The Second World War (50 page)

Casablanca yielded other decisions of importance, including the proclamation, at Roosevelt’s insistence, that the only terms the Allies would accept from Germany, Japan and Italy were those of ‘unconditional surrender’. The Sicily decision, however, was the crucial provision and one, moreover, which the Americans would find it increasingly difficult to modify as 1943 unfolded. The course of events, rather than British diplomatic ingenuity, was to be the cause of that. At the Trident conference in Washington in May 1943, the Americans arrived ‘armed to anticipate and counter every imaginable argument of the British and backed by ranks of experts whose briefcases bulged with studies and statistics’, according to General Albert Wedemeyer of the US Army War Plans Division. Wedemeyer, who had been at Casablanca, summarised the American experience there: ‘We lost our shirts . . . we came, we listened and we were conquered.’ They were determined not to lose again and would in future outdo the British at the game of preordination. Their detailed preparations ought to have won them the match at Trident, but during the course of the conference Alexander signalled from Tunis that the Anglo-American army was victorious and that its soldiers were ‘masters of North Africa’s shores’. This euphoric signal, and Churchill’s skilful over-bargaining for an extension of the Mediterranean campaign into the Balkans, persuaded the Americans to endorse the Sicilian expedition as a safer alternative. The Sicily campaign began in July, and events there determined that they should then give their agreement to the invasion of mainland Italy. Marshall and his colleagues approached the Quadrant conference, held at Quebec in August, in what he had laid down should be ‘a spirit of winning’: no further diversion from the Second Front whatsoever. However, during the course of Quadrant news arrived from Sicily of Italy’s impending offer of surrender. This first outright defeat of one of the Axis partners, and the prospect it offered of being able to establish a front on the Italian mainland close to one of Germany’s frontiers, undermined the Americans’ commitment to the purity of a Second Front strategy yet again. Eisenhower was authorised to launch the operation, sketched in at Trident in Washington, to put an Anglo-American army ashore in Italy; but it was to be limited to the south and its purpose was to divert German strength from the sector chosen for the Second Front, now codenamed Overlord.

The Quadrant decision was not quite the end of Churchill’s protracted effort to put back the landing on the north coast of France until such time as he felt sure it would succeed without grievous loss. Eisenhower’s advance up the Italian peninsula went further than Marshall intended, before troops were finally withdrawn to take part in the invasion of France via the southern route. Quadrant was, however, the last occasion on which Churchill could propose any diversion of force at all from the Second Front. The Americans had absolutely rightly set their face against Balkan adventures, since not only geography but the Wehrmacht’s own difficulties in campaigning against Tito should have dissuaded him from such notions. Nevertheless the Americans ought to have set even stricter limits on the Italian campaign, which ultimately came to serve Germany’s purpose better than that of the Allies. After Quadrant, they did quash all Churchill’s efforts to diversify the Mediterranean strategy. Thereafter it was to be Overlord and only Overlord, and Churchill could wriggle away from it no further. At Trident he had agreed to the appointment of a chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, charged to prepare the Overlord plan. At Quebec he had conceded that the Supreme Allied Commander should be American. The irony was, however, that as events and American insistence drove him ever closer to biting the bullet Britain’s teeth grew blunter. ‘The problem is’, Churchill minuted to his Chiefs of Staff on 1 November 1943, ‘no longer one of closing a gap between supply and requirements. Our manpower is now fully mobilised for the war effort. We cannot add to the total; on the contrary it is already dwindling.’ Oppressed by this sense of decline, Churchill could still not bring himself to name the date for an event he accepted could no longer be postponed. Neither Roosevelt nor even the stony-faced Marshall as yet pressed him to face the inevitable. That would be left to the implacable Stalin, whom all three were to meet at Tehran in November.

The First World War came to Africa three days after the outbreak in Europe when the German west coast colony of Togoland was invaded and swiftly occupied by British and French forces from the Gold Coast and Senegal; the Kaiser’s three other colonies, with the exception of German East Africa in which the redoubtable von Lettow-Vorbeck sustained a guerrilla resistance to the end, were brought under Allied control soon afterwards. The Second World War, by contrast, came to Africa piecemeal and with delay. For that there was good reason: one result of Versailles had been to transfer sovereignty over Germany’s former African colonies to Britain, France and South Africa by League of Nations mandate; and while Italy, which had extensive African possessions on the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, was allied to Germany, nevertheless it did not enter the war against Britain and France, both also major colonial powers within the continent, until June 1940. Although Hitler retained a colonial governor-in-waiting on his ministerial staff, he had made no move in the meantime to extend his war-making southward across the Mediterranean. Indeed, until Italy declared for him, he had no means with which to mount offensive operations into Africa, and, unless Mussolini tried but failed there, he had no cause.

Germany’s defeat of France, in which Italy played an ignominious and Johnny-come-lately part, provided Mussolini with the stimulus to reach for laurels in Africa. Pétain’s armistice with Hitler left Vichy in control of the French empire as well as the French navy and armed forces, and therefore neutralised the French forces on the fringes of Mussolini’s empire – the
Troupes spéciales du Levant
in Syria and Lebanon and the great
Armée d’Afrique
in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Further, when the armistice provoked the British into attacking and crippling the French main fleet at its moorings at Mers-el-Kebir on 3 July 1940, killing 1300 French sailors in the process, after its admirals had refused to sail it out of Pétain’s hands, the resulting bitterness ensured that the French forces would lend no support at all to their former allies. In July, therefore, Mussolini struck at the British where the Italian forces in Africa were strongest and theirs weakest. On 4 July units from the Italian garrison in Ethiopia occupied frontier towns in the Anglo-Egyptian condominium of the Sudan, on 15 July they penetrated the British colony of Kenya, and between 5 and 19 August they occupied the whole of British Somaliland on the Gulf of Aden.

Italy’s ability to move so audaciously against the East African territories of what was still the world’s greatest imperial power was determined by the otherwise uncharacteristic disparity of strength prevailing between the two in that corner of the continent. After the recent conquest of Ethiopia, still only superficially pacified, Italy maintained there and in its older colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland an army of 92,000 Italians and 250,000 native troops supported by 323 aircraft. The British, by contrast, deployed only 40,000 troops, most of them local, and 100 aircraft. Britain’s local forces included the soldierly and loyal units of the Somaliland Camel Corps, the Sudan Defence Force and the Kenya battalions of the King’s African Rifles, but they were wholly outnumbered by the enemy and outclassed in equipment. The 10,000 troops in the French enclave of Djibouti were loyal to Vichy (and would remain so until they were persuaded to come over after the North African landings in November 1942).

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 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.