The surrender at Amba Alagi

In mid-May 1941, on the mountain massif of Amba Alagi in northern Ethiopia, the resistance of the last main force left to the Viceroy of Italian East Africa came to an end. After two weeks of fighting among the rocks, in rain and piercing cold, the Duke of Aosta, Amedeo d’Aosta, asked the British for terms of surrender. Negotiations began on 16 May, and over the following days the two sides agreed that the garrison would come down from the mountain with military honours. According to the British official history, some five thousand soldiers went into captivity, and with them the Duke himself, a cousin of the King of Italy.

War chronologies record the event under 18 May, and three days later, under 21 May, state once again that “the Italian Viceroy of Ethiopia has surrendered”. This is the same event described twice. The sources also differ on the dates of the individual acts of surrender. According to Italian studies the terms were agreed at noon on 17 May, while a British publication of 1942 states that the garrison came down from the mountain on 18 May. The British official history by Ian Playfair dates the march-out of the garrison to 19 May, and the Duke’s formal surrender to the commander of the 5th Indian Infantry Division, Major General Mosley Mayne, to 20 May. Italian sources likewise indicate that the Viceroy came down from the mountains on Monday 19 May. The date of 18 May, in the middle of these few days, is usually taken as the conventional date of the surrender.

The last stronghold

After the defeat at Keren in March 1941 the Viceroy regarded Eritrea as lost. On 30 March he telegraphed Benito Mussolini that the long-foreseen violent collapse had begun and that nothing remained but to resist wherever possible and for as long as possible, for the honour of the flag. The remnants of the army were to concentrate in three mountain centres: General Pietro Gazzera in the province of Galla-Sidamo in the south-west, General Guglielmo Nasi around Gondar north of Lake Tana, and the Viceroy himself at Amba Alagi, on the imperial road from Asmara to Dessie. According to the British official history, the Duke went there on 3 April, when he left Addis Ababa, and combined his last reserves with the remnants of General Luigi Frusci’s army retreating from Eritrea. Italian studies state that he shut himself up on the mountain on 17 April.

The choice of place carried a symbolic message. Amba Alagi, a peak some 3,400 metres high, rises just above the pass by which the road climbs in hairpin bends to a height of nearly three thousand metres. In December 1895 the Ethiopians of Ras Makonnen, father of the future Emperor Haile Selassie, had routed an Italian detachment under Major Pietro Toselli here in the Battle of Amba Alagi, and the pass and the fort on it had borne his name ever since. In 1936 the army of Marshal Pietro Badoglio had marched through these same passes towards the last battle of the war with Ethiopia. Now the history of the Italian empire was to end here.

The position was strong. To the right and left of the road a chain of steep peaks linked by narrow, rocky ridges stretched for some fifteen kilometres. The Italians had fortified them with wire, cut gun and machine-gun emplacements into the rock and fitted out shelters in caves. The eastern route round the position, through the Falaga Pass, was barred by fortified hills. Estimates of the garrison’s strength vary. The British at first put it at four to five thousand men with about thirty guns, which, as Playfair admits, was an underestimate. A British publication of 1942 spoke of more than five thousand men with 250 machine guns and 54 guns, while Italian studies speak of some seven thousand soldiers, including carabinieri, airmen and sailors from Assab, and about three thousand askaris. According to Playfair the garrison had food for three months and enough water, though not in abundance. According to some authors, the Italian Marshal Enrico Caviglia later called Amba Alagi a rock without water or food and criticised the Duke for choosing it for his last stand.

Pincers from north and south

General William Platt, who after the conquest of Eritrea had only enough troops to conduct one serious operation at a time, wanted to deal first with Nasi and the Wolchefit Pass on the road to Gondar. General Archibald Wavell, however, ordered him to clear the road from Asmara to Dessie as quickly as possible, because he needed it to move troops north to Egypt. The task of destroying the Duke’s forces went to the 5th Indian Infantry Division under General Mayne, who had replaced General Lewis Heath, sent to Malaya. With the 4th Division gone to Egypt and troops needed to guard Asmara and Massawa, Mayne had little at his disposal: Lieutenant Colonel B. C. Fletcher’s mobile force with tanks and Bren carriers, the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, two battalions from other brigades, a commando unit, two field artillery regiments and a heavy battery. In the air he was supported by the Rhodesian No. 237 Squadron RAF with old Gladiators, Lysanders and Hardys, and by a few Wellesley bombers. Meanwhile very numerous bands of Ethiopian patriots under Ras Seyum, led by Lieutenant Colonel W. Rankin of the Sudan Defence Force, were to work round the massif and come out in its rear. On 27 April they took Sokota.

