East African Campaign

The East African Campaign, also known as the Abyssinian Campaign, was the war for Italy’s empire in the Horn of Africa. It began on 10 June 1940, when Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, and ended on 27 November 1941 with the surrender of the last Italian garrison at Gondar. In the summer of 1940 the Italians, with an enormous numerical advantage, occupied several border towns in the Sudan and Kenya and, in August, the whole of British Somaliland. In the winter and spring of 1941 British, Indian, South African and African troops, supported by the Free French, Belgians from the Congo and Ethiopian guerrillas, struck at them from three directions and in less than four months destroyed the main Italian forces. The Viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, surrendered at Amba Alagi in May, and Emperor Haile Selassie I returned to Addis Ababa exactly five years after the Italians had entered it. Ethiopia, the first country conquered by a future Axis power, was the first to regain its independence during the Second World War.

Name and dates

British writers call it the East African Campaign or the Abyssinian Campaign, and Polish historians likewise speak of the East African or Abyssinian campaign. The Italians speak of the fall of Italian East Africa. The campaign is dated from 10 June 1940, the day of Italy’s declaration of war, although the first military operations came a day later: on 11 June British aircraft attacked airfields in Eritrea, and on 13 June Italian bombers struck the British air base at Wajir in Kenya. Its end is taken to be the surrender of General Guglielmo Nasi at Gondar on 27 November 1941, the last surrender of organised Italian forces in East Africa. Scattered Italian units kept up a guerrilla war until the armistice of September 1943, and some authors date the surrender of Gondar to 28 November, when the last documents were signed.

Background

After victory in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the capture of Addis Ababa in May 1936, Mussolini joined Ethiopia with the older colonies of Eritrea and Somalia to form Italian East Africa. At the end of 1937 the post of Viceroy and Governor-General went to Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, a kinsman of King Victor Emmanuel III, an airman and an officer of moderate views, who replaced Rodolfo Graziani, hated after the massacres of 1937. The Duke tried to soften occupation policy but failed to crush the resistance: in the mountains, especially in the province of Gojjam, the Ethiopian patriots, known as the arbegnoch, were still fighting.

In June 1940 the Duke of Aosta, as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of Italian East Africa, had a huge army at his disposal. According to Italian figures it numbered about 290,000 men on 1 June and, after mobilisation, more than 370,000 by August, including sailors and airmen. Some seventy per cent of them were askaris, locally recruited soldiers commanded by Italian officers. The Eritrean battalions were the best; most of the other colonial units, however, had been trained to suppress revolts, not to fight a modern, well-armed enemy. From metropolitan Italy came two infantry divisions, among them the elite Granatieri di Savoia (Savoy Grenadiers) division, together with Blackshirt battalions and Alpini units. In June 1940 the air force had about 320 aircraft, most of them obsolete, and the Red Sea Flotilla at Massawa had seven old destroyers and eight submarines.

This army, however, had a weakness that could not be remedied. From the moment Italy entered the war the British fleet closed the Suez Canal to it, and the colony was cut off from the mother country. Stocks of fuel, ammunition and spare parts were expected to last a few months. The Italian command assumed that the war would be short and would be decided in Europe and Egypt, and that East Africa had only to hold out until then.

Across the borders stood modest British forces. Since August 1939 General Archibald Wavell had commanded the whole Middle East, being responsible at the same time for Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and East Africa. In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan General William Platt, commander of the Sudan Defence Force, had about nine thousand men, including three British battalions and some twenty Sudanese companies, to defend a frontier nearly two thousand kilometres long. In Kenya there were two brigades of the King’s African Rifles, and in British Somaliland fewer than two thousand men, including the Somaliland Camel Corps. As early as 1939 Wavell had been preparing plans to stir up a rising in Ethiopia, but until June 1940 the policy of avoiding friction with Italy kept them on hold.

