The First Victory

by Andrew Stewart

  These were to conduct an essentially static defence and, if they were defeated, to withdraw with the minimum loss while waiting for Rommel to defeat the British in the Western Desert and push them out of Africa. In July 1941, faced with now inevitable defeat, Mussolini ordered his forces to continue their resistance, tying down as many British soldiers as possible and preventing reinforcements being sent north. Even this revised strategy did not work. Their military forces often gave the appearance of simply not wanting a war for which they believed they were hopelessly unprepared.56 The fact was that Italy was not organised for the battle ahead; the country’s leader had told his commanders to prepare for war in 1942 at the earliest, so when it came two years ahead of schedule his forces were not ready.57 Aosta was left to operate under orders from Rome to conduct an entirely defensive campaign and, whether he agreed with these or not, it meant that the men he commanded for the most part lacked offensive spirit. Indeed, it could be said that as a result of Mussolini’s failings, in Italian East Africa strategic paralysis set in at almost every level and the land battle was lost almost before it had begun.

  If their fighting on land was often of a very poor quality, the other major failure was the decision not to attempt any offensive action in the Red Sea. Italian naval strategy was also flawed from the outset as it allocated very limited resources to the area – only seven fleet destroyers, two escort destroyers, eight submarines and five motor torpedo boats. Although at the time Italy had more cruisers than the combined British and French Mediterranean fleets, it chose not to operate any of them south of Suez. The retention of 108 submarines in Italian home ports was another curious oversight at a time when nothing could have made a more effective contribution to what appeared to be their main effort; the invasion of Egypt could only have benefited from a strong and active regional naval presence. At the same time the strategic effect that even a small submarine force operating from Massawa could have had on British shipping bringing supplies and troops to support the advance from Kenya was apparently lost on the Italians. Even so, the United States took the decision to declare this a war zone and out of bounds to their shipping. This was an additional burden on British merchant tonnage, with the Mediterranean supply routes already closed, but the Italians did not exploit the potential advantage.58 With resources so thinly spread, offensive action by even the relatively small Red Sea forces could have entirely closed the route to Allied shipping and severely affected Wavell’s strategic planning. The impact would have been devastating: Britain would have been isolated from one-twelfth of its oil supply while forces in Egypt would have been left dependent on desert tracks through neutral Iraq to Palestine, or from Mombasa via rail to southern Sudan and then an 1,800-mile journey to Cairo using river steamers and railways.59 However, Italian naval forces sat in their ports without venturing to interfere with British shipping and in so doing ensured that the ‘immense strategic asset of [Massawa], astride a vital sea route, had been neglected’.60

  Deliberately encouraged by the British media, the military performance during the campaign, coming after the disasters that had already been suffered during Operation ‘Compass’, helped create an image of Italian incompetence. The public’s general perception of the quality of its forces was made clear in mid-July 1941 in an anecdote repeated in The Times. By this stage Italian troops had assumed responsibility for the garrisoning of the conquered Greeks but they were widely treated with scorn by the populace, who said of them: ‘This year the German army is to clean up Europe, in 1942 the German army will occupy Asia; in 1943 the German army will occupy the Americas; in 1944 the glorious Italian army will occupy Malta.’61 It was very difficult to find anybody who was willing to say a positive word. One of those speaking in the House of Lords review that followed the capture of Addis Ababa did make some attempt, highlighting the defence of Keren where the Italians and their locally raised troops ‘fought stubbornly and bravely in a series of counter attacks, all the time suffering heavy casualties’. Another of those present was prepared to give ‘great credit’ to them for their fighting qualities and remarked that on the retreats from Dessie and at Keren they had demonstrated some ability.62 This brief speech noted that, ‘although we might not have a very good opinion of the fighting qualities of the Italian forces, we must all of us realise what extraordinarily clever, astute and resourceful engineers and miners they are, especially in work connected with fortifications and demolition’. There was also praise for Aosta, who ‘made a terrific effort to save the honour of his country so tarnished by the Dictator who calls the tune in Italy’.63 With no real sense at this stage of just how close the battle for Keren had actually been, this was the extent of the appreciation that was offered.

