The Italians take Kassala

Before dawn on 4 July 1940 three columns of Italian troops moved out of western Eritrea towards Kassala, a town in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan some twenty kilometres from the frontier. After a bombing raid, at about half past six in the morning, Italian cavalry reached the town, followed by colonial infantry, tanks and artillery. It was defended by a few hundred Sudanese soldiers and policemen, without guns and without air support. After several hours of fighting the defenders withdrew eastwards along the railway, and in the early afternoon the Italians entered Kassala. The same day another detachment took the frontier fort of Gallabat, some three hundred kilometres to the south. Kassala was the first sizeable town of the British Empire to be captured by the Italians in this war.

An empire cut off from home

Italian East Africa, created in May 1936 out of Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and conquered Ethiopia, found itself trapped the moment Italy declared war on France and Britain. British Egypt and the Suez Canal separated it from the mother country, and on three sides it was surrounded by enemy colonies: the Sudan to the west, Kenya to the south, and British and French Somaliland to the east. Reinforcements, fuel, ammunition and spare parts could be brought in neither by sea nor by land. On paper the Italian forces were enormous. On 1 June 1940 the Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Aosta, Amedeo d’Aosta, had some 290,000 men under his command, most of them colonial troops – askaris from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia – and about three hundred aircraft. A large part of these forces, however, was tied down fighting Ethiopian guerrillas, who had not laid down their arms since 1936. Heavy weapons, transport and fuel were lacking, and with every week aircraft without spare parts dropped out of service.

Facing them were British forces that were weak everywhere. General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had about nine thousand troops in the whole of the Sudan and about eight and a half thousand in Kenya. In the Sudan the commander was General William Platt, since 1938 commandant (in Arabic, kaid) of the Sudan Defence Force. He had three British infantry battalions and some 4,500 men of this local force, divided into 21 companies. The best of these, the motor machine-gun companies, drove lorries with machine guns mounted in the back and a few armoured cars built locally on Ford chassis. Together with the provincial police and irregular scouts they watched a frontier more than one and a half thousand kilometres long. Platt kept his British battalions at Khartoum, Atbara and Port Sudan, and ordered his frontier units to watch, harass and delay the Italians but not to let themselves be destroyed.

Rome envisaged a defensive war in this theatre. Mussolini and the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, wanted the forces in East Africa to hold the empire until the war was decided in Europe and Egypt, and allowed offensives only on a limited scale. The Duke of Aosta, aware that every lorry lost and every shell fired could never be replaced, shared this caution. He did, however, agree to a few attacks intended to improve the position on the frontier before the rainy season came and turned the roads to mud until the end of September.

Why Kassala

Kassala lies at the foot of a rocky massif on the eastern edge of the Sudanese plain, on the railway leading to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. For the Italians it also had historical significance. In 1894 it had been taken from the Mahdists by the troops of the Governor of Eritrea, Oreste Baratieri, and Italy held it until 1897, when, after the defeat at Adwa, it handed it over to the British. In 1940 the Italian command saw it above all as a threat. Because of the railway and the roads it was the best starting point for a British thrust into Eritrea, while in Italian hands it could become a forward bastion shielding the colony. It was also hoped that a success would raise the troops’ morale and impress the local population, whom the Italians hoped to win over against the British.

The operation was planned and led by General Luigi Frusci, Governor of Eritrea and Amhara and commander of the northern sector, assisted by General Vincenzo Tessitore. From the Tessenei area moved two colonial brigades, four cavalry squadrons, about twenty-four tanks and armoured cars and ten artillery batteries, supported by aircraft. Sources differ on the strength of this force, most often giving about 6,500 men, though some accounts give far more. Two columns advanced on either side of the river Gash; the third, mainly cavalry, went round the mountain massif and came in from the east. Italian intelligence believed there were some three thousand British troops in the area, so Frusci wanted to take the town quickly, before reinforcements arrived, and was prepared to accept losses.

The battle for Kassala

In reality Kassala was defended by two motorised companies and a mounted infantry company of the Sudan Defence Force, together with the local police – between about three hundred and five hundred men, according to different sources. Another machine-gun company arrived from the interior at noon, when the fighting had already been decided. After the Italian bombers’ raid the fighting took place on the approaches to the town. The Sudanese in their machine-gun lorries attacked the flanks and rear of the Italian columns and pulled back before the enemy could deploy. One of the first to fall was Lieutenant Francesco Santasilia, who led a cavalry charge. The defenders, however, had nothing with which to stop tanks or reply to artillery, and the Italian air force ruled the battlefield. After several hours they withdrew in good order and regrouped at the next railway station, by the bridge at Butana. According to Italian accounts, the cavalry rode into the town at about 1 p.m.

