by John Keegan
Britain was limited in its ability to reinforce its East African garrison from Egypt, where it had maintained an army since its annexation of that semi-autonomous fief of the Ottoman Empire in 1882, because of the need to defend Egypt’s western frontier against the army of 200,000 men, mostly Italians, that Italy maintained in Libya (which it had ruled since also annexing it from Turkey in 1912). Britain’s strategic difficulty cast a long shadow. Douglas Newbold, Civil Secretary in the Sudan, writing home on 19 May 1940, gloomily anticipated the outcome of the approaching war: ‘Kassala is Italy’s for the asking. Port Sudan probably, Khartoum perhaps. Bang goes 40 years’ patient work in the Sudan and we abandon the trusting Sudanese to a totalitarian conqueror.’
Newbold’s fears for the security of Britain’s hold on all East African territories were fortunately to prove over-pessimistic. Although strong on the ground, Italy’s Ethiopian army suffered from disabling weaknesses. It was timidly led – though the Duke of Aosta, the Italian viceroy, was a man of personal courage and distinction – it was isolated from resupply and it could not be reinforced. The British, by contrast, were at liberty to build up their forces in the region by the transfer of troops from India and South Africa through the chain of ports they controlled along the littoral of the Indian Ocean. In April 1940, General Sir Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief in the Middle East, had visited Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa – whose parliament had narrowly voted to enter the war the previous September – and brought back the guarantee that the dominion would raise a brigade and three squadrons of aircraft for service in Kenya. The force was to be commanded by Dan Pienaar, like Smuts a veteran of the Boer War against the British but, like him, now also a devoted supporter of the imperial cause. In September Wavell risked transferring the 5th Indian Division from Egypt to the Sudan, to join a British brigade there. During the autumn two extra South African brigades arrived in Kenya to form the 1st South African Division. In December, following the success of Wavell’s counter-offensive in Egypt against the Italian Libyan army, Wavell sent to the Sudan the additional reinforcement of the 4th Indian Division. By the beginning of January 1941, therefore, the new British commander in East Africa, General Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral commanding the Mediterranean fleet, disposed of sufficient force to contemplate expelling the Italians from their footholds on British territory and carrying the war into their Ethiopian empire.
The Ethiopian campaign
The British had been to Ethiopia before, on a punitive campaign against the Emperor Theodore in 1867-8; the difficulties of campaigning among its towering mountains had wisely persuaded them not to stay. The Italians, by the deployment of aircraft, tanks and overwhelming numbers, in 1936-7 had broken the primitive army of the Emperor Haile Selassie and thereby also avenged themselves for their defeat at the hands of the Emperor Menelek at Adowa during their first attempt to establish an Ethiopian empire in 1896. The coming Ethiopian campaign, though fought between the European powers, was to partake of the spirit of those preceding it. It was to be essentially colonial in character; many of the troops engaged were non-European; and the mountainous terrain and the absence of roads, railways and all the rest of the infrastructure upon which European armies depended for movement and supply imposed a colonial rhythm on its course.
The British plan for their counter-offensive against the Duke of Aosta’s command had been fixed at Khartoum at the end of October 1940. Anthony Eden, the British war minister, had arrived there on 28 October to join Haile Selassie, returned from exile in England in expectation of reinheriting his kingdom, Wavell, Cunningham, who was to take command on 1 November, and Smuts, who had flown from South Africa. Smuts and Eden had strong political motives for urging an offensive. Smuts needed a victory to overcome opposition by his anti-British nationalists to South Africa’s participation in the war; that opposition, though not as strong as in 1914 when unreconciled Boers had actually taken up arms in revolt, was still a challenge to his leadership. Eden, for his part, was anxious for the British success at this point of juncture between the African and Arabian corners of the Islamic world, because he needed to offset growing German influence over such Muslim leaders as the Mufti of Jerusalem and Rashid Ali in Iraq, who saw in Britain’s time of adversity an opportunity to repay her for such grievances as the maintenance of an imperial garrison at Baghdad and the sponsorship of Zionist settlement in Palestine.
