French Somaliland joins Free France

On 28 December 1942 the authority of the Vichy government formally came to an end in French Somaliland, a small colony on the Gulf of Aden whose only significant town and port was Djibouti. The colony, loyal for more than two years to Marshal Philippe Pétain, went over to General Charles de Gaulle’s Free France as the last French territory in Africa to do so.

It is sometimes written that the governor “surrendered to invading British and Free French forces”. In reality there was no invasion and no fighting. The colony had long been surrounded by British-controlled territory, and its fate was decided by blockade, hunger, the desertion of part of the garrison and negotiation. The surrender was sealed by an agreement signed on 28 December, and the troops who entered the town were French, not British.

A colony cut off from the world

French Somaliland mattered in the strategy of the region for one reason: from Djibouti ran the railway to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s main route to the sea. In June 1940 Djibouti had a strong garrison – seven battalions of Senegalese and Somali infantry – and its commander, General Paul Legentilhomme, wanted to fight on against Italy alongside the British. Most of the officers, however, obeyed Pétain’s government. The armistice with Italy provided for the demilitarisation of the colony and free Italian access to the port and the railway. At the beginning of August 1940 Legentilhomme made his way to Aden with two officers, and the British, left on their own, lost neighbouring British Somaliland.

From September 1940 Royal Navy ships from Aden blockaded the colony’s coast. In September Vichy sent a naval officer, Pierre Nouailhetas, to serve as governor. After a British air raid on Djibouti on 25 September he began to rule with an iron hand: Europeans suspected of contacts with the Allies were interned at Obock, several dozen people were sentenced – most of them in absentia – to death or hard labour, and in May 1941, according to historians of the colony, six Africans were shot without trial to deter deserters.

In the spring of 1941, as the East African campaign drew to a close and the British entered Addis Ababa, French Somaliland found itself encircled. London preferred not to take the colony by force – after Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar, Franco-British clashes did the Allied cause little good. A policy of “winning it over without bloodshed” was therefore adopted. Nouailhetas was prepared to make the port and the railway available, but would allow no contact whatsoever with the Gaullists, and the negotiations stalled.

Hunger

The burden of the blockade fell above all on the inhabitants. Horses, donkeys and camels were eaten, fresh food ran out, and beriberi and scurvy spread. Some of the inhabitants fled into the desert or to British Somaliland. Some accounts, drawing on Lukian Prijac’s study of the Djibouti blockade, speak of numerous victims of malnutrition-related disease, around 70 per cent of them women and children; the exact number of dead cannot be established. Local people called the blockade “carmii”, after a variety of sorghum normally fed to cattle, which people were then eating.

Only the occasional Arab dhow and two French ships from Madagascar got through the blockade. Relief came only with the war in the Pacific: from December 1941 the Royal Navy needed its ships in the east. In January 1942 the British abandoned the land blockade, and in March, according to most studies, they lifted the blockade entirely and unilaterally.

Five-sided talks

In 1942 several parties were negotiating over Djibouti at once. The British commander in East Africa, General William Platt, gave these talks the code name “Pentagon”, because five partners took part in them: Platt himself, the Vichy governor, the Free French, the British minister in Addis Ababa and the United States. The American consul in Aden even flew to Djibouti on his own initiative to talk to Nouailhetas, for which Washington later had to apologise to the British. After the war de Gaulle suspected that London had deliberately dragged its feet in order to draw the colony into its own sphere of influence; historians differ in their assessment of this charge.

Meanwhile, even Vichy came to regard Nouailhetas’s rule as too brutal. He was recalled in September 1942, and on 21 October Auguste Truffert took over. The real turning point, however, came from events elsewhere: the British took Madagascar, and on 8 November the Allies landed in North Africa. At the end of November Réunion passed into Free French hands. The Djibouti garrison became a lone island of loyalty to a government which, after the German occupation of the free zone, no longer had even the appearance of independence.

In November about a third of the garrison – the 1st Senegalese Tirailleur Battalion under Major (chef de bataillon) Georges Raynal – crossed the border near the town of Zeila into British Somaliland. This was an open break with Vichy by a regular unit, and the rest of the garrison could no longer be relied upon.

Surrender without a shot

On 4 December Christian Dupont became governor. He proposed an economic agreement to the British without any change in the colony’s political allegiance, but was turned down. He was told instead that if French Somaliland went over to the Allies without a shot being fired, French rights to it would be respected after the war. That settled the matter. On 26 December – two days after the assassination of Admiral Darlan in Algiers – Raynal’s soldiers returned to the colony’s territory, while a Free French detachment from a Somali unit approached from the direction of Ethiopia.

The act transferring the colony was signed on 28 December at Chebele, a small station on the railway to Addis Ababa, a dozen or so kilometres from Djibouti. According to the Fondation de la France Libre, Dupont remarked on reading the protocol that he was being treated as a defeated enemy, but he signed it. Sources give different times for the formal transfer of power: French studies give 10 a.m., English ones 10 p.m. Free French troops entered Djibouti on 29 December, and on 30 December the office of governor was taken over by André Bayardelle, transferred from New Caledonia.

Aftermath

The port of Djibouti and the railway to Addis Ababa were put back into service for the Allies, although the damaged infrastructure and the flight of the workers meant that normal operation of the port was restored only in 1945. A battalion of Somali tirailleurs was formed from local recruits and later fought in Europe. Free France gained another territory and more men, and from 1944 officials loyal to Vichy were removed from service.

Its place in the war

The rallying of French Somaliland did not alter the balance of forces in the war, but it closed an important chapter: the last territory subject to Vichy vanished from the map of Africa. The whole of French Africa – from Morocco to Madagascar – was now on the Allied side, though still under rival authorities: de Gaulle’s in London and Brazzaville, and General Henri Giraud’s in Algiers. Their quarrel was to dominate French politics in the following months, until the creation of a joint committee in June 1943. For the people of Djibouti the end of the blockade meant above all the end of a famine that had cost many of them their lives, though beyond the borders of the former colony it is rarely remembered.