  Cunningham’s military aide believed the offensive would not have been possible if the opponents had been German; and the Germans, he speculated, held the same opinion.64 For the young Major Blewitt the war remained ‘us against the Bosch [sic]’ and he was actually quite correct in questioning the unity of the Axis alliance.65 The German consul in Addis Ababa was interviewed by a South African intelligence officer in April 1941 as he moved through British Somaliland on the way to being evacuated back home.66 Dr Strohm was described as ‘Hitler’s personal “man on the spot”’ for Central and North Africa, who had been sent to the region by the authorities in Berlin to survey the post-war potential for immigration and settlement and the exploitation of the local economy by a victorious Nazi state. Strohm began a series of observations about what he had witnessed over the recent months by stating ‘bluntly that “the Italians, although a great cultural people, were the world’s worst and most timid fighters”’. He went on to put the defeat down to ‘a lack of guts’ and the inadequacies of their training and equipment. Following on from the initial defeats they had suffered, he believed that it was the ferocity of ‘white troops on the native mind’, the effective use of propaganda and the impact of British and Commonwealth armour which had combined so that ‘once the “rot” had started it had a “snowball” effect and could not be checked’.

  For the British Empire as a whole the victory was a huge morale boost as it struggled to fight on alone in the war against the previously dominant Axis. For Mussolini, defeat did more than cost him an empire: it also deprived him of a force of 300,000 men, 325 aircraft and 23 ships and submarines. The strategy Wavell employed, one born entirely of necessity, was certainly a triumph of improvisation, offensive spirit and, above all, the imaginative use of limited resources.67 Whilst it has never been confirmed precisely who said it, one contemporary description of the campaign apparently involved a revision of the Churchillian flourish to ‘Never have so many been defeated by so few.’68 Once again this seemed to imply that there had been little in the way of a real challenge for the British and Commonwealth forces when this was not the case. Lord Croft, speaking in his conclusion to the House of Lords, accurately identified why there had not been a much greater response to such a tremendous victory.69 As he put it, ‘if our eyes had not been fixed on other great events our countrymen would have been full of pride and enthusiasm – as I am sure they are – at the success of these remarkable achievements’. Another of those present referenced in his review the actions at Kassala, Agordat, Massawa and Asmara, Mogadishu, Bardia, Gorai, Gojjam and Gondar, ‘a string of names . . . that will convey very little to most people’.70 Yet, writing about the British Army and the Second World War more than forty years later, David Fraser, by this point a retired general and pre-eminent military historian, argued that, when compared to the outcome in the Western Desert, the successful campaign in East Africa ‘was no less sensational in its results and more lasting in its consequences’.71 It is just that it has remained largely forgotten, superseded by later victories that gained much more fame in British memory. The fact that the entry into Addis Ababa took place on the same day as the beginning of the German attacks that would ultimately lead to the disaster in Greece and Crete provides a clue as to why this might hav
e been the case. It also helps to explain why the heroics of the British and Commonwealth forces that fought and won so decisively in East Africa remain largely overlooked in the vast narrative of the Second World War.

  NOTES

  Introduction: A Forgotten Campaign

  1.‘Surrender Of Gondar’, The Times (London), 29 November 1941; ‘Gondar Victor is Only 46’, Daily Express (London), 29 November 1941; ‘46, He Ends an African Empire’, Daily Mirror (London), 29 November 1941.

  2.‘Opinion – Going in Gondar’, Daily Express (London), 29 November 1941.

  3.‘King’s Crisis’, Time, 24 April 1939.

  4.‘Notes on Operations in East Africa 11th February 1941–3rd July 1941’ (Army Staff College), n.d., p. 1, JSCSC.