The losses showed that the victory had cost the Italians more than the vanquished. According to the British official history, the Sudan Defence Force lost one man killed, three wounded and 26 missing, some of whom later returned to their units. The Italians had 43 killed and 114 wounded.

Gallabat, Kurmuk and Moyale

At the same time as the attack on Kassala, a colonial battalion with a banda – an irregular unit – struck from Metemma in Ethiopia at the fort of Gallabat (Al-Qallabat) on the far side of the dry frontier riverbed. Its defenders, a company of the Sudan Defence Force’s Eastern Arab Corps, withdrew. Gallabat had special significance for the Italians: through it ran the road by which the British could supply the rebels in the Ethiopian province of Gojjam. The Italians also took Karora on the Red Sea without a fight, the Sudanese police having withdrawn on orders, and on 7 July another colonial battalion with a banda, supported by artillery and aircraft, drove sixty Sudanese policemen out of Kurmuk, further south, after a brief fight.

On the frontier with the Kenya Colony the fighting lasted longer. On 1 July the Italians attacked Moyale, a post on the edge of the Ethiopian highlands where the roads to Wajir and Marsabit meet. A company of the King’s African Rifles beat off the first attack. On 10 July, however, several battalions attacked after a heavy artillery bombardment, and after several days of fighting, in mid-July, the garrison withdrew from Moyale. By the end of July the Italians had advanced nearly a hundred kilometres into Kenya, to the wells at Buna and Dabel, and halted there because they could not supply any further advance.

A victory with no sequel

The Italians went no further. At Kassala the colonial brigade built anti-tank obstacles, machine-gun nests and strongpoints, and the town’s garrison grew. The attitude of the inhabitants proved a disappointment. The Italians had counted on anti-British feeling, but throughout the occupation the people of Kassala passed valuable information to the British. The Sudan Defence Force continued to patrol the area round the town, and on 5 July a company of a British West Yorkshire battalion arrived as a reserve at Gedaref (Al-Qadarif). Rumours of its arrival reached the Italians in greatly exaggerated form, and Platt tried to sustain that impression by moving small units about so that they looked like much larger forces. The rainy season of 1940 was exceptionally light and the roads remained passable, but the Italians made no attempt to march on Khartoum or Port Sudan. According to British intelligence, Italian superiority at the time was so great that a determined thrust might well have succeeded.

For the British, the loss of Kassala was above all a blow to prestige, and for a time there were fears in the Sudan for the safety of Khartoum. Wavell began moving reinforcements to the Sudan from Egypt and India, and in those same weeks the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie I arrived in the Sudan incognito to prepare a rising in Ethiopia from its territory. Italy’s entry into the war had turned him overnight from an awkward exile into an ally of Britain.

Place in the war

The capture of Kassala, Gallabat and Moyale marked the beginning of a brief period of Italian success in East Africa. In August 1940 Italian troops occupied the whole of British Somaliland, and the British evacuated Berbera for Aden. It was the only British colonial territory captured by the Italians in the entire war. The Duke of Aosta, however, did not exploit his advantage. Short of fuel and ammunition, and expecting Germany to defeat Britain and the Italians in Libya to take Egypt, the forces in East Africa waited, and the British gained time. In the autumn the 5th Indian Infantry Division arrived in the Sudan, Colonel Frank Messervy’s motorised Gazelle Force operated around Kassala, and in November the British briefly retook Gallabat.

When in the winter of 1940–1941 the Italian army in Egypt and Cyrenaica was defeated and the 4th Indian Infantry Division was transferred to the Sudan, the Italians abandoned Kassala of their own accord, and British and Indian troops entered it on 19 January 1941. From there Platt’s offensive set out through Agordat and Keren into Eritrea, while General Alan Cunningham’s forces struck from Kenya. On 5 May 1941 Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa; in May the Duke of Aosta himself capitulated at Amba Alagi, and on 27 November 1941 the last Italian garrison surrendered at Gondar. Kassala, taken in July 1940 so quickly and at so little cost to the defenders, laid bare the whole contradiction of Italy’s war in East Africa: an army with huge numerical superiority that could not afford to use it.