The First to Be Freed: British Military Administration in Eritrea and Somalia, 1941-1943

by K. C. Gandar Dower

Published by HMSO in January 1944

Early in 1941, when the army of General Platt was fighting its way up the precipices of Keren and the army of General Cunningham was racing across Somalia's desolate flats, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland were headline news. Now the war has rolled many thousands of miles away, and "nothing much has been happening there since then." Yet all the while, in these remote lands, events were taking place which gained greatly in significance as the Allied armies took North Africa and swept into Europe. For British administrators in Eritrea and Somalia were learning lessons which should stand in good stead on the wider, more brightly lit European stage. The knowledge gathered and the methods followed in these distant desert colonies are not, of course, all applicable to European problems. But here at least in Italian East Africa, British administration had its first recent experience of occupied enemy territory, and occupied enemy territory its first recent experience of British administration.

In this treatise we are not concerned with Ethiopia, for Ethiopia was never an occupied enemy territory in the true sense of the term. As soon as conditions permitted, in accordance with Mr. Eden's statement of February 1941, the Emperor Haile Selassie returned not only to his throne but to his power. Britain had redeemed the first of her many pledges to free the conquered and to cast down the proud. This treatise therefore describes only the two and a half years' work of the administration in Eritrea and Somalia, two of the world's less promising deserts which Mussolini had decreed should blossom with at least an imported rose.

The eastern lowlands of Eritrea stretch for five hundred miles or so down the western shore of the Red Sea from the Sudan in latitude 18 degrees north to 12 degrees north and the French Somaliland border. This coastal plain consists of a narrow strip of featureless, boulder-strewn scrub, never more than fifty miles wide, railless, roadless, waterless and, for the most part, port-less too.

Far to the south Assab sweats in its solitary shimmer, isolated from the rest of the colony. Behind Assab are the salt pans of the Danakil desert, 300 feet below the level of the sea. But, if the war takes you to Eritrea, you will see nothing of Assab. You will land at the unattractively impressive port of Massawa, amid the humidity and the prickly heat of what is said to be one of the hottest towns on earth. If you are able, you will move on forthwith in one of the administration's cars. After driving awhile through thorn trees and crumbling barrenness, you find yourself climbing the towering wall that has loomed at you dimly out of the haze of heat.

Immediately you are confronted with Italian engineering at its best. The hills give place to mountains, and the mountains to greater mountains. Up them, always at an easy gradient, the road winds inevitably, majestically on. Every now and again you catch glimpses of the mountain railway or the dizzy stretches of the aerial ropeway that are likewise breasting this tremendous precipice. At more than one place you can stop your car and look down on a scenic-railway constructor's dream. The view is full of drops and stretches of track that vanish round corners or into the black blobs of tunnel mouths, minute and far below. And if the brown-gray-red of the landscape is temporarily tinted green by Eritrea's short rainy season, you reflect that deserts, if they are vertical enough, can be very beautiful.

Suddenly, without warning, you find that these mountains have a top. Before you know it, you are trundling through Asmara, wondering how this European city of broad boulevards, super cinemas, super Fascist buildings, cafés, shops, two-way streets, and a first-class hotel ever came to get there. This is the partly cultivated and densely populated high plateau, the 8,000-foot altipiano, on the mountain backbone that stretches away right into Ethiopia, and the only region of Eritrea high or healthy or cool enough for white settlement. This altipiano is of no tremendous width; if you drive a further sixty miles to the pretty little unwarlike town of Keren, you will have already dropped a considerable height, and you have yet to cascade down the 2,000 feet of semi-precipice up which General Platt's troops so miraculously fought their way. Down at the bottom you are again in Africa. The people are the shock-headed Beni Amer, the streams are bordered by thick fringes of dum-palms, and most of the year have so little water in them that they justify the saying that "if you fall into a river in Africa, you get out and dust yourself."

And so you reach Agordat, with its white glare and its arched government buildings, and its settlement of West Africans stranded on the course of their pilgrimage to Mecca, and beyond that the camel country and the steadily growing heat, till you come at last to Tessenei and the borders of the Sudan. By then your memory of Eritrea is a jumble of heat and camels and goats and engineering, spectacular bridges and frizzed hedgehogs of black hair, the ruined forts of Dologorodoc, great scrub-covered mountains, piled, tumbled boulders, and granite rocks. Asmara, with its cinemas and quick-trotting pony carts, has receded into the improbable world from which it sprang. And even now you have not seen the most Walt Disney country of all that stretches its fantastic hundreds of square miles southward into Ethiopia. "Magnificent," you say, if you have a taste for grandeur rather than beauty. If you are merely economically, agriculturally or industrially minded, you murmur, "What a hole."

Somalia, like Eritrea, is a desert, but of a more normal kind. Eritrea is small, spectacular, and vertical. Somalia is vast, dreary and flat. Of all its 274,000 square miles, only in certain small portions of the Southeastern Province can it be called productive. For the rest, it is a featureless expanse of nothing in particular. There is not a single farm in the thousands of square miles of Mudug Province which, in the words of one Political Officer who had cause to know it well, is "a worthless desert of sand and low scrub which does not grow to the height of more than about three feet. In general the view of any part of it, as from the bridge of a ship at sea, is perfectly flat, a featureless plain with an equidistant horizon in all directions. Great numbers of stock subsist on the scrub, and on the stock subsist the people, their diet being confined to milk and meat." The Northwest Province is much the same, save that here the ground rises slowly to the Ethiopian border, while the remote red mountains of the Northeastern Province stretch interminably to the lighthouse of Gardafui. Nature has combined with Somali grazing practice to render desolate this perhaps once-watered land. Apart from the wandering tribesmen, no one lives there now save a handful of political and gendarmerie officers, whose duty it is to keep order. These men are practically cut off from their fellows, for Dante, for instance, lies far from Mogadishu at the end of 1,200 miles of boulder-strewn roads, covered twelve inches deep in friable dust in the dry weather and impassable during the rains.

Of Somalia's four main rivers, only the Juba flows all the year round or contrives to find the sea. The Webi Shebeli, after a promising start, loses its sense of purpose, runs parallel to the coastal dunes for the last 150 miles of its curious course, and just fails to reach either the Indian Ocean or the Juba. It is along these rivers that the only cultivable part of Somalia lies, with the exception of the Iscia Baidoa area, a country of many natural springs and the center of native millet production.