From the south came Brigadier Dan Pienaar’s 1st South African Brigade, which General Alan Cunningham had sent north from Addis Ababa on 13 April. At Kombolcha, a few kilometres short of Dessie, it ran into a strong Italian position with plentiful artillery. After several days of working forward through the mountains, carrying all their equipment on their backs, the South Africans and an accompanying band of patriots under Lieutenant A. G. S. Campbell attacked on 22 April and routed the defenders that same day. Dessie fell almost without a fight. According to Playfair, the British took more than eight thousand prisoners there, many of them Italians of the Africa Division, and 52 guns, at a cost of nine killed and thirty wounded. The advance north was held up for several days by ingenious roadblocks, among them a collapsed tunnel near Woldia.

Cunningham, whose operations were hampered by constant requests from Italian civilians for protection from marauders, meanwhile proposed fresh talks with the Viceroy on the safety of Italian women and children. He laid down a condition, however: the British would take responsibility for protecting, feeding and evacuating Italian civilians only if the Italian forces laid down their arms unconditionally. The Duke regarded this as an attempt to extort a surrender by threats and rejected the proposal on 20 April.

From 3 to 14 May

Mayne’s plan rested on deception. The Italian position was very wide for the number of its defenders, so the divisional commander decided to feint attacks in the centre and the east and to deliver the main blow from the west, across almost trackless mountains, where the Italians did not expect any sizeable force. On 1 May Fletcher’s force, with a detachment of Skinner’s Horse and No. 51 Commando (Middle East Commando), took a hill on the road towards the Falaga Pass that was named Commando Hill; on 2 May it beat off counter-attacks and took another hill, and on 3 May it tried to seize the pass itself, without success. That same day a battalion of the Royal Garhwal Rifles staged a demonstration in the centre, along the main road. In the evening, as a British publication of 1942 described it, a great show was put on in the valley with lorry headlights and the noise of engines, to make the Italians believe that the main attack would come along the road. War chronologies take this day, 3 May, as the start of the siege of Amba Alagi.

At 4.15 a.m. on 4 May the British artillery opened up on the western flank, and the 29th Indian Brigade, secretly concentrated behind Sandy Ridge, crossed the undefended ridge. Within a few hours the 6th/13th Frontier Force Rifles and the 3rd/2nd Punjab Regiment had taken a succession of heights that the British named Pyramid, Whale Back and Elephant. At dawn the next day they captured Middle Hill, but then the attack stalled. The narrow ridge leading towards Little Alagi, the western neighbour of the main peak, was blocked by wire covered by machine guns, and the 1st Battalion, the Worcestershire Regiment, was pinned down by fire. Mayne therefore shifted the weight of the attack to the east. On 7 May Fletcher’s newly formed brigade group began working round the enemy’s eastern flank; on 8 May Indian troops took two hills south of the Toselli Pass, and over the following days the 3rd/12th Frontier Force Regiment captured the Falaga Pass and reached the Gumsa hill, from which British observers could see the whole Italian position. Artillery and aircraft began systematically destroying emplacements, ammunition dumps and water points. Rain made it difficult to supply the troops on the peaks, and the nights were bitterly cold.

On 8 May Cunningham placed Pienaar’s brigade under Platt’s command. By 10 May its leading troops were only some thirty kilometres from Amba Alagi, with Rankin’s patriots and Campbell’s scouts operating nearby. Playfair observes that these irregular allies were a mixed blessing: they attracted many men whom no one controlled and who were interested chiefly in loot, British or Italian. On 11 May Mayne flew over the Italian positions to arrange with Pienaar an attack from the south on the hills called Twin Pyramids and Triangle. Before it could take place, the patriots captured Twin Pyramids on their own initiative and with great dash. Their unaided assault on Triangle was bloodily repulsed. On 14 May the South Africans, supported from the east by the 9th Indian Brigade, attacked Triangle methodically all day, and during the night the Italians abandoned the hill. The ring around the main peak and Fort Toselli was closed.

Negotiations and military honours

There was no assault on the peak itself or on Fort Toselli. According to Playfair, the defenders’ endurance had run out. The more the perimeter shrank, the more accurate the fire from the ground and the air became, and the wounded lay in forward positions from which they could not be evacuated. On 13 May the Viceroy reported to Rome his anxiety over the fate of the wounded. The soldiers also feared the irregular Ethiopian bands, and many Italians had surrendered earlier precisely to avoid falling into their hands. Some accounts, repeated in encyclopaedias as well, say that a shell hit a fuel dump and the oil contaminated the last source of drinking water. According to Italian studies, on 14 May the Duke obtained Mussolini’s permission to surrender.

