The British take Mogadishu

On 25 February 1941 British troops from Kenya reached Mogadishu, the capital of Italian Somaliland. The city had been declared open and nobody defended it. According to the British official history, the 23rd Nigerian Brigade entered it that day, having covered some 235 miles, nearly 380 kilometres, in three days. The South African official history is more detailed: on the evening of 25 February a patrol of East African armoured cars drove into the city, and the formal entry of the commander of the 11th African Division, General Harry Wetherall, took place the following day. According to the same history, the leading brigade covered 275 miles, about 440 kilometres, in two and a half days. The fall of Mogadishu completed an operation that had begun only two weeks earlier, on 11 February, with the capture of Afmadu near the Kenyan border. It had been meant to give the British no more than the port of Kismayo, and within fourteen days it had shattered the entire Italian defence in the south of Italian East Africa.

A plan meant to end at Kismayo

General Alan Cunningham, who took command of the forces in the Colony of Kenya in November 1940, found there an army which at the end of November numbered, according to British figures, about 77,000 men: 27,000 South Africans, 33,000 East African soldiers, 9,000 West Africans and 6,000 Europeans serving in African units. Lacking transport, Cunningham at first advised postponing the attack on Kismayo until after the spring rainy season. What changed this was the December raid on the Italian post at El Wak, which exposed the enemy’s weakness, and the Italian defeats in Libya. At the end of January 1941, convinced that with the enemy’s morale collapsing he could take greater risks, he obtained the consent of General Archibald Wavell to capture Kismayo, and on 2 February he issued his orders. The date of the attack, 11 February, was set with an eye to the expected rains, the phase of the moon and the amount of transport available; in the north, meanwhile, the offensive from the Sudan into Eritrea was already under way.

There were enough lorries for only four brigade groups instead of six. From the railhead near Nairobi to the River Tana it was nearly 250 miles, and from the Tana to the Juba another 250, along sandy tracks through waterless bush. General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen’s 12th African Division comprised Brigadier Dan Pienaar’s 1st South African Infantry Brigade, the 22nd East African Brigade with battalions of the King’s African Rifles, and the 24th Gold Coast Brigade. Wetherall’s 11th African Division included Brigadier Gerald Smallwood’s 23rd Nigerian Brigade. From the sea they were supported by a Royal Navy squadron designated Force T, with the cruisers Shropshire, Hawkins, Capetown and Ceres and the aircraft carrier Hermes. In the air the operations were carried out mainly by squadrons of the South African Air Force, 94 aircraft in all, including reserves.

The plan was kept strictly secret: no written orders were issued, and dummy wireless traffic was used to persuade the Italians that a non-existent 4th Australian Division was stationed in the Wajir area. The orders covered only the capture of Kismayo and a bridgehead over the Juba. Cunningham warned his commanders, however, that if Italian resistance collapsed, the next objective would be Mogadishu. If the port had not been taken by the tenth day of the operation, the troops would have to pull back or be supplied over open beaches.

11 February: Afmadu

It is often said that British troops entered Italian Somaliland on 11 February. The border was not in fact first crossed that day: British patrols and columns had been operating on the Somali side since the end of January, and the Italian command knew of their incursions at Dif, Liboi and Colbio. What began on 11 February was the main offensive. On 10 February Cunningham issued an order of the day to his troops that ended with the words: “Hit them hard and hit them again.” That same day South African Junkers Ju 86 and Fairey Battle bombers spent several hours bombing and strafing the defences of Afmadu, the junction of the roads from Wajir, Kismayo and Jelib. The garrison, one colonial battalion and irregular bands, could not withstand the air attack and, with the Italian command’s permission, withdrew towards Jelib, and on the morning of 11 February the 22nd East African Brigade entered Afmadu almost without a fight.

The Italians had long since abandoned any intention of defending the plains west of the Juba. After the El Wak raid the Viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, Prince Amedeo, recalled the governor of Somaliland and commander of the Juba sector, General Gustavo Pesenti, who according to Italian accounts had even advised him to seek an armistice. He was replaced by General Carlo De Simone, who in August 1940 had led the main column in the conquest of British Somaliland, which ended with the capture of Berbera. According to Italian figures De Simone had about 35,000 troops, including some 4,200 Italians, in two colonial divisions strung out along nearly six hundred kilometres of the river: the 102nd Division defended the lower Juba and the 101st its upper course. The motorised 15th Amhara Brigade was held in reserve at Brava. The line was thin, and in the dry season the river could be forded in many places. On 10 February the Duke of Aosta flew to Mogadishu and inspected the Juba defences, but he could promise no reinforcements: in the north the British were assaulting Keren, and from Libya came news of the defeat at Beda Fomm. All he did was confirm the order to hold the river for as long as possible.

