East Africa Campaign: Liberation of Italian East Africa
Britain destroyed the Italian empire in East Africa in about four months in 1941, and it is the first Allied victory of the war. Italy had taken Ethiopia in 1936 and held it alongside Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, with some 250,000 troops, most of them locally recruited askari. When Italy entered the war in June 1940 those forces overran British Somaliland and pushed into Sudan and Kenya, and were then cut off from resupply entirely. Wavell attacked from two directions in January 1941: Platt from Sudan into Eritrea and Cunningham from Kenya into Somaliland, the latter covering 1,700 miles in eight weeks. The hard fighting was at Keren, where Italian and Eritrean troops held mountain positions above the road for fifty-three days and inflicted heavy casualties before the pass was forced. Meanwhile Gideon Force — a few hundred men under Orde Wingate with Ethiopian irregulars — escorted Haile Selassie back into his own country from Sudan, and he re-entered Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941, five years to the day after the Italians had taken it. The last organised Italian force surrendered at Gondar in November. The campaign is remembered less than it deserves. It restored a member state of the League of Nations that the League had failed to protect, it freed the Red Sea route so that American shipping could legally supply Egypt, and it released troops for Greece and the desert. It was also the first restoration of a country conquered by the Axis, and Haile Selassie spent the rest of the war insisting that Ethiopia was an ally rather than a liberated colony, which the British had to be argued into. He ruled until 1974.
- Year: 1940 CE
- Category: Military