Course of the campaign

Summer 1940: Italian attacks on the Sudan and Kenya

Despite his superiority, the Duke of Aosta did not intend to mount a major offensive. He wanted to shorten the front and seize favourable jumping-off points, while Rome above all wanted propaganda successes. On 4 July 1940 the troops of General Luigi Frusci, commander of the northern sector, advanced from Eritrea into the Sudan. Three columns of colonial infantry, cavalry and artillery, supported by tanks and aircraft and numbering, according to different sources, from about 6,500 to 11,000 men, moved on Kassala, an important railway junction. The town was defended by about 320 men of the Sudan Defence Force and the local police, without artillery. The Sudanese harassed the attackers for several hours and then withdrew inland, having inflicted, according to British figures, far heavier losses than they suffered. On the same day the Italians took the fort at Gallabat, opposite Metemma in Ethiopia, and over the following days Kurmuk and several settlements on the Blue Nile. They went no further, because they ran short of fuel, and the people of the Sudan, contrary to Rome’s calculations, did not rise against the British.

In the south the Italians attacked Moyale, a frontier post in northern Kenya. The first attack, on 1 July, was beaten off by a company of the King’s African Rifles, but on 10 July several battalions attacked after a heavy artillery bombardment, and after a few days the garrison withdrew. The Italians pushed on to the wells at Buna and Dabel, about a hundred kilometres inside Kenya, and halted there. These were small successes, but they caused alarm in London. Winston Churchill accused Wavell of a “static policy”, and Wavell sent the 5th Indian Infantry Division to the Sudan, where it began to arrive in September.

August 1940: the conquest of British Somaliland

The Duke of Aosta’s only major offensive that summer was directed against British Somaliland. After the fall of France the neighbouring French Somaliland passed under Vichy control and ceased to threaten the Italians, leaving the British protectorate isolated. On 3 August 1940 three columns under the overall command of General Guglielmo Nasi, several times more numerous than the defenders, crossed the border. On 5 August they took Zeila on the coast, cutting the British off from Djibouti, and Hargeisa. The British, reinforced by battalions from Aden and Kenya to about four and then five thousand men, made a stand on the hills above the dry bed of the Tug Argan, where the road from Hargeisa to the port of Berbera crosses the mountains.

The Battle of Tug Argan lasted from 11 to 15 August. Italian artillery and weight of numbers gradually wore down the defence, colonial units outflanked the positions along mountain tracks, and the commander of the defence, General Reade Godwin-Austen, facing encirclement, asked for permission to withdraw. Wavell was in London at the time, and permission was given by his deputy in Cairo, General Henry Maitland Wilson. On 17 August a battalion of the Scottish Black Watch held up the Italians in a delaying action at Barkasan, while British and Australian warships evacuated about seven thousand soldiers and civilians from Berbera to Aden. On 19 August the Italians entered the abandoned port. Captain Eric Wilson of the Camel Corps, who had held a machine-gun position for several days, was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross before it emerged that he had survived as a prisoner of war.

According to British figures, the British lost 38 killed and 222 wounded, while the British official history estimated Italian losses at more than two thousand men. According to Italian figures, 465 men were killed on the Italian side in the whole campaign in British Somaliland and more than 1,500 wounded. Churchill felt that the colony had not been defended stubbornly enough. Wavell replied that “a big butcher’s bill was not necessarily evidence of good tactics”, a remark the Prime Minister did not forget for a long time. It was the only occasion in the whole war on which the Italians conquered an entire British territory without German help. Propaganda made the most of it, but the victory changed little: it had used up fuel and ammunition that could not be replaced, and from then on Aosta’s army went over to the defensive.

Autumn 1940: Khartoum, Gallabat and the Red Sea

The most important decisions of the autumn were taken in Khartoum. Haile Selassie, who had lived in exile in England since 1936, flew to Egypt in June 1940 and at the beginning of July reached the Sudan, where he tried to convince a sceptical Platt that his return would spark a rising. On 12 August the small Mission 101 under Colonel Daniel Sandford crossed into Gojjam to unite the scattered bands of patriots. At the end of October the British Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, flew to Khartoum. At a conference attended by the Emperor, the Prime Minister of South Africa Jan Smuts, Wavell, Platt and General Alan Cunningham, brother of Admiral Andrew Cunningham, a plan was agreed for an offensive against Italian East Africa combined with support for an Ethiopian rising. In November Cunningham took command of the forces in Kenya, and Major Orde Wingate arrived in Khartoum to direct irregular operations.

