of those Italian soldiers escaped to fight anywhere else?

  4526304710

• 2. An Empire Cut Off

  ›

  On the 9th of May 1936, Benito Mussolini announced the creation of Italian East Africa. It joined Ethiopia, newly conquered in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, to the older colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Italians shortened its name to the AOI. Four years later, on the 10th of June 1940, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. That decision made the AOI a danger to every nearby British and French colony. It also made Italian forces in Libya a threat to Egypt.

  The timing was poor for Italy. The Italian General Staff had planned for a war only after 1942. In the summer of 1940 the country was far from ready for a long struggle or for holding large areas of Africa. Once Britain held the Suez Canal, the colony could receive neither supplies nor reinforcements.

  In Addis Ababa, Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, ruled as Viceroy and Governor-General, a post he had held since November 1937. On the 1st of June 1940 he commanded about 290,476 troops, counting naval and air personnel. Mobilisation lifted that figure to 371,053 by the 1st of August. He divided his army among four commands, with headquarters at Asmara, Jimma, Addis Ababa and Mogadishu.

  Roughly 70 per cent of his soldiers were locally recruited Askari. The best were the regular Eritrean battalions and the Somali colonial troops. One Eritrean cavalry unit, the Penne di Falco, or Falcon Feathers, once sent a squadron charging at British and Commonwealth troops. The riders threw small hand grenades from the saddle. Most colonial units had been trained for colonial policing rather than modern war. The Somali Dubats were useful light infantry, and irregular bande knew the country well and served as scouts and saboteurs. After war was declared, a company of 100 men was formed from German residents of East Africa and stranded German sailors.

  Italy's arsenal on paper included 672,800 rifles, 824 guns, 126 armoured cars, 24 M11/39 medium tanks and 39 L3/35 tankettes. Ammunition was another matter, and shortages grew severe. Foreign merchant ships captured by German raiders in the Indian Ocean sometimes reached Somali ports, but their cargoes rarely helped. The Yugoslav steamer Durmitor, taken by the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis, reached Warsheikh on the 22nd of November 1940. Its hold held salt and several hundred prisoners.

  7159398345

• 3. Wings and Warships

  ›

  In June 1940 the Italian air command in East Africa counted 323 aircraft. Only 183 were first-line machines. Of the 140 in reserve, 59 were operational and 81 were unserviceable. The SM.79 was the only modern bomber, and the CR.32 fighter was already obsolete. What the force did have was a cadre of pilots who had flown in the Spanish Civil War. Spare parts were scarce, so many aircraft were cannibalised to keep others flying. Workshops run by Caproni and Piaggio could repair about fifteen badly damaged aircraft and engines each month.

  The South African Air Force opposed them with whatever it could find. In Kenya the first aircraft were old and slow, and the South Africans even pressed an old Valentia biplane into service as a bomber. Pilots of 1 Squadron claimed 48 enemy aircraft destroyed and 57 damaged. It is thought that they over-claimed.

  Between 1935 and 1940, Italian naval planners sketched an ocean-going escape fleet, the Flotta d'evasione, for service in the tropics. The grandest version called for three battleships, an aircraft carrier, twelve cruisers, 36 destroyers and 30 submarines. A more realistic plan shrank this to two cruisers, eight destroyers and twelve submarines. Even that proved too expensive. By 1940 the Red Sea Flotilla had seven older destroyers, a few torpedo boats and eight modern submarines, all based at Massawa in Eritrea. Its supplies were meant to last for a war of about six months.

  The submarines fared terribly. The crew of Macallé was struck down by chloromethane poisoning from the refrigeration system, and the boat was run aground and lost on the 15th of June 1940. On the 19th of June, Galileo Galilei engaged an armed trawler off Aden. All but one officer was killed by shell-fire, and the submarine was captured along with documents that included operational orders for four other Italian submarines.

  The British put those papers to work at once. They used them to intercept and damage Torricelli on the 21st of June. Torricelli was then sunk off Perim Island by Kandahar, Kingston, Khartoum and a sloop. The destroyer Khartoum had been hit by a shell from Torricelli. A torpedo on board exploded, and the fire could not be controlled. The sloop Falmouth used the same documents to sink Galvani in the Gulf of Oman on the 24th of June.

