The fall of Assab

By June 1941 the Italians held only one place on the Red Sea coast: the port of Assab in southern Eritrea, not far from the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. The British took it in a small landing operation code-named Chronometer. The ships carrying the troops left Aden on 9 June; on the evening of 10 June they set out from the island of Perim for the Italian port, and at dawn on 11 June the men of the 3rd Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment leapt out onto the jetty. The garrison, caught asleep, surrendered almost without a shot.

Popular lists record the fall of Assab under 10 June and state that it was the last Italian port in East Africa. The second statement is true: Massawa had capitulated on 8 April, and the British had taken the ports of Italian Somaliland back in February. The date, however, needs to be made more precise. The British naval record of operations lists the operation under 10 June, because on that day the force was already under way and was due to strike at dawn. While lying at Perim, however, the commanders postponed the landing by a day, so it took place on the morning of 11 June. That is how British studies date the capture of the port, while the Italian encyclopaedic version even gives 12 June. The date of 10 June thus corresponds to the day the expedition set out from Perim.

The oldest Italian colony

Assab mattered more to the Italians than its size suggested. The bay was bought from local sultans in November 1869 by the missionary and traveller Giuseppe Sapeto, formally on behalf of the Genoese shipowner Rubattino but in reality for the Italian government, which did not wish to provoke Egypt and Britain. In 1882 the Italian state took over the possession officially. It was the first scrap of land from which Italy’s colonial empire in Africa grew: from Assab and Massawa, occupied in 1885, grew Eritrea, and from Eritrea the expeditions that ended in defeat at Adwa in 1896 and in the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–1936.

For decades, however, the port was a sleepy little town among the scorching deserts of the Afar country, living off salt and petty trade, because Ethiopia preferred French Djibouti and its railway to Addis Ababa. Only after conquering Ethiopia did the Italians begin to develop it, building a road across the desert all the way to Dessie in the Abyssinian Highlands. By the end of the 1930s some eight thousand people lived there, including several hundred Italians.

During the war Assab remained a backwater. In June 1940, just before Italy entered the war, the destroyer Pantera laid two minefields in the approaches to the port, and in March 1941 Axis ships trying to break out of Massawa took refuge there. When Asmara and Massawa fell at the beginning of April, the port on the far southern tip of Eritrea was cut off from the rest of the Italian forces. In May the Viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, capitulated at Amba Alagi, and all that remained of Italian East Africa were General Pietro Gazzera’s forces in the province of Galla-Sidamo in the south-west, General Guglielmo Nasi’s around Gondar, and, as the British official history puts it, a small isolated garrison at Assab on the Red Sea.

The plan made at Harar

The British were in no hurry about Assab, since in itself it no longer threatened anyone. The strategic aim of the campaign, the security of shipping in the Red Sea, had been achieved in April with the fall of Massawa, when President Roosevelt announced on 11 April that the sea was no longer a combat zone and opened it to American ships bound for Egypt. The garrison at Assab, however, served two awkward purposes. Italian supplies passed through the port and along the coast roads to neighbouring French Somaliland, a colony loyal to the Vichy government, which the British were blockading in order to induce it to go over to the Free French. Italian agents in Assab were also, according to the British, intriguing in the neighbouring Kingdom of Yemen, across the water from British Aden.

On 26 May 1941 Rear Admiral Ronald Hallifax, commanding British naval forces in the Red Sea, flew from Aden to Harar together with the air officer commanding at Aden. They met General Alan Cunningham, whose troops from Kenya were then fighting in southern Ethiopia. Cunningham agreed with the East Indies Fleet command that Assab must be taken, and placed at Aden’s disposal the 3rd Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment, which had earlier helped to retake British Somaliland. A staff made up of representatives of all three services prepared Operation Chronometer. On his way back from Harar Hallifax flew over Assab, and air reconnaissance confirmed that the Italians had removed the coastal artillery from the shore and that the port was weakly defended.

