The surrender at Gondar

At 5.30 a.m. on 27 November 1941 units of the British 12th African Division and Ethiopian patriots moved off in the final assault on Gondar, the old capital of the Ethiopian emperors north of Lake Tana. Before noon the airfield at Azezo fell; soon afterwards the attackers stood before the 17th-century castles of Fasil Ghebbi, and in the afternoon armoured cars entered the outskirts. General Guglielmo Nasi, acting Viceroy and Governor-General of Italian East Africa, sent a last report to Rome and surrendered with more than 20,000 men. It was the last surrender of organised Italian forces in East Africa.

Popular chronologies state that “the last Italian armed forces in East Africa” surrendered at Gondar on 28 November. That is a day too late. The British official history and Italian studies agree in dating the assault, the last report to Italy and the surrender to 27 November. The date of 28 November appears in some biographies of Nasi, probably because the surrender formalities were completed a day later, while individual Italian outposts around the town laid down their arms only on 30 November. The word “last” also needs qualifying: Gondar was the last stronghold of the Italian empire, but not the end of Italian resistance. Scattered groups of soldiers and settlers carried on a guerrilla war until the autumn of 1943. The town also appears in the literature as Gonder.

The empire’s last stronghold

When the Viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, surrendered at Amba Alagi in May 1941, the Italians were left with two large concentrations in the whole of Italian East Africa: General Pietro Gazzera’s in the province of Galla-Sidamo in the south-west, and General Nasi’s in the mountainous Amhara around Gondar. The Viceroy had drawn up this plan as early as late March, when after the defeat at Keren he concluded that he could not hold Addis Ababa: his troops were to defend themselves in several mountain strongholds for as long as possible, “for the honour of the flag”. Gazzera surrendered to the Belgians at Saïo at the beginning of July, and the duties of Viceroy then passed to Nasi.

Nasi, an artilleryman born at Civitavecchia in 1879, was one of the most experienced Italian colonial officers. He had fought in Libya before the First World War, commanded a Libyan division on the southern front in the war with Ethiopia in 1936, and then served as governor of Harar and of Shewa and as deputy viceroy. In August 1940 it was his troops who captured British Somaliland, the only British colony the Italians occupied in this war. He was regarded as an administrator who knew how to come to terms with local chiefs. The Italian historian of colonialism Angelo Del Boca, generally severe in his judgement of the Italian army in Africa, considered him the best Italian officer in East Africa. The post-war Ethiopian government nevertheless put him on the list of war criminals it submitted to the United Nations.

Nasi’s redoubt comprised Gondar with its airfield at Azezo and a network of advanced outposts on the mountain passes through which ran the only roads into the town. According to Italian studies it was held by a garrison of roughly 40,000: a dozen or more Italian battalions, including Blackshirts and Carabinieri, a dozen or more colonial battalions of askaris, and irregulars. From April the stronghold was cut off. Nasi reduced rations, organised a market for the local population and fishing on Lake Tana, and his workshops armoured farm tractors to serve as makeshift tanks. According to Italian studies, in the autumn he received money from Italy by secret flights from Libya to buy food. In the air he had next to nothing: according to Italian studies, at the start of the siege there were two Fiat CR.42 fighters and one old bomber at Azezo airfield.

The rainy season and the Wolchefit Pass

The British were in no hurry over Gondar. After Amba Alagi and Saïo the best divisions, the Indian and the South African, left for Egypt, where they were needed against Rommel, and from June to September the rainy season on the Ethiopian plateau turned the roads to mud. Two African divisions remained, made up mainly of King’s African Rifles battalions from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Nyasaland, with units from the Gold Coast and the Sudan, together with the growing bands of Ethiopian patriots. In the spring and summer it was the patriots, with a handful of British liaison officers, who besieged the Italian outposts, cut the roads and harried supply convoys. The garrison at Debre Tabor, on the road east from Gondar, surrendered in July.

The toughest nut to crack proved to be the Wolchefit Pass, on the road from Asmara to Gondar. There the road climbed in hairpin bends up an escarpment more than a thousand metres high, in places cut into sheer rock. It was held by Mario Gonella’s garrison, numbering about 4,000 men according to British figures: two Blackshirt battalions and irregulars. From May it was besieged by patriots led by the British Major Ringrose, and later by an Indian battalion and units of the 12th African Division. The Italians replied several times with sorties. In one of them, in June, they captured a local nobleman who had gone over from them to the patriots in the spring, and Nasi, according to Italian studies, forbade his execution. Hunger, however, proved more effective than assaults. On 28 September, after more than five months of siege, when the food ran out, Gonella surrendered with military honours to the 25th East African Brigade. According to the British official history 1,629 Italians and 1,450 colonial troops went into captivity.

The fall of Wolchefit closed the ring around Gondar from the north. The commander of the 12th African Division, Major General Charles Fowkes – the same man who in April, as a brigadier, had led the column entering Addis Ababa – had the road repaired throughout the autumn so that, once the rains were over, artillery and armoured cars could be brought up to the town. From September all forces in the region were directed by General William Platt, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the newly formed East Africa Command in Nairobi.

Kulkaber

The last obstacle was the Kulkaber Pass (Italian: Culqualber), some fifty kilometres south-east of Gondar, where the road from Dessie and Debre Tabor squeezed between Lake Tana and the mountains. From August it was held by Colonel Augusto Ugolini’s group: a Carabinieri battalion, a Blackshirt battalion, an askari battalion and two batteries of obsolete First World War guns, about 2,000 men in all, or about 2,900 together with the neighbouring Fercaber Pass. From September the position was surrounded. Worst of all was the lack of water, since the besiegers had taken both nearby rivers. The defenders replied with sorties, the largest of which, on 18 October against the hill of Amba Mariam, brought them captured weapons and food.

