The Italian invasion of British Somaliland (3–19 August 1940) was part of the East African campaign (1940–1941) in which Italian, Eritrean and Somali forces entered the Somaliland Protectorate and defeated its garrison of British, Commonwealth and colonial forces supported by Somali irregulars. The Italian victory was based on mobility and speed but was hampered by the terrain, rainy weather and British resistance.
At the Battle of Tug Argan (11–15 August) Italian attacks had the advantage of artillery and the outnumbered defenders were gradually worn down and slowly outflanked, until the remaining fortified hilltops were vulnerable to capture. After the failure of a counter-attack towards the Mirgo Pass, the local commander, Major-General Reade Godwin-Austen, had too few men to retrieve the situation and to keep open an escape route at the same time and was given permission to retreat towards Berbera.
The British fought a rearguard action at Barkasan on 17 August and retreated after dark. The improvised evacuation went better than expected and the second blocking position at Nasiyeh was not needed. The rainy weather continued to slow the Italian advance and when the airstrip near Berbera was found still to be garrisoned, a prospective Italian coup de main was cancelled.
The British defeat was controversial and the beginning of a deterioration in relations between General Archibald Wavell, the theatre commander, his subordinates and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which ended in Wavell being superseded by Claude Auchinleck in July 1941. On 16 March 1941, British Empire troops had recaptured Berbera in an amphibious assault. By early April, the rest of the colony was back under British control.
Background
Africa Orientale Italiana
On 9 May 1936, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proclaimed the foundation of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, AOI), formed from the colonies of Italian Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and Ethiopia, conquered in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (3 October 1935 – 5 May 1936). On 10 June 1940, Mussolini declared war against Britain and France, making the Italian forces in Africa a threat to British supply routes along the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Egypt and the Suez Canal were obvious targets and an Italian invasion of French Somaliland (Djibouti) or British Somaliland was also feasible. Mussolini looked forward to propaganda triumphs in Sudan and British East Africa (Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda). The Italian General Staff had based its strategic calculations on an assumption that there would be no war until 1942; the Regio Esercito (Italian Royal Army) and Regia Aeronautica (Italian Royal Air Force) were not prepared for a long war, nor to occupy large tracts of Africa.
Middle East Command
The Kingdom of Egypt included Sudan, a condominium between Egypt and Britain. The British had based military forces in Egypt since 1882 but these were greatly reduced by the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which only allowed British military forces to occupy Egypt in defence of the Suez Canal. The small British and Commonwealth force garrisoned the Suez Canal and the Red Sea route, which was vital to Britain's communications with its Far Eastern and Indian Ocean territories. In mid-1939, Lieutenant-General Archibald Wavell was appointed General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of the new Middle East Command, with responsibility for the Mediterranean and Middle East. Until the Franco-Italian Armistice (Armistice of Villa Incisa), the Italian 5th Army in Tripolitania (western Libya) faced the French army in Tunisia and the Italian 10th Army in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya), confronted the British in Egypt.
The Italian Royal Army had about 215,000 men in Libya and in Egypt, the British had about 36,000 troops, with another 27,500 men training in Palestine. Wavell had about 86,000 troops at his disposal for Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran and East Africa. Faced with frontiers guarded by about eight men to the mile, Wavell concluded that a defensive strategy was the only feasible policy and intended to mount delaying actions at the main posts and hope for the best. The Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden convened a conference in Khartoum at the end of October 1940 with Emperor Haile Selassie, the South African General Jan Smuts (an advisor for the region with Winston Churchill), Wavell and the senior military commanders in East Africa, including Lieutenant-General Platt and Lieutenant-General Cunningham. An offensive strategy was decided on against Ethiopia, including the use of Arbegnoch (Amharic for Patriots), by the conference. In November, the British and Commonwealth forces gained an intelligence advantage, when the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) at Bletchley Park broke the high-grade cypher of the Royal Army in East Africa. Later in that month, the replacement cypher for the Regia Aeronautica was broken by the Combined Bureau, Middle East (CBME).
British Somaliland
The British had fought the Dervish War (Somaliland campaign 1900–1920) against the Dervish haroun and their Dervish state, to gain control over the territory. In 1910 the British garrison had been forced to retreat to the coast until the end of the First World War and only after four campaigns did Somali resistance end in 1920, after three weeks of attacks by local troops, a King's African Rifles (KAR) battalion and the Royal Air Force (RAF). The colony had an area of about 68,000 sq mi (180,000 km2) with a plain inland from the coast up to 60 mi (100 km) deep, ending at a mountain range an average of 4,000 ft (1,200 m) high.
There was little scope for agriculture and most of the 320,000 inhabitants made a living from livestock herding. Berbera, the biggest town and port, was ringed by desert and scrubland; in the cold season it had a population of about 30,000, falling to around 15,000 in the summer months. The port was a first class anchorage and was the principal entrepôt of the colony, despite having no port installations making it unsuitable for an expeditionary force, since ships had to be unloaded by lighter, a method that took ten days to empty a 3,000 gross register ton (GRT) ship. Loading and unloading was impossible during the period from July to August, when the Kharif, a strong and hot wind, blew.
French Somaliland
Brigadier-General Paul Legentilhomme, in command of British as well as French forces since the outbreak of war obstructed the enforcement of the Armistice of Villa Incisa, continued to co-operate with the British. On 27 July, the terms of the armistice pertaining to French Somaliland were discovered by the British to be the demilitarisation of the colony and free Italian access to the port and the French part of the Addis Ababa railway. When the governor, Hubert Deschamps said that he would obey instructions from the Vichy regime, Legentilhomme threatened to use force to prevent him from doing so. When the local Italian Armistice Commission tried to make contact, Legentilhomme assured Cairo that he would play for time but anticipated that the Italians would attack.
