The Battle of Tug Argan

On 11 August 1940, a week after Italian troops entered British Somaliland, General Carlo De Simone’s main column attacked the position on which the British had decided to defend the road to Berbera: a handful of rocky hills in a wide pass above the dry bed of the Tug Argan, in the Assa hills, some seventy kilometres by road from Berbera. For four days soldiers from Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, the Punjab and Somaliland, supported by four light howitzers, beat off the attacks of colonial brigades that outnumbered them several times over and had longer-ranged artillery. Yet the Italians took the hills one by one and infiltrated along mountain paths into the defenders’ rear. On 15 August, threatened with being cut off from their only supply road, the defenders were ordered to withdraw and evacuate the colony. That same day the last hill still holding out fell, and its defender, Captain Eric Wilson, was later awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Posthumous – although he had not died at all.

The pass and its defenders

The road from Hargeisa to Berbera ran through the Karrim Pass, crossed the Tug Argan and then turned east straight away, between the Assa hills to the south and a tangle of low hills and dry watercourses to the north. The floor of the pass was flat and stony, dotted with sparse thorn bushes. Out of it rose several isolated rocky hills, roughly two kilometres apart. The British gave them simple names: from the north, Black Hill, Knobbly Hill, Mill Hill and Observation Hill, and, some three kilometres east of Mill Hill in the second line, Castle Hill. On each one machine-gun posts were dug and a little barbed wire was strung. The position had good observation and could not be bypassed by road, but its weaknesses were obvious. The pass was very wide for the strength of the defenders, the ground between the hills could be infiltrated, and apart from Castle Hill every post lay in the front line, with no depth at all. Nor were the Assa hills east of the bend in the road impassable for infantry: camel tracks led through the Mirgo and Jerato passes, widening the front still further. From the Mirgo Pass to Black Hill was about thirteen kilometres.

The hills in the pass were held by the 1st Battalion of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment (Northern Rhodesia was then a British protectorate). The western end of the Assa hills, which the defenders called Punjab Ridge, and the positions on the right flank were held by the 3/15th Punjab Regiment from Aden. Vickers heavy machine guns with Somali crews from the Camel Corps were also sited on the hills. The only artillery was the 1st East African Light Battery with four 3.7-inch mountain howitzers and, from dawn on 10 August, the three-pounder saluting gun from the Australian cruiser HMAS Hobart with its crew of three. Because it had to be partly dismantled to be loaded, it fired once every few minutes. In reserve stood the 2nd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles and the 1/2nd Punjab Regiment, while the last to arrive, the Scottish 2nd Battalion, the Black Watch, was brought up by lorry on 10 August to the area of Laferug and Barkasan, on the road behind the pass. Brigadier Arthur Chater commanded the Tug Argan sector, and from the evening of 11 August the whole force was under Major General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen, who had reached Berbera on the day the battle began.

Facing them was De Simone’s column, the reinforced Harrar Division. Its three colonial brigades, the XIII, XIV and XV, supported by field artillery and tankettes, together with the II Colonial Brigade, which was to outflank the British positions from the north across trackless country, gave it at least a several-fold numerical superiority. Most important was the superiority in firepower. The Italian guns outranged the British mountain howitzers and could shell each hill in turn without interference. They were further supported from the air by Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 bombers and fighters, against which the British air force at Aden, more than 300 kilometres away, could offer only sporadic Blenheim raids.

11 August: Punjab Ridge

According to British accounts, as early as the evening of 10 August the lights of Italian lorries could be seen approaching the pass, and Somali herdsmen were fleeing ahead of them through the Mirgo Pass. On the morning of 11 August bombers attacked Punjab Ridge, and artillery fire continued until midday. In the afternoon the infantry moved forward. A force the British estimated at a brigade at least drove a company of the 3/15th Punjab off Punjab Ridge and repulsed its counter-attack. The attacks on Mill Hill and Knobbly Hill broke down.

The post on Observation Hill played a special part that day. It was commanded by Captain Eric Wilson, a 27-year-old officer of the East Surrey Regiment seconded to the Camel Corps. His Somali machine-gunners threw back an attack on the hill and then took in the flank the Italians assaulting neighbouring Mill Hill, inflicting such heavy losses that the enemy brought up a battery of mountain guns to within about 650 metres. Two shells came straight through the loopholes. Wilson was badly wounded in the right shoulder and the left eye, several of his men were also wounded, and the machine guns were knocked off their mountings. Wilson repaired them, set them up again and carried on firing. His Somali sergeant was killed beside him.

12 and 13 August: the fall of Mill Hill

On 12 August the Italians attacked all the main hills at once. Towards evening, after fierce fighting, the most weakly fortified of them, Mill Hill, held by Rhodesian troops, fell. The defenders had to abandon two of their four precious howitzers, having first disabled them. More dangerous than the loss of Mill Hill, however, was the fact that the Italians had established themselves in the Assa hills and by nightfall had taken the heights dominating the southern part of the pass. The next day the defenders of Knobbly Hill repulsed another attack, but small Italian detachments began coming down from the Mirgo Pass and at night ambushed a convoy carrying water and ammunition to Castle Hill. The convoy fought its way through, but it was clear that the road by which everything, water included, reached the hills was under threat. On 13 August two Bofors anti-tank guns arrived at the position – the defenders’ first real anti-tank weapons.