For the rest Somalia is a land of distances and heat, wells and camels and gathering desiccation, of interest only to the policeman and the administrator. No one, however much of an eye he has for grandeur, will say "magnificent" and anyone industrially minded will still say, "What a hole."

The Italians established themselves in Eritrea in the second half of the nineteenth century. The railway, begun in 1898, topped its precipice only after thirteen years of effort, but years earlier the name of Asmara, in those days the sensible little highland capital of an unpretentious colony, was appearing on maps of Africa that still knew no Nairobi. Somalia, originally part of the Empire of the Sultan of Zanzibar, also dates from the end of the century, when the Italians landed on the beach at Mogadishu, just below the point where the club now stands. Here, and on the Webi Shebeli plantations, and later on the Juba river, which was ceded to Italy after the last war, 250 colonists lived for many years quiet, unpolitical, unostentatious lives.

It was not until 1930 drew near that expansion fever came over these two deserts. About that time, Mussolini decided to build them up as the twin bases for a pincer attack on Ethiopia. From that moment their economy went crazy, and their history during the next five years makes some of the strangest reading of our time. By 1940, both Eritrea and Somalia were suffering from that political and economic over-development which rendered their collapse inevitable under the stress of war. Then came the blockade, the exposure of inefficiency and corruption, the wandering thousands of armed and lawless banda, the looting and the helplessness; and finally the arrival of the British to face all the problems of reorganization, the solutions of which were very far from clear.

Fortunately, however grave the problems, the general principles along which their solution must be sought were precise and free from doubt. They were not novel or devised in a hurry to meet the situation; they formed part of public international law, founded upon conventions to which all the belligerents had set their seals. That these principles had from the first been disregarded by the Germans in Poland, Norway, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and France could be no excuse for similar behavior. It was a duty to administer the occupied territories at as little cost to the British war effort as might be; and it was a duty to maintain in them as much of the Italian way of life as was compatible with the interests of the Eritreans and Somalis and with Allied conceptions of decency and justice. The story of how this was attempted and carried out is the theme of the following chapters.

Every newspaper reader is familiar with the spectacular history of the German-occupied territories, the massacres and the violent resistance, the dead-weight of fear under which alike the subject peoples and the German garrisons live. It is perhaps to the credit of the British administration in Eritrea and Somalia that this work is lacking in melodramatic adventure or blood-curdling events.

The Size of the Problem

The British Military Administration, then called the Occupied Enemy Territories Administration, came into being early in 1941, and it came into being in a hurry. If Britain had been Germany, doubtless a body of men would have been training for this particular task ever since 1935, but Britain is not Germany. Moreover, there was another excellent reason why steps had not been taken earlier. No one familiar with the military situation in East Africa at the end of 1940 could have dreamed that the fall of this part of the Italian Empire would come about so swiftly. Even in January 1941, when the state of Italian morale was becoming apparent, General Cunningham believed that he could do no more by May than clear Kenya's Northern Frontier Province and capture Kismayu. Instead, so complete was the Fascist collapse that by February almost all Somalia was in our hands; by the first week in April General Cunningham was in Addis Ababa and General Platt was in Asmara.

"Within five months of my assumption of duty," the Chief Political Officer wrote of the new responsibilities both in Eritrea and Somalia, and in Ethiopia, "administrations had to be established for a territory about 720,000 square miles in extent, containing 119,000 European civilians and about 12,000,000 Africans. At no time was there more than a handful of trained staff available for the purpose, particularly for administrative, legal, financial and political duties, and even by the end of June 1941 the total number of officers employed under me, in occupied enemy territories and at my headquarters, amounted only to 268, which is almost the exact strength of the European Italian staff of the post office at Asmara."

Yet the way in which this organization, founded hurriedly and late and collected under the gravest difficulties, tackled its problems makes one of the most remarkable tales of the war. Men from the neighboring African dependencies of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and the Sudan, some from as far afield as Rhodesia, Egypt and Palestine, some with previous administrative or specialized experience and some without, many of them unable to speak more than a few words of Italian, let alone Somali, Tigrinya or Amharic, but all of them alike in their adaptability, plunged cheerfully into the seas of chaos before them. In a few months they had rescued Eritrea and Somalia from complete totalitarian collapse, and were running them with smoothness and efficiency. And they were doing so in the middle of a war in lands through which war had passed, populated not only by Africans but also by an allegedly hostile European race.

The handful of administrators who entered these territories found themselves faced with problems less colossal, but no less difficult, than those likely to be met in Europe. They had on their hands two over-capitalized bankrupt semi-deserts, which had never been self-supporting and which had never been intended to be self-supporting. These territories had developed no industries and little agriculture, their imports for years had greatly exceeded exports, they had been maintained hitherto only by enormous, grants-in-aid from Italy. Their native populations consisted chiefly of Somalis and Eritreans, of which the former had earned a well-deserved reputation for turbulence, while the latter had recently developed a marked disrespect for the Italians; and both had at their disposal quantities of rifles, hand grenades, ammunition and machine guns beyond their wildest dreams.

The Italians also were of a difficult type. Although, particularly in Eritrea, there were intelligent and able men among them, there were large numbers of government officials for whom nominal jobs had been ingeniously created, unwanted men who had left Italy for the good of their political health, and Fascists who had left Italy to line their pockets. This surplus European population was concentrated in Eritrea, mostly in Asmara, that remarkable levitated white elephant, which Fascist grandiosity and engineering skill had conjured into existence at 7,800 feet, in the midst of a country that lacked the means to support it. In this strange city lived 45,000 Italians, who could not obtain enough fresh milk for their small children and imported their vegetables from Rome, and 100,000 natives, largely crowded into latrine-less native quarters, which lacked enough water even for their unambitious needs.

To quote from official reports, at Massawa, at Asmara and elsewhere, the Italians had "established factories and engineering shops… There is an impressive transport equipment, there are airfields, aircraft engineering shops, and electric light and power. But there is nothing for which all these facilities can be used except to supply the needs of an army, campaigning southwards against Ethiopia. The elimination of that army brought to an end the only purpose of the greater part of the organization and equipment of the Italian colony, with the resultant problems of unemployment, supply and subsidy which have caused us and are continuing to cause us the gravest difficulties."

