The First Victory
Page 3
The scant consideration given to East Africa and its defences was of course symptomatic of a far greater problem. Throughout the inter-war years, very little thought appears to have been given to this issue not just outside the region but also by the various colonial governments who should have taken the initiative yet instead seemed reluctant to act. The political status of the British-administered territories across the region had changed in the years following the First World War’s end and protectorates had, for the most part, become colonies: Kenya, Uganda, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, along with one other, the former German territory of Tanganyika, which was administered as a League of Nations mandate. Efforts were therefore made to persuade the governors and ministers sitting in each of these executives to organise at least some basic outline of a balanced military force which could be used if the region found itself threatened with attack.30 As the security of Europe began to unravel throughout the 1930s, Major-General Sir George Giffard, Inspector General, African Colonial Forces, took the lead, undertaking a number of tours from 1937 onwards to visit the various British outposts and meet with their senior officials.31 Known amongst his staff as ‘Gentleman George’, Giffard had first served with the KAR in 1911 and had fought in East Africa throughout the First World War, winning the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and being mentioned in dispatches five times. Renowned for his organisational skills and quiet but effective leadership, his obituary writer noted that as a result of his work, ‘the African Colonial Forces ceased to be merely a “bush whacking” force and became able to fulfil a role within a modern army’.32 The key challenge he faced was dealing with politicians, and he could never quite persuade his hosts that it was necessary for them to fund the armaments and equipment he proposed in order to build up adequate regional military forces. In fact, so unconvinced were they of the potential risk that existed that even the simple idea of establishing some form of a military reserve struggled to find their support. The authorities in Nairobi were amongst those who were reluctant to accept that there was any real merit in Giffard’s proposals.
Although now a formally established colony, Kenya was still in many respects a fairly fragile imperial territory. Its population was distributed in a hugely unequal way and by the time of the 1926 census 12,529 European settlers were living alongside more than 2.5 million Africans.33 This hardly suggested a strong or established presence. Many of the settlers were described as having come from the ‘gentlemanly stratum’ and with a military background, hence a popular description of the colony as ‘the officers’ mess’.34 Along with the Masai and the Kavirondo, the Kikuyu were the most important local group: one inter-war description referred to them as ‘somewhat of a bogey to both former and British and German administrations’ but ‘warriors [who are] more picturesque than formidable’.35 Successive governments in London followed the mantra, established in 1923, that in overseas territories such as these they exercised ‘a trust on behalf of the African population . . . the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races’.36 Despite subsequent wartime speeches by the British governor which noted that these subjects referred to their monarch as ‘Kingie Georgie’, as one Kikuyu chief put it, there was growing resentment of ‘an island of white settlers surrounded by much larger African and Asiatic population groups’.37 On the outbreak of the Second World War there had been little change, with a white community of approximately 21,000 people ‘administering’ nearly 4.5 million Africans.38
A further complication came from the peculiarities attached to the way the frontier had been established. From Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana) to the Indian Ocean was a distance of 1,200 miles, virtually all of it bush and semi-desert. On the Kenyan side of the frontier there was a desert nearly 300 miles wide, the Northern Frontier District, which was so barren that for their safety Europeans were forbidden from entering it without a permit. There were only the old camel tracks to travel along with three important locations where these converged because of the presence of water: Marsabit, Isiolo and Moyale. A long straight line separated the British colony from the territory to the north, allegedly the result of the young officer in the Royal Engineers who had been tasked with drawing up the correct maps having been unexpectedly told that he had to finish the job quickly. At this stage of his survey, having only reached the El Dima Hills, he concluded that without completing his journey there was nothing he could do but draw a straight line from where he had reached to the shores of Lake Rudolf. The entirely artificial border remains to this day, and is as much of a problem now as it was during the inter-war period, in large part because it failed to take into account the nomadic nature of those who lived along it but moved freely on both sides.39
