The First Victory

by Andrew Stewart

  The situation in East Africa also seemed generally to have been largely forgotten, albeit not for the troops who were still involved. The German attack on Russia in June 1941 had seen the coalition fighting the Axis powers grow in size but it looked as if this would be short-lived. In Africa, Wavell had gone and so in turn had Cunningham who, in August, left with his reputation hugely enhanced to take up a senior role in Cairo in General Headquarters Middle East Forces. According to Punch magazine, along with his brother he had become one part of ‘Cunningham Brothers, Removal Contractors by Land and Sea’, and Auchinleck had selected him to now head north and take the fight to Rommel and his Afrika Korps.122 In Ethiopia, fighting (or more accurately, surrendering) continued, following the conquest of Galla-Sidamo and, in addition to the small groups of stragglers across the region, a further 3,000 prisoners were captured at Dendi at the end of June and 2,900 more at Amba Gorgias at the end of September.123 Wetherall was in temporary charge of the British and Commonwealth forces and there were still significant numbers of enemy troops to be rounded up in a conquered territory of more than half a million square miles. For the final operations his forces were much reduced, with the South Africans having left for Egypt after the fall of Amba Alagi. The majority of the West African troops had also gone, the Nigerians having left in August and the Gold Coast brigade following them in October. The greatest challenge the new commander faced, however, was maintaining law and order in a country awash with weapons as more than 20,000 rifles and 20 million rounds of ammunition had been sent by the British authorities to support the Patriots. The Italians had also issued their own arms and equipment in the hope that they would be used by those Ethiopians who were opposed to Selassie’s return to support their defence. Added to this, many thousands more were found on deserted battlefields and in hidden reserve dumps. With the military campaign not yet concluded this was clearly a heavily armed country in which there were significant political tensions.

  Against this volatile background, the final battle of a campaign that had started the previous June with minor border raids was another complicated set-piece mountain attack on the last Italian outpost. ‘Fluffy’ Fowkes had been wounded four times during the last war and awarded the Military Cross and bar, serving afterwards in various roles and locations including Russia and China, in the process of which he gained a diverse range of military experience.124 He had been one of the original brigade commanders appointed in 1939 and during this campaign he had probably seen more fighting than anybody. It was therefore perhaps fitting that he should be given the final task of capturing Gondar on the Ethiopian plateau. The town was situated at a height of about 6,800 feet but surrounded by other peaks to the north-east and south-east which rose to more than twice its size as the terrain fell away rapidly to the south towards the depression which contained Lake Tana. There was also a series of steep-sided valleys with numerous streams and plentiful supplies of water. Approaching from Asmara in the north, there was a good road which went through the Wolchefit Pass, an earth track with uncertain bridges which offered a route from Dessie, and another rougher route from Gedaref with no bridges. The Italian forces were hemmed in but in a strong defensive position and it would need a progression of attacks to force them out. The Italian commander was the experienced and capable Nasi, Vice-Governor of and victor in British Somaliland, and he had placed strong detachments which allowed him to effectively control the three main approaches.

  In many ways, Gondar provided a perfect image of how the entire Italian East African Empire had functioned. Interrogations by the British of captured prisoners revealed there was still good morale and they knew little or nothing about the forces massing against them. One of the first correspondents to arrive after the battle described it as ‘a full-grown city with three-story [sic] office buildings and many villas and large, deep air-raid shelters now scarred by the siege’.125 A postal service still operated, with letters typed on cloth and sewn into the clothing of some of the Africans who lived there and smuggled them out. These were also intercepted and from them it was established that there were between 100 and 200 civilians still in the town, including ten or eleven white women and a small number of children; an additional four white women worked in the brothel. Unlike at Massawa there was no radio link with the outside and only five planes had arrived from Italy in the preceding five months having taken a route via Benghazi to the Yemen and then on to French Somaliland. They carried money, medical supplies and ammunition, and took back with them air force pilots, young children and serious medical cases.126 Although the cheese factory continued to operate, food was scarce, but it was still possible to produce alcohol and shops continued to function despite the damage caused by the bombing from British and South African aircraft.127 High up in the mountains the war had seemed to be far distant, but it had now come much closer.

  In preparing for the assault some of the more remote Italian posts were cleared, but resistance continued elsewhere and troops from the KAR still faced often stiff fighting. With the weather intervening to make transport difficult, it was something of a relief when, and totally unexpectedly, the defending garrison at neighbouring Wolchefit surrendered despite their own exceptionally strong position. This was put down to a combination of the pressure that was created by unopposed air attacks and a fear of what would happen if the Patriot forces entered the town. It meant that the route was clear for the advance towards Gondar itself and, although the attackers continued to take a number of casualties from mines and booby traps, plans were hastily revised to allow for a speedier move. As the troops from the 26th East African Brigade moved closer, they found that the road had been comprehensively destroyed and it was so steep at one point that the men trying to make repairs had to be let down on ropes. The advance was therefore made either on foot or using mules and donkeys which had been commandeered from the local inhabitants, but there were no saddles and the African troops did not have any experience of using pack transport. Although Fowkes had concluded that it was impossible to move a large force and achieve any measure of surprise, what he did not know was that the Italians refused to believe regular forces could cross such country. They were now to be proven wrong: moving forward on 25 November along a single track, the troops, along with 150 donkeys and mules for each battalion, were able to carry between them to the assembly area enough food, ammunition, communications equipment and medical supplies to operate for four days. Efforts were made to camouflage this approach using branches and nets and this, along with the glare of the morning sun which was directly in the eyes of the Italian defenders, allowed for a force of about 5,000 men to be readied for an attack.