In Somalia, too, the conditions found were similar in the main, though different in detail. True, Mogadishu had never suffered from the elephantiasis that had overtaken Asmara. True, the Italian population of the colony was only one-tenth of that of Eritrea; but they were more violently Fascist, incorrigibly corrupt, and cordially hated by the Somali, who is difficult to deal with even at his friendliest. Here in Somalia there was some agricultural development, but the crops grown had always been uneconomic and were practically useless save for export to protected monopolistic markets. In any case, production had broken down, for the labor had run away, and the farmers seemed unwilling to help either themselves or each other. Here, too, to a greater extent than in Eritrea, the natives had armed themselves with sufficient weapons to give vent to their love of tribal feuds and their hatred of the Italians, or, if they felt so minded, to start a Jehad under a new Mad Mullah. Neither in Eritrea nor Somalia did circumstances seem propitious for a quickly collected, under-staffed, largely inexperienced and somewhat experimental scratch administration.

The Pioneers Move In

On 19 January 1941, having been appointed Chief Political Officer, Major-General Sir Philip E. Mitchell arrived in Cairo to begin his work. He was at that date a general without an army; his command consisted of precisely one staff officer. The first Deputy Chief Political Officer (DCPO) for Eritrea was appointed a week later, on 26 January, while the army was advancing towards Keren. On 9 February he crossed the frontier and next day set up his headquarters at Agordat. He had with him at this stage only one officer, the secretary to the Administration, and twelve native policemen borrowed from Khartoum.

Fortunately, the situation was not complex. There was no Italian population to help or hinder, and the tribes had a structure similar to that of their relatives in the Sudan. Problems mostly centered around the mysteries of the lira and piastre, the restarting of trade despite these mysteries, the question of what to do with the Tessenei cotton crop, and of getting in supplies. For these matters he was, at this stage, directly responsible to the General Officer Commanding, Lieutenant-General Sir William Platt. The entry into Asmara was a very different business. So far the only Italian civilian encountered had been a 74-year-old, bankrupt ex-contractor, who had stayed behind at Tessenei. But now the Administration was confronted with an Italian population of 40,000 or 50,000, with the entire governmental and municipal staffs from which not one clerk was missing, and with rows of ornate and armed Italian police, ten to every British soldier.

The first Deputy Chief Political Officer for Somalia was appointed on 11 February 1941, while the armies were tearing their way through Jubaland. Four days later he flew to Kismayu, the little Indian Ocean port. It had been captured only the day before. He found everything in chaos. The Italians had fled before the British came, sanitary services had broken down, and the natives had spent two days in an ecstasy of looting. He appointed a Senior Political Officer who had previous experience of Somalis in Kenya's Northern Frontier Province, and then returned to Nairobi to organize. Almost before he got there, Mogadishu had fallen and the army was racing for the Ethiopian border. Vast new tracts of country were conquered from day to day, and were duly handed over to the Administration. The DCPO returned forthwith with such assistants as he was able immediately to muster. A few of these were flown direct to Mogadishu but the main party of sixteen British officers, three British other ranks and twenty-nine motor vehicles, left Nairobi by road on 7 March and after a thousand miles of hard driving reached the capital in a week.

These new Political Officers were distributed as rapidly as might be through the vast square mileage of Somalia's less barren wastes. Within a week of their arrival they were in Kismayu, in the white little coastal towns of Brava and Merka, along the great stretches of the Juba River at Gelib, Bardera and Lugh, on the meandering Webi Shebeli at Afgoi and Villaggio D'Abruzzi, on the road to Ethiopia at Bulo Burti and Belet Uen. Here, isolated from the world and from each other, often unaided by so much as a native clerk (the average Somali being ignorant alike of English and of typing), each wrestled with the particular brand of chaos he found in his own allotted district.

Administrative duties were not the only tasks that fell to these officers in the early days. The army had advanced so swiftly into Ethiopia that it had left behind it whole tracts of untouched country, especially to the northeast between the Mogadishu–Jijiga road and the Cape of Gardafui. These vast, desolate stretches of rock and sand might have given scope for prolonged resistance in the hands of a more determined enemy; as it was, they were swiftly reduced to order by a handful of Political Officers. An aircraft was sent to drop pamphlets on Rocca Littorio, the administrative center of Mudug, with instructions for surrender, and next day an Assistant Political Officer, an officer of the King's African Rifles, and eight tough South African troops arrived in a Junkers Ju 88. The stipulated white flags could not be seen, but the party decided to risk it. The Resident of Rocca Littorio duly made his submission. This process would have been repeated at Obbia if the dilapidated condition of the Valencias, the only available aircraft, had not led to a series of forced landings up and down Somalia. In the end this tiny port was occupied by forces traveling by lorry, from Rocca Littorio.

Only the northeast corner of Somalia remained. The exploration of this area fell to the same Assistant Political Officer, accompanied now by six Tanganyika police. On 19 April he landed at Gardo, found it deserted, and got into touch with the local chiefs. Meanwhile, units of the Camel Corps, with a number of semi-commando units, were pushing in from British Somaliland still farther to the north. Bender Cassim and Dante fell, and the Italians grouped themselves for a first and final stand near the lighthouse at Gardafui. Unfortunately for their stand, however, a British officer, his orderly and one other rank walked by mistake into the Italian position before an attack could be launched. The garrison, having now retired to the final limits even of Somalia, had no alternative save to surrender on the spot.

Thus the occupation of the greater part of Somalia had been completed with the use of the fewest possible troops, and the British officials had to settle down to less exciting days, to thinking out what was to be done with the wrecked tunny fishery at Bender Cassim and the always uneconomic £3,000,000 salt works at Dante. Above all, it was necessary to deal at once with the large-scale raids which were now being launched by well-armed Somali tribesmen against their cousins in British Somaliland in an unprecedentedly totalitarian manner, including rape and the theft of water-carrying camels, two practices which were quite contrary to the traditional protocols governing Somali looting.

Settling Down

It may be easier to capture a capital than to administer it successfully. If the capital is surrendered without actual fighting, as was the case in Mogadishu, Addis Ababa, and Asmara, then there is usually in the streets a large-sized crowd, drawn by a mixture of curiosity and the desire to witness the making of history. Normally, that crowd can be relied on to applaud, partly from the human instinct to clap the conqueror, partly from policy, partly in all sincerity. But behind the front of enthusiasm and excitement, opinion is not yet formed; for every man and woman in the streets, ten are waiting doubtfully behind their shuttered windows. In these early critical hours or days, a single incident of impatience or exasperation, a confusion arising from the clash of languages, an accidental omission, may put an end to understanding for years to come.