Whilst cross-border tensions were an irritant, the reality was that local defence had not been seen as a priority since 1918 and there was very little sense that any of the senior political figures saw the existence of any threat to security. Before Giffard’s intervention, an assessment conducted in late 1927 by the then KAR Inspector General, Colonel H.A. Walker, had considered the possibility of an invasion from neighbouring Ethiopia.40 Although the report was more interested in technical details about how the various British-led units might operate together, it concluded that it was doubtful that any attacking force could advance far into Kenya. The proposal put forward was that concentrating defences at a key point would probably suffice to defeat any invader, and the report also recommended that the Kenya Defence Force be established. This took place the following year, with compulsory membership for all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty, but this militia was not particularly well thought of by the settlers and, just eight years later, the decision was taken that it should be disbanded.41
Its replacement, the Kenya Regiment, was created on 1 June 1937 to provide what it was hoped might be a better-received alternative. It was at the same time a very visible response to Giffard’s efforts. A Defence Force ordinance mandated compulsory training of British subjects of European descent and of youths up to the age of eighteen, and a team of regular army instructors was sent from Britain to help with the training. The intention was to produce a first-class territorial unit, but in reality many settler families continued to prefer that their sons join the KAR reserves; when the war broke out the regiment’s white officers and NCOs who were considered suitable were put through additional leadership training courses and posted out of it to take command of various other African units.42
The main military forces in the region as war once again approached remained the 3rd Battalion, KAR which was operating in what had become established as its principal recruiting area. This battalion had a listed strength of two machine gun sections and six companies and, whilst most of the men were stationed in Nairobi with the headquarters, constant patrols were still conducted near the northern frontier. As had been the case prior to the First World War, an additional guarantor of security was the local police force, in which there were 115 Europeans and nearly 2,000 Africans who were all armed and attended an annual musketry course. In many respects, Kenya and the wider East Africa region were no better or worse off in terms of their ability to protect themselves than the vast majority of the other territories that made up the British Empire.43
With German power checked by defeat in 1918 and subsequent dismantling by post-war peace treaties, a new competitor was seeking to assert itself across the region – although the story of Italy’s involvement ultimately proved to be disastrous.44 By the time the leadership in Rome decided to join with the rest of the European powers who had already secured control of African territories and the resources they contained, few parts of the continent remained unclaimed. Even so, the decision of successive Italian leaders to pursue a long-running military struggle with a country that was largely inhospitable, commanded no sea routes and had no discernible mineral wealth was perhaps not the best considered. Ethiopia, the final African territory to attract the European powers’ attention, could ha
ve been annexed by a British military expedition in 1867 but there was no political appetite in London. Two years later the opening of the Suez Canal focused attention on the coastal regions that commanded the Red Sea but still there was no real sign of external interest in the territory.45 The Bay of Assab was, however, bought that same year by an Italian shipping company and a little over twenty years later a colony had been formally organised in Eritrea with the encouragement of the British, who were looking to counter any potential threat from the Mahdists in neighbouring Sudan.46 Efforts to expand beyond the coastal area led to the initial conflict between the Italians and the Abyssinian Empire (also referred to as Ethiopia) which had formed from a collection of semi-independent provinces to become a unified kingdom. This led in January 1887 to the defeat of a small Italian garrison and, in response, the authorities in Rome dispatched an expeditionary force to safeguard its holdings in Eritrea.
