The Battle of Agordat

On 31 January 1941 the 4th Indian Infantry Division of General Noel Beresford-Peirse decided the battle for Agordat (Akordat), a fight lasting several days for the first sizeable town in Eritrea on the road from Sudan to Asmara. After three days of fighting in the hills, during which the Indian troops outflanked the Italian positions from the south-east by way of the Cochen massif, on the morning of 31 January an infantry brigade with British Matilda tanks crossed the plain in front of the town, destroyed the Italian tanks massed for a counter-attack and cut the road to the east. In the afternoon the defenders began hurriedly to abandon their positions, and at seven o’clock on the morning of 1 February the Indian troops entered the deserted town without a fight. The battle was thus decided on 31 January, but Agordat itself was occupied the following day. The figures for the spoils of victory also vary. The often-repeated numbers, given among others by the Italian historian Angelo Del Boca, speak of about a thousand prisoners and 43 guns, whereas the British official history states that the Italians lost roughly two battalions and 28 field guns. Agordat was the first major victory of General William Platt’s offensive in Eritrea, and it opened the way to Keren.

The pursuit from Kassala

The offensive in Eritrea began earlier than planned. After the first successes of Operation Compass in Egypt, General Archibald Wavell, the British commander in the Middle East, moved the 4th Indian Infantry Division from the Western Desert to Sudan in December 1940 and early January 1941. Together with General Lewis Heath’s 5th Indian Infantry Division it was to attack Kassala, taken by the Italians in July 1940, on 8 February. Meanwhile in Rome the new Chief of the General Staff, Ugo Cavallero, agreed that the forces of Italian East Africa should leave the border lowlands and make their stand on the more defensible passes. The commander of the northern sector, General Luigi Frusci, long hesitated, because retreating from Kassala, which propaganda had presented as a prize of empire, meant a loss of prestige. Nevertheless, on the night of 17–18 January the Italian 12th Colonial Brigade abandoned the town.

The British knew of it almost at once. Since the autumn of 1940 codebreakers in England and in Cairo had been reading the new ciphers of the Italian army and air force in East Africa, and British commanders sometimes learnt of Italian orders and unit strengths sooner than the intended recipients. Wavell ordered Platt to set off in pursuit immediately, and on 19 January British and Indian troops entered Kassala. Two roads led from there to Agordat: a northern one, a poor track through Keru and Biscia, the terminus of the Eritrean narrow-gauge railway, and a southern one, a good road through Tessenei, Aicota and Barentu. Both met at Agordat, and from there the only road to Asmara ran through Keren. The 4th Division took the northern road, the 5th Division the southern.

Ahead of the 4th Division went Colonel Frank Messervy’s Gazelle Force, a motorised detachment of Indian troops and men of the Sudan Defence Force, supported by a battery of artillery. On 21 January it was halted at Keru by the Italian 41st Colonial Brigade. There followed a scene from a previous century: mounted askaris of Lieutenant Amedeo Guillet’s group burst out of the scrub with sabres and grenades straight at the British guns, and only point-blank artillery fire and machine guns drove them back with heavy losses. On the night of 22–23 January, threatened with encirclement by a brigade of the 5th Division, the 41st Brigade withdrew, leaving its commander, his staff and more than eight hundred men in British hands. On 24 January Gazelle Force reached Biscia, and on 25 January it stood before Agordat and cut the road linking it with Barentu.

The position at Agordat

Agordat was a small town on the northern bank of the Baraka, for most of the year a dry, palm-fringed bed of sand. The ground lent itself to defence as few places did. To the north and west it was screened by the river valley; south-west of the town rose the rocky hill of Laquatat, with concrete trenches, emplacements and forts at either end; and further east stretched a plain about three kilometres wide, cut by dry stream beds, with field fortifications and anti-tank ditches. On its eastern side the plain was closed off by the Cochen massif, rising some six hundred metres above it, with a ridge nearly three kilometres long. At its foot stood a low rocky knoll that the British named Gibraltar. The road from Barentu reached the town from the south, while the road to Keren left it eastwards through a narrow gap just north of the Cochen massif. Whoever held Cochen and came down from it onto the road would cut the defenders’ only line of retreat.