This phase is even more difficult for the Administration than for the troops, for the troops have but to behave patiently and punctiliously, whereas the Administration has to deal with complicated governmental machines and solve the personal equation of the frequently touchy individuals who compose those machines. It is so easy, to put it at its simplest, to intern too many or to intern too few; to create a situation which broadens the temporary humiliation of the inhabitants into years of silent misery and requires from the occupying power a larger force to garrison the land and a larger body of administrators to run it. If, on the other hand, no mistakes are made and confidence is gained, the occupied territory may largely run itself. In a week or two, the public may realize that the dreaded catastrophe was no catastrophe at all, that things have not changed for the worse. In a matter of months, they may feel they have changed for the better.

In Asmara, on 2 April, it was especially vital that confidence should be gained; the Administration was still so understaffed that it is hard to see how it could have carried on without cooperation. By now, some half-dozen new officers had arrived, the twelve police had grown to about eighty, and sixty partly trained irregulars swelled their nominal if not their effective strength; but the time had not yet been reached when the Administration could begin to think of itself in terms even of separate one-man departments. Cooperation was secured, however, and Eritrea did not tread the unhappy path of conflict and oppression.

In Somalia, though the European civilian population was less than 7,000, both international law and common sense demanded that the Administration should as far as possible work in close cooperation with the Italian authorities. Such a policy would keep both the native and European population in employment, would reduce the danger to security, and reduce to a minimum the British staff which it was necessary to employ. Here, however, the Italians proved less unreservedly cooperative, more Fascist and more corrupt, than those of Eritrea. In Mogadishu immediate cooperation of a kind was obtained from the municipio, whose mayor, despite pronounced Fascist sympathies, for which he later had to be interned, saw the necessity for organizing relief. The staffs of the various government departments, who had already received three months' pay in advance, found it difficult to make up their minds. In the end two parties emerged, a Fascist minority which consisted of the more recent immigrants, minor officials and a few hot-headed, diehard leaders, and the government party, including the civil servants and residents of long standing, who recognized that cooperation was in the best interests of their country.

In the end, however, even their assistance proved more trouble than it was worth. To quote from a contemporary report, "the Italian officials we have retained in office pursue their corrupt and idle course. They do little and care less for the welfare of their fellow countrymen. Italians in difficulties inevitably come to British officers for help and advice, and openly expressed contempt for Italian officialdom is growing in volume." In the end, after five months' trial, the experiment had to be abandoned and the majority was removed. But the municipio is still functioning today. Not one serious act of sabotage occurred, and Somalia, like Eritrea, was spared the misery of hating its masters.

Gradually, in both Eritrea and Somalia, things steadied down to normal administration. Little by little, the natives learned that the overthrow of the Italians did not mean the enthronement of anarchy, while the Italians, realizing that after all the world had not come to an end, settled down to a provisional acceptance of the British occupation.

It was easy to understand this attitude. Fascism had suffered a crushing local defeat, but in the eyes of Italians, the most wishful thinkers in all Europe, there was no reason why a German triumph in Egypt should not at any moment reinstate Mussolini in the howdah of his White Elephant. Serious attempts at sabotage or risings were not to be expected from a people who had failed to fight to the end, even when the dice was loaded in their favor. But in such times as the months before El Alamein there were signs that they would become restive, and even dangerous, if German troops approached. However, the chief occupation of even the more enterprising Fascists never got beyond rumor-spreading and black-listing, threatening Italians who cooperated too readily with the castor oil they would be made to swallow one day, and photographing cooperators at their work.

On the whole, the extreme Fascists canceled out the extreme anti-Fascists, who were neither numerous nor very influential. Their weakness was only to be expected. While Italy was still at war, pro-British or pro-democratic activity was easy to denounce as unpatriotic treachery. On the whole, therefore, the Administration decided that it was best to regard the Italians in Eritrea and Somalia as neither Fascist nor anti-Fascist, but just Italian; not to attempt to build up an anti-Fascist party, since in so doing one would automatically stimulate a pro-Fascist party; to take the line that would keep the colonies quietest and enable them to be administered with the minimum of fuss. Therefore, while all Fascist propaganda was suppressed in schools, for many months no attempt was made to remove the emblems and slogans with which Mussolini had so plentifully and entertainingly bestrewn the arid countrysides of Eritrea and Somalia. They were left as crumbling monuments to a crumbling power. Until quite recently, as you drove through what was then called the Viale Mussolini, you might still be exhorted somewhat anachronistically to "believe, obey and fight." All this, however, has now been changed at the request of the Italians themselves; Fascist names have disappeared from the streets of Asmara and the one-time Viale Mussolini now rejoices in the name Corso d'Italia.

Keeping the Peace

Of all the important duties of an Occupied Territory Administration, the first is to maintain security. The officers of the Administration need to be able to go about their work without fear of interference, and the army must know that its lines of communication are safe. In Eritrea it was necessary, too, that Italians should not feel themselves in danger of molestation from their armed and by no means orderly ex-subjects. The collapse of a regime is the ideal time for paying off old political and personal scores and for the acquisition of sudden wealth by rapid, illegal means.

In this section, which describes how order was restored and maintained in Eritrea, it is essential to remember that throughout the British occupation there has existed in the territory a military garrison which in time of emergency would take control. That emergency has never arisen, but it should not be forgotten that the garrison was always there, and that its presence was a constant source of discouragement to the lawless. Had no garrison existed, the Administration could certainly not have carried on with the scanty personnel at its disposal. Equally, but for the skill, determination and tact of the Administration, a very much larger garrison would have been required than the small force which was distributed here and there throughout the land.

In Italian times there were in Eritrea two kinds of police, Mussolini's Polizia Africana Italiana (known as the PAI) and the royalist Carabinieri. The PAI were employed for police work of every kind, but quite half of their duties was to make Italians good Fascists. They corresponded in fact to the German Gestapo, and in the towns, which is where they mostly operated, their powers were unlimited. The Carabinieri, on the other hand, were an old-established gendarmerie, who came directly under the King and figure at the head of the Italian Army list. They had, of course, existed long before the PAI, and though they had found it wise to become good Fascists there was little love lost between them. The Carabinieri operated more in the out-districts than the towns.

There were innumerable other groups of Italians, such as the glorious customs officers of the Guardia di Finanza, who walked about Asmara in riding boots and striking uniforms. It was by no means easy to tell at first sight who was a policeman and who was only an impressive imitation; and in the end all had to be issued with armbands to ensure identification.

