The surrender of Gazzera

At dawn on 3 July 1941 General Auguste Gilliaert’s Belgian-Congolese troops attacked the Italian positions at the foot of Mount Saïo in south-western Ethiopia. By early afternoon they had taken hills held by the Italians since April, and at 1.40 p.m. two cars flying white flags came down the mountain. General Pietro Gazzera, who had succeeded the Duke of Aosta in command of all Italian forces in East Africa, was asking for terms of surrender. On 6 July Gilliaert drove into Saïo and accepted the formal surrender of Gazzera, eight other generals and several thousand soldiers. Of the whole of Italian East Africa the Italians now held only the area around Gondar.

War chronologies usually record under 3 July that Gazzera surrendered the remnants of his forces “in the Jimma area”. The date is justified, since the decision to surrender was taken that day, but the act itself was spread over several days: Italian studies date the agreement to 4 July, British and Belgian ones the formal surrender to 6 July, and the news reached scattered units so slowly that in places shooting went on until 9 July. The place also needs clarifying. Jimma, the provincial capital, had been in British hands since 21 June, and Gazzera surrendered at Saïo, today’s Dembi Dolo, more than two hundred kilometres further west, close to the Sudanese border.

The last viceroy

Pietro Gazzera, born in 1879 at Bene Vagienna in Piedmont, was a gunner and staff officer. During the First World War he served at the supreme command, close to General Pietro Badoglio, and in November 1918 he was one of the Italian plenipotentiaries at the signing of the Armistice of Villa Giusti with Austria-Hungary. From 1929 to 1933 he was Minister of War in Benito Mussolini’s government, and later a senator. In the summer of 1938 he became governor and commander of the troops of the province of Galla and Sidamo, one of the six parts into which Italian East Africa was divided. It was a territory larger than Italy itself, with some five million inhabitants.

In June 1940 Gazzera took command of the southern sector, facing Kenya and southern Sudan: according to the Italian biographical dictionary, some fifty thousand men, forty thousand of them colonial troops, armed to a large extent with weapons captured from the Austrians in 1918. After the collapse of the front in Somalia and the British entry into Addis Ababa, the war closed in on him from all sides. When the viceroy, the Duke of Aosta, surrendered at Amba Alagi in May 1941, Rome appointed Gazzera commander-in-chief of the armed forces and acting governor-general of Italian East Africa. Formally he stood at the head of an empire; in practice he was defending a single, disintegrating province.

Retreat through Galla and Sidamo

According to Italian studies, Gazzera then had some seventy thousand men in seven colonial divisions, together with the remnants of the forces that had reached him from Harar, Somalia and the area around the capital. Rome, however, ordered him to defend the whole province instead of concentrating his forces in one or two strongholds, and the askaris were deserting in ever greater numbers. In Galla and Sidamo, until then one of the quieter parts of the country, the guerrilla war of the Ethiopian patriots was growing, emboldened by the return of Emperor Haile Selassie I to the country in January and then by his return to Addis Ababa on 5 May.

At the beginning of May a motorised column sent north from Shashamane on the viceroy’s orders ran into British armoured cars by Lake Langano and turned back. From then on the African troops of General Alan Cunningham, advancing from the north, from Addis Ababa, and from the south, from the Kenyan border, pushed the Italians back from one river to the next. Shashamane fell on 14 May and Soddo on 22 May, where two Italian generals were captured. In June the African units forced the Omo river and advanced on Jimma. Gazzera moved his headquarters to Saïo and declared Jimma, where many Italian civilians lived, an open city. The commander of the garrison asked for terms, and on 21 June the British entered the town, taking between eight and fifteen thousand prisoners, according to various studies.

Only then did Gazzera order his three remaining colonial divisions to assemble around Saïo. None of them arrived. One was destroyed on the Didessa river, the second got stuck, hemmed in by partisans, some hundred kilometres from its objective, and the third surrendered to the Ethiopians. Gazzera, convinced that the British pursuit was closer than it really was, also ordered the bridge over the Indina river east of Saïo to be blown up, and so shut himself in a trap. To the west the Belgians were waiting for him.

The Belgians at Saïo

Only in November 1940 did Hubert Pierlot’s government in London recognise a state of war with Italy, which opened the way to the use of the Force Publique, the colonial army of the Belgian Congo. Congolese soldiers with Belgian officers travelled more than two thousand kilometres to enter Ethiopia from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in March 1941. On 11 March, together with battalions of the King’s African Rifles, they attacked Asosa, and on 25 March they took Gambela on the Baro river. The Italians withdrew to the Saïo plateau, which rises some 1,200 metres above the surrounding country.

