The Italians invade British Somaliland

In the first days of August 1940 Italian troops from Ethiopia crossed the border of British Somaliland, a protectorate on the Gulf of Aden defended by a mere few thousand imperial soldiers. According to the British official history, the first units entered British territory on 3 August. Many accounts nevertheless give 4 August, because that morning the main column set off for Hargeisa, the first clashes with British patrols took place, and news of the invasion went round the world. The offensive was commanded by General Guglielmo Nasi, deputy to the Viceroy of Italian East Africa. Within four days his three columns had taken the port of Zeila near the border of French Somaliland, Hargeisa and Odweina, and stood before the main British position in the hills covering the colony’s only port and capital, Berbera. It was the only major offensive the Italians managed in East Africa, and the only occasion in the whole war on which they conquered an entire British territory without German help.

The poorest possession of the Empire

British Somaliland had been a protectorate since the 1880s. Britain had then concluded agreements with the leaders of the Somali clans, and its interest in the coast opposite Aden lay chiefly in its value as a hinterland for that base on the route to India: cattle and sheep for the garrison came from here. The British moved into the interior only after twenty years of war against the Dervish movement of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, which ended in 1920 with a campaign in which Royal Air Force aircraft took part and the fall of the Dervish State (PL). The colony covered some 176,000 square kilometres and had about 320,000 inhabitants, almost all of them nomadic herdsmen. A desert plain ran along the coast; behind it, a few dozen kilometres from the sea, rose a range of mountains, and beyond them, towards the Ethiopian border, a plateau. Berbera, the largest town, had a good anchorage but no quays: ships were unloaded by lighter, and in July and August the strong, hot kharif wind often made even that impossible.

The protectorate’s border was more than 1,200 kilometres long. After the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 it bordered Italian East Africa along almost its entire length, and only a short stretch in the west separated it from French Somaliland. British plans had long assumed that the colony could not be held and should be abandoned in the event of war. Its only armed force was the Somaliland Camel Corps, a little over 600 men, mostly Somalis under British officers, armed with single-shot rifles and machine guns and without artillery. In December 1939 the Chiefs of Staff, at the request of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, changed their minds: for the sake of imperial prestige British Somaliland was to be defended and Berbera held for as long as possible. All the plans rested on co-operation with the French, who had a stronger garrison in Djibouti and had fortified the border passes. General Paul Legentilhomme, the commander in French Somaliland, was to command the forces of both countries in the event of war.

After the fall of France

The armistice of June 1940 overturned these assumptions. Under the Franco-Italian armistice French Somaliland was to be demilitarised, and the Italians gained the right to use the port of Djibouti and the French section of the railway to Addis Ababa. Paul Legentilhomme declared that he would fight on alongside the British and played for time for several weeks, but the colony’s governor and its naval and air commanders sided with Pétain’s government. In July the Vichy authorities sent a new governor to Djibouti, General Gaëtan Germain, and Legentilhomme, to avoid bloodshed, slipped away to Aden at the beginning of August and then joined the Free French. British Somaliland was left on its own, and its western flank, hitherto covered by the French, lay wide open.

Wavell nevertheless believed it better to defend the approaches to Berbera than to give up the colony without a fight. In his view the defence required at least five battalions. They were gathered in haste, while disputes over costs between the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and the War Office delayed every decision. At the beginning of August the garrison commander – a Royal Marines officer and until then commandant of the Camel Corps, Arthur Chater, newly promoted to brigadier – had the 1st Battalion of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment and the 2nd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles from Nyasaland, both sent from Kenya; a battery of four light mountain howitzers; two Indian battalions from Aden (the 1/2nd and 3/15th Punjab Regiment); and the Camel Corps, reinforced by a few dozen officers and NCOs from Southern Rhodesia. On 8 August a fifth battalion arrived by sea from Aden, the Scottish 2nd Battalion, the Black Watch. In all there were some four to five thousand men from four parts of the Empire, with different customs and rations, without a proper staff or base, and almost without artillery, transport or signals. Air support could come only from the Bristol Blenheim squadrons at Aden, more than 300 kilometres’ flight from the battlefield, much of it over the sea, and they were also tied down escorting convoys in the Red Sea.

Only three routes passable for vehicles led through the mountains to Berbera: from Zeila along the coast, from Hargeisa, and from Burao (Burco). The shortest, through Hargeisa, crossed the mountains by a wide pass above the dry bed of the Tug Argan. There Chater placed two battalions and the battery; one battalion covered the other approaches and one was held in reserve. The Camel Corps and patrols of the Somali border police, the so-called illalos, formed a thin screen in front of the positions to watch and delay the enemy.

The Duke of Aosta’s plan

The Viceroy of Italian East Africa, the Duke of Aosta, Amedeo d’Aosta, had been thinking of a strike against British Somaliland and Djibouti from the moment Italy entered the war. He feared that the British and French would together attack Harar from there, and taking both colonies would shorten the frontier he had to guard. He put the plan to Benito Mussolini as early as 18 June. After the armistice Djibouti ceased to be an objective, but the Italians still distrusted the French and feared that the British would use their colony as a bridgehead. Caution prevailed in Rome, and approval for the offensive came only at the end of July. After the capture of Kassala and Moyale in July, the operation against British Somaliland was to give the regime its first real conquest.

