The British enter Addis Ababa

On the morning of Sunday 6 April 1941 a small military column drove through the outskirts of Addis Ababa. It was led by a lone armoured car of the King’s African Rifles flying a small, home-made Union Jack, followed by Major General Harry Wetherall, commander of the 11th African Division, and Brigadiers Charles Fowkes, Dan Pienaar and Gerald Smallwood. At the Little Gebbi, the former imperial palace and since 1936 the residence of the Italian viceroy, Italian officials and General Renzo Mambrini, chief of police of Italian East Africa, were waiting for them. Without much ceremony the Italian flag was lowered from the mast and the Union Jack hoisted. The capital of the empire that Benito Mussolini had proclaimed in May 1936, after Marshal Badoglio’s troops marched in, ceased to be Italian without a shot being fired. The Italians had not been driven out by force: the viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, had concluded that the city could not be defended, withdrawn the army from it and left behind only the police, whose task was to protect Italian civilians until the British arrived.

The fall of Addis Ababa crowned the advance of General Alan Cunningham’s forces, which had set out from Kenya in February, taken Mogadishu and pushed through the Ogaden and Harar into the heart of Ethiopia. In the same days, in the north, the troops of General William Platt, who had taken Keren in March, occupied Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and closed in on Massawa, the main Italian port on the Red Sea. In the first week of April, then, the Italians lost both the capital of Eritrea and the capital of the whole of Italian East Africa.

Eritrea: Asmara and Massawa

War chronologies based on English-language compilations state that the British took Asmara on 3 April. According to the British official history and Italian studies, the city surrendered two days earlier, on 1 April 1941. After the fall of Keren the retreating Italian forces tried to halt the pursuit at a last position before the capital, at Ad Teclesan, where the winding road from Keren climbs onto the plateau. According to Italian studies, of the nearly twenty thousand soldiers who began the retreat from Keren, at most five or six thousand got there. On 31 March, after a day of fighting, the 9th Indian Infantry Brigade of General Lewis Heath’s 5th Indian Division took the position, capturing, according to Playfair, 460 prisoners and 67 guns.

The commander of the forces in Eritrea, General Luigi Frusci, had already given up the defence of Asmara on 28 March. According to Italian studies, he asked the British to treat it as an open city because of the several tens of thousands of Italians living there, and himself left via Adigrat for the south, towards the massif of Amba Alagi. On the evening of 31 March the last train left Asmara for Massawa. The next day, 1 April, representatives of the Italian authorities handed the city over to the British. Italian accounts state that the official ceremony took place at half past ten in the governor’s palace. So ended more than half a century of Italian rule in the capital of the Kingdom of Italy’s oldest colony.

Massawa remained. Its commander, Rear Admiral Mario Bonetti, had some ten thousand men according to the British official history. Heath presented him with an ultimatum in an unusual way: he telephoned his headquarters over a line that had not been cut. He warned that if the Italians scuttled the ships in the harbour, the British would accept no responsibility for feeding and evacuating the Italian population of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Bonetti replied that the Duke of Aosta had ordered him to resist and that he could give no guarantee about the ships. On 2 April the last five destroyers of the Red Sea Flotilla left harbour on a suicidal raid against Port Sudan. On the morning of 3 April British aircraft spotted them: two ships were sunk from the air, two more were abandoned by their crews off the coast of Arabia and destroyed by aircraft and the destroyer Kingston, and the fifth, which had suffered a breakdown during the night, had already been scuttled by her own crew. By 5 April Indian units and the Eastern Brigade of the Free French under Colonel Monclar (Raoul Magrin-Vernerey) had closed the ring round the port.

The viceroy gives up the capital

In the south, Cunningham’s forces climbed onto the Ethiopian highlands in the second half of March. On 17 March the 23rd Nigerian Brigade reached Jijiga; on the night of 21–22 March it forced the Italians to abandon the Marda Pass, and on 26 March, after fighting on the Bisidimo river, its armoured cars drove into Harar. According to the British official history the brigade had covered almost a thousand miles, some 1,600 kilometres, in thirty-two days. The collapse of Italian authority had a dark side, however. In Dire Dawa mutinous and deserting colonial soldiers began to attack Europeans. According to the South African official history, they murdered seven Italians. On 29 March the Italian authorities of the town themselves asked the British for help, and two companies of the Transvaal Scottish entered the town on foot and restored order after street fighting.

The viceroy, Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, already knew by then that he could not hold the capital. The disintegrating colonial divisions could not stop a motorised pursuit, and after the defeat at Keren there was nowhere left to draw reserves from. On 24 March he ordered General Carlo De Simone to hold out for as long as possible on the Awash river and to remove everything of value from Addis Ababa. The army, apart from the units needed to protect Italian civilians from expected acts of revenge, was to withdraw northwards. From then on resistance was to be centred on three mountain strongholds: the Amba Alagi massif on the road from Asmara to Dessie, Gondar under General Guglielmo Nasi, and the province of Galla-Sidamo in the south-west. According to the British official history, Mussolini approved the plan while calling for resistance to the last. On 30 March the viceroy cabled Rome that the long-expected rapid collapse had begun and that nothing remained but to resist wherever possible and for as long as possible, for the honour of the flag.

