Birkby takes up the story:
Our men could see the guns hammering the picturesque fort of Mega itself and our fire silenced the enemy guns. Our aircraft bombed and machine-gunned the fort all morning and a direct hit from a bomb killed every man in one of the blockhouses. The mortars of the Irish battalion pounded another blockhouse until the 12 blackshirts in it came out, waving a white flag.
The action reached its climax in the late afternoon. The troops waited for zero hour at 16h45, while black clouds hung over them and rain beat down with then orchestrating the shallower note of mortar fire.
At zero hour the Irish advanced with bayonets fixed across a clearing and down a hillside towards the fort from the left. The Scottish came in from the right, firing as they advanced, and their mortars behind them laying a barrage. The South Africans were fighting in heavy mist. Just after five o clock, through a break in the mist, a Scottish officer saw a white flag flying from a high mast behind the fort.
The Field Force Battalion (FFB) on the mountain peaks had not only captured the enemy’s main artillery position, but now commanded the whole valley in which Mega lay. The FFB boys had not known what it was to be dry for three days and they had little sleep, because they were continually at ‘stand to’. Despite this, they set out on a forced march of 12 miles across the veld at 07h30 on the last day of the battle and they started to scale a mountain with its summit lost in the mist. They slid and slipped and slithered as they struggled upwards, dragging their heavy mortars and machine-guns behind them through the thick bush.
The mist was so dense that at times they lost sight of each other. The advance guard reached the summit after hours of climbing, to be met by two enemy machine-gun posts. The FFB men flung themselves down flat and fought the enemy until reinforcements dragged up mortars through the narrow defile and started to bombard the Italians. The Italian officer commanding the enemy artillery hoisted a white flag, astonished at the sudden appearance of troops in his rear.
Some of the most gallant acts were performed when the SA Irish regiment ran into a field of land mines. Lt HJ Barker of the 5th Field Company, SAEC, won the MC for going forward personally with his men under fire and clearing the road to Mega of mines. The mines were home-made and nobody knew either how they worked or where they were laid as they were buried six inches below the surface with no protruding parts. Barker stayed with his men while they dug them out with their bayonets.
The main battle of the campaign took place in February 1941 at the Juba River, near the village of Gobwen in what is now Somalia. Logistical difficulties were as much of a problem as the enemy. In a night march, the men had to manhandle everything, even their heavy mortars, through the dense thorn scrub. Some of them moved forward on their hands and knees as they carried loads of mortar bombs, which weighed 9lb (4kg) each. Sometimes they had to link their arms and push bodily backwards through the bush. Light tanks came up at about half past four in the morning and helped by crashing tracks through the bush for the infantry to follow in the moonlight. Eventually the infantry and their trucks were across the ridge and near the “starting line” which was about a mile from Gobwen.
South African artillery began battering Gobwen and the area around it after daybreak. At zero hour, 07h00, the barrage lifted and the guns began to bombard the enemy positions and artillery in Juba on the other side of the river, while bombers roared overhead and strafed them too. The Cape Town Rifles (The Dukes) and the 1st Transvaal Scottish advanced on the village from different directions.
War reporter Birkby was again an eyewitness to the battle. “Two companies of the Dukes stormed across the open landing ground, a peaceful looking field that became an inferno. From a ridge on the other side of the river enemy mortar posts and machine-gun nests bristled. Enemy artillery had plotted every part of the area, and shells came over not in ones and twos but in dozens. The Dukes went on through bursting shells and mortar bombs with the whistle of bullets in their ears. Men began to fall. Their comrades showed great heroism getting wounded men to safety. Often the rescuers themselves were wounded.”
The pattern established in these battles continued through the campaign until the fall of Addis Ababa, the capital of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), on 5 April 1941, and the final surrender of all Italian forces in Abyssinia and Sudan by their overall commander, the Duke of Aosta, on 18 May. The South African forces would overcome considerable disadvantages of geography and climate – steep and narrow roads, thick bush, extreme heat and cold – and mount indirect and frontal attacks on entrenched Italian defences, supported by artillery. They were heavily outnumbered but made up for this disadvantage with their mobility and superior leadership. South African combat engineers were able to overcome the delays imposed by Italian demolitions of passes and bridges.
Birkby described the scene after the surrender of the garrison at Amba Alagi in northern Abyssinia, the last objective of the South Africans:
I came up again from the South African camp to the summit of Toselli Pass, through the chaos of dead animals and men among the wreckage of shelled trucks. Two hundred Italian lorries, some of them burned out, cluttered the mountain road. The pass had been blown up here and there. The few buildings on the mountain slopes were just riddled ruins. Macaroni and mortar bombs, chianti carafes and grenade, all were jumbled in one mournful mess with the dead who would need these things no more.
Like rock rabbits emerging from their holes on the pyramidal peak, the beaten men came out of the ruins of Toselli fort. In one unending stream, like soldier-ants on the march, 4 500 Italians moved down the mountainside, their column one gigantic letter Z against the green background. They marched past the Major General Mayne and his brigadiers. The pipe band of the Transvaal Scottish played a lament. The leaden-footed Italians tried to fit their pace to the unfamiliar Highland music. Some of them marched smartly in fours, some in shambling, shapeless rabble.
For the Springboks, it was exactly a year after the 1st South African Brigade had been constituted for full-time service. They had played a major part in the collapse of the Italian empire in Africa, thus making the Red Sea and the Suez Canal safe for Allied shipping and stabilising the strategic balance in the Middle East.
The Outspan Club was one of many facilities available for Springboks in North Africa and Italy.
A South African armoured car on a pontoon bridge in East Africa.
South African infantrymen on patrol in East Africa.
Vital for morale: a field post office in East Africa.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской
