The British offensive in East Africa

On 19 January 1941 British and Indian motorised units drove into Kassala, the Sudanese railway junction the Italians had captured in July of the previous year. The town was empty: the Italian garrison had pulled back in haste towards Eritrea, leaving behind fortifications, stores and mines. The same day General William Platt’s two Indian divisions crossed the border into Eritrea and set off in pursuit. A day later, on 20 January, the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie I crossed from Sudan into Ethiopia, while in the south, on the Kenyan frontier, General Alan Cunningham’s troops had for several days been driving the Italians out of their border posts. After six months on the defensive, the British Empire went over to the attack in East Africa, and within four months the offensive had shattered Italy’s empire in the Horn of Africa.

Six months of waiting

Since June 1940 Italian East Africa, made up of Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia, conquered in 1936, had been cut off from Italy. The Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, had under his command, according to Italian figures, some 290,000 men, most of them askaris – locally recruited soldiers – but he could count on no deliveries of fuel, ammunition or spare parts. In the summer he exploited his superiority only to a limited extent: in July he took Kassala, Gallabat and Moyale in Kenya, and in August the whole of British Somaliland, where on 19 August his troops entered Berbera. Then he went over to the defensive, waiting for the war to be decided in Europe and in Egypt.

The British made good use of the time. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, reinforced Sudan with the 5th Indian Infantry Division, which began arriving in September, while brigades from West Africa, East Africa and the Union of South Africa poured into Kenya. At the end of October 1940, at a conference in Khartoum attended by the British Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Jan Smuts, Emperor Haile Selassie, Wavell and Platt, it was agreed that in the spring of 1941 there would be an offensive from two directions, combined with support for an Ethiopian uprising. In November Alan Cunningham, the younger brother of Admiral Andrew Cunningham, took over the command in Kenya. In November, too, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park and in Cairo broke the new ciphers of the Italian army and air force in East Africa, so that British commanders knew the enemy’s plans.

December brought the turning point. On 9 December Operation Compass opened in Egypt, and after the victory at Sidi Barrani, on 11 December, Wavell sent General Noel Beresford-Peirse’s 4th Indian Infantry Division from the desert to Sudan. Its transfer took until early January. In Rome the new Chief of the General Staff, Ugo Cavallero, decided that the forces in East Africa should abandon all offensive plans and defend themselves on favourable ground. The commander of the northern sector, General Luigi Frusci, was ordered to withdraw from the border lowlands of Kassala and Metemma to the passes in the mountains of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Frusci procrastinated, since abandoning Kassala meant a loss of prestige and of the railway junction, but the withdrawal orders, intercepted and read by the British, determined when the attack would be launched.

Kassala and the pursuit into Eritrea

Platt planned to strike at Kassala with a pincer movement by both Indian divisions only on 8 February 1941. Wavell, seeing that Italian morale was crumbling, brought the date forward, first to 9 February and then to 19 January. The Italians forestalled him. In mid-January they began to pull in their northern wing, and on 17 and 18 January they hurriedly abandoned Kassala and Tessenei, just across the border. All the while they were harried by the patrols of Gazelle Force, Colonel Frank Messervy’s motorised unit, which had been troubling them for months. When British and Indian troops entered the empty town on 19 January, Wavell ordered the planned attack to be turned into a pursuit. Some sources, including English-language biographies of Platt, date the recapture of Kassala to 18 January, the day of the Italian withdrawal. British troops, however, entered on 19 January, and that day is usually taken as the start of the offensive from Sudan.

Three columns moved on Eritrea. The 4th Indian Infantry Division, preceded by Gazelle Force, advanced east along the road through Sabderat and Keru towards Agordat. General Lewis Heath’s 5th Indian Infantry Division was to take Aicota and from there swing towards Barentu or Biscia. From the Red Sea coast, from the Port Sudan area, came a small detachment named Briggs Force after its commander, which recaptured Karora on the border and pushed south parallel to the coast. Apart from raids by the Italian air force, the pursuit at first met no resistance.

The first serious fighting took place in the Keru gorge, which was held by the rearguard, the 41st Colonial Brigade. On 21 January a troop of mounted askaris from Lieutenant Amedeo Guillet’s Gruppo Bande Amhara charged out of the scrub at Gazelle Force’s artillery positions. The horsemen got almost as far as the guns, which fired at them over open sights, and within minutes the field was strewn with dead and wounded men and horses. The charge at Keru is regarded as the last cavalry attack the British Army faced in the war. The colonial brigade withdrew on the night of 22–23 January, but not all of it got away: its commander, General Ugo Fongoli, was captured together with his staff and some 800 soldiers. Meanwhile the 5th Division took Aicota, and in the last days of January both Indian divisions stood before Agordat and Barentu, where the Italians had decided to make a stand. The Battle of Agordat ended on 31 January and opened the way for the British towards the mountains at Keren.