  The final military action of the campaign fought in East Africa began at 5.30 a.m. on 27 November as artillery opened fire on the main Dalflecha Ridge which, along with the plateau at Maldiba, was the principal target of the attack. The defending troops had at least a three-to-one advantage and were dug into positions they had been preparing for up to seven months. As a result, the fighting was heavy, but only for the initial stage throughout the morning, and the ridge was captured by lunchtime. When the commanding officer, Brigadier William Dimoline, moved forward along the route of this initial advance shortly afterwards it took him nearly an hour of climbing, often crawling on his hands and knees. Exhausted by the exertion, he marvelled at the job his men had done by getting up there in the face of stiff Italian opposition and with mines and booby traps strewn across the battlefield. As the troops paused, British aircraft were now used in a bombardment that lasted more than two hours, after which the advance resumed. The second objective fell shortly afterwards as, at 4 p.m., word was received that Nasi had sent an envoy from the plateau requesting terms and Italian ammunition dumps were soon being destroyed. By the day’s end the town was captured and 23,000 prisoners were taken. Guards had to be placed everywhere both to protect Italian personnel, such as those working at the electricity plant, from the local Ethiopians and the Patriots, and to stop other key sites b
eing wrecked. The divisional commander warned that any looters were to be shot on the spot but this did not stop the violence immediately.128 Some of the surrounding garrisons did not get the order to surrender until the following day and it took several more days to restore order in and around Gondar before the battle could finally be considered to have come to an end.

  Churchill sent a secret and personal message to Fowkes to congratulate him on this final victory, which appeared ‘to have been brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed’.129 Whilst the only British troops involved in the final assault were from 1st Battalion, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, casualties for British and Commonwealth troops throughout November were the highest for any one month since the campaign had started. A total of 369 men had been killed or wounded, a clear indication of just how tough this final but largely forgotten stage of operations had been.130 According to one of the attacking soldiers, the Italians fought better at Gondar than anywhere else, something that was put down almost entirely to Nasi’s leader--ship skills and personality.131 When the battlefield was cleared, a number of positions manned by African troops were found to have fought to the last man and even the last round. In a fitting final touch, the Union Jack hoisted over the final Italian outpost to surrender was the one that had flown in Addis Ababa, sent to a British officer in the 22nd East African Brigade, Major Michael Biggs, by his wife with the instruction that he should ‘hoist it over somewhere for me’.132 He had dutifully carried it throughout the campaign and, with nobody apparently having remembered to pack an official flag, it was used to mark both the entry into the Italian-held capital and at the surrender of their final outpost when it was raised above the castle that had been built by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.

  On 15 December the East African Force was abolished and replaced by East African Command, now once again directly under War Office control as opposed to the commander in Cairo. Platt had arrived ten days before to take over this new role giving him responsibility for a huge area from Eritrea in the north to the River Zambezi in the south. This final act also carried with it confirmation that the British Empire had decisively won its first campaign victory of what would prove to be a very long war.

  CONCLUSION

  The British Empire’s First Victory

  THE CAMPAIGN IN East Africa was a great success both for the British and Commonwealth forces who fought there and the commanders who led them. A massive pincer movement through Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia converged with another that had advanced through Eritrea and ended with a final series of assaults against a remote Italian mountain fortress. With a speed and comprehensiveness that was not foreseen in the original plan, an eventually significant victory came about gradually through the development of events and the overwhelming of a confused and progressively shattered opponent.1 This was the unanimous view of the small number of published eyewitness accounts where it was described as ‘a military masterpiece of its time’, whilst another conclusion stated with confidence that the campaign would ‘go down in military history as a classic’.2 It was not simply a case of writers striving for hyperbole but a genuine series of assessments that this was seen as having been a triumph of the first order.

  Blewitt, Cunningham’s ever-present military aide who recorded how the battle had been conducted, described the entry of the troops into Addis Ababa as completing ‘probably the fastest and longest advance in the history of the British army’, an assessment with which others much more experienced than he in the conduct of war agreed.3 According to one former senior military officer speaking in the House of Lords in late May 1941, the strategic significance of the campaign was in fact much greater than most people understood.4 Lord Birdwood, who had been a soldier since the war fought against the Boers in South Africa, believed that had the Duke of Aosta’s army remained intact and able to take the offensive, Germany would have had the freedom to attack and capture not only Egypt but possibly also Syria, completing the encirclement of Turkey. One of his equally experienced colleagues believed it could not ‘be surpassed in the annals of the British Army’.5 Yet for Wavell, who remained modest throughout, it was no more than ‘an improvisation after the British fashion rather than a set piece in the German manner’.6 This may have been how it was conceived but the outcome was devastating for the Axis, and Italy in particular.