14 August: Godwin-Austen’s decision

On 14 August Italian aircraft and artillery pounded Castle Hill and Observation Hill all day. An attack on Observation Hill was again repulsed, and Wilson, wounded and increasingly ill, was still manning his guns. That day the battered Italian XIV Brigade was relieved by the XIII Brigade. In these days Benito Mussolini was urging the Viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, Amedeo d’Aosta, to throw all available reserves and the entire air force of the empire into Somaliland. The British tried to regain the initiative. Two companies of the 2nd Battalion, King’s African Rifles, counter-attacked towards the Mirgo Pass to push the threat away from the road and, after initial success, were driven back.

For Godwin-Austen the situation was now clear. The enemy had almost closed the road along which all supplies and water flowed. His artillery, out of reach of the British howitzers, could destroy the hills one after another, and the field artillery regiment that might have changed this was still on its way from Egypt. After four days of fighting the men were exhausted. If Tug Argan fell, there was no position behind it that could not easily be outflanked, and an attempt to defend Berbera itself would be pointless. Wavell was then in London, so on 14 August Godwin-Austen reported to his deputy in Cairo, General Henry Maitland Wilson, that if the position fell he saw no alternative to an evacuation, which might save perhaps seventy per cent of the force. He added that he was ready to fight to the end if so ordered. After the failed counter-attack at Mirgo he no longer had the men both to stabilise the front and to cover a possible withdrawal. The choice came down to fighting on and losing the whole force, or pulling out.

15 August: the order to withdraw and the fall of Observation Hill

Early on the morning of 15 August Godwin-Austen sent his conclusions to Cairo, and soon after midday he received Wilson’s order to evacuate. His plan provided for holding two covering positions on the road to Berbera, at Barkasan and at Nasiyeh, and for embarking first the civilians and then the troops over the next three nights.

In the pass the fighting went on until evening. Observation Hill was under fire all day. Two of Wilson’s machine-gun posts were smashed, and he himself, wounded and racked with malaria, kept the last one in action. At about 5 p.m., according to the citation for his award, the hill was taken by the XIII Brigade. In the final phase the Italian command decided not to complete the envelopment of the British flanks but to strike straight at the centre of the pass, and this blow succeeded. After dark the Northern Rhodesian battalion abandoned Black Hill, Knobbly Hill and Castle Hill, and the Punjabis their positions on the right flank. The Black Watch, together with two companies of the King’s African Rifles and part of the 1/2nd Punjab Regiment, occupied the covering position at Barkasan, through which the troops from Tug Argan fell back. The Italians took the pass, and the road to Berbera lay open before them.

A posthumous Victoria Cross for a living man

Eric Charles Twelves Wilson, born in 1912, the son of a clergyman from the Isle of Wight, had served since 1937 with African colonial troops, first in the King’s African Rifles and then in the Camel Corps. After the fall of Observation Hill he was presumed dead. In October 1940 The London Gazette announced the award to him of a posthumous Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest decoration for gallantry. It was the only Victoria Cross awarded for the fighting in British Somaliland, and the press compared the defence of Observation Hill to the Battle of Rorke’s Drift of 1879. Wilson, however, had survived. The Italians had taken him prisoner and he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Eritrea, where another captured officer was astonished to meet the “fallen” captain. Freed in 1941 after the Italian defeat in East Africa, he received his decoration at Buckingham Palace in July 1942. He later served with the Long Range Desert Group and with the King’s African Rifles in Burma, and after the war was a colonial administrator in Tanganyika. He died in 2008, one of the last surviving holders of the Victoria Cross from the Second World War.

Assessment of the battle

The British official history stresses that most of the defenders’ losses were borne by the Northern Rhodesian battalion and the Somali machine-gunners of the Camel Corps, who together carried the weight of the fighting in the pass. Italian losses were many times higher, especially in the colonial brigades, which advanced over open, stony ground under machine-gun fire. Exact figures for the battle itself vary from source to source. What is certain is that the Italians paid a high price for the pass, but they achieved their aim. Their commanders made good use of their superiority in artillery and numbers, and the outflanking moves through the Assa hills forced the defenders to withdraw before they could be surrounded.

The Battle of Tug Argan decided the fate of British Somaliland. Beyond the pass there was no further line of defence, and holding Berbera made no sense. The British nevertheless achieved what mattered most in August 1940: they broke contact with the enemy and saved their force. Godwin-Austen and Henry Maitland Wilson were convinced they had acted rightly, and Wavell backed them. Winston Churchill, however, concluded that since the losses had been so small the colony had been defended too weakly, and demanded Godwin-Austen’s removal and a court of inquiry. Wavell refused, and the dispute over Tug Argan began a crisis of confidence between the Prime Minister and his Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East that ended with Wavell’s removal in July 1941. In September 1940 Godwin-Austen took command of an African division in Kenya, with which he advanced into Italian Somaliland in 1941. For the Italians Tug Argan remained their greatest land victory in East Africa. It did not, however, change the position of their cut-off empire, which had used up stocks of ammunition and fuel to win it and less than six months later had to defend itself against a British offensive.