On the Sudan front, on 6 November 1940, Brigadier William Slim’s 10th Indian Infantry Brigade, supported by tanks, recaptured the fort at Gallabat. The Italian air force, however, controlled the skies: it shot down several British Gladiators and bombed the infantry on stony ground in which they could not dig in. Part of one British battalion panicked, and Slim had to withdraw from the fort. The setback was not a large one, but it showed that the Italians could still defend themselves. On the Red Sea the British quickly gained the upper hand. As early as June the Italian flotilla lost several submarines, and from the summer Allied convoys sailed to Suez almost without loss. The only serious attack by Italian destroyers on a convoy, on the night of 20–21 October, ended with the loss of one of them. In November British codebreakers at Bletchley Park and in Cairo broke the new ciphers of the Italian army and air force in East Africa. From then on British commanders knew the plans and strengths of the Italian forces, often sooner than the Italians to whom the messages were addressed.

In December 1940 Italy’s position worsened on every front. The offensive in Greece had stalled, and on 9 December the British launched Operation Compass in Egypt, which destroyed Graziani’s army. The new chief of the Italian general staff, Ugo Cavallero, agreed that the Duke of Aosta could withdraw his troops from the border lowlands to mountains that were easier to defend. Wavell, who after the first successes in Libya had moved the 4th Indian Infantry Division to the Sudan, decided to strike earlier than planned.

January–April 1941: Eritrea and Keren

When the British read the orders to withdraw, Platt brought his offensive forward. The Italians abandoned Kassala on 17 and 18 January 1941, and on 19 January British and Indian troops entered it. Pursuing the retreating Italians, the 4th and 5th Indian Infantry Divisions reached Agordat. After fighting on 31 January, in which British Matilda tanks broke the Italian positions, the Italians lost the town, and on 2 February Barentu as well. Most of the Italians, however, managed to withdraw into the mountains. The only road and railway to Asmara and Massawa ran through the Dongolaas Gorge below Keren, ringed by granite peaks from which the Italian artillery could watch every move the attackers made.

The Battle of Keren lasted from 3 February to 27 March 1941 and was the hardest-fought engagement of the whole campaign. General Nicolangelo Carnimeo gathered in the mountains the Savoy Grenadiers, Alpini, Blackshirt battalions and the best Eritrean brigades; estimates of the defenders’ strength vary widely, from fifteen thousand or so to more than thirty thousand men. The first attacks in February achieved no more than the capture of hilltops from which counter-attacks by the grenadiers and askaris drove the Indian troops off again and again. After six weeks of preparation, on 15 March, the general assault was launched by both Indian divisions, under General Noel Beresford-Peirse and General Lewis Heath, supported by Colonel Monclar’s Free French brigade with units of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion. On the night of 15–16 March the 5th Division took Fort Dologorodoc above the gorge and held it, although the Italians counter-attacked repeatedly until 22 March. Sappers then cleared the road of obstacles, and on 27 March British tanks and infantry broke through to Keren. According to the American historian Harold Raugh, the attackers lost 536 killed and more than 3,200 wounded. Estimates of Italian losses vary: according to some authors, about three thousand soldiers from Italy alone were killed, to which must be added far heavier losses among the askaris.

After Keren, resistance in Eritrea collapsed. On 31 March the British broke through the last line at Ad Teclesan, and on 1 April they occupied Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, without a fight. On 8 April, after an assault by Indian and French troops, Massawa surrendered, and nearly ten thousand men were taken prisoner. Before surrendering, the Italians scuttled more than a dozen ships and the floating docks in the harbour, and the last destroyers, sent on 2 April to attack Port Sudan, were either sunk by British aircraft or scuttled by their own crews. The Red Sea was free. On 11 April President Roosevelt declared that it was no longer a combat zone, and from then on American ships could carry supplies to Egypt.

The offensive from Kenya: Italian Somaliland and the road to Addis Ababa

At the same time Cunningham struck from Kenya. His army, made up of the 1st South African Infantry Division and the 11th and 12th African Divisions, with brigades from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and the Gold Coast, was originally meant only to take the port of Kismayo before the rainy season. The Italians, however, judging the plains of Somalia impossible to hold, withdrew behind the Juba River. On 14 February 1941 the British took Kismayo, on 22 February they broke through the defences on the Juba at Jelib, and on 25 February a motorised Nigerian brigade entered Mogadishu, the capital of Italian Somaliland, unopposed. The pursuit pressed on northwards along the Imperial Road built by the Italians and on 17 March reached Jijiga in the Ogaden. From 16 March Operation Appearance, a landing from Aden at Berbera, restored British rule in British Somaliland, shortening the supply route of Cunningham’s army.