Since the Administration as yet possessed no adequate police, it was essential to make use temporarily of the existing Italian force, or such members of it as were not positively disaffected. The PAI were considerably overstaffed (their ranks included 1,200 white men) and it proved practicable to dispense with the services of the more dangerous, chiefly the younger men and the more influential officers, and to accommodate them in the POW camps to which the whole force could correctly have been relegated. At one time it appeared that the fifty per cent remaining might refuse to carry on, but in the end they decided to cooperate, realizing that, if they did not, the Carabinieri would. Every effort was made to avoid interning the chief of the PAI. He was a charming, harmless gentleman, with such intriguing and melodramatic devices as a button on his desk which automatically locked his office door; but in the end he became too much of a nuisance and had to be removed.

With this large but untrustworthy force, salted by a handful of Sudanese police, the Administration set to work to tackle as varied a collection of potential threats to security as can easily be imagined. The following weeks were marked by no single attempt at political assassination and by only one doubtful case of serious sabotage, but they cannot be classed as dull. There was, for instance, the tendency of tribesmen to use the arms and ammunition they had acquired, not against the government, but against each other and for highway robbery. There was the need to explain forcibly to the sedentary indigenous population of the altipiano that the time had not come to repudiate all obligations to concession owners and to loot occupied as well as unoccupied farms with the threat and occasionally the use of violence. There were the attacks by natives on Italians living in shacks on the outskirts of Dekamere. And, throughout the country, there were the vast numbers of strong, unemployed young men of military age, who wore civilian clothes and had never, never, never fought against us.

In Asmara, in spite of the curfew, there was a great deal of petty crime, chiefly in the native quarter. The town was full of ex-soldiers, who had returned from the war without work, support or principles, of excited locals, and of Sudanese and French Equatorial Africans, who at the best of times are good workers but doubtful citizens outside their own countries. In the end it was decided to attempt to remove from Asmara the vast extraneous native population, and by the end of July law-abiding citizens had little of which to complain.

But perhaps the worst problem of all was presented in Massawa, where from 5 May to the middle of August only one British lieutenant of police was available to struggle with a town which combined all the potentialities of a distressed area, a recently blockaded port, an abominable climate, and a mixed population of all the Red Sea races, in addition to 2,000 Italians, many of whom were Fascists.

Here occurred the concealment of the municipal funds by Italian officials, which led, after many false trails had been followed, to the digging up of 2,250,000 lire in the local churchyard. Then there was the cleaning up of the islands of the Dahlak archipelago and the capture of a number of prominent Fascists who were trying to escape in a small boat, not only with their ideology, but also with large sums of money and goods. There was the case of the Resident of Nocra, whose luggage seemed to contain most of the cutlery of Massawa. There was the impossibility, even with such help as the military could provide, of guarding the vast open-sided goods shed of the Campo di Marte, in which a great quantity of inadequately catalogued goods had been dumped from German vessels before they were scuttled. There was the indiscriminate looting, which, unchecked by the police, was at first carried on even in daylight, and which led at length to the shooting of four offenders and the internment of the PAI. There was the almost simultaneous arrest of Massawa's two most prominent religious leaders on serious charges, Father Avarodo, the parish priest, for being in unlawful possession of a revolver, and the Moslem Cadi for holding written communication with the enemy.

At this time, too, broke out a serious fracas between the Eritreans and some unruly Sudanese of a Pioneer company, which came eventually not only to sticks and stones but to bayonets and hand grenades. The Italian police failed to put in an appearance while this riot was going on; it was finally checked by the courageous action of two young British officers, who managed to put a sudden stop to fighting in which fifteen people had already been killed and upwards of fifty injured. Finally, on 7 August, occurred the great fire at the ammunition dump, in which 8,000 Italian shells and 1,200 Italian land mines went up. The fire rendered 4,000 natives homeless. Sabotage was suspected, but never proved.

At the same time, there were continuous thefts from the railway and even heavier ones from the aerial ropeway, which drops 8,000 feet in forty-eight miles down some of the remoter stretches of Eritrea's lawless mountainsides. Some of the criminals were undoubtedly baboons, which learned how to swarm up the pylons and help themselves, but the unearthing of caches totaling £3,000 in value and the conviction of thirty-five employees proved that a human element was concerned as well.

At this stage, when the British officers numbered only four or five, there was no hope yet of taking charge ourselves, but in August 1941 the situation was changed by the arrival of an adequate number of trained officers from Southern Rhodesia. Six months after the occupation, the Eritrean Police Force began to take the field. It consists today of 3,000 Eritreans, under ninety-seven British officers and inspectors. It has a strong CID branch, with fingerprint, record and photographic sections; four armored cars, which once belonged to the Italians; a half-squadron of some sixty mounted men; and a striking force 250 strong for repelling raids from beyond the Ethiopian frontier. There has never been any lack of volunteer recruits, who receive pay, uniforms, and three months' training, and come from a great variety of tribes. Those chosen for Asmara are mainly Copts, but in the lowlands the rank and file are recruited from the tribesmen, less literate but less timid than the town-bred Eritrean.

Today Eritreans do every job for which they can be trained. They control the traffic, they man the armored cars. The Italian members of the force have been gradually reduced from their original multitude to 165 PAI, most of whom are technical experts, photographers, investigators and prosecutors, and 185 Carabinieri, who work in the country under British officers in scattered twos and threes. Italians are never employed in native areas or for political matters, but for straightforward police work in districts in which Italians reside.

Police work in Eritrea has lost its early glamour. There is, of course, petty crime in Asmara and Massawa, there are occasional minor tribal scraps in the remoter lowlands, and there are occasional raiding parties from Ethiopia. But whereas in Italian times a policeman would never dream of going about unarmed, today he never carries a weapon unless he is engaged on some special task.

For the last two years in Eritrea, the Administration has maintained as high a standard of security as was ever reached in Italian times, despite the arms in the hands of natives and the presence of a nominally enemy community. This has been achieved by a very much smaller police force, of whom only a hundred are British or Allied white personnel.

Italians in Distress

The economic state of Eritrea at the time of the occupation would be incomprehensible except in the light of Fascist colonial policy during the previous six years. Until 1935, the colony was a normal African territory, supporting perhaps 5,000 Europeans; by 1941 it was containing but not supporting 60,000 civilians, in addition to the armed forces.