  The Bab-el-Mandeb, whose name means Gate of Tears, is only 15 nautical miles wide. After the Armistice of the 22nd of June 1940 removed French naval support, the 1,200-nautical-mile Red Sea passage became Britain's main route to the Middle East. From August to October the British ran 86 ships in northbound BN convoys and 72 in southbound BS convoys. The Italians struggled to find them. Destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines sailed again and again on air and agent reports and came back with nothing.

  The Regia Aeronautica managed only six air attacks on convoys in October and none after the 4th of November. The only destroyer attack came on the 21st of October against BN 7, a convoy of 31 ships, and it caused superficial damage to a single vessel. From June to December the RAF escorted 54 convoys, and Italian aircraft sank one ship and damaged one. The remnants of the Red Sea Flotilla stayed bottled up at Massawa, where a reckoning was waiting.

  8443407724

• 4. Wavell's Impossible Map

  ›

  Five staff officers were all the planning help General Archibald Wavell received for an area of 3,500,000 square miles. He had been appointed in mid-1939 to head the new Middle East Command. In July of that year he devised a strategy to defend the Mediterranean and then dominate it as a base for striking Germany. The conquest of Italian East Africa ranked second only to the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal. In August he ordered quick plans to win control of the Red Sea. He wanted thrusts from Djibouti toward Harar and Addis Ababa, or from Kassala to Asmara and Massawa, preferably both at once.

  The collapse of France in June 1940 forced him onto the defensive. After Italian operations at Kassala and Gallabat, Winston Churchill blamed Wavell for a "static policy". Wavell replied that the Italian attacks were not serious. He still travelled to Sudan and Kenya to see for himself, and at Khartoum he met the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

  At the end of October 1940, Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, convened a conference at Khartoum. Selassie attended, along with South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, Wavell, Lieutenant-General William Platt and Lieutenant-General Alan Cunningham. They agreed to attack Ethiopia, with support for Ethiopian irregular forces. Platt would advance from the north. Cunningham would drive north from Kenya through Italian Somaliland. A third force would land by sea in British Somaliland. All three were to meet at Addis Ababa. Success would remove the land threat to supply lines and reopen the land route from Cape Town to Cairo.

  In November 1940, codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park broke the high-grade cypher of the Italian Army in East Africa. Later that month the Combined Bureau, Middle East, broke the replacement cypher of the Regia Aeronautica.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke added a deception called Operation Camilla. It was meant to convince the Italians that Britain planned to retake British Somaliland with the 4th and 5th Indian divisions. Clarke set up administration offices at Aden for Italian intelligence to find. He distributed maps and pamphlets on the climate, geography and population of the colony. Rumours called "Sibs" were circulated among civilians in Egypt, bogus information was planted on the Japanese consul at Port Said, and indiscreet wireless messages were sent. The operation began on the 19th of December 1940.

  It worked, though with an odd side effect. The Italians began to evacuate British Somaliland rather than reinforce it, and troops were sent north into Eritrea, where the real attack was coming. Misleading wireless traffic also persuaded them that two Australian divisions were in Kenya, so they reinforced the wrong area.

  In December 1940, Ugo Cavallero, the new Italian Chief of the General Staff, wanted offensives against Sudan and Suez abandoned in favour of defending the AOI. General Luigi Frusci was ordered to pull back from Kassala and Metemma. He refused to leave the lowlands, because withdrawal would cost prestige and Kassala was an important railway junction. British codebreakers quickly decrypted the Italian withdrawal plan. Platt began his offensive into Eritrea on the 18th of January 1941, three weeks early.

  3250882545

• 5. Early British Setbacks

  ›

  On the 1st of July 1940, Italian troops attacked Moyale, on the edge of the Ethiopian escarpment in Kenya. A company of the 1st King's African Rifles repulsed them. On the 10th of July about four battalions attacked after a heavy artillery bombardment, and after three days the British withdrew unopposed. The Italians pushed on to water holes at Dabel and Buna, nearly 100 km inside Kenya, but a lack of supplies stopped them there.