Haile Selassie, a diplomatist of subtlety, persuaded Eden at Khartoum that despite Foreign Office representations to the contrary his return to Ethiopia, where resistance to the Italian occupation was beginning to revive, offered the best prospect of undermining their common enemy’s grip on the country. Ethiopian ‘patriot’ units, armed by the British, were already in existence on the Sudanese border. On 6 November a British officer, Orde Wingate, representative of a tradition of irregular soldiering which reached back to the early days of Indian conquest and had been most recently embodied by T. E. Lawrence, arrived in Khartoum with a million pounds to spend and a fervent belief that he could restore Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, to his throne. He immediately took the ‘patriot’ units under command, flew into Ethiopia to make contact with the internal resistance and, on his return, began preparations to escort the emperor across the frontier.
On 20 January 1941, in the words of an official imperial propagandist, ‘His Majesty the Emperor Haile Selassie I accompanied by the Crown Prince . . . and two powerful Ethiopian and English armies crossed the frontier of the Sudan and Ethiopia and entered into his own.’ The exigencies of long exile excused the exaggeration; Wingate’s column was almost comically weak, camel-mounted and bereft of modern equipment. However, it was at least in motion towards the capital of Addis Ababa; and so too, after some inconclusive border skirmishes, were the main British forces which constituted the real threat to Italy’s Abyssinian empire. On 19 January the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions crossed the frontier north of the Blue Nile, heading for the fabled city of Gondar; they met little resistance, though at one point a force of local horsemen, the Amharic Cavalry Band, led by an Italian officer on a white horse, attempted a death-or-glory charge against their machine-guns. On 20 January the Sudan Defence Force, whose officers included the famous anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (the equally famous Arabist, Wilfred Thesiger, was on the staff of Wingate’s ‘Gideon Force’ accompanying the emperor), crossed into Ethiopia south of the Blue Nile. Finally, on 11 February, Cunningham’s army of South Africans, the King’s African Rifles and the Royal West African Frontier Force marched out of Kenya into southern Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland.
The Duke of Aosta correctly estimated that the most dangerous of these incursions was that of the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions in the north and accordingly concentrated the best of his troops around Keren, a small town in Eritrea defended by high peaks and approachable only along a deep and narrow gorge. The Indian divisions attacked it on 10 February and were driven off, attacked again on 15 March and were counter-attacked; but, when their engineers undertook a systematic dismantling of the obstacles with which the approaches to Keren had been surrounded, the Italians decided that they were beaten and retreated into the hinterland. The whole of Eritrea was occupied by 2 April. By then the Italian position in the south had also collapsed. General Cunningham’s army, advancing from Kenya into Italian Somaliland, found it difficult to keep up with the enemy, so keen were the local troops to desert their Italian officers and make for home with their rifles and ammunition, rich prizes in that territory of endemic banditry. In late March, having swung north-west from Somaliland towards central Ethiopia, he was forced to fight a battle to open the road to the ancient walled city of Harar, which was won by the black Nigerians of the Royal West African Frontier Force – soldiers in whom Cunningham had previously but wrongly reposed little trust. Thereafter the Italians’ hold over their local units began to collapse irretrievably; by early April only a thin screen of Savoy Grenadiers stood between Cunningham and Addis
Ababa. They were brushed aside, and on 5 April the capital fell to the British. Haile Selassie, escorted by Wingate’s ‘Gideon Force’, made a triumphal entry on 5 May. Meanwhile the Duke of Aosta had retreated to the mountain fastness of Amba Alagi, where he surrendered in late May. He was to die of tuberculosis in British captivity the following year.
The war in Ethiopia was now effectively over. British Somaliland had been recaptured by an amphibious landing launched from Aden on 16 March; the Italian commander of Berbera, the capital, burst into tears on surrendering his revolver to a British officer, who comforted him with the thought that ‘war can be very embarrassing’. A handful of Italian diehards escaped westward to surrender to a Belgian force advancing from the Congo on 3 July. In the course of the campaign Italy lost some 289,000 troops, mostly locals, and the majority being taken prisoner. The victors were at once dispersed to other fronts where they were more urgently needed – the Indians and South Africans to the Western Desert, the West and East Africans to their home stations, whence they would be shipped in 1944 to fight the war against the Japanese in Burma, in which Wingate would win a legendary reputation. A Free French force which had come from the Middle East to fight returned there. General Sir William Platt, the commander of the Sudan Defence Force, would go on to capture Madagascar from its Vichy garrison – which Churchill feared it could or would not hold against the Japanese – in November 1942. Cunningham, the conqueror of Ethiopia, departed for Egypt, where he would lose his reputation as a successful soldier in the struggle against Rommel.