The defence of Agordat was prepared by Orlando Lorenzini, an experienced commander of colonial troops who enjoyed immense authority among the askaris and whom the Italians called the “Lion of the Sahara”. Under his command were units of the Italian 4th Colonial Division, reinforced by brigades falling back from the Sudanese border. Sources estimate the defenders’ strength differently. According to the Indian official history, British intelligence believed that Agordat was held by three colonial brigades, three Blackshirt battalions, two field artillery groups, two batteries of medium artillery, a company of M11/39 medium tanks, a company of tankettes, three groups of irregulars, known as bande, and a German company. Italian accounts list about ten battalions of askaris, a Blackshirt battalion and the remnants of Guillet’s cavalry. The German company was made up of sailors from merchant ships that the outbreak of war had caught in the port of Massawa and that could not leave it. The Duke of Aosta, the Viceroy Amedeo d’Aosta, ordered Agordat and Barentu to be held to the last. He counted on the British being unable, among the rocky hills at the foot of the Eritrean highlands, to exploit the advantage that motor vehicles had given them on the Sudanese plains.

The attackers had no numerical superiority. At Agordat the 4th Indian Division had two infantry brigades, the 5th and the 11th, plus Gazelle Force, the third brigade having been left in the Port Sudan area. The 5th Brigade arrived from Gedaref only on 27 January. On the other hand, B Squadron of the 4th Royal Tank Regiment had managed to arrive from Egypt with Matilda infantry tanks – slow, but so thickly armoured that Italian anti-tank guns and tank guns could rarely harm them. In the air the balance was shifting in Britain’s favour: the first Hurricanes of No. 1 Fighter Squadron of the South African Air Force had arrived on the Sudan front, and British and South African aircraft were attacking airfields in Eritrea. According to Italian figures, between mid-January and mid-February the Italian air force in East Africa lost 61 aircraft, 50 of them in combat or destroyed on the ground.

The fight for Cochen

General Beresford-Peirse first wanted to outflank the position from the north, but on 26 and 27 January Gazelle Force’s reconnaissance found no route there passable for motor vehicles. He therefore decided to seize the Cochen massif and descend from it onto the Keren road, while pinning the defenders with an attack across the plain. On the evening of 28 January battalions of the 11th Indian Infantry Brigade climbed to the summit of Cochen unopposed. The Italians had evidently regarded the steep, scrub-covered massif as inaccessible. The same night the 5th Brigade tested the position on Laquatat hill and found it too strong to be taken on the run. At dawn it fell back to its start line, and on the night of 29–30 January its men established themselves on the rocks of Gibraltar, though they could not entirely dislodge the Italians from them.

On 30 January the 11th Brigade moved off from Cochen towards the Keren road, and the defenders then realised what threatened them. Lorenzini threw fresh battalions against the massif – five, according to some accounts – and hauled mountain guns up the slopes, which began to shell the Indian positions at close range. The fighting went on all day in the heat, on steep slopes and in ravines where everything from ammunition to water had to be carried up on men’s backs, as there were no mules. In each battalion one company did nothing but carry supplies, and the porters more than once dropped their loads and, bayonets fixed, plugged gaps in the line. Towards evening the 11th Brigade’s command abandoned its attempts to reach the road and held only the summit of the massif, and on the night of 30–31 January it pulled the exhausted battalions back for a short rest. The Italian counter-attacks halted the Indian troops but did not push them off Cochen, and in the process they drew into the hills reserves that were then lacking on the plain.

31 January

At 5.20 a.m. on 31 January the 5th Indian Infantry Brigade, with Matilda tanks, attacked Gibraltar and the Italian positions on the plain between Cochen and Laquatat. Most positions fell quickly; only on the left flank did machine-gun fire from Laquatat hold up the infantry until midday. Then reports came in that the Italians were beginning to withdraw along the Keren road. A column of three tanks and seven Bren Carriers was sent towards the road. On the way it ran into Italian M11/39 tanks and tankettes, concealed in a hollow and poised for a counter-attack. According to the Indian official history, the Matildas destroyed eleven of them. The short 37 mm guns of the Italian tanks could not pierce the Matildas’ armour, and according to some accounts several of the Italian vehicles were crewed by German sailors from Massawa. Counter-attacks by askaris and cavalry on the open plain collapsed under fire.

At 12.45 p.m. the 5th Brigade pressed on and cut the Keren road east of Agordat, and by 4.30 p.m. it had placed another battalion astride it. Italian resistance was crumbling. On Cochen the 11th Brigade now met almost no opposition. At around 4.30 p.m. the defenders hastily abandoned Laquatat and withdrew through Agordat along a track running north of the road, beside the railway, fearing that the Keren road behind them would be cut for good. Part of the retreat was disorderly, but most of the 4th Colonial Division managed to slip away. At 5.30 a.m. on 1 February Gazelle Force set off along the road eastwards, and at seven o’clock the 5th Brigade entered the deserted town without a fight. Some fifty undamaged lorries were captured. Beyond Agordat the pursuit was halted at the Baraka, where the Italians had blown up the bridge known as the Ponte Mussolini and mined the riverbed and all the approaches. Only on the evening of 2 February did Gazelle Force, with the tanks and the 11th Brigade, come to a halt a few kilometres short of Keren, in front of a gorge blocked by the Italians.