Command went to Guglielmo Nasi, a general with long colonial experience, Governor of Harar in 1936–1939 and in 1940 commander of the eastern sector and deputy viceroy. He had forces equal to a corps: 23 colonial battalions made up of askaris from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, three Blackshirt battalions (of the Fascist Militia), irregular units, 21 artillery batteries, half a company of M11/39 medium tanks, a squadron of tankettes, armoured cars and some sixty aircraft. Sources give differing figures for the strength of these forces, from about 24,000 to 35,000 men, the overwhelming majority of them African soldiers. The Italian superiority was thus at least several-fold, and in artillery crushing.

The plan provided for three columns. The left, under General Sisto Bertoldi, was to take Zeila, cut off French Somaliland and advance east along the coast. The right, under General Arturo Bertello and made up mainly of irregulars, was to reach Odweina and Burao and cover the flank. The main, central column – the reinforced Harrar Division with three colonial brigades, the tanks and most of the artillery – was led by General Carlo De Simone. It was to take Hargeisa, set up a base there and strike across the mountains at Berbera. In an appreciation of 14 July the Duke of Aosta predicted that the decisive clash would come in the passes on the road from Hargeisa and that, if the British did not give way, the Italians would outflank them. That is exactly what happened.

The first days of the invasion

On 3 August British air reconnaissance spotted several hundred Italians on the British side of the border. The columns moved off simultaneously, keeping in touch by radio and liaison aircraft. On the morning of 4 August De Simone’s column was advancing on Hargeisa, harassed and delayed all day by Camel Corps patrols. The same day Italian bombers attacked Berbera. Over the following days the Regia Aeronautica bombed the port, the landing grounds and Aden, while British Blenheims attacked the columns on the roads and the airfields near Dire Dawa. Both sides lost aircraft, and the British Gloster Gladiator fighters which it was attempted to keep at the landing grounds at Berbera and Laferug were soon destroyed or withdrawn to Aden, since those airfields had only small-arms defence.

On 5 August Bertoldi took Zeila (Saylac) and cut the link with Djibouti. His further march along the coast was slow, harried by aircraft, British warships and Camel Corps patrols. The same day De Simone renewed his attack on Hargeisa with larger forces, including tankettes. The Camel Corps and a company of the Northern Rhodesian battalion defending the town destroyed or disabled several vehicles with anti-tank rifle fire but had to fall back. Some sources state that the Italians entered Hargeisa only on 6 August. In the east Bertello’s troops reached Odweina on 6 August and then, instead of making for Burao, turned north-west towards Adadleh on the Tug Argan, onto the axis of the main column’s advance.

A pause of several days followed. The Italians built up supplies at Hargeisa, while rain and lorry traffic churned up the only road. The Duke of Aosta urged haste, but Nasi replied that he would not hurry along a road that was falling apart. The march resumed on 8 August, and for two days the column worked its way through the Karrim Pass towards the British positions on the Tug Argan, preparing its attack.

Reinforcements that came too late

When it became clear that the Italians were attacking in strength, Wavell, who had flown to London for talks on 7 August, ordered a field artillery regiment and anti-tank guns of the 4th Indian Infantry Division to be sent from Egypt in a special convoy, and an infantry battalion, a battery and a company of sappers of the 5th Indian Infantry Division from India. None of these troops arrived in time, and in the end they were diverted to the Sudan. To command the enlarged force Wavell appointed Major General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen, who was then on his way to Kenya to take over the 2nd African Division. He was ordered not to let the Italians through the main position but at the same time, in secret, to prepare a plan for evacuation. He reached Berbera on 11 August and took command that evening, with Chater remaining in command of the Tug Argan sector. The battle for the pass began that same day.

A single scene best conveys the poverty of the defence. Since the defenders had no anti-tank guns at all, and reports spoke of Italian medium tanks, the captain of the Australian cruiser HMAS Hobart, lying at Berbera, offered a three-pounder saluting gun with a crew of three and thirty rounds. The offer was gratefully accepted.

Place in the war

The invasion of British Somaliland came at a moment when Britain was expecting a German landing and the Battle of Britain was being fought over its southern counties. Wavell, responsible at once for Egypt, Palestine, the Sudan, Kenya and Somaliland, could send nothing more than a few battalions to the Gulf of Aden. The first days showed that the Italians could conduct a well co-ordinated operation by several columns separated by hundreds of kilometres of desert, although every day’s march consumed fuel, tyres and ammunition which the East African campaign, cut off from the mother country, could not replace.

The fate of the colony was decided over the next two weeks in the Tug Argan pass and during the evacuation from Berbera. On 19 August the Italians occupied the abandoned port, and Mussolini annexed British Somaliland to Italian East Africa. The loss angered Winston Churchill, who judged that the colony had been too weakly defended, and marked the beginning of his distrust of Wavell, which ended with the general’s removal in July 1941. Italian rule lasted less than seven months. On 16 March 1941 a British landing from Aden recaptured Berbera, and soon the whole colony was back under British rule. In 1960 British Somaliland gained independence and a few days later united with the former Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic.