The Italians take Berbera

On the evening of 19 August 1940 the first Italian troops entered Berbera, the capital and only port of British Somaliland. The town was deserted and partly in flames. The last British warship, the Australian cruiser HMAS Hobart with the defence headquarters aboard, had sailed for Aden that morning, and over the previous three days and nights Royal Navy ships had taken some seven thousand soldiers and civilians off the beaches. The capture of Berbera brought to an end the Italian invasion that had begun on 3 August. For the first and only time in the war the Italians had conquered an entire British colony, and Mussolini could announce that the empire had grown by a territory the size of England. The British had lost the colony but saved almost all of their troops. It was precisely the fact that so many had survived that angered Winston Churchill.

The retreat from Tug Argan

Major General Alfred Reade Godwin-Austen received the order to evacuate the colony from Cairo on the afternoon of 15 August, when the Battle of Tug Argan had been lost. That evening the troops withdrew from the pass. The plan provided for two covering positions on the road to the sea: at Barkasan, about 53 kilometres from Berbera, and at Nasiyeh, about 27 kilometres from the port. The rearguard at Barkasan was formed by the 2nd Battalion of the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment, with two companies of the 2nd Battalion, King’s African Rifles, and part of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Punjab Regiment. The units from Tug Argan passed through its positions, while the weakened Northern Rhodesian battalion and the remnants of the Camel Corps fell back further, towards the port.

The Italians followed cautiously. The rains had turned the roads to mud, and after four days of assaults General Carlo De Simone’s column needed to reorganise. It reached Barkasan only on 17 August. The brunt of the fighting fell on the Black Watch. The Scots counter-attacked several times, with the bayonet among other things, and held the position all day, although it was clear that the enemy’s numerical superiority would soon allow him to outflank it. On the coast, General Sisto Bertoldi’s western column, which had been advancing from Zeila since 5 August, reached Bulhar, some sixty kilometres west of Berbera, on 17 August and was halted there by the guns of the cruiser HMS Ceres. Because the embarkation was going faster than expected, Godwin-Austen decided not to occupy the Nasiyeh position, and after dark on 17 August he withdrew the rearguard from Barkasan straight to the port.

The evacuation

Berbera had no quays, and in August, during the monsoon, wind and waves usually made it impossible to ferry men out by boat at night and in the morning. The Royal Navy therefore built a jetty on the beach from which men could be embarked regardless of the tide. Civilians, including officials of the colonial administration, had begun to be taken off even before the order to retreat; the soldiers followed from 16 August. The cruisers HMS Ceres, HMS Carlisle and HMAS Hobart, the destroyer HMS Kimberley, the sloop HMS Auckland and a number of transports and hospital ships took part in the operation. For thirteen days Blenheim fighters from Aden patrolled over the port, and the Italian air force, although it bombed the harbour and the ships several times, failed to stop the embarkation. According to some authors, one reason was an order from Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, who on 15 August is said to have told General Guglielmo Nasi not to hinder the British departure too much, in the hope of a peace brokered by the Vatican. What is more certain is that an Italian plan to take the port by surprise with a few hundred infantrymen was called off when it turned out that the airfield near Berbera was still held.

The embarkation was completed at 2 p.m. on 18 August. HMAS Hobart, with Godwin-Austen’s staff, stayed on overnight to pick up stragglers and finish destroying buildings, vehicles, fuel and stores, and on the morning of 19 August sailed for Aden. According to Royal Navy figures, 7,140 people were evacuated: 5,690 soldiers, 1,266 civilians and 184 sick. The British official history speaks of about seven thousand people in all. Some 350 vehicles were left behind, together with most of the stores that could not be loaded aboard the ships. Most of the Somali soldiers of the Camel Corps were sent home, and those who sailed to Aden later formed an armoured car unit under the old name. The only vessel lost was a tug, which her crew scuttled in the harbour. The Italians later raised her and renamed her Stella d’Italia.

