The Second World War (51 page)

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.

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.

The Italian army in Libya, commanded by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, numbered some 200,000, organised in twelve divisions and based on Tripoli, at the end of the short sea route from Sicily. General Archibald Wavell, with 63,000 troops, had his main base at Alexandria, which was also that of the Mediterranean fleet, since Malta had been effectively relegated to the status of an air base in June, immediately after the collapse of France and Italy’s declaration of war. Thitherto Italy’s Libyan army had been held in check by the French Army of Africa beyond the Tunisian border; the combination of the French Toulon fleet with the British Malta fleet had also sufficed to nullify Italy’s considerable maritime strength. After 24 June, however, when Pétain signed terms with Mussolini, Italy’s six battleships suddenly became the largest capital force in the Mediterranean, held at risk by the Royal Navy’s five only because it also deployed two aircraft carriers, while Graziani’s army four times outnumbered Wavell’s.

Apparently parity at sea and incontestable numerical superiority on land prompted Mussolini unwisely to order an offensive into Egypt on 13 September 1940. Three days later and sixty miles into Egypt, Graziani halted his forces to construct a firm base. They were to remain there, building camps and forts, for the next three months. However, Mussolini had certainly misread the signs, and his assumption of the offensive had abashed the Royal Navy not at all. On 8-9 July its Force H (based on Gibraltar) and the Mediterranean fleet (based on Alexandria) had engaged the Italian battle fleet in its entirety between Sardinia and Calabria, inflicted damage on it and forced it to retire. Four months later, on 11 November, the air group of HM Carrier
Illustrious,
operating with Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s Alexandria fleet, caught the Italian battleships in the harbour of Taranto in the heel of Italy and seriously damaged four of them at their moorings. The Royal Navy’s superiority over the Italian surface fleet was established by these engagements and was to be reinforced by its destruction of three heavy cruisers in the night battle of Cape Matapan (Tainaron) on 28 March 1941 at the outset of the campaign in Greece. Thereafter, though the Italian navy intermittently succeeded in running convoys across the narrows between Sicily and Tripoli, and its light forces of motor torpedo-boats and midget submarines achieved some daring successes against the Mediterranean fleet, Mussolini’s battleships kept to port. The British Admiralty’s fear in June 1940 that it might have to abandon the Mediterranean, as it did at the nadir of its fortunes in 1796, thereafter receded. Axis airpower, punishingly deployed against the emergency convoys run to Malta and Alexandria during 1941, denied it free use but could not break its command of the inner sea.