Kismayo abandoned

On the afternoon of 11 February the Kismayo garrison was ordered to evacuate. Among the Italian gunners the word went round that the decision had been taken at a night conference attended by the Duke of Aosta. The little port town, which according to the South African official history then had some 3,600 inhabitants, mattered above all because seventeen merchant ships – Italian, German and one Yugoslav – had been lying there since June 1940. Those that could put to sea were ordered to escape to neutral or Vichy-controlled ports, Madagascar for example. The tanker Pensilvania reached Mogadishu, where, according to the Duke of Aosta’s report, she was hit by a British cruiser and beached. Two ships reached Diego Suarez, two scuttled themselves at sea, five fell into British hands, three disappeared, and the rest were scuttled in the harbour. On 12 and 13 February the Italians destroyed the coastal guns and set fire to the ammunition and fuel dumps, and the garrison command left the town before the soldiers did.

At first the British knew nothing of this. On 13 February the Gold Coast brigade took Bulo Erillo on the Juba after hard fighting, capturing 141 prisoners and four armoured cars, while Pienaar’s South African brigade spent the whole day lying hidden in the bush near Gobwen, at the mouth of the river. Pienaar had orders not to send out patrols and to keep wireless silence, so although he could hear explosions from the direction of Kismayo he could do nothing. In the evening the airmen and the ships of Force T, which had drawn no response from the Italian batteries, confirmed that the Italians were withdrawing. The Nigerian brigade was still too far away, so Cunningham sent the 22nd East African Brigade from Afmadu to Kismayo.

At dawn on 14 February the South Africans attacked Gobwen, but found the village empty and the pontoon bridge over the Juba destroyed. For several hours Italian artillery shelled them from Jumbo across the river. That same day South African armoured cars and King’s African Rifles battalions entered Kismayo unopposed, and by 5 p.m. they held the whole town. The East African column was greeted in the streets by the inhabitants, many of them drunk after looting the Italian wine stores. The port had been taken six days ahead of the date Cunningham regarded as critical. Among the spoils were three of the eight coastal guns and ten of the sixteen anti-aircraft guns in usable condition. The first convoy from Mombasa put into Kismayo on 19 February, although unloading from lighters at the one working quay proved very difficult.

Crossing the Juba

After taking Kismayo, Cunningham resolved to give the Italians no time to recover. On 12 February Wavell had agreed to a march on Mogadishu, which would complete the isolation of Italian East Africa, but stipulated that it must not require large forces, since priority went to aid for Greece and Turkey. On 11 February the British government had decided to give them all possible help in the event of a German attack, and Wavell wanted the South African division back as soon as possible. At its mouth the Juba was nearly two hundred metres wide and tidal, and the Italians had artillery on the far bank. On 15 February Cunningham demanded a crossing by the following day at the latest. Pienaar, who had personally spotted an old ford upstream from an aircraft, sent a column there with the 1st Battalion, Transvaal Scottish.

On 17 February the South Africans forded the river at Mesandaro, and in the afternoon, at Yonte, some fifteen kilometres from the mouth, two platoons of the Natal Carbineers crossed in folding assault boats manned by engineers. The Transvaal Scottish infantry followed them and formed a bridgehead. During the night and at dawn on 18 February it was attacked by the Italian 195th Colonial Battalion. The askaris, under Italian officers, charged several times across the open plain and were cut down by machine-gun fire, while the defenders suffered only three men lightly wounded. On 19 February the engineers completed a pontoon bridge, named Union Bridge, and the armoured cars routed an Italian battalion advancing from Margherita, today’s Jamaame. The same day, some hundred kilometres upstream, the Gold Coast brigade crossed the Juba unopposed at Mabungo.

The Italian position collapsed within two days. On the morning of 20 February, after brief shelling from Gobwen, white flags appeared over Jumbo, and the sector commander, Colonel Bernardi, surrendered the place with thirty officers and more than a hundred Italian gunners. A senior NCO of the South African battalion crossed to fetch the Italian commander by hauling himself along the cable of an old ferry. Italian accounts state that De Simone issued the order for a general retreat that day, and under the blows of the motorised columns it soon turned into a rout. On 21 February the South Africans took Margherita, capturing some five hundred prisoners, and on 22 February they closed a pincer from two sides, from the south and from Mabungo, around Jelib, the key point of the Italian defence on the road to Mogadishu. For the South Africans it was the hardest day of the whole operation. A Natal Carbineers patrol that approached an Italian officer carrying a white flag came under fire from an ambush and lost thirteen killed and seven wounded. Shells from their own artillery, which could not be stopped in time, also fell near Jelib. In the afternoon the South Africans entered the town, and the 1st Transvaal Scottish cut the road from Jelib to Mogadishu. The 102nd Colonial Division had ceased to exist. Many of its soldiers, especially the askaris, were not taken prisoner but threw away their weapons and melted into the bush.