The 2nd Battalion, the Black Watch, was sent to Aden from Egypt by cruiser, ready to reinforce the French, as Legentilhomme feigned ignorance of the armistice terms. Legentilhomme also denied entry to the new Vichy French governor, General Gaëtan Germain (25 July to 7 August). On 19 July, Legentilhomme was opposed in the Governor's Council by the navy and air force commanders and to avoid bloodshed decided that those opposed to Vichy should depart. Legentilhomme had run out of time and left for Aden on 5 August, leaving Germain to sever relations with the British. Italian apprehension about the possibility of the British using the colony as a bridgehead continued; Germain was superseded by Pierre Nouailhetas as governor beginning on 7 August, who arrived from France on 2 September.
Prelude
British defence schemes
The Somaliland border was 750 mi (1,210 km) long; after the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, all but the 45 mi (72 km) border with French Somaliland was contiguous with the new Italian colony. According to the Hornby Report of 1936, the War Office intended to offer no resistance to an invasion. In 1938, the governor, Arthur Lawrence, deplored such a defeatist policy and suggested that the colony could be demilitarised, that the British could leave or that the colony could be defended. According to the British military commander, Brigadier Arthur Chater RM, a small reinforcement would give the local garrison the means to resist an invasion of the colony for twelve days, sufficient for a relief force to arrive from India, but the policy was rejected. In August 1939 the evacuation policy was revised according to two scenarios, that if the French succeeded in defending Djibouti, the British would withdraw towards them and if the French were defeated, the British would retreat into the hills and wait on events. All of the defence arrangements were based on co-operation with Legentilhomme, who would command both forces in time of war.
During the Phoney War Wavell became reluctant for British forces to come under French command, unless the withdrawal plan to Djibouti was implemented, which gave Chater more discretion, provided that he still co-operated with the French. Chater wanted to garrison Hargeisa and Burao to fight delaying actions and then retire towards the hill country. The main road into Somaliland from Djibouti was commanded by hills with six passes good enough for wheeled vehicles; both sides agreed that they must be garrisoned to deny them to the Italians and provide a base for debouching when an Allied counter-offensive began. In December 1939, the British had another change of mind, ordering that an invasion must be resisted and that Berbera must be held for as long as possible as a matter of imperial prestige. The commitments entered into with the French had led to them to go to the trouble and expense of fortifying their colony; because of dissension between Legentilhomme and Paris and within the British and French alliance, the passes at Jirreh and Dobo, parallel to the border, were left unfortified, despite permission to base defences in the British colony.
In 1940, the 631 members of the Somaliland Camel Corps (SCC) were based in five places in the colony and a small party of police worked at Berbera. The SCC had 29 motor vehicles, 122 horses and 244 camels but no heavy weapons, only old Belgian .475 in (12.1 mm) calibre, single-shot rifles, with 1.4 million bullets of dubious quality, machine-guns and anti-tank rifles. In February, the British government planned to send 1,100 reinforcements by mid-May but financial wrangling between the War Office and the Colonial Office delayed the arrival of the first infantry battalion until 15 May and the second until 12 July. The garrison of French Somaliland was asked to block the Jirreh and Dobo passes but the British strategy was to hope that French Somaliland was the more tempting target.
British preparations
After the Armistice of Villa Incisa, the end of pro-British prevarication by Legentilhomme led to Chater receiving orders to plan an evacuation if the colony became untenable. By August, the garrison consisted of the 1st Battalion Northern Rhodesia Regiment (1st NRR), the 2nd (Nyasaland) Battalion KAR, the 1st East African Light Battery (four 3.7-inch mountain guns) from Kenya, the 1st Battalion 2nd Punjab Regiment and the 3rd Battalion 15th Punjab Regiment from the Colony of Aden and the SCC, including 37 officer and NCO reinforcements from the Southern Rhodesia Regiment; on 8 August, the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch arrived. The troops were a motley collection, with different customs and culinary arrangements, no proper base or headquarters, short of artillery, transport and signalling equipment. Aircraft had to fly from Aden, while also busy with convoy patrols and air defence; only two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns of the 23rd Battery, Hong Kong and Singapore Brigade RA could be spared from Aden.
The British expected that Berbera would be the objective of an Italian invasion; the frontier with Ethiopia was too long to guard and there was no position from whence to contest the approaches to the port through Zeila near French Somaliland, thence east along the coast road or through Hargeisa or via Burao. The inland mountains were passable by wheeled and tracked vehicles only on the Hargeisa and Burao roads, Hargeisa being the more direct route through a gap at Tug Argan and the Burao road through a defile known as Sheikh Pass. Once north of the hills, the coastal plain had no feature where a small force could prevent the advance of a larger one.
Chater garrisoned Tug Argan with two battalions and the mountain artillery, one battalion to guard the other two approaches and kept one battalion in reserve. When the Black Watch arrived, it went into reserve and the 3/15th Punjab Regiment reinforced Tug Argan. The Camel Corps formed a screen in advance of the main defences to observe and delay invaders with patrols of the Somali Police Force (Illalo) an armed constabulary, usually used as a frontier police force. The RAF in Aden had 8 Squadron (Bristol Blenheim bombers plus two Free French Martin Marylands), 11, 39, 45 Squadron (Blenheim) and 203 Squadron (Blenheim IVF long-range fighters), 94 (Gloster Gladiator fighters), 223 Squadron (Vickers Wellesley). A Bristol Bombay of 216 Squadron participated and 84 Squadron ferried six Blenheim IFs to Aden to replace losses on 15 August.