  5.Major-General I.S.O. Playfair et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East: Vol. I, The Early Successes against Italy (to May 1941) [History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Military Series] (London: HMSO, 1954).

  6.La Guerra in Africa Orientale: Giugno 1940–Novembre 1941 (Roma: Ministero della difesa, Stato maggiore dell’esercito, Ufficio storico, 1952).

  7.Brian Melland, ‘The Campaign in East Africa’, December 1970, CAB146/374, TNA.

  8.Possibly the best known account remains Michael Glover, An Improvised War: The Ethiopian Campaign, 1940–41 (New York: Hippocrene, 1987). Glover had served in the British Army during the war and wrote several military-themed books before his death in 1990.

  9.The Abyssinian Campaigns: The Official Story of the Conquest of Italian East Africa (London: HMSO, 1942); W.E. Crosskill, The Two Thousand Mile War (London: Robert Hale, 1980); Kenneth Gandar Dower, Abyssinian Patchwork (London: Frederick Muller, 1949); Carel Birkby, It’s a Long Way to Addis (London: Frederick Muller, 1942).

  10.Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211.

  11.John Keegan, The Second World War (London: Hutchinson, 1989), p. 324.

  12.John Terraine, The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939–1945 (Suffolk: St Edmundsbury Press, 1985), p. 323.

  13.Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, 1940–1945 (London: Harper Press, 2009), p. 118; Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 121; Williamson Murray, ‘British Military Effectiveness in the Second World War’, in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray (eds), Military Effectiveness – Vol. III, The Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 102.

  14.James J. Sadkovich, ‘Understanding Defeat: Reappraising Italy’s Role in World War II’, Journal of Contemporary History (Vol. 24, No. 1, Jan. 1989), p. 38.

  15.For example Giorgio Rochat, Le guerre italiane 1935–1943: Dall’impero d’Etiopia alla disfatta (Torino: Einaudi, 2005) and Andrea Molinari, La conquista dell’Impero: La guerra in Africa Orientale, 1935–1941 (Bresso: Hobby and Work Publishing, 2007).

  16.Colonel Harry Latham to Philip Allen, 10 November 1943, CAB103/178, TNA.

  17.It is not uncommon to see notes in books written previously on this subject making reference to the use of language within the text. Amharic, the Ethiopian language, is also Semitic and written in Ethiopic script and there are different ways of translating it into English. For the purposes of this study it became most obvious in terms of geographic locations and, reviewing the archival material, it is clear that there was often a struggle to agree upon a uniform usage, with variations to be found even in the same document. Without being able to offer a definitive answer to the competing claims, this book has instead sought to adopt a consistent approach which may, or may not, be considered entirely correct by all readers.

  18.‘The East African Campaign – Compiled by the Indian Historical Section’, comments by Lieutenant-Colonel J.E.B. Barton, 12 November 1954, J.E.B. Barton Papers, 7203–33–2, NAM.

  19.‘Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions, geographical sub-regions, and selected economic and other groupings’, United Nations Statistics Division, 31 October 2013, http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm [accessed 10 April 2016].

  1: Strategic Miscalculation

  1.‘The Special Official Gazette of the East Africa Protectorate’ (Vol. XVI, No. 374, 5 Aug. 1914), pp. 823–826; Robert M. Maxon, Struggle for Kenya: The Loss and Reassertion of Imperial Initiative, 1912–1923 (London: Associated University Presses, 1993), p. 79.

  2.John Lonsdale, ‘East Africa’, in Judith Brown and Wm Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol. IV, The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 532–534; Nazifa Rashid, ‘British Colonialism in East Africa During the Nineteenth Century’, IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IOSR–JHSS) (Vol. 19, Issue 3, Mar. 2014), pp. 8–11; ‘First World War – A Global View’, TNA, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/first-world-war/a-global-view/ [accessed 20 October 2015].

  3.Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Fifth Edition], 1994), p. 100.

  4.Ibid., p. 107.

