Eritrea 1941

by A.J. Barker, William Platt (Contributor)

Genres: World War II, Military History, Eastern Africa

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Barker served as a regular infantry officer in the British Army from 1936 to 1958. Since leaving the Army he has written a number of books on military history, as well as numerous technical articles dealing with weapons, tactics and equipment.

Reviews

[Paul W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eritrea sits on what used to be the Erythræn Sea, now known as the Red Sea, bordering Ethiopia and Sudan. Although located in the tropics it has mountains up to 3000 metres (9800 feet) and arid lowlands. It was a country of dust storms, rains and floods; of flies, mosquitoes and fever.
It’s position on the Red Sea, the only supply line to Allied forces in Egypt given the Italian’s control of the Mediterranean, meant it was of vital strategic importance in WW2.
For a few months in 1941 it saw some of the heaviest fighting in Italian East Africa. One officer who fought there write that “Nothing I met in nine months as a company commander in N.W. Europe compared with it. Physically, by World War Two standards, it was sheer hell.” The commanding officer of the allied forces, General Platt noted that “Few battles have been fought under fouller conditions.” In this book, Barker tells the story of those who fought here.
Although often seen as a campaign by the British against the Italians, it was in fact fought primarily by Eritreans and Ethiopians supported by some Italians, against an Allied force made up primarily of Indians and Pakistanis, supported by Sudanese, Somalis, Ghanaians, Senegalese, Moroccans, Rhodesians and South Africans as well as some British and French troops.
The story starts in June 1940, with Mussolini declaring war on behalf of an unprepared Italy. Sudan, a country as large as Germany, stood waiting to be conquered as part of a strategic push from Libya and Italian East Africa on the Allied forces in Egypt.
To defend Sudan’s 1200 mile frontier with Italian East Africa the Allies had a force which comprised just 7500 men, seven obsolete biplane bombers and no tanks or artillery. As Barker notes, ‘The Sudan was as good as lost.’ ‘Outnumbered in men and machine as he was, it seems astounding now that Platt’s territory was not overrun within a few weeks of war being declared.’ “The moment was never more opportune; the Italians had the resources and the opposition was negligible.’
Mussolini had declared on 10 June that “The hour marked out by destiny is sounding in the sky of our country. This is the hour of irrevocable decisions.” But there were no decisions, no actions. Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, ‘could have ranged over the whole of the Sudan and bombed targets at will [but] did so little to exploit its superiority.’ The Italian General Staff had no plans for the sort of war which quickly developed.
Instead, in August 1940 the Italians invaded British Somaliland. After just ten days, the British had withdrawn, defeated by the Italians, abandoning a ‘considerable amount of equipment’ which was ‘subsequently put to use by the Italians.’ Importantly, this campaign also started the rift between Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, and Churchill, when in response to Churchill’s complaints that the allied troops should have fought to the end, admonished Churchill that “a big butcher’s bill is not necessarily evidence of good tactics, rather the reverse.’
November 1940 saw the launch of ‘the first British [sic Allied] offensive of the Second World War’ as ‘a single brigade group supported by a few old aeroplanes’ attacked the Axis forces which had occupied Gallabat in Sudan.
By December 1940, Churchill’s admonitions to Wavell were seemingly panicked and certainly not helpful: “Let first thoughts be for Greece”, “Rhodes should be regarded as of first importance”, “Treat the air defence of Malta as priority”, “Liquidate Italian East Africa”, “Capture Eritrea quickly”, “Follow up the successes in Libya”, “Be ready to release ten squadrons of aircraft to Turkey”. It was at this time that Wavell decided that securing his supply line to Egypt was actually his highest priority. However Wavell knew that the primary force in East Africa, the 5th Indian Division, ‘was not enough to ensure success’. The problem was there ‘were no uncommitted formations, naval, army or air force in the whole Middle East at that time.’ Despite the unexpected success of O’Conner’s ‘five day raid’ on Italian positions in Egypt and the as yet unseen promise it held of defeating Italian and Axis forces in Libya, withdrawing troops from the Western Desert was Wavell’s only option. Faced with this Wavell decided to transfer the 4th Indian Division from Egypt to the Sudan.
