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

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СКАЧАТЬ not. It is going to be a bloody battle, a bloody battle against both enemy and ground. It will be won by the side which lasts longest. I know you will last longer than they do. And I promise you I will last longer than my opposite number.’¹² As far as Platt was concerned, this represented the last throw of the dice, for he had run out of alternative schemes. ‘What will you do if it doesn’t come off?’ General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, asked him in the days leading up to the attack. ‘I’m damned if I know, sir,’ he replied. March the 15th was designated as the day of the assault, a week earlier than Platt would have liked, but headquarters were pushing. Platt quickly regretted his scheduling: the day dawned oppressively muggy. ‘I could not have chosen a worse date. Some of the efforts of the troops that day were defeated almost as much by the heat and heat exhaustion as by hostile opposition.’

      As 96 British big guns opened fire and the Italians responded with a barrage of machine-gun fire and a hail of mortars, the 4th Indian Division launched a multi-pronged assault on Hog’s Back, Brig’s Peak and Sanchil, while the 5th Indian Division followed up with an attack on Fort Dologorodoc. This was the rationale behind the long weeks of stockpiling. Over the next 12 days, British artillery worked its way through a stockpile of 110,000 shells, representing, Platt later calculated, the equivalent of 1,000 lorry-loads of ammunition. Firing continually, the British were inflicting a highly effective form of psychological torture: sleep deprivation. ‘We’d be given a list of pre-arranged targets and we would go through them in chronological order through the night, keeping them on their toes,’ recalled Winchester.¹³ In that rocky terrain the shock waves bounced from cliff to cliff, numbing the brain and shattering the senses. Cochrane experienced the intolerable effect of this constant bombardment from the other side after being taken prisoner by the Italians. ‘By the second night,’ he recorded in his memoirs, ‘I would have given anything to get off the hill.’¹⁴

      The West Yorkshires finally broke through on March 16, seizing first the Pimple, then the Pinnacle and finally Fort Dologorodoc. For the first time, the British could venture close enough to inspect the pile of rocks blocking Dongolaas Gorge. It proved to be nothing like as solid as feared – sappers estimated they could clear it in two days. Suddenly Keren no longer seemed quite so impregnable. ‘Keren is ours!’ declared one British commander.

      He was a trifle premature. Realizing that Dologorodoc represented a fatal breach, Carnimeo tried repeatedly to recapture the fort, sending wave upon wave of Savoia Grenadiers and native troops unsuccessfully against the position. As bodies piled up at the fort perimeter, Italian morale began to waver. It nearly buckled entirely when the popular Lorenzini, said by the ascaris to be immortal, was killed reconnoitring the ground for a seventh counterattack. Italian units were now down to two-thirds of their original strength. But British nerves were also starting to go. On the crests, young men who knew they were about to die penned farewell letters to their parents. Casualties were running so high that drivers, orderlies and mess sergeants were being mustered to form new companies thrown into the fray. ‘There was a nasty moment when one or two people got so-called shell shock and we had to take a very firm line,’ remembered Kerr. ‘It started spreading, demoralization is very infectious. There are moments when you simply have to say “Go back where you came from and don’t come running down here.” At heart we all wanted to turn away. It was only pride or shame or a sense of responsibility that kept you going.’¹⁵

      In the early hours of March 25, the British played their final card. Two brigades attacked on either side of Dongolaas Gorge, one unit working its way silently along what proved to be a poorly-barricaded railway tunnel high on the ridge, the other moving up from Fort Dologorodoc. By the morning of March 27, a last desperate Italian counterattack had been repulsed and sappers had cleared the pass. The guns fell silent as white flags shot up from Italian soldiers on the peaks. With his units in tatters, Frusci had ordered a withdrawal, congratulating his soldiers for their heroism in a florid declaration. ‘Our many dead, who include one general and five senior officers, remain in Keren as armed guards and a warning to the enemy. We have left Keren only temporarily,’ he promised, unconvincingly. ‘We will soon return there and the sacred flag of our country will once again flutter in the light of our future glory.’¹⁶

      If Platt had fulfilled his pledge to last longer than his opposite number, it had only been by a hair’s breadth. The British had come within a whisper of calling off the assault. The general later confessed that in the last three days of the battle, his reserves had shrunk to just three tanks. ‘A company commander said to me when he heard that, “Was that quite sound sir?” No, it was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.’¹⁷

      The battle of Keren was over and with it, Italy’s most spirited military performance of the Second World War. The official Italian tally was 3,120 dead – a total that characteristically omitted around 9,000 Eritrean and Ethiopian ascaris who had fallen alongside their European comrades.¹⁸ British forces, which had pulled off what was as much a quartermaster’s as a soldier’s victory, had lost between 4,000 and 5,000 men.¹⁹ Added together, both sides had probably sustained more than 50,000 casualties, averaging out at around 1,000 dead and wounded each day. ‘It was incredibly tough, and it is a source of wonder how we ever succeeded,’ an officer in the West Yorkshire Regiment later recalled. ‘It will never, like some battlefields of the First World War, look small and insignificant, but will stand always, huge and rugged, the gateway to Eritrea.’²⁰

      The feared escarpment had gone from insurmountable threat to just another geological feature. The Pimple, the Pinnacle and the Sphinx were no longer of any interest to the British soldiers who had crouched in the dust, trying to guess what hidden gullies and unexpected ridges – the dips and bumps that held the key to survival or destruction – lay ahead. As instructions were shouted, equipment packed and trucks and tanks jostled, nose to tail, for their place in the grey-green caterpillar working its way up Dongolaas Gorge, past the inevitable anti-climax that was Keren itself, the men were already forgetting a landscape they would never see again. For many, there was a dreamlike quality to the sudden telescopic shift in focus. ‘It always surprised me, in any battle, how limited one’s life was while the battle was going on,’ remarked Kerr. ‘You knew every stone for the next 50 yards. It always struck me as extraordinary how when a battle ended, like in Keren, how the next day the birds were there, peace reigned, the place was in a bit of a mess, suddenly there were trees and everyone walking about and standing up in daylight and one wondered at how different it was from yesterday, a different world entirely – what had we been doing all those weeks? At one moment somewhere is a battlefield and life is being lost right and left. And the next day, total peace and silence.’²¹ The convoy roared through Keren – ‘a pathetic little town’, commented Richard Dimbleby, before putting it out of his mind forever – and ground on to Asmara.

      Frusci was to stage a series of rearguard actions further up the Imperial Way, but his men had lost their stomach for the fight. The trouble with Maginot lines, as military strategists know, is the symbolic significance they come to acquire in the eyes of those who shelter behind them. When they collapse, so does the notion of further resistance. The Italians knew that they were not going to stumble on a better position than Keren, and Keren had gone. A few days later, Dimbleby, who had given his radio listeners a crisply eloquent account of the campaign, watched open-mouthed as a small touring car loaded СКАЧАТЬ