The Ethiopian campaign was an oddity among those of the Second World War, strategically a footnote to the nineteenth-century ‘scramble for Africa’, tactically a Beau Geste episode of long camel treks and short bitter conflicts for mountain strongpoints and desert forts. It was appropriate that among the colourful variety of colonial units which had taken part – Mahratta Light Infantry, Rajputana Rifles, Gold Coast Regiment, Gruppo Banda Frontiere – the Foreign Legion should have been one. Committed at the personal insistence of General de Gaulle, who at that time was urgently seeking means to turn his declared revolt against Pétain and Vichy into a reality, the Legion had fought vigorously and effectively in the Battle of Keren before returning to the Middle East to take part in the Battle of Bir Hacheim, with its great reputation yet further enhanced.
Ethiopia was not the only front south of the Mediterranean on which de Gaulle sought, in the aftermath of the fall of France, to establish an alternative to the Vichy regime. During September 1940 he had led a Free French force, embarked together with British units of the Royal Navy, against Dakar in Senegal, the cornerstone of the French presence in West Africa. His aim, which was to rally the garrison to the Free French cause, failed; so too did the Royal Navy’s, which was to immobilise units of the French fleet which had arrived to defend the harbour. However, though on 25 September de Gaulle was forced to withdraw discomfited, this Free French effort at penetrating West Africa was not without results. On 27 August the resolute follower of de Gaulle, Philippe Leclerc, had succeeded in rallying the colony of Cameroon; on hearing that news the black governor of Chad also came over and the French Congo rallied shortly afterwards. With Cameroon, Chad, Congolese and some rallied Senegalese troops, Leclerc invaded Gabon on 12 October and with his confr’re, Pierre Koenig, led columns against the capital Libreville, which surrendered on 12 November. It was evidence of how bitterly ideological this fratricidal war between Frenchmen had become that the governor, Masson, hanged himself rather than surrender; his successor capitulated the same day.
The Syrian war
De Gaulle now controlled a solid wedge of territory in the great West African bight and also disposed of four independent military forces on the continent; a brigade in Egypt and a ‘division’ in East Africa (the two soon to be united as part of the British Western Desert Force); a garrison in West Africa and, in Chad, Leclerc’s Groupe Nomade de Tibesti. Leclerc, by far the most dynamic of de Gaulle’s followers, led his tiny command northward into Italian Libya in the spring of 1941, made contact with the British Long Range Desert Group and then independently captured the oasis of Kufra on 1 March. It was the first single-handed Free French success against the Axis. Conscious of the significance of his victory, Leclerc at once prompted his little band of white and black French soldiers to take a solemn oath (‘Le serment de Kufra’) not to lay down arms until the French flag should once more fly over the German-annexed cities of Metz and Strasbourg; Leclerc, a former cadet at Saint-Cyr, belonged to the graduating class of ‘Metz et Strasbourg’. In the spring of 1941 it must have seemed a bold gesture to cast down such a challenge. Not even the indomitable Leclerc might have dared to foresee that three years later he would be leading French soldiers down the Champs-Elysées to a solemn Te Deum of gratitude in Notre-Dame de Paris for the liberation of the city, or that by November 1944 his 2nd Armoured Division would indeed be present to watch the tricolour rise over Metz and Strasbourg.