The Awash line was meant only to gain time. On the afternoon of 2 April Italian sappers blew up the road and railway bridges over the river gorge. The next day Brigadier Fowkes’s 22nd East African Brigade, whose 5th Battalion King’s African Rifles had found a ford a little way upstream, crossed the Awash almost without loss and took the town of Awash, while South African engineers began building a new bridge. The speed of this manoeuvre cut off the remnants of two Italian colonial brigades that were falling back along the southern road and had counted on the demolished roads to hold up the pursuit for several days. On the same day, 3 April, the Duke of Aosta left Addis Ababa for Amba Alagi, where he joined his last reserves to the remnants of Frusci’s army from Eritrea. According to Italian studies, he handed over civil and military authority in the city to General Agenore Frangipani and General Mambrini.

Talks on the fate of the civilians

What worried Cunningham most was not the Italian army but what might happen in Addis Ababa between the departure of the Italian troops and the arrival of his own. By his estimates at the time, the city had some twenty thousand white civilians and about a hundred thousand Ethiopians. The Italian census of October 1939 put the number of Italians at more than 35,000, the vast majority of them men. The events in Dire Dawa showed what a moment of interregnum could bring, and the memory of the massacre that Italian Fascists and soldiers had carried out in Addis Ababa in February 1937 after the attempt on the life of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani was still vivid among Ethiopians. It also mattered that the United States was still neutral, and any incident involving women and children could have resounded around the world.

On 30 March Cunningham proposed to General Archibald Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, that contact be made with the viceroy. On 2 April a letter from Wavell was dropped over Addis Ababa from an aircraft. The British commander wrote that he wished to cooperate in ensuring the safety of Italian women and children in so far as his duty to continue fighting the Duke’s forces allowed, and that Cunningham would receive any proposals. That same evening the Italian command gathered its commanders at Moggio and told them that the Awash line could no longer be reinforced, nor protection provided for the thousands of Europeans in the capital, and that it was therefore necessary to negotiate with the British over its surrender. An Italian aircraft dropped a message at Dire Dawa that an envoy of the viceroy would fly in the next day. At the same time the Duke informed Rome that a pause in operations would allow him to withdraw his troops from the area of the capital.

On 3 April the envoy landed at Dire Dawa and was driven to Cunningham’s headquarters at Harar. He was given the British terms: the Italians were to protect women and children in Addis Ababa until the British could take over the task, to leave the city’s services intact together with their staff and stocks of food and fuel, and to hand over the railway from Awash to the capital with its rolling stock and crews. The written Italian reply was evasive: the safety and supply of the population had been provided for, the British would be responsible for order as soon as they entered the city, and Italian officers would give them all the information they needed. The Italian command did not intend to do anything more. Orally, however, the Duke of Aosta conveyed through his envoy his thanks for the British initiative.

London complicated matters. On 4 April the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, headed by Winston Churchill, informed Cunningham that it did not approve of Wavell’s proposal. The British were not to accept responsibility for the Italian civilian population without the unconditional surrender of the Italian armed forces and the handing over intact of the ships lying at Massawa. Cunningham believed that London had not understood that the talks concerned only the capital itself, and feared that hard demands would merely stiffen Italian resolve. He proposed to Wavell that the advance be halted and negotiations resumed, and when he received no reply within twenty-four hours he ordered his troops to press on. Meanwhile, on 4, 5 and 6 April, bombers and fighters of the South African Air Force attacked the airfield at Addis Ababa. After entering the city the British counted some thirty burnt-out, damaged or wrecked Italian aircraft there.

6 April

Early on the morning of 5 April, as soon as the bridge over the Awash was ready, the 22nd East African Brigade moved on. At 7.40 a.m. that day an Italian police officer arrived at the British lines with a request that they occupy Addis Ababa as quickly as possible, because looting had broken out in the city. According to the South African official history, General Mambrini, escorted by policemen on motorcycles, drove out under a white flag to meet the leading troops of the King’s African Rifles and surrendered the city to them, fearing for the lives of Italian soldiers and civilians there. By the afternoon Fowkes’s column stood at Akaki, a dozen or so kilometres from the capital. Cunningham, however, did not allow it to enter the city that day. He decided that a detachment representing the whole division would march in the following morning.