  On the 4th of July 1940, an Italian force of about 6,500 men from Eritrea invaded Sudan and advanced on the railway junction at Kassala. The garrison of 320 Sudan Defence Force soldiers and local police retired after causing ten Italian casualties, at a cost of 43 killed and 114 wounded. The Italians also took the fort at Gallabat. They went no farther, because they ran short of fuel. They were also disappointed to find little anti-British feeling among the Sudanese.

  British Somaliland fell next. On the 3rd of August 1940, the Italians invaded with two colonial brigades, tanks, armoured cars and 21 howitzer batteries. Zeila and Hargeisa were captured on the 5th of August, cutting the British off from French Somaliland. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Reginald Chater had begun with about 1,754 troops, and reinforcements raised the garrison to five battalions.

  On the 11th of August the Battle of Tug Argan began, named for a dry sandy riverbed where the road from Hargeisa crosses the Assa hills. By the 14th, Major-General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen risked defeat in detail by a larger force with more artillery. With one battalion left in reserve, he asked Henry Maitland Wilson in Cairo for permission to withdraw, and received it. The 2nd Battalion, Black Watch, covered the retreat to Berbera.

  The Royal Navy lifted 5,960 troops, 1,266 civilians and 184 sick and wounded from the colony. Most of the force had left by 2:00 p.m. on the 18th of August, and the Italians entered Berbera on the evening of the 19th. British casualties were 38 killed and 222 wounded. Italian casualties were 2,052, and the strain on fuel, ammunition and vehicles forced them onto the defensive. Churchill criticised Wavell for giving up the colony without enough fighting. Wavell called it a textbook withdrawal in the face of superior numbers.

  At 5:30 a.m. on the 6th of November 1940, the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade, under William Slim, attacked Gallabat. Support came from a regiment of field artillery, tanks and an RAF contingent of six Wellesley bombers and nine Gloster Gladiator fighters. The fort fell to hand-to-hand fighting, but the day turned. Three British tanks were knocked out by mines and six broke down on the rocky ground. Italian bombers and fighters attacked all day, and the ground was too hard for trenches.

  Then panic spread. Burning grass set an ammunition lorry on fire, and the noise of exploding ammunition was taken for an Italian counter-attack from behind. A platoon advanced with fixed bayonets toward the sound, and some troops thought they were retreating. Part of the 1st Battalion, Essex Regiment, broke and ran, and some fugitives got as far as Doka. Slim ordered a withdrawal that evening. British losses since the start of the attack were 42 killed and 125 wounded. Two Baluch companies still held the fort during the day on the 9th of November, and the British reoccupied it unopposed the next morning.

  8648277326

• 6. The Patriots

  ›

  In August 1939, Wavell ordered a covert plan to encourage rebellion in Gojjam, a western Ethiopian province the Italians had never managed to suppress. Colonel Daniel Sandford arrived in September to run it. Until Italy declared war, British appeasement policy held the conspiracy back. Mission 101 was formed to coordinate the Ethiopian resistance, whose fighters were known as the Arbegnoch, an Amharic word for Patriots.

  Haile Selassie reached Egypt in June 1940 and went on to Sudan in July. There he met Platt to discuss recapturing Ethiopia, despite Platt's reservations. The British recognised Selassie as emperor that month, and in August Mission 101 entered Gojjam to reconnoitre. A sum of £1 million was set aside to finance operations. Operational Centres, each made up of one officer, five NCOs and several picked Ethiopians, were trained in guerrilla warfare to lead the rebels.

  On the 20th of November 1940, Major Orde Wingate was flown to Sakhala to meet Sandford. The RAF bombed Dangila, dropped propaganda leaflets and supplied Mission 101. That lifted Ethiopian morale, which had suffered under Italian air power since the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Mission 101 persuaded the Arbegnoch north of Lake Tana to ambush the Metemma-Gondar road, and the Italians withdrew their garrison at Wolkait in February 1941.