So began the siege of Saïo, in which for most of the time it was the besiegers who were in the worse position. In April the Belgians had about 1,600 soldiers and 600 porters, too few to take the plateau. On 15 April they attacked across the Bortai stream, and on 21 April they beat off a strong counter-attack by Eritrean battalions. In the rainy season the road from Sudan turned to mud, while the rivers were still too shallow for barges. For several weeks they lived on air drops, on half rations, and disease killed more men than the Italian artillery. When reinforcements arrived in June, they harassed the Italians with patrols so as to appear far more numerous than they were, and Saïo was bombed by three old Hawker Hart biplanes of the South African Air Force.

At the end of June Major General Auguste-Édouard Gilliaert, until early 1941 commander-in-chief of the Force Publique, arrived from the Congo. On 27 June General William Platt, under whose command the Belgians served, instructed him to attack as soon as the opportunity arose. Gilliaert concentrated almost all his forces against Saïo, although according to the studies he had only some three thousand soldiers and two thousand porters in Ethiopia, against Italians several times more numerous.

3 July

On 2 July the Belgians crossed the Bortai stream. At dawn on 3 July their forward posts opened fire on Saïo, and half an hour later the Belgian artillery joined in. The Italians replied with heavy fire from their own batteries. One battalion attacked two hills that the Italians had held since April, a second covered its left flank, and a third, under Lieutenant Colonel Edmond Van der Meersch, came out on the right flank along a goat track reconnoitred by patrols. The hills fell, and the defenders, cut off from the fortifications on the summit, fell back to the plain.

The Italian command was convinced that it faced three Belgian divisions reinforced by South Africans. It had supplies left for about two months, and there was no way to retreat. Gazzera informed the Allies in Addis Ababa by radio that he wished to discuss surrender with the Belgians. At 1.40 p.m. two staff cars flying white flags came down the mountain, carrying eight Italian generals, Gazzera’s chief of staff and a Catholic chaplain. Gilliaert met them not far from the Bortai stream. The Italians asked for a cessation of hostilities throughout the area south of the Blue Nile and for military honours for their soldiers. The Belgian general agreed.

On 6 July Gilliaert drove into Saïo and accepted the formal surrender. The number of prisoners varies with the source: studies based on Belgian figures speak of 6,454 prisoners, including some 3,500 askaris; British ones of some 2,950 Italians, 1,535 African soldiers and 2,000 men of irregular units; and the Italian biographical dictionary of about four thousand men. At Gazzera’s request Gilliaert guaranteed the Eritrean askaris safe passage to British prisoner-of-war camps and gave them a Congolese escort to protect them from Ethiopian reprisals. One colonial battalion went over to the Allies. The Force Publique lost some 460 men in the whole campaign, most of them Congolese, four-fifths of whom, according to Belgian figures, died of disease.

Place in the war

Gazzera’s surrender ended the fighting in southern and western Ethiopia. Of the whole empire that Mussolini had proclaimed in May 1936, the Italians were left with only the mountainous country around Gondar, north of Lake Tana. There the duties of viceroy were taken over by General Guglielmo Nasi, who held out through the rainy season and did not surrender until 27 November 1941. Since the British had taken Assab, the last Italian port on the Red Sea, in June, from July onwards the war in East Africa was merely a matter of putting out the last embers. Most of the British, Indian and South African troops had already left for Egypt, leaving behind two African divisions and the Ethiopian patriots. Scattered groups of Italian soldiers and settlers kept up a guerrilla war until the autumn of 1943.

For the Belgians Saïo mattered far more than its scale would suggest. It was the first major victory of Belgian arms since the defeat of May 1940, and it had been won by a colonial army that the government-in-exile had only just decided to send into battle. Streets in Belgium and the Congo still bear the name Saïo. The Force Publique brigade later served as a garrison in Egypt and Palestine in 1943–1944, and in 1944 Gilliaert again took command of the colonial army.

Gazzera was held as a prisoner of war in Kenya, India and the United States. After Italy’s surrender he was released at the request of Prime Minister Badoglio and returned home in December 1943, where until the end of the war he dealt with the affairs of Italian prisoners of war. In 1952 he published memoirs under the telling title Guerra senza speranza (“War without Hope”). The empire for which Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, bringing League of Nations sanctions down on Italy, had by July 1941 been reduced to a single besieged stronghold at Gondar.