This large-scale immigration had its basis neither in agriculture nor in normal industry. Italians were certainly invited to come out and take up land, but once they arrived it was made so difficult for them to do so that in the end they would rather do anything else. They filled in forms in triplicate and returned them to the political offices, which eventually refused their applications. These difficulties were not due to inefficiency or red tape. As a part of deliberate policy the government was reluctant to alienate native land, not because it hoped to make Eritreans good farmers but because it feared that the granting of concessions would discourage recruiting.

Similarly, Eritrea's few potential industries had never been developed, not through inefficiency or idleness, but because the colony was required as an outlet for manufactured goods. Captured correspondence included a letter from the Duke of Aosta to a man who wished to start a tannery, in which the Viceroy said: "As you are well aware, it is contrary to the policy of the Italian government to encourage industries in Eritrea." Thus it came about that if you happened to be a normal Italian colonist, you did not farm, you did not attempt to produce; you worked in a garage or an engineering shop or one of a hundred minor businesses that catered for army needs, and you imported your fruit, your vegetables, your tinned milk and your every necessary of life from Italy.

It was a remarkable fact that, even after ten months of blockade and war, Eritrea had failed to take the most elementary steps along the road to self-sufficiency. Agriculture and industries had not been stimulated, with the result that in the last weeks before the British came conditions were appalling. The shops were empty, people had killed off their chickens and eaten every tin of preserved fruit, and when the Fascist chief for Eritrea put in his occasional appearance at the market place in order to pacify the women he was sometimes received even with jeers and catcalls. In the end the authorities, hoping to reduce the booty, threw open the military stores, but the resulting congestion and disorganization were so complete that hardly anyone got in, and those who did could not get out again. Women describe other women, in fur coats and jewelry, trying to shoulder sacks of maize too heavy for them, sprawling in the mud, and getting nowhere. As a result little was taken away, and the captured military stores helped the Administration to feed the population during the first difficult six weeks. This unexpected haul proved exceptionally fortunate for the Administration and Eritrea, as the destruction of ships along the quays and across the mercantile harbor mouth at first limited the usefulness of Massawa. The respite gained gave time for the channel to be swept. On 27 May 1941 the first dhow arrived with a cargo of dhurra, and others followed swiftly in its wake. A famine was successfully averted.

Because of the scarcity of supplies, the depreciation of the lira and the loss of very many of the male breadwinners by war casualties or captures, relief was an urgent necessity for the majority of the Italian population. The natives presented no such problem, for the Eritrean had always contrived to keep himself in all necessaries of life save dhurra. Though those who had worked for the Italian military authorities had now lost their jobs, it was possible to support them at least on a bare subsistence level by reducing by a third the price of imported sorghum by means of a subsidy. The European problem was far more serious. A relief organization had to be set up. The American Red Cross generously placed at the Administration's disposal large stocks of essentials and, in an attempt to supply fresh milk for women and young children, the Army even imported some by air.

Two factors which increased the need for relief in Eritrea were the depreciation of the currency and the insolvency of the banks. The lira, now robbed of artificial protection, was pegged at 480 to the £, which was only one-fifth of its nominal value. It was, moreover, no longer a fully negotiable currency except between Italians; notes of a higher denomination than fifty lire were not officially recognized as legal payment. The banks were not insolvent through any fault of their own; on direct orders from Rome, all save fifteen per cent of their cash assets were destroyed. As in the circumstances obligations could only partially be met, it was decided that holders of credit balances of 5,000 lire or less should be entitled to draw the full amount, but that beyond that figure ten per cent was all that the banks could pay.

By October 1941 no less than 12,000 Italians were receiving relief, partly because of genuine unemployment, partly because some families, having expended their private means, had now come on the dole. The establishment of this service on a more efficient basis was only one of the tasks of the new Department of Labour, which, unlike its predecessors in Italian times, aimed at finding work without reference to politics. Fortunately it was greatly assisted in its task by the arrival of the American projects, which absorbed a great deal of Italian and Eritrean labor in 1942. For about eighteen months, while Eritrea was being built up into an Allied arsenal, more than 10,000 Italians were employed either by American military or civilian undertakings, the British Military Administration or the British fighting services. Even now that Eritrea's value as a base for war has largely passed away with the expulsion of the Germans from North Africa, unemployment has not reared its ugly head again, partly because of evacuations and repatriations, but mostly because of the ingenuity with which Italians, encouraged by the Administration, have embarked on new industries and enterprises.

Housing presented a difficult and immediate problem. Asmara was overcrowded when it first surrendered, owing to an inflow of women and children, mostly from Gondar. During the summer of 1941 available space in other towns was filled by Italians from Dessie, while a steady trickle continued to arrive from other parts of Ethiopia. It was not easy to fit into this congestion the British personnel of the Administration, the staff of British Airways, and the forerunners of the great American projects, with which the history of the next year or two is closely interlinked. Construction of new buildings was hampered by lack of material, and the situation was only partially met by putting in order houses at Keren. It was finally solved by building accommodation camps outside Asmara, where impoverished and unemployed Italians could be economically supported while looking for new jobs, and by the removal of one-sixth of the population through repatriation and evacuation.

The difference between these two terms is important. Repatriates were women, children, and sick or infirm men who were unlikely to be of use to the enemy's war effort. The evacuees were able-bodied males whose presence in Eritrea was for one reason or another considered undesirable. Again, most repatriates were volunteers who wished to return to Italy, while evacuees had to be kept under British control for the duration.

The tale of the repatriations is very different. When registration took place in 1942, 8,000 volunteers asked to be sent home, though the vessels the Italian government was sending could take only 3,700. The selection and movement of so big a body proved no minor task; the railway could take no more than 350 people a day, and only eleven buses were available for the job. Nevertheless, nine British officers, three NCOs and women welfare workers competed successfully with the problems of collecting, accommodating, searching, disinfecting and embarking 900 fit women, 1,300 children and 500 sick, all in a shade temperature at Massawa of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The last and largest flight took place in the midsummer of 1943, when three Italian ships took on board not only volunteers but also some thousands of women and children who, in the opinion of the Administration, were better returned to Italy. Without a single casualty of any kind 7,152 people were embarked. There were others embarked at Mogadishu.

Both the Italian Red Cross and Signor Caroselli, ex-governor of Somalia, who was in charge of the Italian ships, approved the manner in which this move was handled, and the International Red Cross delegate reported: "Everyone in Asmara and Massawa expressed their satisfaction with the good organization, and especially with the treatment received from British officials."