On 16 May the Viceroy sent General Giovanni Battista Volpini to Mayne’s headquarters with a proposal for a truce. Volpini never arrived: on the way he and his escort were killed – according to the British official history by roving marauders, according to Italian sources by Ethiopian partisans surrounding the Italian lines. The negotiations were therefore taken up on Amba Alagi itself by Colonel Dudley Russell of the 5th Division’s staff. The Italians wanted to avoid humiliation and proposed an unusual solution: the Viceroy and his troops would remain on Amba Alagi under arms, but as non-belligerents, until the end of the war. The British refused. They did, however, agree to a surrender with military honours. According to Italian studies the terms were agreed at noon on 17 May, and the officers kept their side arms. Before the surrender the Duke allowed the askaris to return to their home villages; according to Italian studies, however, few of them took the opportunity.

The surrender was a ceremonial affair. According to the British publication of 1942, the soldiers of the garrison marched past a British guard of honour to the skirl of the pipes of the 1st Battalion, Transvaal Scottish, and then laid down their arms in neat piles at the foot of the mountain. Italian accounts describe how the Duke emerged from the cave that housed his headquarters and came down from Fort Toselli with General Mayne at his side, escorted by a South African NCO. Behind him in two columns came the remnants of the garrison, laden with packs, cardboard suitcases tied with string, and guitars. The Viceroy saluted the guard of honour and the Italian flag as it was lowered. The next day – 20 May, according to Playfair – he formally surrendered to Mayne and was escorted to Platt.

The entry under 21 May in chronological lists, which speaks of the surrender of “the Italian Viceroy in Ethiopia” and of the remnants of the Italian forces fighting on, refers to the same event. Its second part, however, is true. After the Duke’s capture the duties of Viceroy passed to General Gazzera, whose troops in Galla-Sidamo, hemmed in by British forces, the Force Publique from the Belgian Congo and the patriots, held out until 6 July 1941. The British entered Jimma on 21 June. Nasi held out longest, at Gondar, which capitulated only on 27 November 1941. Scattered groups of Italian soldiers and settlers carried on a guerrilla war until the autumn of 1943.

Prisoner number 11590

The Duke, prisoner of war number 11590, was flown to Kenya. Italian accounts recall that during the flight the British airmen briefly handed him the controls so that he could fly an aircraft one last time. He was sent to a camp for senior officers at Donyo Sabuk, a few dozen kilometres from Nairobi, in a malaria-ridden area. He pressed for better conditions for Italian prisoners and for the repatriation of civilians, but was not allowed to visit other prisoners. At the end of 1941 he fell ill with tuberculosis and malaria, and he died in the military hospital in Nairobi on 3 March 1942, aged 43. In accordance with his wishes he was buried among his soldiers in the Italian military cemetery at Nyeri.

Place in the war

The surrender at Amba Alagi closed the most important chapter of the East African campaign, in which the British Empire, in less than five months, had broken an army that in 1940 numbered more than three hundred thousand men. A British publication of 1942 reckoned that Platt’s forces alone had by then taken fifty thousand prisoners and 340 guns, while tens of thousands of colonial soldiers had deserted to their homes. Of Italian East Africa there remained only isolated groups, cut off from one another, which could no longer threaten the Sudan, Kenya or shipping in the Red Sea. For Wavell the most important thing was that the road from Addis Ababa to Asmara was now free and the troops that had fought at Amba Alagi could go north. The 5th Indian Division and the South Africans were urgently needed in Egypt and the Middle East, where in those same days the British were fighting Iraq, defending besieged Tobruk and preparing for the defence of Crete.

For Italy the Viceroy’s surrender marked the end of the empire Mussolini had proclaimed in May 1936. The loss of Ethiopia, to whose capital the Emperor had returned on 5 May, was a blow to the regime’s prestige that could not be concealed. Propaganda nevertheless turned Amba Alagi into a tale of chivalrous defence to the last. The military honours accorded by the British, the respect with which they treated the Duke, and his death in captivity in 1942 made him “the hero of Amba Alagi”, and in 1953 Italian cinema devoted a film to the defence of the mountain, La pattuglia dell’Amba Alagi. This memory readily overlooked the fact that for four years the Duke had been the viceroy of an occupation during which the Italians suppressed the patriots’ resistance with chemical weapons and executions, and that the men who tightened the ring around Amba Alagi were fighting for the liberation of their country.

For the British it was a victory at a bad moment. Two days after 18 May the Germans attacked Crete, and in June a failed offensive in Libya sealed Wavell’s recall. Platt remained in East Africa as head of the new East Africa Command, and in the autumn Cunningham took command of the Eighth Army in Libya. Eritrea and Italian Somaliland passed under British military administration for years, and after the war the question of their future became one of the more intractable problems of decolonisation in the Horn of Africa.