The pursuit to Mogadishu

The collapse of the Juba line convinced Cunningham that there was almost nobody left between the river and Mogadishu. On 22 February he proposed to Wavell something that only a few weeks earlier would have been taken for fantasy: a march from Mogadishu through the Ogaden to Harar, more than a thousand kilometres away, and its capture by the beginning of April, before the rains came. To shorten the supply line he asked for Berbera to be retaken from the sea. Wavell agreed on 24 February. He ordered Harar to be taken if possible and the link between Addis Ababa and Djibouti to be cut, and promised to prepare a landing at Berbera from Aden.

Meanwhile the pursuit was already on. At 6 a.m. on 23 February Wetherall’s 11th African Division, with the 23rd Nigerian and 22nd East African Brigades, set off eastwards from the bridgehead at Mabungo. The East Africans led the way to Modun, where the cruiser Shropshire shelled Italian camps, and on 24 February they took Modun and the coastal town of Brava. The Nigerians then took the lead, brushed aside several rearguards and on 25 February cleared Afgooye on the Webi Shebeli river, where they found intact ammunition, engineer and supply dumps. Mogadishu was less than forty kilometres away. Italian accounts state that the city, already declared open, was handed over to the British by the podestà, Salvatore Giuliana. A War Office report summed it up briefly: Somaliland had fallen like a ripe pear.

In Mogadishu the British found booty that decided the further course of the campaign. According to the British official history it amounted to 350,000 gallons of motor fuel and 80,000 gallons of aviation spirit, nearly two million litres in all. According to the South African official history, most of the hidden stocks were revealed for a reward by Somalis, whom General Wetherall encouraged with money to betray the caches. The wrecks of 21 aircraft stood on the airfield, and at headquarters a handbook was found describing every airfield and landing ground in Italian East Africa. In and around Mogadishu some two hundred British officers and merchant seamen were also freed. Most of them were survivors from ships sunk by the German raider Atlantis, brought to Somaliland in November 1940 aboard the captured Yugoslav steamer Durmitor. Some of them at once volunteered to help get the port of nearby Merca working. The port of Mogadishu itself was out of action for some time, because magnetic mines dropped earlier by the RAF lay across its entrance, and there was no minesweeping equipment on the spot.

Place in the war

The capture of Mogadishu ended the campaign in Italian Somaliland within fourteen days of the taking of Afmadu. British losses were slight. According to estimates by the command in Nairobi, by the fall of Mogadishu some 31,000 enemy soldiers had been put out of action – the whole of the 102nd Colonial Division and more than half of the 101st – although many of them had not been killed or captured but had simply deserted. Throughout this time the Italian air force hardly showed itself, and the Duke of Aosta wrote to Rome that the lack of aircraft was being felt more keenly with every moment. According to Italian historians the Viceroy had doubted from the start that the Juba line could be held, but he first assured Rome of its strength and then, after the fall of Mogadishu, blamed the defeat on the poor performance of the colonial troops.

The operation that had been meant to end at Kismayo opened for the British a road into the heart of Ethiopia from the direction in which the Italians least expected it. On 1 March a motorised column of the Nigerian brigade set off north from Mogadishu along the Imperial Road and in a little over a fortnight covered more than seven hundred kilometres through the Ogaden. On 16 March a landing from Aden retook Berbera and British Somaliland, on 17 March the Nigerians entered Jijiga, at the end of March Harar fell, and on 6 April Cunningham’s troops marched into Addis Ababa. In the north, General William Platt’s army had by then only just broken the defences of Keren in Eritrea, on 27 March. The pursuit through Somaliland and the Ogaden, in which an army made up mostly of African soldiers covered, according to British figures, nearly 2,700 kilometres in about eight weeks, was one of the fastest advances of the war.

The swift victory also mattered beyond Africa. Wavell needed every division to defend Egypt and for the expedition to help Greece, while in Tripoli the first units of General Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Korps were already disembarking. The collapse of Italian Somaliland brought nearer the moment when British troops from East Africa, above all the South Africans, could be moved north. For Italian Somaliland itself, 25 February 1941 marked the end of more than half a century of Italian rule. The colony passed under British military administration, and in 1950 it returned to Italian administration, now as a United Nations trust territory, which in 1960 united with British Somaliland to form independent Somalia.