Italian enthusiasm for these repatriations had waxed and waned with the fortunes of Rommel in Libya. When things went well with him, they wished to stay; when things went badly with him, they wished to go; and finally, when the invasion of Italy became imminent, they again preferred to remain in Eritrea. The children took repatriation as a picnic, but on the whole the women showed up poorly. Egoism, class-consciousness, and quarrels between the wives of soldiers and civilians led to jealousies, scratched faces and torn clothes. Quite a number of women tried for various reasons to avoid repatriation, while to the credit of the Italians a number of young and fit men were keen to get back to Italy by any illegal means.

These young men were "prepared" and coached by Italian doctors. They breathed sulfur to give the impression of tuberculosis; they practiced throwing fits. Attempts to swim out to the boats were frequent; two men who swarmed up an anchor chain were produced only when two senior Italian officials, who had denied all knowledge of their presence, were told that they would be taken as hostages pending the delivery of the stowaways. Masquerading, too, was not uncommon, and one young man was so well made up that he deceived female searchers and got as far as the jetty where he presented a false identity card. An officer making the last check on the lighter noticed prominent veins on his hands, and sent him back to the body-searching pen. The masquerader, with a smile, said it was "just too bad," and handed to the women searchers as souvenirs the two soft sponges that had provided him with a youthful bosom.

The official report excellently sums up the trials and achievements of the evacuation branch. "In spite," it says, "of the lack of trained Italian-speaking staff, of inexperience in moving populations of these magnitudes, of the necessity of building up a new organization from bedrock in three different territories in a very limited time, of the temperament of the population to be handled, of the scarcity of transport and equipment, of varying climatic conditions, of delays in the arrival of the various flights of Italian ships and other shipping, and of the consequent upsetting of plans, movements and tempers of all concerned, the ultimate results were successful, due to the ability of the British race to ensure that, however unsatisfactory rehearsals may appear to be, everything goes off all right on the night.

African Arsenal

So far this treatise has been concerned only with matters of internal administration, with the restoration of law and order, with the social services, the problem of relief, and the encouragement of agriculture and industry. We have not yet considered what steps were taken by Britain to utilize the conquered colonies for purposes of war.

Here the possibilities of Eritrea were great. The Italians had deliberately neglected both agriculture and industry, but they had militarized the territory with efficiency, imagination, and disregard for expense. Eritrea was suited geographically, too, to play an important part in Allied strategy. The capital, Asmara, lay on the main air route from West Africa, by way of Khartoum and Aden, to the East. Secondly, Massawa was capable of considerable expansion as a port. Thirdly, had Egypt fallen, Eritrea was the nearest place to the south at all suitable for a base.

For reasons of security, it would be a little difficult even yet fully to go into all the steps which were taken to make the most of Eritrea. It is also rather outside the scope of this work. Just as it is not our task to describe the very important, unsung work of the military garrisons, so we are not concerned with detailed discussion of the naval developments by which Massawa was adapted to her part in Red Sea and Indian Ocean strategy at a time when the Germans were threatening Alexandria and the Japanese striking at Ceylon. We can also only hint at the work of United States Ordnance, which took over the running of the great Italian CITAO, Fiat, Pirelli, and Feltrinelli organizations and a number of other works, and expanded them into what became known as Asmara Arsenal. Here tires were reconditioned and retreaded, quantities of accumulator plates were made, spare parts of every kind were manufactured, including thousands and thousands of pistons, and lorries were reconditioned on an American scale. In short, third-line maintenance of British Army transport was undertaken for Eritrea, the Sudan, and for part of the Middle East. The full story of their adventures must be told at a later date, but partly because Johnson, Drake and Piper (J D & P), and Douglas Aircraft were both civilian firms, it is within the scope of this book to give a sketchy picture of the part they played in the American projects, which not only affected conditions in Eritrea, but directly and indirectly employed some thousands of Italians. In assisting this concern the Administration was largely occupied throughout 1942.

The main activities of J D & P were in Massawa, in Ghinda, and at the airport at Gura. Of the many ships that had been scuttled with different degrees of efficiency in Massawa harbor, a number had been salvaged by the British, but others had remained beneath the water. At the beginning of 1942, J D & P got to work upon these ships with expert divers and excellent equipment. They succeeded in raising a number of vessels that had been believed irretrievably lost. Their greatest triumph was the recovery of the dry dock, in each of the air compartments of which the Italians had blown a hole.

Massawa's climate did not correspond with American ideas of what a climate should be, and J D & P set to work to recondition it. It was not long before they had constructed refrigerators, improved machine shops, and air conditioned barracks. At Ghinda, the nearest point in the mountains where the climate was cool enough for Europeans to live in reasonable comfort, this civilian firm built a transit camp for the Army; the camp has also served as a rest camp for Royal Navy personnel and employees of the firm. It proved especially useful when thousands of Italians were being moved to Massawa for repatriation to Italy in April and May 1943.

Meanwhile, at Gura, J D & P were converting a large Italian airport into what was to become the great American air base of the Middle East. Here the Italians had established a large flying field with a two-mile runway, twelve large hangars, shops for the repair and assembly of aircraft, and wooden barracks big enough for 2,000 men by Italian standards. The climate at 6,000 feet promoted efficiency, the water supply was good, and the damage which the RAF had done to the buildings was extensive but not irremediable.

On this site, under Lend-Lease, Douglas Aircraft was to establish a complete supply and maintenance organization. It was one of the tasks of J D & P to prepare for their arrival an African edition of Byrd's "Little America," a small city complete in every detail. J D & P therefore set to work, rebuilt about fifty of the old Italian barracks, and installed new plumbing features, including a sewage system to dispose of a problem the Italians had contentedly ignored.

Meanwhile, Douglas Aircraft was collecting technicians from all sections of the aircraft industry in the United States, together with a small army of men versed in everything from handling X-ray machines to waiting at tables, from showing motion pictures to running a telephone switchboard, from operating a power plant to making ice cream sodas. Recruitment of personnel was complicated by the high physical, technical and moral standards required of men who were to be transplanted into a strange piece of occupied enemy territory in the heart of Africa. It was not easy to procure supplies for such an undertaking. High priorities naturally helped, but they by no means solved the difficulties. Yet despite all complications and setbacks, men and materials were ready for shipment by 15 February 1942, only ten weeks after the decision to go ahead had finally been announced.