On 13 November units of the 12th African Division and patriots, preceded by air attacks, assaulted Kulkaber, but after a day of fighting, at times hand to hand, they were driven back. For the following week aircraft of the RAF and the South African Air Force bombed the pass every day. In those days – between 20 and 22 November according to British and Italian studies – Sergeant Giuseppe Mottet, pilot of the last serviceable fighter of the Regia Aeronautica in East Africa, flew the last Italian combat sortie of the campaign: he strafed British artillery positions near Kulkaber, killing their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ormsby. After landing at Gondar he destroyed his aircraft and fought on as an infantryman.

At 3 a.m. on 21 November the decisive assault began. According to Italian figures, three King’s African Rifles battalions of the 25th Brigade, artillery and some 6,500 patriots attacked from the north, and from the south two South African battalions, a Gold Coast battery and another 3,500 Ethiopians, supported by light tanks. Only 1,500 defenders remained fit to fight. When their ammunition ran out, the Carabinieri and Blackshirts defended themselves with bayonets and grenades, counter-attacking to recover lost positions, but by evening the pass had fallen. All three Italian battalion commanders were killed. According to the British official history 2,423 prisoners were taken and the attackers lost 206 men. Italian sources state that 1,003 men of the two garrisons, Kulkaber and Fercaber, were killed, including 513 Italians and 490 askaris, and about 800 were wounded. About half of the two hundred askaris’ wives and children who, in accordance with African custom, accompanied their husbands in the positions were also killed. The Carabinieri Corps was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour for Kulkaber.

27 November

After the fall of the pass the Allied forces took the hills above Gondar and on 23 November stood before the town itself. The garrison was by now only a shadow of the 40,000-strong army. The askaris, who had not been paid for months, were deserting en masse, and those who remained knew that no help would come from anywhere. In those same days the British Crusader offensive was under way in Libya, intended to drive Rommel back from the Egyptian frontier. Even had it failed, no Axis force could have covered the thousands of kilometres separating Cyrenaica from Ethiopia.

At 5.30 a.m. on 27 November the assault began from the south. The first objective was the airfield at Azezo, which fell around noon. Soon afterwards the Allied troops reached the castles of Fasil Ghebbi, built in the 17th century by Emperor Fasilides. In the afternoon, when the armoured cars of the Kenya Armoured Car Regiment entered the outskirts, Nasi sent his last report to Italy. According to Italian studies it read: “The reserve brigade, thrown into the southern front, has failed to halt the attack. The enemy has already crossed the wire, and armoured vehicles have broken into the town. I consider that all means of further resistance have been exhausted, and I am sending envoys.” Shortly afterwards his headquarters, housed in the building of the Bank of Italy, was surrounded and Nasi surrendered.

According to the British official history about 10,000 Italians and 12,000 African soldiers went into captivity. British losses in the whole of the fighting for Gondar since April amounted, according to the same source, to 32 killed, 182 wounded and six missing, as well as fifteen aircraft. The losses of the Ethiopian patriots, who bore a large share of the fighting, were never counted. The Italian general Pietro Maravigna stated in 1949 that in the whole defence of Amhara some 4,000 Italian and colonial soldiers had been killed and 8,400 wounded or taken sick. The last Italian outposts in the area laid down their arms on 30 November.

The surrender also had a political dimension. The British, who after the liberation of Addis Ababa treated Ethiopia as territory under military administration, took care, as at earlier surrenders, that the Italian troops should surrender to them rather than to the Ethiopians, for fear of reprisals for the years of occupation. For Emperor Haile Selassie I, who had returned to his capital in May, the fall of Gondar meant that for the first time since 1936 there was no longer any organised Italian army on Ethiopian soil.

Place in the war

Nasi’s surrender ended the East African campaign, if it is reckoned as lasting until the enemy’s last organised force. It had lasted since June 1940 and was the British Empire’s first strategic victory in this war: in less than eighteen months the empire Mussolini had proclaimed in May 1936 ceased to exist, the Red Sea was opened to shipping, and as early as April 1941 the United States had declared it no longer a combat zone, allowing American ships to carry supplies straight to Suez. More units could now leave East Africa. The African battalions that took Gondar set out a few years later for Burma, where in 1944 Fowkes led the 11th East African Division against the Japanese.

Nasi was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Kenya. The Duke of Aosta died in captivity in Nairobi in March 1942, and Nasi then took charge of some 60,000 Italian prisoners. He returned to Italy in 1945. When in 1949 the Italian government appointed him commissioner for taking over Somalia from the British, protests by Haile Selassie, who pointed out that Ethiopia regarded him as a war criminal, led to the appointment being withdrawn. He died in Modena in 1971.

The war in Ethiopia, however, did not end on 27 November. Some of the soldiers from the shattered garrisons and some settlers took to the mountains. According to the Italian historian Alberto Rosselli, as many as 7,000 people carried on the guerrilla war, hoping that the Axis forces would win in Egypt and return to the Red Sea. Individual groups operated in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia until the Italian armistice of September 1943. Ethiopia, for its part, was formally recognised as a sovereign state only by its agreement with Britain of January 1942, although for several more years it had to put up with British advisers and British control over part of its territory.