The Battle of Cheren

On February 5, 1941 the Battle of Cheren, Eritrea began when elements of the British Indian Army under Lt. General William Platt, advancing from the Sudan, clashed with the regular and colonial Italian forces under General Nicolangelo Carnimeo. The leading British unit, “Gazelle Force” of the 4th Indian Infantry Division under Colonel Frank Messervy came to the battle later than expected due to Italian forces blowing up bridges and obstructing the roads, buying precious time for reinforcements to arrive from Addis Ababa, including the Alpini battalion of the Savoy Grenadiers. The initial clash came when a regiment of Highlanders and a Punjab regiment attacked on the left side of Dongolaas Gorge, eventually seizing Brig’s Peak. However, a counter-attack by the Savoy Grenadiers drove them back and it was only with tenacious effort that they were able to hold on to their fall-back position on Cameron Ridge. The Italian forces kept up a heavy fire and persistent attacks on the British positions, stalemating the entire British advance in that area. Italian forces repelled other attacks as the British tried to find a weak point to exploit but it was to no avail. Hard pressed and running out of ammunition, after three days of hard fighting the British had to retreat back to their starting point.

After a brief respite, another Punjab regiment (the first) attacked Brig’s Peak again, coming under heavy fire from the defending Italians. General Carnimeo had set up a deep defense that made excellent use of the terrain with its many layers of ridges. Once again, the Indian troops fought their way to the peak, pushing the Italian colonial forces back. However, by the time they reached that point, so many men had to be detailed to carry and secure supplies over the rugged terrain that few were left to defend the front line and, once again, a fierce attack by the Savoy Grenadiers reclaimed the peak and forced the Indians to retreat. As before, they fell back to what the British called Cameron Ridge and only with great difficulty managed to hold the line there against the charging Italian troops. Likewise, another attack was launched on Acqua Col, one of the areas they had been repulsed from before. The Italian soldiers defending Acqua Col endured heavy artillery fire before the Rajputs, Sikhs and other Indian troops came charging forward. It was a hard and desperate fight but the Italians would not be moved. Expected British reinforcements had to be diverted to keep the Italian forces from overrunning Cameron Ridge so that finally the attack on Acqua Col had to be abandoned.

The British had thrown everything they had at the Italians and displayed no shortage of valor but the Italian troops had thrown back each attack. General Platt finally decided to halt, reorganize his forces, wait for reinforcements and further train his troops for a more intricate plan of attack. For General Carnimeo, on the other hand, the 6th Colonial Brigade arrived to lend support as did the 11th MVSN Battalion but he did not have the seemingly endless logistical support available to the British. He could only deploy his men to best effect and make the British pay for every step forward they took. He had superiority in numbers but also much more ground to cover along with inferior weapons and equipment. As February turned to March, the British began to move, reinforced by more troops, including mobile machine gun companies and units of the Free French army. Platt planned a broad, coordinated offensive that would have to include attacking the only fortified strongpoint in the area, Fort Dologorodoc which prevented the British artillery from moving forward to support an attack Acqua Col.

On March 15, 1941 the British assault began with Platt heading again for Sanchil, Brig’s Peak and then Hog’s Back and Mount Sammana. General Lewis Heath and Brigadier Messervy were to attack the fort. The Italians were resolutely determined to resist them and, at first, the Italian army repeated their past successes. Platt drove his men forward against the high ground from Cameron Ridge, took heavy losses but gained ground. Then the Italian troops counter-attacked and drove the Indians back. The bloody cycle went on all the rest of the day and into the night with losses mounting for both sides as the Italian and Indian troops fought back and forth, taking and retaking hill after hill. Italian troops were even more successful on the left (right from the British perspective) where the assault on Ft Dologorodoc by Highland light infantry was beaten back. Indian reinforcements likewise came under withering Italian fire and were pinned down, unable to advance or retreat. All they could do was stay under what cover they could find and wait until night fell when they were finally able to fall back under cover of darkness. The stalwart Italian troops had turned the first day of Platt’s operation into a bitter defeat for the British. However, the British were nothing if not persistent.