Through the Marda Pass the British climbed onto the Ethiopian highlands. On 25 and 26 March they took Harar and on 29 March Dire Dawa, where the Italian settlers themselves asked for help against marauders who were looting and killing. The Duke of Aosta, wishing to spare Italian civilians, agreed that the capital should not be defended. On 6 April 1941 South African and African troops entered Addis Ababa, where for some time the Italian police continued to keep order. According to British figures, Cunningham’s troops covered about 2,700 kilometres in some eight weeks, losing about five hundred men. In southern Ethiopia the South Africans took Mega on 18 February, and on 22 February Moyale was back in British hands.

Gideon Force and the Emperor’s return

The third thrust was the smallest but politically the most important. On 20 January 1941 Haile Selassie crossed the Ethiopian border at Um Idla, accompanied by Wingate. The force soon named Gideon Force consisted, according to British figures, of about fifty officers, twenty British NCOs, some eight hundred men of a Sudanese frontier battalion and eight hundred Ethiopian soldiers, with no artillery and only occasional air support. Supplies were carried by camels, almost all of which – about fifteen thousand – died on the mountain tracks. For several weeks Wingate used night raids, propaganda and deception to persuade the Italian commanders that he had far larger forces behind him. The patriot movement in Gojjam grew, and the colonial troops began to desert.

At the beginning of March the Italians abandoned Burie, and in the first days of April, after further attacks, their main force in Gojjam, about twelve thousand men, withdrew from Debre Markos. Ras Hailu, the former ruler of Gojjam, who had collaborated with the Italians, handed the town over to the British, and on 6 April, the day Cunningham’s troops entered the capital, the Emperor rode into Debre Markos. On 5 May 1941, exactly five years after the entry of Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s troops, Haile Selassie made his ceremonial return to Addis Ababa and called on his people not to take revenge on the Italians. Wingate meanwhile was still pursuing Colonel Maraventano’s column as it retreated from Debre Markos. On 23 May its roughly 1,100 Italians and several thousand colonial soldiers, convinced by Wingate’s ruse that large British forces were approaching, surrendered to a force of about two thousand men, of whom only about 160 were trained soldiers and the rest patriots.

Amba Alagi

After the fall of Eritrea and the capital, the Italian army broke up into several groups: the Duke of Aosta with a few thousand men held out on the massif of Amba Alagi in the north, Nasi at Gondar, and General Pietro Gazzera in the province of Galla-Sidamo in the south-west. Amba Alagi, a mountain nearly 3,500 metres high, with positions and stores cut into the rock, was the same mountain on which in 1895 the Ethiopians had destroyed an Italian force under Major Toselli. The Viceroy arrived there on 17 April with about seven thousand men. The 5th Indian Infantry Division approached from the north and the 1st South African Brigade from the south, taking Dessie on the way on 26 April.

The main assault began on 4 May, and by 10 May the massif was surrounded. The defenders were running out of water and ammunition, the colonial troops were deserting, and the Duke feared for the fate of the wounded should they fall into the hands of Ethiopian guerrillas. On 16 May he offered to surrender. The British granted the defenders the honours of war, and on 19 May 1941 the Duke of Aosta and about five thousand Italians came down the mountain bearing their arms, marched past a British guard of honour, and only then laid down their weapons. The Viceroy was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Kenya, where he died of tuberculosis and malaria on 3 March 1942. To the Italians he became “the hero of Amba Alagi”.

Jimma, Wolchefit and Gondar

After the Viceroy’s surrender, Gazzera took over his duties. His troops, harried by the patriots and from the west by the Force Publique of the Belgian Congo, lost one town after another. On 11 June a British landing took Assab, the last Italian port on the Red Sea. On 21 June 1941 the British entered Jimma, and on 6 July Gazzera surrendered to General Auguste Gilliaert’s Belgians. The duties of Viceroy then passed to Nasi, who was holding out in the mountainous province around Gondar, north of Lake Tana, with more than forty thousand men at the beginning of April, over half of them askaris.