Barentu and Gallabat

At the same time the 5th Indian Infantry Division was fighting on the southern road. Barentu, a fortified small town with an airfield in a basin surrounded by steep hills, was defended by General Angelo Bergonzi’s Italian 2nd Colonial Division. According to the British official history, after sending most of the 12th Brigade to Agordat it had nine battalions, 32 guns and about 36 light tanks and armoured cars. The 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, advancing from the west through Aicota, fought a strong Italian rearguard in the hills at Gogni for several days from 24 January, and could move on only on 29 January, after the Italians withdrew during the night. From the north came the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade, which had turned south after the fighting at Keru. In a gorge north of Barentu the Italians brought down hundreds of tons of rock onto the road with explosives and defended themselves doggedly. On 29 January they twice counter-attacked the hills held by the 10th Brigade, and on 31 January they struck at the 29th Brigade with tanks and infantry.

When news of the fall of Agordat arrived, the defence of Barentu lost its purpose. On the night of 1–2 February the 2nd Colonial Division left the town by mountain tracks towards Tole and Arresa, and on the morning of 2 February both Indian brigades marched in. The first soldiers are said to have found food still warm in the field kitchens. Pursued by a motorised machine-gun group and by aircraft, the Italians soon abandoned their vehicles and scattered into the mountains. The road from Tessenei to Agordat became a supply route for Platt’s army.

In the same days the Italians withdrew along the whole Sudanese border. On 26 January they abandoned Om Ager, and on the night of 31 January–1 February the garrison of Gallabat – a fort for which William Slim’s brigade had fought in vain in November 1940 – left for Gondar, leaving more than a dozen minefields behind it. For clearing them along a stretch of nearly ninety kilometres, Second Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat of the Indian sappers was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Losses and spoils

The exact losses of both sides at Agordat itself cannot be established, and the figures depend on what is counted. The British official history writes that the 4th Colonial Division lost roughly two battalions, 28 field guns and a number of medium and light tanks at Agordat. According to Del Boca, a thousand prisoners, 43 guns and fourteen damaged tanks were taken, and another thousand men are said to have surrendered during the pursuit to Keren. The Indian official history records that about three hundred men were taken prisoner on 1 February, with more still coming in. According to the Italian official history, compiled by Alberto Rovighi, in the fighting at Agordat and Barentu and in the retreat to Keren the Italians lost, in killed, wounded and captured, 179 officers, 130 NCOs, 1,230 Italian other ranks and 14,686 askaris, as well as 96 guns and more than twenty tanks and tankettes. These figures, however, cover the whole retreat from the Sudanese border, not the battle alone.

According to British tallies, in the two weeks after leaving Kassala Platt’s forces advanced about two hundred kilometres, fought four battles and took some six thousand prisoners, eighty guns, 26 tanks and four hundred lorries. The British, however, had no illusions. At Agordat they found hundreds of rifles and thousands of cartridges and grenades, showing that the retreating army was still well armed. The Italian 4th Colonial Division, which had fought stubbornly and skilfully, survived the defeat as an organised force, and its retreat gained the defenders of Keren a few priceless days.

Place in the war

The Battle of Agordat was the first major victory of the British offensive in Eritrea and also the first battle in which Platt’s troops came up against a strong, organised Italian defence. The Duke of Aosta’s order to hold Agordat and Barentu to the last was not carried out, but the Italians withdrew in fairly good order, blowing bridges and mining roads behind them. The battle also showed what lay ahead: fierce and often very good fighting by the battalions of Eritrean askaris, the superiority of British infantry tanks, against which the Italians in East Africa had nothing to fight with, and ever more complete British air superiority. It came in the same days as the capture of Tobruk and the occupation of Derna in Libya, and it added to the impression that Italy’s African empire was falling apart on every front at once.

Victory did not, however, bring a quick end to the fighting in Eritrea. On 3 February Wavell cabled Platt: “Now go on and take Keren and Asmara.” At Keren General Nicolangelo Carnimeo and Orlando Lorenzini gathered Savoy Grenadiers, Alpini and the best Eritrean brigades on the granite peaks above the Dongolaas gorge. The Battle of Keren lasted more than seven weeks, until 27 March 1941, and was the hardest engagement of the whole campaign. Lorenzini was killed in it on 17 March by a shell splinter. Only after Keren did Asmara (1 April) and Massawa (8 April) fall, and Eritrea, Italy’s oldest colony, ceased to be Italian. The 4th Indian Infantry Division then returned to North Africa, and in April 1941 Beresford-Peirse took command of British forces in the Western Desert, where he faced not Rodolfo Graziani but Erwin Rommel.