  5.Kenya Colony and Protectorate, 1936 (London: HMSO, 1937), pp. 3–4.

  6.In addition, further to the south there were more British territories. In 1899, the British South Africa Company had received a royal charter to administer the territory which later became known as Northern Rhodesia, and twelve years later North Western and North Eastern Rhodesia were united under a single administration. This territory also shared a 150-mile north-east border with German East Africa and a shorter southern border with German South West Africa. Southern Rhodesia had become a British possession in 1888 and the British South Africa Company was set up to run the territory as a commercial venture. Ten years later the British High Commission for South Africa was given responsibility for its overall supervision. Nyasaland became another British Protectorate in 1893 and administrative control passed to the Colonial Office in 1904, after which it was governed as a Crown Colony.

  7.Brigadier-General C.P. Fendall, The East African Field Force 1915–1919 (London: H.F. and G. Witherby, 1921), pp. 15–22.

  8.Kenya Colony and Protectorate, p. 4; Claude Lützelschwab, ‘Colonial Settler Economies in Africa’, XIVth International Economic History Congress, Helsinki, 21–25 August 2006, p. 4.

  9.Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), p. 303.

  10.Fendall, The East African Force, p. 23.

  11.Ross Anderson, The Forgotten War 1914–18: The East African Campaign (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2007), pp. 21–22; Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hordern [from a draft by Major Henry FitzMaurice Stacke], History of the Great War, Military Operations: East Africa, Vol. I, August 1914–September 1916 (London: Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence, 1941).

  12.Lieutenant-Colonel H. Moyse-Bartlett, The King’s African Rifles: A Study in the Military History of East and Central Africa, 1890–1945 (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1956), pp. 259–261.

  13.Hordern, History of the Great War, pp. 18–30.

  14.Edward Paice, Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007), pp. 29–30.

  15.Anderson, The Forgotten War 1914–18, pp. 51–55; Moyse-Bartlett, The King’s African Rifles, pp. 275–279.

  16.Dan Whitaker, ‘The Uncatchable Lizard’, History Today (February 2013), pp. 29–35; William Weir, Guerrilla Warfare: Irregular Warfare in the Twentieth Century (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008), pp. 46–58.

  17.Major-General S.H. Sheppard, ‘The East African Campaign, 1914–1916’, The Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (Vol. 87, Issue 545, 1942), p. 71; Moyse-Bartlett, The King’s African Rifles, pp. 259–415.

  18.These included Francis Brett Young, Marching on Tanga: With General Smuts in East Africa (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917) and several popular post-war accounts such as Fendall, The East African Force, 1915–1919 and Christopher J. Thornhill, Taking Tanganyika: Experiences o
f an Intelligence Officers, 1914–1918 (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1937).

  19.Ross Anderson, ‘J.C. Smuts and J.L. van Deventer: South African Commanders-in-Chief of a British Expeditionary Force’, Scientia Militaria – South African Journal of Military Studies (Vol. 31, No. 2, 2003), pp. 117–141.

  20.Ian van der Waag, ‘The Union Defence Force Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939’, Scientia Militaria – South African Journal of Military Studies (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2000), p. 184.

  21.General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa: The Campaign for German East Africa in World War One (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1920), p. 325.

  22.Bill Nasson, ‘Africa’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War: Vol. I, Global War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 439–440.

  23.Simon Ball, ‘The Mediterranean and North Africa, 1940–1944’, in John Ferris and Evan Mawdsley (eds), The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Vol. I, Fighting the War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 359–362.

  24.Kevin Burley, British Shipping and Australia 1920–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 73–75; David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 604–605; Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), p. 9.

  25.See, for example, ‘Defence Loans Bill’, House of Commons Debate, 27 February 1939, Hansard, Vol. 344, cc 927–1043.

  26.‘Future Size of Our Regular Army – Memorandum by the Secretary of State for War’, C.P.200 (23), 17 April 1923, pp. 1–14, CAB24/159, TNA.