By January 1941 the forces had assembled but it was no sure thing – the Axis and Allied forces ‘seemed to be equally matched.’ With the Axis forces having ‘slipped out’ of Kassala on the Eritrea-Sudan border, the first battles occurred in late January at Agordat and Barentu in the hills in central Eritrea. These battles gave a foretaste of the desperate fighting to come. The lack of transport meant Allied troops were marching towards the front. In the rugged country of Eritrea the Italian mountain guns were superior to the British 25-pounders, and Axis mule transport was superior to what mechanised transport the Allies did have. But by 31 January, after ‘bitter hand to hand fighting’ and fierce counter-attacks by the Axis, Agordat had fallen and the Axis withdrew from Barentu. The Italians had squandered their air superiority and ineffectively used the terrain, failing to adequately defend the mountain roadblocks they had established.
As they withdrew, the Italians mined ‘Ponte Mussolini’, the bridge over the Baraka river on the road from Agordat to Keren. On 1 February, after ‘eight hours of gruelling hard work in the heat of the day’ the Allies cleared the mines and repaired the bridge. But these few hours were crucial. They were ultimately to cause a ‘delay of over seven weeks.’
That set the scene for the main event – the battle for Keren. Located in the middle of Eritrea, Keren sits at an altitude of 1390 metres (4500 feet) surrounded by the sheer cliffs of razor-edged ridges with numerous highly defensible steep rugged mountain peaks guarding the entrance; ‘a high, solid wall which stretches without a break as far as the eye can see…’. The only way through this formidable and forbidding barrier from the west was the narrow Dongolaas Gorge.
Not surprisingly General Platt adopted a cautious approach to engaging ‘a vastly superior force well entrenched in positions which favoured the defence.’ Before the Allied offensive on Keren the British ‘ruthlessly weeded out’ leaders so that by the time of the battle of Keren ‘many of the original commanding officers had been replaced by younger men’.
However the Italians had not used the first six months of the war to enhance the defences of Keren. ‘There were no permanent fortifications. ‘Fort’ Dologorodoc was but a relic of the past; no obstacles had been prepared; no defensive plan was ready; no boundaries or offensive localities fixed’. With the withdrawal to Keren bordering ‘on a state of chaos’, the Axis forces abandoned much of their heavy equipment including thirty field guns. However twenty-four hours after Generale Nicolangelo Carnimeo’s arrival the situation at Keren had undergone a radical change.
What followed was two months of bitter fighting. Time and again Allied attacks were beaten back, or ground won was ceded to determined Axis counter-attacks. As the battle raged on ‘the sun beat down on bare rocks, which reflected and retained heat but afforded no shade; the need for water became more and more acute’.
As the corpses mounted from the battle and faeces piled up because latrines were impractical in the stony ground, sanitary conditions deteriorated. Millions of flies rose at dawn and buzzed around the dead; the stench was nauseating.
By the middle of February the first phase of the battle for Keren concluded. The troops of both the 4th and 5th Indian divisions ‘had been almost constantly in action for four weeks [and] were suffering sadly from lack of sleep and the conditions under which they had been living’. They were ‘exhausted by efforts which had achieved so little’ as a result of ‘insufficient material’ and ‘too few troops’ to deal with ‘difficult’ terrain and a ‘tenacious’ enemy. Barker describes the Keren battlefield as ‘a miniature Passchendale, with heat substituting for mud.’
The key challenge for the Allies was logistics: They had to maintain 70,000 troops operating on 8 fronts, across a frontier of 1200 miles, in primitive country. The Allied troops demanded five different types of rations—British, Indian, Sudanese, French and Senegalese—to cater to ‘different races, different nationalities and different religions’. The ‘crippling shortage of transport in the Sudan’ limited their ability to build up supplies in the forward area to mount a large-scale offensive from. Reinforcements and supplies needed to be taken to the front on foot. At one gap on the climb to Cameron Ridge covered by an Italian machine-gun the men would pause before dashing across one by one’ —‘Death Run’.
Because of these logistical factors, it had been estimated that preparations for a renewal of the attack would not be completed until 21 March. So for the next five weeks, the Allies focused on training hard in mountain warfare techniques. Churchill, in what was becoming a typical display of ignorance, sent ‘a reproachful telegram’ to Wavell suggesting that ‘those responsible for directing the war in the Middle East were not acting fast enough.’
The Italians drew the wrong conclusion from their defensive victory. The Italian High Command ‘assumed that the British had returned to the kind of defensive posture that had been displayed before Gallabat’ and rejected Genearle Carnimeo’s pleas for reinforcements. Despite this Carnimeo ‘announced a ‘battle of barbed wire’ with troops ‘set to work to dig in and improve the field defences; barbed wire entanglements were thrown up round almost the whole perimeter so as to link up individual positions and reduce the danger of infiltration.’