The Kenyan front: El Yibo instead of Ethiopia

According to popular chronologies, British troops from Kenya launched their first attacks on Ethiopia on 16 January. In fact the fighting of 16 January was still taking place on the Kenyan side of the border. Cunningham, who had under his command Major General George Brink’s 1st South African Infantry Division and the 11th and 12th African Divisions, considered a direct advance from Kenya through southern Ethiopia on Addis Ababa impossible before the rainy season. He did, however, want to clear the border area and spark a rising against the Italians in the province of Galla-Sidamo. At dawn on 16 January South African units attacked the wells at El Yibo and El Sardu in northern Kenya’s frontier district, occupied by the Italians in the summer of 1940. According to the South African official history, after three days of fighting, with air support, the Italians abandoned El Yibo on the night of 17–18 January, and on 18 January the South Africans entered El Sardu. In the following days patrols moved forward towards the Turbi hills and Moyale, where there were skirmishes on 24 and 25 January.

Only on 31 January did the 2nd and 5th South African Infantry Brigades cross the Ethiopian border. They took Gorai, El Gumu and Hobok, and on 18 February, after a three-day battle in torrential rain and piercing cold, captured the fortified town of Mega. On 22 February a patrol of Ethiopian volunteers attached to the division entered Moyale. The rising in the south on which Cunningham had been counting did not break out.

24 January: Italian Somaliland

It is also said that troops from Kenya attacked Italian Somaliland on 24 January. This date, too, is inaccurate. The South African official history, based on the records of the command in Nairobi, states that Cunningham decided to open operations on the Somali front only on 11 February 1941. He chose that date in view of the expected rains, the phase of the moon and the amount of transport available, which was enough for only four brigade groups. His aim was modest: to capture the port of Kismayo and a bridgehead at the mouth of the Juba river. No orders were issued in writing, and only a handful of officers knew of the commander’s intentions. At the end of January preparations, reconnaissance and the concentration of the 11th and 12th African Divisions on the border were under way, and some English-language accounts give 24 January as the start of the operation. The advance into Italian Somaliland did not, however, begin until February.

The Italians had no intention of defending the Somali plains in any case. In January their command judged them untenable and withdrew the 102nd Somali Division behind the lower Juba and the 101st Division upriver, towards the Ethiopian highlands. On 11 February African units took Afmadu, on 14 February Kismayo, and after the defences on the Juba had been broken, on 25 February a motorised Nigerian brigade entered Mogadishu unopposed. An offensive that was meant to halt at Kismayo turned into one of the fastest pursuits of the war.

The Emperor returns to Ethiopia

The third thrust was the smallest but politically the most important. Since August 1940 Colonel Daniel Sandford’s Mission 101 had been operating in the province of Gojjam, bringing together scattered bands of Ethiopian patriots, the so-called arbegnoch. In November Major Orde Wingate arrived in Khartoum to conduct irregular operations. Platt, who was sceptical of Wingate’s ideas and of the Emperor’s political role, nevertheless agreed that Haile Selassie should return to his country as the standard-bearer of the rising. On 20 January 1941 the Emperor, accompanied by Wingate, crossed the border near Um Idla and raised the imperial flag on Ethiopian soil. Some British accounts give the date as 21 January. It was the first day since May 1936 that the ruler of Ethiopia had been in his own country.

The force that escorted him, soon named Gideon Force, numbered at its peak, according to British figures, some fifty officers, twenty British NCOs, about 800 men of a Sudanese frontier battalion and 800 Ethiopian soldiers, without artillery. Its supplies were carried by camels. Wingate was to seize a foothold in Gojjam, install the Emperor there and kindle a rising that would tie down Italian garrisons far from Eritrea and from the road to Addis Ababa.

Its place in the war

January 1941 opened an advance on three sides in East Africa against which the Italian forces, cut off from home and starved of supplies, had no defence. What gave the British the advantage was not so much troops as knowledge of the enemy. Decrypted signals allowed Wavell and Platt to strike where the Italians were just withdrawing. Not everything went to plan, though: the deception operation Camilla was meant to persuade the Italians that both Indian divisions were preparing to retake British Somaliland, but instead of reinforcing Berbera the Italian command began to evacuate it and shift troops to Eritrea – precisely where the real blow was coming. The offensive of Platt and Cunningham had one more aim: to open the Red Sea to shipping before the situation in North Africa and the Balkans forced Wavell to withdraw troops from the theatre.

The further course of the campaign bore out these calculations, though not at once. At the beginning of February Platt was held up at Keren, where Italian grenadiers, Alpini and Eritrean battalions held out until 27 March. On 1 April the British entered Asmara, and on 8 April Massawa capitulated. From the south Cunningham conquered Italian Somaliland, crossed the Ogaden and on 6 April entered Addis Ababa. On 5 May Haile Selassie returned to his capital, exactly five years after Italian troops had marched into it, and on 19 May the Duke of Aosta himself surrendered at Amba Alagi. The last Italian garrison, at Gondar, gave up in November 1941. Kassala, whose loss in July 1940 had been a humiliation for the British, became the starting point of Britain’s first victorious land campaign of the war.