With the rising moon giving some visibility, the British renewed their attack on Ft Dologorodoc, taking two key approach points. When the Italian troops inside counter-attacked to drive them back, a West Yorkshire regiment crept up the rocky slopes and hit the fort from the other side. Only a skeleton force of the Italian garrison remained behind, fighting a desperate and bloody hand-to-hand battle for the strongpoint. However, after a great deal of fierce but gallant combat, they were overwhelmed and the fort was taken by the British as the new day began to dawn. Nearby Italian troops launched multiple counter-attacks to retake the fort but with supplies running low and the British holding the commanding position in the clear light of day, none were successful. Meanwhile, Platt and his attacks were less successful as their repeated advances failed to dislodge the Italian troops. Day after day they came forward, were repelled or made minimal gains only to face Italian counter-attacks that often ended, like the fighting in the fort, in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Platt finally decided he would have to find a new avenue of attack if he was going to have any success.

This took some time as his reconnaissance forces were chased away by heavy fire from the Italian lines even under cover of night. Still, they eventually found a more vulnerable gap (dubbed the “Railway Bumps”) which was attacked with British and Indian troops, the mobile machine gun companies and even 12 Matilda II infantry tanks against which the Italians had no defense whatsoever. The capture of the fort also meant that British artillery could devastate the Italian lines from almost any position. The Italian troops resisted fiercely but it finally became clear that the British had every advantage and any further combat would be to no avail. General Carnimeo ordered his men to begin falling back toward Asmara. Unfortunately, units of the Savoy Grenadiers and the Bersaglieri had been fighting so tenaciously that they had been completely surrounded and with the rest of the army pulling out, they had no choice but to surrender. Nonetheless, while the Battle of Cheren was a defeat for Italy, it was an honorable one. The Italian and colonial African forces had fought with incredible tenacity, skill and heroism.

Their gallant defense earned them the battlefield respect of their British enemies with Compton Mackenzie writing about the ridiculous portrayal of Italian troops by Allied propagandists and how the Battle of Cheren proved them false said, “…except for the German parachute division in Italy and the Japanese in Burma no enemy with whom the British and Indian troops were matched put up a finer fight than those Savoia battalions at Keren. Moreover, the Colonial troops, until they cracked at the very end, fought with valour and resolution, and their staunchness was a testimony to the excellence of the Italian administration and military training in Eritrea.” It was a hard fought battle by two determined foes that could respect each other for the ability they displayed. It was a battle that should be long remembered in Italian military history and the annals of the Italian Royal Armed Forces of World War II.

The Invasion of Abyssinia Begins

It was on this day in 1935 at 5am that Italian forces under the command of General Emilio De Bono marched across the frontier into Abyssinia in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. As one of the Quadrumvirs who led the March on Rome, the seminal event in the history of the "Fascist Revolution" but also a staunch monarchist who gave his first loyalty to the King, De Bono was chosen to lead this campaign because Mussolini wanted it to showcase Fascist military might. There would be a Fascist general in charge and the Blackshirts of the MVSN would make up the bulk of the ground forces initially involved, all with the intention of showing that the new, Fascist, Italy had prevailed in Ethiopia where Crispi's Italy had failed. Since De Bono was also a hero of the Great War and known to be an Italian patriot and loyal to the King, the Duce could expect no problems in the choice from the palace.

Unfortunately, many people have taken a very critical view of General De Bono and this seems, looking at the plain facts, to be rather unjust. His invasion of Abyssinia was a success, it simply did not proceed as rapidly as Mussolini wanted. General De Bono crossed into Abyssinian territory, captured several important positions, announced the abolition of slavery (something which is seldom recognized) and even accepted the surrender of the Ethiopian Emperor's son-in-law, some of whose troops even switched to join the Italian side. General De Bono advanced from the north out of Eritrea while General Graziani advanced from the south out of Italian Somaliland. There were to move methodically until all Ethiopian resistance was crushed between them. However, Mussolini wanted a swift, stunning sort of war which is not what General De Bono had in mind at all. Remembering well the horrific casualties of World War I, De Bono intended to fight a cautious and mostly defensive war in order to conserve the lives of his soldiers while inflicting greater losses on his enemies.