19 August

On the morning of 19 August the Italians resumed their march, passed through the abandoned positions at Nasiyeh and entered Berbera in the evening. The ruins of warehouses were smouldering in the port, and the wrecks of four British aircraft lay on the airfield. That same day British bombers from Aden appeared over the town and attacked the incoming troops. An Italian war bulletin announced the capture of the colony’s capital, and Benito Mussolini annexed British Somaliland to Italian East Africa. Fascist propaganda, hungry for success after the failed Alpine campaign, presented the victory as proof of the empire’s might. Militarily, it was a well-planned and efficiently executed operation: several columns, separated by hundreds of kilometres of desert and mountains, cooperated with one another and with the air force, and the command overcame its supply difficulties, though at the cost of heavy wear on lorries and tyres.

The losses and the dispute over them

The two sides give different figures. According to the British official history, the defence of British Somaliland cost 260 men, including 38 killed. The rest were wounded and missing – according to one tally, 102 wounded and 120 missing. The RAF lost seven aircraft, and ten more were seriously damaged. The British official historian estimated Italian losses at 2,052 men. The Italian official history, compiled by Alberto Rovighi, gives 465 killed, 1,530 wounded and 34 missing, 2,029 men in total, of whom only 161 were Italians and the rest askaris. According to Italian figures, Somali irregulars also suffered losses on both sides.

The ratio of one to eight became the source of a dispute that long weighed on the British high command. Winston Churchill, who in those same weeks was rallying the country for the Battle of Britain, took the small losses as proof that the colony had not been defended with sufficient determination. He demanded that Godwin-Austen be removed and that a court of inquiry be set up. General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, who had been in London during the battle, refused. He wrote that Godwin-Austen had judged the situation correctly and that his deputy in Cairo, General Henry Maitland Wilson, had taken the right decision. To his telegram to the Prime Minister he added a sentence to the effect that a big butcher’s bill was not necessarily evidence of good tactics. According to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, it threw Churchill into a greater rage than he had ever seen. On 20 August, however, in his speech to the House of Commons, the Prime Minister presented the withdrawal from the colony as the right course, stressing that the force had survived practically intact.

Italian gains in the summer of 1940

With the capture of Berbera the Italians reached the high point of their success in East Africa. It is often said that by the end of August the Italians controlled British Somaliland and several towns and forts on the borders of Sudan and Kenya, including Kassala, Gallabat and Moyale. This needs qualifying: the border gains dated from July, not August. On 4 July the Italians took Kassala in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the fort at Gallabat (Al-Qallabat), over the following days Kurmuk and Karora on the Red Sea, and in mid-July, after several days of fighting, they forced a King’s African Rifles garrison to abandon Moyale in the Kenya Colony and advanced as far as the wells at Buna. In August they made no further progress on these sectors. At the end of the month Italian propaganda therefore counted all the summer’s gains together: the whole of British Somaliland and a few border posts in Sudan and Kenya.

That was where the expansion ended. The Somaliland campaign had consumed fuel, ammunition and tyres which the empire, cut off from the mother country, could not replace. The Duke of Aosta had no thought of marching on Khartoum or Nairobi and went over to the defensive, waiting for the war to be decided in Europe and in Egypt. The British, meanwhile, gained time to bring reinforcements into Sudan and Kenya from India, South Africa and West Africa.

Place in the war

The loss of British Somaliland was a humiliation, but not a strategic defeat. The colony was of little economic importance to the empire, and the soldiers who had been saved returned to fight elsewhere, some of them in Sudan and Kenya within a few weeks. Nor were the Italians able to threaten the Red Sea convoys any more than before. The dispute over the losses, however, had lasting consequences. Churchill never forgave Wavell the telegram about the butcher’s bill, and after further disappointments he replaced him in July 1941 with General Claude Auchinleck; Godwin-Austen, despite his later successes in Italian Somaliland and North Africa, he regarded as a commander too ready to retreat.

Italian rule in Berbera lasted less than seven months. In the offensive of the winter and spring of 1941 British forces destroyed Italian East Africa, and on 16 March 1941 two Indian battalions which had defended the colony in August 1940 landed from Aden on either side of Berbera in Operation Appearance and retook the port almost without a fight. Soon the whole colony was back under British rule, and its military governor was Arthur Chater, who had commanded its defence in 1940. British Somaliland remained a protectorate until 26 June 1960, and a few days later it united with former Italian Somaliland to form the independent Somali Republic.