Although the enemy and chance joined forces to disrupt the stream of material from the United States, Gura opened up and carried on. When aircraft hydraulic equipment did not arrive on time, the Douglas workers adapted and improvised or else invented what was required to get sorely needed planes in the air again. When the need for an optical instrument arose, the project's instrument shop, one of the largest and best equipped in the world, designed and manufactured ninety per cent of the parts required. Gunsights, bombsights and cameras presented no problems that could not be solved at Gura. In one emergency the parachute shop repaired, dried, refolded and packed 137 parachutes in twenty-four hours. When propeller blades were damaged, the propeller shop made their return to America unnecessary by straightening them out on the spot even in the period before the arrival of the proper parts. The engine shop began by repairing the shrapnel-torn sheet metal walls and roof of their hangar. Then its staff ransacked Asmara and Massawa for equipment for their machine shop. They had it installed only two days before the first thirty-four Allison engines arrived for repair. When the famous B-24 Liberator, "Shanghai Lil," the first American bomber to blast Naples, crashed in the desert, a repair crew from Gura flew to the spot, patched it up with angle iron, and got it safely home. It was in the repair shops, too, that the innovation of "distorted perspective" drawings of B-24 Liberators was first invented and adopted. This series of incidents, taken from the records of many departments, gives some idea of the conditions at first encountered and the type of work on which Gura was engaged. Unfortunately, as in the case of U.S. Ordnance, military secrecy prevents a full description of all that was done in the short period during which the organization was working at full blast.

Today the American projects are no more. U.S. Ordnance has vacated its arsenals, Johnson, Drake and Piper have returned to the United States, and Douglas Aircraft's "Little America" will soon be an almost empty city. The tide of war has rolled away from Egypt and from Africa, and the days when the United Nations needed a great base in Eritrea are happily now past.

Map of the Africa Orientale Italiana: the biggest extension of Eritrea was reached during the Italian empire (1936–1941), when northern parts of conquered Ethiopia were assigned to Eritrea by the Italians as a reward for the Eritrean "Ascari'" help in the conquest of Ethiopia.

The map sent out to the press had this caption: “Addis Ababa, Oct. 5 – War on three fronts: Italians are reported pushing into Ethiopia along the three fronts indicated, frequently using bombing planes to prepare for the advances. One of the main Ethiopian forces is reported at Dessye.”

Italian East Africa, with provinces and provincial capitals, between 7 May 7 1936 (Annexation of Ethiopia) and August 1940 (when Italy invaded and annexed British Somaliland).

Fascist poster calling for revenge against the British takeover of Italian East Africa. The image is of mountain fighting in Ethiopia during Italian conquest in 1936.

Italian artillery in Tembien, Ethiopia in 1936.

Italian soldiers recruited on 1935 in Montevarchi to fight the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, 1935.

Haile Selassie passes through Jerusalem on his way to exile in England.

British troops use a bulldozer to pull down a fascist stone monument at Kismayu in Italian Somaliland, 11 April 1941.

Fascist monument on the equator.

Ceremonial in Mogadishu. This is the annual Fascist celebration in the capital of Italian Somaliland in 1939. There are no Somalis in the picture.

Getting things straight. Enemy weapons are collected in Kismayu. The first task was to keep abandoned equipment out of the hands of the restless tribes.

The Parade of the Mounted Men. They belong to the Eritrean Police Force. Put into the field six months after the occupation, the Force keeps order throughout the country.

Eritrean volunteers formed the body of the Eritrean Police Force of 3,000 men. The number of British officers and inspectors in it is less than 100.

Hobok Fort in Abyssinia captured by South African 1st Infantry Division, 1941.

Mega Fort in Ethiopia prior to the attack by the South African 1st Infantry Division. 1941.

Haile Selassie, Emperor of Abyssinia, with Brigadier Daniel Arthur Sandford (left) and Colonel Wingate (right) in Dambacha Fort, after it had been captured, 15 April 1941.

Men of the (British) King's African Rifles (KAR) collecting surrendered arms at Wolchefit Pass, after the last Italians had finally ceased resistance in Ethiopia. 28 September 1941.

Soldiers of the King's African Rifles (KAR) during the British advance into Italian Somaliland, 13 February 1941.

Smoke rising from Fort Gallabat, on the Sudan-Abyssinian frontier, 22 November 1940.

Men of the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) remove monumental stones placed by the Italians to mark the boundary of their new empire on the Kenya - Italian Somaliland border. 1941.

Indian soldiers in action before the capture of Keren in Eritrea. This gun hurled approximately 24,000 shells a day. Note the shadow of camouflage on the field gun. 1941.

Ethiopian camel troops transporting supplies through the bush, 22 January 1941.

Ethiopian men gather in Addis Ababa, heavily armed with captured Italian weapons, to hear the proclamation announcing the return to the capital of the Emperor Haile Selassie in May 1941.

Ethiopian soldiers, 1936.

Vickers Wellesley Mk I, K7775, KU-N, of No. 47 Squadron RAF, based at Agordat, Eritrea, in flight during a bombing mission to Keren, 2 April 1941.

Italian mounted troops advance with their flag at the head of the column.

South African soldiers at Moyale, after the Italian forces had withdrawn, with a captured Italian flag, 1941.

Four Italian soldiers taking aim in Ethiopia in 1935, during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Italian forces under Mussolini invaded and annexed Ethiopia, folding it into a colony named Italian East Africa along with Eritrea.

Askaris with camel artillery.

Dubats on the march.

Italian soldiers being transported by truck during the Italo-Ethiopian War in Ethiopia.

Original contemporary caption: “A group of Native Eritrean troops with the Italian army in Ethiopia, are shown assembled before the march on Aduwa.”

Original contemporary caption: “Marching towards the enemy: the vanguard of the Italian troops push on to Makale. The Italian soldiers wear heavy boots to protect their feet from the rough ground that the Ethiopian warriors traverse barefoot.”

Original contemporary caption, 6 November 1935: “Mussolini’s tanks break through a stone wall and climb a hill to clear the way for the advance of the Fascist legions on the northern front.”

Original contemporary caption: "With the Indian Army in Eritrea."

Italian troops raise the Italian flag over Macalle, Ethiopia in 1935. Emperor Haile Selassie's appeals to the League of Nations for help went unanswered, and Italy was largely given a free hand to do as it pleased in East Africa.