I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ Each feature of the land had acquired its own distinct, tantalizing identity in the bloody baptisms that tracked the battle’s progress. Hellfire Corner, they called the point at which British troops were forced out of the shelter of the hills, exposing themselves to withering enemy fire. Above the horribly exposed plain, dubbed ‘Happy Valley’ with the squaddie’s traditional irony, towered razor-sharp Mount Sanchil. The highest peak, it ran north-west, stretching into Brig’s Peak – christened after the 11th Brigade sent to conquer it – Hog’s Back and Mole Hill. At Sanchil’s base, overlooking the mouth of Dongolaas Gorge, reared the bluff that would be named Cameron Ridge, after the Cameron Highlanders who managed to scrape a vital first position there. Across the pass, above the foothills called the Pimple and the Pinnacle, rose Fort Dologorodoc, a cluster of trenches and cement parapets enjoying panoramic views. The cat-like formation became, with a certain inevitability, the Sphinx.

      The Italians had never meant to make a stand at Keren. General Luigi Frusci, governor of Eritrea, had originally planned to dig in further up the road to Asmara. Since pulling out of Kassala in January, the Italians had been consistently on the defensive, holding up the British advance when the terrain gave them the upper hand, but always pulling out before losses rose. The British soldiers had almost been caught off-guard by an ambush at a place called Keru, where an Italian officer on a white horse had led a troop of Eritrean horsemen in a wild gallop straight into the mouths of the British guns.³ Taken by surprise by what must have been one of the last cavalry charges of the 20th century, British troops had recovered just in time, tipping their cannon so that they pointed into the ground in front of the horses’ hooves. ‘It was suicide, really, but it was gallantry one wouldn’t expect of the Italians. They were totally destroyed,’ remembered Colin Kerr, an intelligence officer with the Cameron Highlanders.⁴

      As his troops withdrew ever further up the Imperial Way, Frusci belatedly realized the huge advantages Keren offered and ordered his men to stop and turn. There would have been no subsequent battle, had the British forces succeeded in keeping up their momentum. But the Italians had blown up a bridge behind them; and mined the river bed. By the time the obstacle had been cleared and the British convoy trundled into Happy Valley, the dull thud of explosions was audible ahead. General Orlando Lorenzini, the ‘Lion of the Sahara’ to his men, was dynamiting the walls of Dongolaas Gorge, triggering a massive rock fall that closed off the pass. If Keren could be compared to a medieval fortress, the Italians had just rushed across the moat and pulled up the drawbridge.

      Hoping to catch the Italians while they were still out of breath, British commanders ordered an immediate assault on Mount Sanchil. The Cameron Highlanders and Punjab Regiment stormed the slopes, capturing Cameron Ridge and Brig’s Peak, only to be forced off the latter by an Italian counterblast. ‘I saw a certain amount of the war after that, in various places, but the first 24 hours of Keren were about as unpleasant as any I saw anywhere,’ recalled Kerr. ‘It was incessant shelling and we were unable to reply to it because we were under observation.’ The first attack ground to a halt as a sober understanding of the enormity of the task ahead dawned. The Italians, whose ranks were being swelled by reinforcements from the rear, were now dug in. They had set up machine guns and heavy mortars on all the loftiest points in the mountain range and designated them ‘last man, last round’ positions. There was to be no surrender, only death.

      In contrast with what many civilians assume, military action does not always require extraordinary degrees of personal courage. Usually, the landscape offers so many possibilities for ambushes and outflanking movements, careful advance and sensible retreat, that a soldier can convince himself he stands a fair chance of surviving. Not so in Eritrea, where the campaign would essentially be fought along one road. On that road, Keren represented the head-on confrontation that brings with it the oppressive awareness of likely death. ‘It was the first set-piece battle I’d been near. The others were skirmishes where one could dodge out of the way. Here there was no avoiding it,’ said one former artilleryman.⁵ Reconnaissance revealed that there was going to be no way of sidestepping this particular showdown: the mountain range stretched for 150 miles. ‘It was a question,’ recalled Platt, ‘of fighting this horrible escarpment somewhere or coming somewhat back. We could not live continuously under the escarpment.’⁶

      When, in 2002, 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 today’s 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 couldn’t 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.

      â€˜Look around you,’ trumpeted the boisterous British general. ‘No shelter anywhere from the sniper fire. Just imagine what it must have been like.’ 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. ‘Horrid terrain to fight in,’ muttered the general. ‘Horrid.’

      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. ‘We were very confident. Morale was grand,’ recalled Patrick Winchester, an artillery officer with the 4th Indian Division, just 21 at the time. ‘We’d been up in the Western Desert, which was the first good thing to happen in the war. We thought “We’ll go and sort them out over there.”’⁷

      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 – who were only paying their wages spasmodically – 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 – the Savoia Grenadiers, the Bersaglieri and the Alpini – were the best Italy could muster. The moment they crossed the border with Sudan and stepped onto Eritrean soil, СКАЧАТЬ