The plan General De Bono had was for the Italian forces to advance into Abyssinia slowly, taking, so to speak, one step at a time. They would move forward, stop, consolidate their lines on a strong, defensive front and then when the enemy attacked, having their primary asset in their huge numbers of Ethiopian soldiers, they could be wiped out by the machine guns and supporting artillery of the Italian lines with minimal losses for themselves. In the aftermath, the lines would be carefully advanced again, another defensive position taken up and then allow the Ethiopians to smash themselves to death again an impenetrable wall of Italian fire. There was nothing wrong with this plan, it was a plan for a slow, cautious advance that would keep Italian losses to a minimum and would end in certain victory. However, Mussolini was also correct in wanting the campaign to be more swift and not just because of his own impatience. The sanctions placed on Italy by the League of Nations meant that Italy could have been economically ruined by a long war and most experts thought that it would take Italy at least two years to conquer Abyssinia if it could be conquered at all without economic collapse at home and the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government. That was a real concern so it was not without some legitimate reasons that General Emilio De Bono was, properly, awarded the rank of Marshal of Italy and then removed from his position with the regular army General Pietro Badoglio taking over to lead a much more swift and aggressive campaign.

In the end, it all worked out and Ethiopia was conquered in an astonishing seven months time with Badoglio leading the Italian troops into the Abyssinian capitol. However, just because the new strategy worked, does not mean that De Bono's plan was necessarily wrong.

Assassination Attempt in Africa

It was on this day in 1937 that Ethiopian nationalists, using hand grenades, attempting to assassinate General Rodolfo Graziani at the Viceregal Palace in Addis Ababa, sparking a wave of retaliation and general unrest.

Italian Troops Capture Hargeisa

It was on this day in 1940 that the town of Hargeisa in British Somaliland was captured by Italian forces in a combined infantry and tank assault after a three-hour artillery bombardment. This was part of a major Italian offensive in the Horn of Africa which ultimately secured the whole region for the Kingdom of Italy. Lieutenant General Carlo De Simone, commanding the center column of the offensive under the overall command of HRH the Duke of Aosta, led the Italian forces in the attack on Hargeisa which was defended by two battalions of British imperial troops from India and British East Africa as well as elements of the Somali Camel Corps. Two days earlier General De Simone had crossed the British Somaliland border from Italian East Africa (Empire of Ethiopia) with twelve battalions of Eritrean colonial troops and four MVSN battalions. Because Italian East Africa was cut off and surrounded by British territory, everyone knew that they would have to conquer British Somaliland very quickly and even then, it would be long odds to hold the region in the face of the larger counter-offensive everyone expected.

In preparing for the attack, General De Simone addressed the Bersaglieri motorcycle troops (himself being a former Bersaglieri regimental commander) saying, “Your task is to be the vanguard, an arduous and difficult work which I know you will carry out to your uttermost. Our end is to reach Berbera [referring to the British port on the coast] and reach it we will”. After the artillery shelled the town the Italian forces advanced but found that the defending British Indian and African troops had little stomach for fighting. Though some tried to put up a fight, most simply retreated and in the ensuing campaign the British imperial forces simply retreated until they reached the coast where they were picked up by the Royal Navy and taken over to the safety of the Arabian peninsula. The British government had not been very generous when it came to military spending in British Somaliland and most considered the cause all but lost as soon as the pro-Allied governor of French Somaliland (Djibouti), General Legentilhomme, was replaced by General Germain. In other areas the Italian forces occupied border outposts in British territory in the Sudan and Kenya. In fact, Italian forces waged quite a brilliant irregular warfare campaign in northern Kenya for some time but the Italian forces were hampered in taking any major offensive action due to a lack of fuel caused by being cut off from the rest of Italian imperial territory and blockaded from the coast by the Royal Navy.

Still, on this day in 1940, an opening victory was won by the Royal Italian forces in a campaign that was a complete success, setting the scene with the Italian troops marching into Hargeisa to raise the Savoy tricolor flag.