  Gideon Force was the small unit that Wingate led. At its peak it had fifty officers, twenty British NCOs, 800 trained Sudanese troops and 800 partially trained Ethiopian regulars. It had a few mortars, no artillery and only intermittent bombing support. It worked in the rugged country of Gojjam at the end of a very long supply line, and nearly all of its 15,000 camels died. With the Arbegnoch, it ejected the Italian forces under General Guglielmo Nasi in six weeks. Together they captured 1,100 Italian and 14,500 Ethiopian troops, twelve guns, many machine-guns and rifles, and over 200 pack animals.

  As Debre Markos and Addis Derra fell, Ras Abebe Aregai gathered Ethiopian Patriots around Addis Ababa to prepare for Selassie's return. The Italians retreated to mountain strongholds at Gondar, Amba Alagi, Dessie and Gimma. After negotiations prompted by Wavell, Aosta ordered the governor, Agenore Frangipani, to surrender the city. He hoped to prevent a massacre of Italian civilians like the one that had occurred in Dire Dawa. Frangipani was ashamed that he was not allowed to fight to the death in the old style, and he killed himself with poison the next day.

  On the 6th of April 1941, Harry Wetherall, Dan Pienaar and Charles Christopher Fowkes, escorted by East African armoured cars, accepted the surrender of Addis Ababa. The Polizia dell'Africa Italiana stayed in the city to keep order. Selassie made his formal entry on the 5th of May, and most of Gideon Force broke off to act as his escort.

  By the 18th of May, an Italian officer named Maraventano had dug in at Agibor, facing about 2,000 men, only 160 of them trained soldiers. Both sides were short of food, ammunition, water and medical supplies. Wingate sent Maraventano a message announcing reinforcements and warning that the coming British withdrawal would leave his column at the mercy of the Patriots. Maraventano consulted Gondar on the 21st of May and was given discretion to surrender. On the 23rd, 1,100 Italian and 5,000 local troops gave up, along with 2,000 women and children and 1,000 mule men and camp followers. Gideon Force could muster only 36 regular soldiers for the guard of honour. Gideon Force was disbanded on the 1st of June 1941, and Wingate reverted to his substantive rank of Major.

  8287542173

• 7. Keren and Massawa

  ›

  On the 22nd and the 23rd of January 1941, a rearguard of the 41st Colonial Brigade fell back from Keru Gorge. It left behind General Ugo Fongoli, his staff and 800 men as prisoners. Gazelle Force, a mobile unit under Colonel Frank Messervy, had been harassing Italian posts around Kassala since the previous autumn. Platt's two Indian divisions followed up the Italian retreat. At Agordat and Barentu the British overran the 2nd Colonial Division, which lost 1,500 to 2,000 infantry and 28 field guns at Agordat. The Italians took to the hills, and the road toward Keren lay open.

  On the 12th of January, Aosta had sent a regiment of the "Granatieri di Savoia" division and three colonial brigades to Keren. The defensive positions had been surveyed before the war and chosen as the main line guarding Asmara and the Eritrean highlands from an invasion out of Sudan. The 4th and 5th Indian Infantry Divisions advanced into rolling country that rose gradually toward the Keren Plateau. The Italians were dug in on heights that dominated ravines and mountains.

  On the 15th of March, after several days of bombing, the 4th Indian Division attacked on the north and west side of the road. During the night, the 5th Indian Division captured Fort Dologorodoc. The "Granatieri di Savoia" and the Alpini counter-attacked Dologorodoc seven times between the 18th and the 22nd of March, and every attempt failed at a heavy cost. Keren was finally captured early on the 27th of March, after a battle lasting 53 days. British and Commonwealth losses were 536 killed and 3,229 wounded. Italian losses were 3,000 Italians and 9,000 Ascari killed and about 21,000 wounded.

  The defeat shattered Italian morale. When the British attacked at Ad Teclesan on the 31st of March, the last defensible position before Asmara, it fell, and 460 Italian prisoners and 67 guns were taken. Asmara was declared an open town the next day, and the British entered unopposed.