The city waited nervously. Italian radio kept up the pretence to the end that the enemy was not approaching the capital, and according to accounts gathered by a South African historian an issue of the Corriere dell’Impero reporting stubborn resistance on the Awash was already being printed. The Ethiopians were waiting for their liberators. At eight in the morning on 6 April Wetherall arrived at Akaki, and staff officers formed up a column made up of units of the 11th African Division, including a company of the South African Natal Carbineers. Ahead of it, war correspondents drove into the city in fourteen battered cars that had covered more than three thousand kilometres from Nairobi. Italian accounts state that at half past ten Mambrini welcomed the British generals on the steps of the Little Gebbi. The act of handing over the city was signed in the palace. An eyewitness, the British journalist Kenneth Gandar-Dower, later described the ceremony as a scene straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

The 23rd Nigerian Brigade, which had led the pursuit all the way from the Juba to Harar, had covered the longest distance in this advance. It was not, however, the first to reach Addis Ababa: for lack of fuel and food it had to stay at Dire Dawa, and only its commander, Brigadier Smallwood, took part in the entry into the capital. The city was occupied chiefly by battalions of the King’s African Rifles from British East Africa, brought to the capital in the lorries of a South African transport company made up of soldiers of Indian and Malay descent, and by the South Africans of Pienaar’s 1st Brigade. In the afternoon the green, yellow and red flag with the Lion of Judah, the imperial standard of Ethiopia, was ceremonially hoisted over the Great Gebbi, the palace of Emperor Menelik II. According to the South African official history, shots of celebration rang out in the city all afternoon. General Frangipani, overwhelmed according to Italian studies by the disgrace of surrendering the city without a fight, took his own life with poison soon afterwards.

Victors as protectors

The capture of the capital confronted the British with a task for which they were unprepared. Wetherall had to protect thousands of Italian civilians, and if he had used his own brigades to do so he would have immobilised the whole division. Italian units, in places as strong as a battalion, still held the surrounding forts. At a conference with representatives of the brigades it was therefore unanimously decided that the Italians would for the time being keep their weapons to protect their own women and children until order could be restored. For some time the Italian colonial police continued to serve in the city alongside British soldiers. The South Africans guarded prisoners gathered at the racecourse, and patrols went out to the surrounding towns to rescue Italian settlers and whole outposts, which readily surrendered to the British so as not to fall into the hands of Ethiopian forces. Just outside the city an Italian battalion fought a regular battle with partisans before reaching captivity under British escort.

The Ethiopians, however, as the South African official history acknowledges, showed great restraint. The forces of the patriots of Abebe Aregai, the most important resistance commander in the province of Shewa, who had been fighting the Italians around Addis Ababa for five years, were gathering around the capital. The British tried to stay on good terms with them while preventing revenge against the Italians until the garrisons of the forts had been disarmed and marched away.

On top of the problem of protecting civilians came difficulties of supply. According to the South African official history, Cunningham’s forces had taken some fifty thousand enemy soldiers prisoner in two months, losing fewer than 150 killed themselves. All of them had to be fed. Captured stocks helped: according to Italian studies, enough food was found in Addis Ababa to feed ten thousand people for a year, along with large quantities of fuel. On its way to the capital the 1st South African Brigade had covered some 1,500 miles, almost 2,400 kilometres, in twenty-five days, and Cunningham’s army as a whole more than 2,700 kilometres from the Tana river in Kenya in fifty-three days. The British official history put the battle losses of this advance at 501 men and eight aircraft.

Place in the war

On the same day, 6 April, a less celebrated but politically no less important ceremony took place elsewhere in Ethiopia. Emperor Haile Selassie I, who had crossed the border from Sudan in January together with the forces of Orde Wingate, soon to be known as Gideon Force, entered Debre Markos, the capital of Gojjam province, abandoned by the Italians a few days earlier. Cunningham did not want the Emperor to appear in the capital too soon, fearing that his arrival would trigger an outburst among the Ethiopians that would endanger Italian civilians. Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa only on 5 May 1941, exactly five years after Italian troops had entered it, and called on his people not to take revenge on the Italians. Ethiopia was the first country conquered by the future Axis powers to regain its independence during the Second World War, although the British continued for some time to treat it as occupied territory.

In the north, on 8 April, after an assault by Indian troops, British tanks and the Free French, Rear Admiral Bonetti capitulated with some 9,600 men. The harbour at Massawa was blocked by scuttled ships and floating docks, but the Red Sea was no longer under threat. On 11 April President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that it had ceased to be a combat zone, which opened the way to Egypt for American supply ships. This was the main strategic aim of the whole campaign. The Duke of Aosta held out at Amba Alagi, where he surrendered on 19 May. The last Italian garrison, at Gondar, surrendered in November 1941. Some soldiers and settlers then carried on a guerrilla war for many months more.

The fall of Addis Ababa came, however, at a time when the matters that counted most for Wavell were being decided elsewhere. On the same day Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece, where British troops had been stationed since March, and in Libya Erwin Rommel’s forces had taken Benghazi three days earlier and were pushing east. Victory in East Africa made it possible to move the 1st South African Division, the 5th Indian Division and part of the air force north, but it came too late to change the course of the spring defeats. For the Italians the loss of their imperial capital was a humiliation that propaganda could not hide. Tens of thousands of Italian civilians found themselves under British occupation. Between April 1942 and August 1943 four great liners, the so-called “white ships”, made three voyages around Africa with British consent and, according to Italian studies, brought some 28,000 of them back to Italy, mainly women, children and the elderly. For Haile Selassie, who had lost his case before the League of Nations in 1936, 6 April 1941 marked the beginning of his return to the throne, and for occupied Europe it was one of the first signs that the dictators’ conquests need not be permanent.