The expedition was given whatever was to hand. The anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Dido, name ship of the Dido class, which had been damaged by bombs during the fighting for Crete and was on her way to be repaired, stopped at Aden and came under Hallifax’s orders for a few days. She was joined by two sloops of the Royal Indian Navy, HMIS Indus and HMIS Clive, the armed patrol vessel Chakdina and the transport Tuna. On board were embarked the Punjabis, a signals company and a company of sappers. The land forces were commanded by Brigadier W. A. Dimoline.

A landing at dawn

On 9 June Dido, with Hallifax and Dimoline on board, left Aden. A strong wind held back the slower vessels, and Clive was also towing a tug fitted with a sweep. At Perim, an islet in the Bab-el-Mandeb strait itself, the commanders concluded that they would not make it by dawn on 10 June and postponed the attack by twenty-four hours. The ships entered harbour at Perim, and the Punjabis, who had been crammed aboard Chakdina for sixty hours since sailing from Berbera, were able to go ashore. At 7.30 p.m. on 10 June the force left Perim and steamed north in two columns. Navigation in the dark was made easier by Dido’s radar, which gave exact ranges to the surrounding islands.

At 3.30 a.m. on 11 June the ships anchored off Assab, and Indus swept the approach. No mines were found. At 4.34 a.m. two motor launches, each carrying thirty men, set off for the harbour. Between 5.05 and 5.12 a.m. Dido shelled targets ashore according to a carefully prepared plan, and RAF aircraft from Aden appeared over the town. They bombed the roads leading to the port and flew low over the houses to drown the noise of the launches, destroying some of the Italian aircraft on the airfield into the bargain. At 5.19 a.m. the troops leapt out onto the main jetty. No one resisted. British accounts stress that there was no sign of vigilance on the Italian side: the bombardment caught many soldiers asleep on the waterfront, and the Punjabis took two generals prisoner in their beds. One of them was Air Brigadier General Pietro Piacentini, commander of the northern air sector of Italian East Africa. The landing party also seized a local tug before its crew could scuttle it.

At 6 a.m. the agreed success signal was seen from Dido. Chakdina and Tuna entered the harbour behind Indus, which was sweeping ahead of them, and landed the rest of the battalion. At 7 a.m. the Italian civil governor came out to the cruiser in a motor boat with an interpreter and surrendered the town to Hallifax and Dimoline. The captured harbour master pointed out the positions of three minefields. The next day 547 prisoners were embarked on the ships, among them both generals and 35 Germans. The only casualty of the operation turned out to be the trawler HMIS Parvati, which struck a magnetic mine near Assab on 13 June. It was the navy’s last loss in the whole East African campaign.

Place in the war

The capture of Assab was one of the smallest operations of the East African campaign and one of the most efficiently conducted. A few hundred soldiers, one cruiser and a handful of smaller vessels settled in a single morning a matter that had been hanging over the coast since April. The British official history devotes a single sentence to it: the Italian garrison at Assab was eliminated by a small combined operation from Aden. From that moment the Italians no longer had a single port in East Africa, and the entire African shore of the Red Sea, with the exception of French Djibouti, was in British hands.

The fall of Assab also tightened the blockade of French Somaliland. In June the British informed the colony’s governor that the blockade would continue until Djibouti joined the Free French, and relations with the Vichy authorities throughout the Middle East had deteriorated still further since 8 June, when British, Australian, Indian and Free French troops entered Syria and Lebanon. The governor did not give way. French Somaliland went over to Free France only at the end of 1942.

On land the war in East Africa went on for several more months. On 21 June the British entered Jimma, and on 6 July Gazzera surrendered to Belgian troops from the Congo. Nasi held out longest at Gondar, surrendering on 27 November 1941. That capitulation ended the campaign fought since 1940 by the forces of Generals William Platt and Cunningham, which had begun with Italian conquests in Sudan, Kenya and British Somaliland and led to the British entry into Addis Ababa and the Emperor’s return to his throne. General Piacentini spent more than two years as a prisoner in Kenya and India, and in 1944 he became Minister of Aviation in Ivanoe Bonomi’s government.