  The post-battle Westminster review paid special reference to its having been a wonderful story ‘of planning and organisation and endurance and valour’, and also highlighted the need for everyone to ‘be inspired by the thought that the men taking part in it came from all parts of our Empire, motivated by the same high ideals’.7 At this stage in the war there were Commonwealth troops in Britain, but they were committed to a largely static role, waiting for an invader that it was hoped would not come.8 In East Africa it was entirely different: here an exotic and potent range of forces were demonstrating the power available to an empire still trying to come to terms with the defeats of the summer of 1940 which had highlighted the apparently pre-eminent power of the German blitzkrieg. Platt’s force consisted of two Indian divisions, which included in their ranks both members of the SDF and English infantry battalions.9 Cunningham’s force was even more multinational, with South Africans, regiments from Kenya and British Somaliland, Indians, Ugandans and Ethiopian irregulars who fought alongside Rhodesians, Nigerians, Gold Coasters, Belgians, French and even a handful of Australian sailors.10 It was an international coalition in the truest sense and, in many respects, a rehearsal for the next, much larger and final military imperial campaign which was fought to an ultimately successful conclusion in North Africa. With the end of the pre-war ‘special relationship’ with France – albeit an often confused and uncertain one that ended in defeat and increasing bitterness – and with the United States destined to fill this vacant position but still hesitant about the merits of involvement in what appeared to many of its citizens a distant war, Britain’s Empire filled the void.

  Within this complex mix, the role that was played by the South Africans needs to be particularly acknowledged. They undeniably played a significant role in the campaign. Militarily, their deployment brought with it a level of equipment that would otherwise not have been available and it certainly impressed the troops who fought alongside them. The mechanisation that had hitherto been unavailable enabled a surprisingly modern war to be fought in which speed and tempo could be used to overwhelm an already doubtful opponent and exploit openings as they presented themselves. As a Rhodesian officer concluded, it was the trucks that had ‘made possible the procession to Addis Ababa’ and he later highlighted how their armoured cars had taken full advantage of the excellent roads built by the Italians but which subsequently contributed to their defeat.11 The availability of mechanised transport also allowed for regular supplies of ammunition and, perhaps of greater significance for morale, water and food. A veteran of the First World War campaign, his unit was the first to enter Kismayu, Mogadishu and Addis Ababa. In three years and three months spent fighting in the first war, he reckoned he had walked more than 10,000 miles; the South African transport meant that in his second war, this was reduced to no more than 300 miles. The arrival of aircraft also had a major impact as the troops on the ground grew in confidence once they had air cover to provide support. Interestingly, according to the Rhodesian observer, the vital contribution actually came from the artillery, which broke the Italian will to fight.

  Perhaps of greater significance, despite some of the concerns that had existed in London and elsewhere, no immediate political cost resulted from this demonstration of South African largesse. During the summer of 1941 Cunningham met various senior political figures in Nairobi who had travelled north to see him and there was some speculation about the role they might wish to take in Kenya’s future. They were not then involved in its administration but it was suggested by the general’s aide that they ought to be: Smuts was widely known to have ideas about a united Africa and Blewitt concluded that
if an offer of some greater involvement was not made ‘the time will come when they take it whether the local people like it or not’.12 No demands came, however, and, buoyed by its successful participation, the South African military continued marching north and onwards to the Western Desert where eventually two divisions took part in the action there as part of the British Empire’s war to control the Mediterranean.13 In its first campaign of the war it had lost only 73 men killed and had 197 other battle-related casualties, with an additional 79 members of the SAAF also lost and 5 reported missing. It had been a good war. As for the South African leader, he remained close to his friend Churchill throughout the wartime years and was lauded across the British Empire as one of its greatest figures.

  A complex campaign which presented considerable technical and logistic challenges, the East Africa war required exceptional military leadership – and this is what was provided. Virtually all of those involved, perhaps aside from the irascible Wingate who had an often impossibly high opinion of his contribution, recognised that much of the credit for the final victory lay with Wavell, who ‘kept his finger on the pulse’.14 The chronic lack of available resources gave him no option but to move forces to where they were most required in anticipation of the likely enemy threat. It also meant that there could be few thoughts of conducting an early offensive; initial British strategy was aimed almost entirely at tying down Italian forces that might otherwise be used against Egypt. Key to this defensive approach Wavell adopted was the geographical advantage enjoyed by the British, which allowed for the isolation of Italian East Africa both from the other Italian colonies in North Africa and from their home base. By these means, the British commander believed, his opponent would be cut off and eventually run out of petrol and essential supplies. The Red Sea lines of communication became critical and, consequently, he viewed victory in East Africa as an essential prerequisite for securing victory elsewhere. It meant that, when he considered his entire command, Italian East Africa was viewed as a threat to his flank which needed to be removed if he were to have any hope of winning in North Africa. Despite this assessment, as late as October 1940 the commander in Cairo estimated that he had sufficient troops in the Sudan and Kenya only for defensive purposes and to potentially conduct minor attacks aimed at the frontier posts; yet, six months later, he had virtually defeated his opponent.