The Allies First Victory
Two Brigade Groups from West Africa had already been sent round the Cape to take part in the attack on the Italians in Ethiopia before Edgar Whitehead arrived in Freetown in November of 1940.
By the following November Mussolini's East African Empire had been destroyed by the British Commonwealth's combined, seventy thousand strong, forces against the Italians three hundred thousand. Three hundred and sixty thousand square miles were captured.
It was Britain's first victory after over two years of defeats in Europe. They suffered only five hundred casualties, including one hundred and fifty killed. Fifty thousand Italians prisoners were taken. (My father, a newly graduated doctor from Witwatersrand University, triaged the Italian POW's after their defeat at the Battle of Gondar, the Italians last hold-out.) They were later transported to South Africa and held at Sonderwater, near Pretoria. It was the biggest and best run prisoner of war camp in WWII, built by the Allies for Italian prisoners of war. (Newly promoted Field Marshall Smuts had been personally affected by the terrible conditions in the British concentration camps in the early days of the Boer War. He was determined that nothing like that would happen this time.)
After the North African landings had ended any possibilities of hostilities in West Africa, orders were to raise and train three thousand African infantry troops as R.A.S.C. personell, as well as an anti-aircraft brigade, to be ready to be shipped to the Pacific arena to operate within three months. The civil authorities undertook to find the recruits mainly from tribes which had not previously been used by the Royal West African Frontier Force (R.W.A.F.F.), who had confined their recruiting til then to the Housa people.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
- Sir Edgar Whitehead's Unpublished Memoirs, Rhodes House, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, by permission.
- Photo credit: National WWII Museum, New Orleans. Article Forgotten Fights: The Battle of Amba Alagi 1941 by Andrew Stewart, PhD. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/battle-amba-alagi-1941#:~:text=May%2017%2C%202020,only%20slowly%20took%20the%20offensive.