  Admiral Mario Bonetti, who commanded the Red Sea Flotilla and the garrison at Massawa, had 10,000 troops and about 100 tanks. On the evening of the 31st of March, three of the last six destroyers put to sea to raid the Gulf of Suez and then scuttle themselves. Leone ran aground and sank the next morning. On the 2nd of April the last five destroyers left to attack Port Sudan and then sink themselves. Major-General Lewis Heath telephoned Bonetti with an ultimatum to surrender and not to block the harbour. If he refused, the British would leave Italian citizens in Eritrea and Ethiopia to fend for themselves.

  Bonetti refused. On the 8th of April, an attack by the 7th Indian Infantry Brigade Group was repulsed. A simultaneous assault on the west side by the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade and the Matilda tanks of B Squadron, 4th Royal Tank Regiment, broke through. The Free French overran the defences in the south-west while the RAF bombed Italian artillery. That afternoon Bonetti surrendered, and the Allies took 9,590 prisoners and 127 guns.

  The harbour was found blocked by two large floating dry docks, 16 large ships and a floating crane, scuttled in the mouths of its three harbours. The Italians had also dumped as much equipment as possible into the water. The British reopened the railway to Asmara on the 27th of April, and by the 1st of May the port was supplying the 5th Indian Infantry Division. On the 11th of April, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already rescinded the Red Sea's status as a combat zone under the Neutrality Acts. That freed American ships to carry supplies to the Middle East by that route.

  418305027

• 8. The Dash Across Somaliland

  ›

  In January 1941, the Italians decided that the plains of Italian Somaliland could not be defended. The 102nd Somali Division and bande, about 14,000 men under General Adriano Santini, fell back to the lower Jubba River. The 101st Somali Division, about 6,000 men under General Italo Carnevali, retired to the mountains of Ethiopia. Cunningham found few Italians west of the Juba and began Operation Canvas on the 24th of January. He used four brigade groups drawn from the 11th and 12th African Divisions.

  Afmadu fell on the 11th of February, and the port of Kismayo three days later. On the 22nd of February, Jelib, the main Italian position north of Kismayo, was attacked on both flanks and from the rear. The Italians were routed, and 30,000 were killed, captured or dispersed in the bush. The motorised 23rd (Nigerian) Brigade advanced 235 miles up the coast in three days and occupied Mogadishu unopposed on the 25th of February. A pause followed, because the British lacked equipment to sweep the harbour of British magnetic mines dropped earlier.

  On the 1st of March, the 11th (African) Division began pursuing the retreating Italians north from Mogadishu toward the Ogaden Plateau. By the 17th of March it had completed a 17-day dash along the Strada Imperiale, the Imperial Road, from Mogadishu to Jijiga in Ethiopia. Harar was captured on the 26th of March, with 572 prisoners and 13 guns. The 23rd (Nigerian) Brigade had advanced nearly 1,000 miles in 32 days. On the 29th of March, South African troops occupied Dire Dawa after Italian colonists appealed for help against deserters who were committing atrocities.

  A second invasion began on the 16th of March 1941 from Aden, aimed at retaking British Somaliland. It was the first successful Allied landing on a defended shore of the war. The Aden Striking Force of about 3,000 men crossed roughly 140 miles in eight navy ships and civilian transports carrying heavy equipment. Some officers doubted whether ships could negotiate offshore reefs in the dark, with the town behind them blacked out. The risk was taken.

  The 1/2nd Punjab Regiment and 3/15th Punjab Regiment landed at Berbera, along with a Somali commando detachment. Both Indian Army units had been evacuated from the same port in August 1940. Hargeisa was captured on the 20th of March, and the next few months went to mopping up. The Somaliland Camel Corps was re-founded in mid-April to resume operations against local bandits. Once Berbera was open, Cunningham's forces could be supplied far more efficiently.

  In eight weeks the British had advanced 1,700 miles from Tana to Mogadishu at a cost of 501 casualties and eight aircraft, and had destroyed the bulk of the Italian air and land forces. Aosta, after the fall of Keren, had retreated to Amba Alagi. This was a mountain 11,186 feet high, tunnelled for strong points, artillery positions and stores, and ringed by similarly fortified peaks. Wavell wanted to avoid big operations in northern Ethiopia that would delay the withdrawal of troops to Egypt, but the road north was blocked there. The 5th Indian Division advanced from the north while the South Africans moved up from the south.

  6641507026