The rainy season halted operations for several months. The British and the patriots besieged the outlying posts, the strongest of which was Colonel Mario Gonella’s garrison at the Wolchefit Pass, guarding the road from the north. On 28 September, after more than five months of siege, the starving garrison surrendered. In November General Charles Fowkes’s 12th African Division and Ethiopian units began the final offensive. The Kulkaber Pass (Italian: Culqualber), defended by Carabinieri and askaris, fell on 21 November after a week of heavy fighting. In those days the last Italian fighter in East Africa, the Fiat CR.42 of Sergeant Giuseppe Mottet, flew the last combat sortie over the British artillery positions. On 27 November 1941 African and Ethiopian troops attacked Gondar, and that same day Nasi surrendered with about ten thousand Italians and twelve thousand African soldiers. Organised Italian resistance in East Africa had ceased to exist.

About seven thousand soldiers from the broken units, among them officers such as Lieutenant Amedeo Guillet, still carried on a guerrilla war in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia in the hope of an Axis victory in Egypt. This fighting ended only after the Armistice of Cassibile in September 1943.

Losses

Casualty figures are incomplete and depend on the period they cover. According to a report sent to Rome by the authorities of Italian East Africa on 16 April 1941, by that date 426 officers and 4,785 Italian NCOs and men had been killed, together with 11,755 colonial soldiers, and tens of thousands had been wounded. To these must be added the losses at Amba Alagi (about 3,500 men), at Kulkaber (about a thousand killed and eight hundred wounded) and in the final fighting for Gondar, where according to the Italian historian Pietro Maravigna about four thousand soldiers were killed, most of them colonial troops. Most of the army went into captivity. Ethiopian losses, especially among the patriots and the civilian population, are not known.

According to the British official history, British forces in East Africa suffered 1,154 battle casualties (killed, wounded and missing) between June 1940 and May 1941, while more than 74,000 men fell sick or were injured in accidents, among them some ten thousand each with dysentery and malaria. Disease killed 744 soldiers. The British lost 138 aircraft, and the Italian air force about 250 of the more than 320 machines with which it had begun the war and the roughly 75 sent out during the campaign. The Congolese Force Publique lost 462 men from all causes.

Significance

The East African Campaign was Britain’s first great land victory of the Second World War and at the same time the first defeat to strip an Axis power of an entire empire. Proclaimed from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in May 1936, the empire had lasted barely five years. Mussolini blamed the “shortcomings of the Italian race”, but the loss of East Africa shook the regime’s prestige more than any earlier defeat. The campaign also laid bare the weakness of the Italian colonial army: the mass desertions of askaris showed that the Fascist empire had not won the loyalty of its subjects.

Strategically, the most important result was the opening of the Red Sea. Once the threat from Massawa had gone, convoys from India, Australia and South Africa, and from April 1941 American ships as well, could sail freely to Egypt. The 4th Indian Infantry Division returned to North Africa in April, followed by the 5th Indian Division and the South African division. The campaign had its cost for the British, however. Wavell had to conduct it at the same time as the offensive in Libya, the expedition to Greece and the fighting in Iraq and Syria, and when Erwin Rommel arrived in North Africa in 1941, the British were short of the troops that were still fighting at Amba Alagi and Gondar. In June 1941 Churchill decided to remove Wavell, and at the beginning of July General Claude Auchinleck replaced him. Alan Cunningham took command of the newly formed Eighth Army, but on 26 November 1941, during Operation Crusader and the day before the surrender of Gondar, he was relieved of his command. Platt went on commanding British forces in East Africa for several more years, and Wingate drew on his Ethiopian experience in creating the Chindits in Burma. He was killed in an air crash in March 1944.

For Ethiopia the campaign meant the recovery of its independence, though not at once in full. At first the British treated the country as occupied territory. Only the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement of January 1942, concluded partly under American pressure, and a further agreement of December 1944 restored the Emperor’s full authority. Eritrea remained under British administration and in 1952 was joined with Ethiopia in a federation, which became the source of the country’s long war of independence. Former Italian Somaliland came under Italian administration as a UN trust territory in 1950, and in 1960 it united with British Somaliland to form independent Somalia. Haile Selassie, who had lost his case at Geneva in 1936, returned to his throne in 1941 as the first ruler of a country occupied by the Axis powers to be restored to power, and his return to Addis Ababa was a sign to conquered Europe that the dictators’ conquests need not be permanent.