The succession of Emperor Menelik II to the throne two years later proved a critical step as, faced by a civil war that threatened his precarious hold on power, it was only with Italian military and financial aid that he was able to retain his position as Ethiopian leader. This left him indebted to the government in Rome but, with his crops destroyed by drought, he was unable to pay what he owed and had no choice other than to negotiate the 1889 Wuchale (or Ucciali) Treaty. The emperor ceded the northern province of Ethiopia but a discrepancy in the final document allowed Italy to claim that the remainder of the country now also fell within its control. Menelik’s discovery of this, along with a cynical attempt by the authorities in Rome to increase the interest on the debts, led him to denounce the agreement. Seeking to strengthen his military position, he approached the French for equipment, which they supplied. The Italian response was to launch an invasion across the border whilst also supplying arms to the emperor’s domestic opponents. Having declared war on his European adversary, Menelik led his forces on 1 March 1896 at what was then referred to as the Battle of Adowa as the Italians suffered a humiliating and catastrophic defeat.47 Using captured arms and munitions, the emperor next brought the rest of his country – containing two-thirds of the population, mostly Galla – under his control; the methods he employed meant that when the Italians invaded again some decades later, they were much better received in Ethiopia’s south than its north. Menelik’s consolidation of his power established him as the most powerful leader the Abyssinian Empire had ever seen. For the Italians, Adowa left a ‘vindictive memory’ that would one day need to be redressed.48
Whilst little was done by successive governments in Rome to change the Ethiopian situation, Italy did not entirely give up on its African colonial ambitions and by 1912 had taken over parts of modern Libya. Benito Mussolini came to power ten years later and was ‘dominated by his desire to increase the prestige and might of his country’.49 He had actually opposed the initial attempts to control Libya and described previous efforts to increase Italy’s presence in East Africa as jingoistic dreams. Once in power he was faced, however, with two of Italy’s perennial problems: rural poverty and overpopulation. The need for expansion was fundamental to Fascist policy and the prestige it would bring was also vital to the continued survival of Mussolini’s regime. The conquest of Libya alone could not solve his problems but the fertile Ethiopian highlands might, and at one stage he apparently considered settling somewhere between 5 and 7 million of his subjects in East Africa.50 As the senior British politician Winston Churchill later put it, there ‘seemed no way in which Mussolini could more easily or at less risk and cost consolidate his own power or . . . raise the authority of Italy in Europe than by wiping out the stain of bygone years and adding Abyssinia to the recently built Italian Empire’.51 What was referred to as the ‘Adowa complex’, which ‘left a deep scar’ and ‘bitter shame’ at being the only white European country to have suffered such a defeat, was certainly a major driver in Mussolini’s thinking.52
Churchill concluded that to ‘proclaim their manhood by avenging Adowa meant almost as much in Italy as the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine in France’; to the leadership in Rome, this appeared an attractive and, more importantly, feasible strategy.53 Joining Libya with Italian Eritrea would create a significant Italian presence stretching from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Indian Ocean.54 When Japan marched into Manchuria in 1931 the response from the League of Nations was ineffective and the Italian leader concluded that so long as their commercial interests were safeguarded, its members would do little to interfere with his own plans.55 Preparations continued until the opportunity to reopen the issue came after a clash between Italian and Ethiopian troops in the disputed Somali–Ethiopian border region.56 At Wal Wal in December 1934 there was a skirmish involving Italian soldiers and the Ethiopian escort to the British-Ethiopian Boundary Commission, and this appeared to Mussolini to provide an excellent opportunity to implement his plans.57 Diplomatic arguments dragged on in the attempt to resolve the crisis. So, with no mutually acceptable solution proving possible – in large part because of the onerous terms put forward by the Italians – after a delay of more than ten months their troops once more advanced into Ethiopia.
Despite the technological advantages enjoyed by Mussolini’s forces, the defending Ethiopians fought bravely and it was not until 9 May 1936, following the capture of Addis Ababa, which had been almost entirely destroyed by indiscriminate bombing, that Mussolini proclaimed to crowds at home, ‘At last Italy has her empire.’58 By this point the ‘civilising’ European power had indiscriminately killed as many as 760,000 men, women and children and Emperor Haile Selassie had been forced to flee. He headed to Geneva and the headquarters of the League of Nations – into which his country had been admitted in 1923, despite some British opposition – in an attempt to persuade its members to intervene. His arguments failed to secure any support, and with no offers of help forthcoming he moved into lonely exile in a large house in the south-west of England. Mussolini, believing that he had achieved the desired increase in prestige and power that both he and the Italian people demanded, formally declared the establishment of the grandly titled Italian East African Empire. This consisted of Eritrea, Italian Somaliland (which had been a protectorate since 1888) and Selassie’s former kingdom. Dominated by mountain ranges interspersed with arid deserts, this covered a huge area; at 540,000 square miles, it was nearly five times the size of Italy.