By the time of the second phase of the battle of Keren the Italians and their allies were defending a 60 kilometre (36 mile) perimeter of ‘mutually self-supporting’ positions. Their aggressive defence had forced the Allied artillery to new positions from which they were less effectively able to shell the Axis. After receiving reinforcements in early March the Axis garrison was ‘well entrenched in as formidable positions as had ever faced the British Army; what is more, the indications were that they were determined to hold it.’
General Wavell flew down to oversee the second phase of the battle. Platt explained his plan for a frontal assault on the peaks guarding the entrance to the Dongolaas Gorge noting ‘there seemed to be no alternative to a frontal attack.’ When Wavell asked “What will you do if it doesn’t come off, William?” Platt responded “I’m damned if I know, sir”.
The assault, brought forward a week, started on the night of 14/15 March 1941. The next day was ‘hot and sultry’ as a thunderstorm ‘hung over the battlefield’. The troops ‘sweltered and broiled’ in the heat. Platt’s plan, based primarily on ‘wishful thinking’, quickly went awry. Despite the initial phase of the attack not meeting its objectives, Platt persisted, launching the second phase—the attack on Mt Dologorodoc—which required the troops attacking Dologorodoc to cross an area laced with a deadly cross-fire. Not surprisingly, the attack stalled and the troops were pinned to the ground on the lower slopes of Dologorodoc—in blistering heat under the full glare of the sun—waiting for dusk to fall.
The 5th Indian Division commander, Heath, quickly devised a revised plan that afternoon, but it too got off to a bad start. The Axis defence was resolute. The attacking Allied troops were shelled as they formed up and machine-gunned as they approached their objective. They attacked up steep slopes, exhausted by the climb, subjected constantly to mortar, machine-gun and grenade attacks, and at times friendly fire from British artillery, before encountering the Axis barbed-wire obstacles where ‘an intense small arms barrage prevented them getting any farther.’
When, after four attempts, the troops of 3/5 Mahrattas did manage to capture the ‘Pinnacle’, they were beaten back by a determined counter-attack by the Italians. Sergeant Basso of the defending Savoia Grenadier proclaimed “whilst the Carabinieri are here they shall not pass!”
Dejectedly the British concluded that ‘this attack was again a failure’ and ‘had attained absolutely nothing’. The ‘mangled battalions’ disengaged as companies were reduced to platoon strength. In one unit, the commanding officer had been killed and every British officer had been wounded. ‘As the days passed a sickly stench and hordes of sleek, black flies hung with ever-increasing intensity over the region.’
A new plan, the fourth, was devised– an attack straight down the middle of the gorge with troops advancing on either side, avoiding the high ground. This broke the cardinal lesson from the N.W. Frontier of India: “Always go for the High Ground’. However after three failed attempts, Wavell reassured Platt “I am sure you are doing right. You have got to fight for the road. There is no other way.” For 33 hours eighty Indian sappers and miners worked in five-hour shifts to clear the roadblock in Dongolass gorge constantly ‘harassed by shells and mortar fire’. By the afternoon of 26 March the roadblock was cleared. Supported by troops attacking Keren from the north having come down from the Red Sea, this fourth attempt was successful. Despite determined counter-attacks from the last of the Axis reserves, the Allied force was finally able to clear the way through to Keren. The Axis troops in the hills withdrew and ‘once again silence descended on the grim wilderness of stones which is Keren.’
Barker concludes that ‘Keren was the supreme Italian effort and the performance of Carnimeo’s troops there has probably never been surpassed in Italian military history.’
For the Allied troops, ‘nothing was worse than Keren: not the battlefields of Italy, Burma, North-West Europe: scorching days, the billowing clouds of flies, the consistent monotony of hard rations, a shortage of water…and the all-pervading, sickening smell of putrefaction and decay. The dead fell or were pushed into the ravines between the positions, where they lay and rotted. It was impossible to bury them or even remove them, and on these corpses and human excrement the flies live and bred happily, so that as time passed conditions deteriorated further and disease flourished.’
Baxter’s tale of the battle for Eritrea, written in 1966, is well told, informative and balanced, eschewing the jingoism that seems to have afflicted some of today’s authors. It captures the story of individual people, and brings home the awful conditions, for both sides, in which this campaign was fought. In the end ‘the victories at Agordat, Barentu, Keren, Massawa and Amba Alagi were all gained by the same handful of men out-numbered time after time.’

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly evokes a rarely highlighted campaign and places the actions in the context of the wider war and political climate of early World War II.
The brutal conditions endured by the predominantly Indian soldiers in the attempts to take Keren are deserving of wider acknowledgment.