I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong
a British general took command of a UN peacekeeping force posted to Eritrea, he decided to use the battle of Keren as a training exercise for his under-employed troops. His aide-de-camp was ordered to dig out the 60-year-old military records, and groups of blue-capped UN officers were taken on tours of the battlefield to discuss how, facing the same logistical challenge but equipped with todayâs equipment, they would plan their attack.
I joined one of the tours, tagging along as the peacekeepers scrambled part way up Cameron Ridge to survey the terrain. None of us was carrying heavy loads, but we were soon stumbling and staggering, rasping for breath. The sand churned beneath our feet, making it hard to get a grip, rocks used for leverage had a nasty habit of rolling back onto you. It was only 10.00 in the morning, but it was already 41° C. The water in our plastic bottles had turned bathwater warm. Within a few minutes, I realized, to my embarrassment, that I was on the brink of fainting. Dots were dancing before my eyes. I couldnât seem to get enough oxygen into my lungs. The men in the group, I noticed with relief, looked no better: their faces had flushed an unbecoming gammon-pink.
âLook around you,â trumpeted the boisterous British general. âNo shelter anywhere from the sniper fire. Just imagine what it must have been like.â Our faces coated in a shiny slick of sweat, we gazed from the bare brown boulders on which the British had once crouched up to the unforgiving heights of Sanchil, where the Italians had sat waiting with their machine guns. âHorrid terrain to fight in,â muttered the general. âHorrid.â
Few of the soldiers mustering in Happy Valley had any real idea of the ordeal awaiting them. Their advance across Eritrea had gone swimmingly up until that point, with victory tumbling upon victory and few casualties suffered on the way. âWe were very confident. Morale was grand,â recalled Patrick Winchester, an artillery officer with the 4th Indian Division, just 21 at the time. âWeâd been up in the Western Desert, which was the first good thing to happen in the war. We thought âWeâll go and sort them out over there.ââ7
Such optimism was compounded by the low regard in which the Italians were held as fighting men. The sight of thousands of Italian prisoners-of-war straggling along in dejected columns had registered on the British troops gathering in Happy Valley. Your average Itie, it was felt, was essentially a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky sort, who packed up fairly easily, showing nothing approaching the steely focus of the German. Italian equipment was lightweight and insubstantial because, in his rush to arm a ballooning military, Mussolini had cut corners and gone for the cheapest options. Often it lay unused at the depot, because the munitions from Rome did not match up with hardware on the battlefield. If the Italians nominally boasted 250,000 men in eastern Africa, Eritrean and Ethiopian ascaris accounted for 75 per cent of these forces, and their loyalty to their masters â who were only paying their wages spasmodically â was shaky. What was more, the Italians, cut off in the Horn, would inevitably face tremendous problems of resupply once they came under pressure. In trying to protect an African empire stretching across 1 million square miles, Italian forces were dangerously over-extended.
What the British troops initially failed to appreciate, however, was that those facing them were no ordinary Italian troops. The regiments and battalions sent to fight in Keren â the Savoia Grenadiers, the Bersaglieri and the Alpini â were the best Italy could muster. The moment they crossed the border with Sudan and stepped onto Eritrean soil, these men were fighting on what they considered home turf, defending Italyâs oldest colony from a foreign invader. In the case of the Alpini, they had grown up in a northern version of the mountainous terrain now confronting them. âWhat are those goats running up there for?â a British colonel asked one of his officers on arrival in Happy Valley, spotting movement on the heights. âThose are not goats, sir,â was the ominous reply. âThey are Alpini.â8
The Italians had the confidence that comes with knowing you enjoy a nearly impregnable position. They held the high ground. The slopes were so rocky that the British could never dig trenches, sheltering instead behind sangars, piles of rocks that provided little protection against a direct hit. What was more, however cheap Italian hardware might be, British equipment â much of which dated back to the First World War â was ill-suited to Keren. The lumbering 25-pound guns were too cumbersome to be taken up the slopes and their long, low trajectories were most effective on flat terrain. Used in mountains, the shells either screamed harmlessly over the heads of Italians crouched on the far sides of the ridges or clipped the tops of the crests on which British troops moved, subjecting soldiers to terrifying âfriendlyâ fire. âTo be shot up the back passage by your own guns when your rickety breast work is designed to give you protection from the front creates a paralysing terror,â remarked Peter Cochrane, who served with the Cameron Highlanders.9 In contrast, the nimble Italians had pack guns that could be moved about on the backs of mules, small red grenades which were simply dropped onto advancing troops and mortars which lobbed their missiles high in the air and neatly onto British positions.
The terrain in itself was challenge enough, but there was also the climate to contend with. On the plains, temperatures rose so high that convoys would sometimes grind to a halt within minutes of departure; radiators boiling, fit young soldiers keeling over with sunstroke. Today, the UN issues its forces in Eritrea with four and a half litres of drinking water a day. The soldiers at Keren were expected to march, run and fight on a pint a day, dysentery or no dysentery. No one wanted to waste a precious drop on washing, so teeth grew black, faces so caked with dirt soldiers often struggled to recognize one another. Rations were monotonous: dried biscuits and bully beef served in metal tins which became too hot to hold and whose instruction labels â âchill before servingâ â were a source of bleak amusement. In other campaigns, British forces supplemented their diet with fruits and vegetables collected on the way. Here, with the exception of the occasional guinea fowl, the landscape had almost nothing to offer. The result was a low-vitamin diet that undermined the bodyâs immune system. Scratch your arm on a thorn tree and within a few days it would go septic. Then the âdesert soreâ would spread until much of the limb was a suppurating mass of pus requiring hospital treatment. The baggy shorts and kilts worn by the troops were a menace, the soldiers soon concluded: in daytime they failed to protect the legs from sun and scratches, at night the men shuddered with cold on the hillsides.
This was not to be a sophisticated campaign. With mechanized transport ruled out by the gradient, fighting often took on an almost medieval directness. When the big guns fell silent, the battle of Keren was reduced to a low-tech war in which the readiness to emerge from cover, stagger up a mountain slope and simply bludgeon a way through mattered far more than weaponry. When Italian positions were overrun, it was a question of hand-to-hand fighting, with few prisoners taken and killing done by bayonet. At one stage, an Indian brigade actually made itself shields of corrugated iron. Held over the head in true storming-the-ramparts tradition, they proved surprisingly effective in warding off the pepperpot grenades raining down from above.
Three days after the first assault on Sanchil and Brigâs Peak had failed, leaving only Cameron Ridge in British hands, Platt ordered an outflanking attempt to be made at Acqua Col, the mountain pass over which the Sphinx held watch. But commanders had only a vague grasp of how the land lay and the Rajputana Rifles were obliged to grope their way forward in the dark. The Italians, enjoying sweeping views, realized what the British were attempting well ahead of time and prepared a devastating response. After four days of fighting, both sides pulled back, exhausted.
Platt was coming under enormous pressure to wrap the Keren campaign up. In London, Winston Churchill was desperate to move British forces back to the Western Desert, to combat the growing menace posed by Rommelâs Afrika Korps. The rains were due to start in a few weeksâ time â another good reason to get Keren over with. But the first two attempts had shown the town could neither be taken by surprise nor from the side. Frontal assault, the great taboo of military strategists, was going to be the only way in. British forces would have to take the mountain range the hard way: feature by individual feature. It was