There was, however, an obvious problem insomuch as this newly secured Italian territory was surrounded on all sides: to the north by Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, to the south and west by Kenya and Uganda, and to the east and north-east by British and French Somaliland. It was also isolated from the Mediterranean supply lines as sea routes of communication were controlled by Britain or France. The first Governor-General of Italian East Africa, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, 1st Duke of Addis Ababa, who was appointed on 9 May 1936, did have around 300,000 troops available, spread across four sectors of Eritrea and Ethiopia, to protect the newly won empire. However, only 30 per cent were actually Italian and less than one-third of these were regular soldiers; the rest were carabinieri and border guards, who both had a reputation for a sometimes uncertain quality of military expertise. The vast bulk of the military forces were locally raised and, although there were some highly trained fighting units amongst their ranks, most were trained only to a basic level. Mussolini had removed the shame of Adowa but the armed units upon which he depended to maintain the future security of Italian East Africa were optimised for occupation, not for fighting wars against similarly equipped and professionally trained opponents.
Many Ethiopian soldiers remained in the field and refused to surrender, and a resistance movement quickly formed which exposed some of the challenges that could lie ahead for the Italians.59 Despite the harshest repression and brutal retaliation – such as an indiscriminate three-day massacre of several thousand Amhara in Addis Ababa following an attempt to kill Badoglio’s successor, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani – the rebels continued their struggle
. Faced by an insurgency for which they should have been better prepared, having previously faced the same in Libya, the military was not adequately equipped or mentally ready.60 Armour was scarce, with just sixty-three light and medium tanks, and its aircraft, though amongst the best in the region, could only be used infrequently. There were actually 200 fighters and light bombers available and the pilots were well trained and motivated, but the planes were poorly maintained due to shortages of spares. Isolation from Italy would take a considerable toll on military capability with a subsequent lack of fuel, ammunition, spares and other replacements only making problems worse. There was also a small Italian Red Sea flotilla of seven destroyers, seven torpedo boats and eight submarines which was based at Massawa and Assab in Eritrea and Mogadishu in Italian Somaliland. Once again, however, this lacked access to critical equipment and supplies and there were no capital ships, which left the flotilla badly under-gunned in the event of any engagement with either the British or the French navies.61 By the end of 1939, within Italian East Africa a stalemate had effectively developed. The Italians occupied all of the major towns and the many newly constructed forts that stretched across the territory. Although they avoided unnecessary engagements to reduce their casualties, many places in the highlands and rural areas were controlled by the irregular forces, particularly on the Gojjam plateau.62
There was clearly something of a mixed picture in terms of the relative strength of the Italian position. Mussolini now controlled a huge African empire but the stability of its position and the quality and quantity of the forces it depended upon to maintain security were ambiguous. Yet despite the potential frailties that existed, it was nonetheless seen as a ‘menace’ to Britain’s imperial communications and defence system and a threat that could prove critical in the event of a German or Japanese attack.63 Only in 1934 was the War Office in London finally convinced that the leadership in Rome was intent on conducting military operations in Africa. One military commentator, upon considering the subsequent invasion of Ethiopia, concluded perceptively that it was in many respects a gamble involving enormous stakes with any resulting success proving ‘a very expensive luxury’.64 So weak were British military capabilities across the East Africa region that it was felt there was no choice but to accept Italy’s victory as the prelude to a settlement of differences, and in 1938 an Anglo-Italian agreement was signed. For Britain’s strategic planners the conclusion remained that, whilst it was hoped Italy might ‘remain neutral and may even become a friend’, the perceived ease with which her naval and air forces would be able to cut the Red Sea route was a cause for grave concern.65 The instructions from the government in London, however, were that nothing was to be done which might threaten relations with Rome, and prior to the declaration of war between the two countries in 1940, a strict interpretation was applied in terms of what this meant. From a military perspective the greatest frustrations that arose from this policy were the restrictions it imposed on gathering effective intelligence and countering the hostile propaganda that was being distributed by the Italians. Most significantly, it also prevented the provision of any support to those Ethiopians who continued to fight their occupiers.