In the spring of 1941, it was the spectre of further fratricidal wars rather than any vision of liberation which exercised those Frenchmen who had taken sides over the issue of the armistice. The largest concentration of Vichy French troops, General Maxime Weygand’s great Armée d’Afrique in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, lay as yet outside the strategic ambit; but General Henri Dentz’s Army of the Levant in Syria and Lebanon was a natural target for subversion by Axis agents. Its bases outflanked from the east those of the British in Egypt, where their desert war with the Italians had broken out in earnest in December; it also provided a bridgehead through which Britain’s Arab enemies, Rashid Ali in Iraq and the Mufti of Jerusalem in Palestine, could be supported. Dentz, like Weygand, was bound to neutrality by the terms of the armistice; but because of the relative weakness of his force (38,000 to Weygand’s 100,000), its isolation from France and its proximity to the Axis power-base in Italy and the Balkans he could be put under pressure to which Weygand was impervious. Early in April British intelligence decrypts revealed that the Germans and Italians were jointly planning to use Syria as a staging and basing area from which to supply Rashid Ali in Iraq, where that general had overthrown the pro-British regent on 3 April. By 13 May new decrypts revealed that German aircraft with Iraqi markings had arrived in Syria, and next day they began bombing the British forces which were entering Iraq to put down Rashid Ali’s coup. Rashid Ali’s action had been intemperate and premature. His army was not strong or resolute enough either to overcome the British garrison, which by treaty occupied the large air base of Habbaniya outside Baghdad, or to prevent British troops also exercising their treaty right to enter and transit Iraq through the port of Basra. His siege of Habbaniya, begun on 30 April, was actually broken by the besieged, who chased the investing force away from the aerodrome on 5 May. Reinforced by the hastily organised ‘Habforce’ of units from Palestine, which made a trans-desert march, and by the 10th Indian Division landed at Basra, British forces in Iraq entered the city and restored the regent on 31 May.
Evidence of Dentz’s complicity, however unwilling, in the Iraq episode clinched the British decision (for which de Gaulle had been pressing) to turn against the Army of the Levant; the danger it offered to the rear of the Western Desert Force operating in Libya was too great to be tolerated. On 23 June, therefore, four British columns moved against it – the 10th Indian Division and Habforce from Iraq against Palmyra and Aleppo, the British 6th Division from northern Palestine against Damascus and the 7th Australian Division from Haifa against Beirut. The short war which ensued was not pleasant; on the border of northern Palestine the involvement of the Free French division resulted in Frenchmen fighting Frenchmen, in the bitterest yet of the internecine struggles between the followers of Pétain and de Gaulle. On all fronts the fighting was imbued with resentment: the British believed they were spilling blood better saved for the Germans; the Vichy French felt the war had been unfairly forced upon them. The French Army of the Levant put up so good a fight that only the 7th Australian
Division succeeded in breaking the defences it encountered, and then because it benefited from heavy naval gunfire support south of Beirut. Once it broke through, however, as it did on 9 July, Dentz accepted that his position was untenable and sued for terms. They were granted on 11 July, and allowed all Vichy troops who rejected de Gaulle’s offer of a place in the Free French forces to return home; only 5700 of Dentz’s defeated 38,000 rallied to de Gaulle. The majority, including Foreign Legionnaires who had fought Foreign Legionnaires in an almost sacrilegious outturn of events, were transhipped to North Africa, where Allied troops would meet them again in the Torch landings of November 1942.
Sour, costly and regrettable though the little Syrian war had been – 3500 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded in its course – the effect of its outcome on British strategy in Africa was wholly beneficent. Following on the heels of Italy’s defeat in Ethiopia and the crushing of the pro-Axis party in Iraq, it ensured the security of Britain’s place d’armes in Egypt from the landward side and liberated the commander of the Western Desert Force from all other preoccupations but that of beating the Axis in Libya.
The Libyan-Egyptian war had begun in earnest in September 1940. It was the second of the three wars fought on African territory between 1939 and 1945, since its outbreak slightly postdated the Ethiopian campaign and antedated the Tunisian war by over two years. At the time it bulked very large in British eyes, being the only focus of engagement on land between a British army and the enemy anywhere in the theatre of hostilities. Tactically, however, it was a very small war indeed, and, though its strategic implications were considerable, that dimension could not be developed while local British weakness was offset by Italian military incompetence, and those conditions determined its character during its six opening months.
