East Africa, part 1
Grand Duchess, Nigist and Kandake Anastasia Romanova, My Four Kingdoms (New Moscow: Icon Press, 1961)
… There was a peace government in Cairo in the beginning of 1935, but peace governments never lasted long. They came to power promising to achieve peacefully what Egypt hoped to gain through war, and when they inevitably failed, they fell apart amid recriminations and infighting. There were a few ministers who had a broader vision of peace – one involving a peace of equality, a peace of compromise – but they were never the ones in control, even when the government loudly proclaimed its wish to avoid warfare. The tide of nationalism was too strong for that, and by that time, the Nile had become an issue of national pride.
We also could have done more, I think. We could have worked with the Egyptians who wanted true peace, reassured them that we had no desire for Egypt to thirst. We could have tried to strengthen them, but we did the opposite: some of our politicians’ rhetoric about water and national development was quite as bellicose as theirs, and the Egyptians might have been forgiven if they considered our offers of arbitration a sham. We could have placed more emphasis on conservation and reclamation projects, to let them know that we wanted to increase the water available for all rather than simply taking more of it for ourselves. All of us – Tewodros and me, the prime minister, the governments of the six kingdoms – might have gone to Cairo with a proposal in hand, and challenged them to reject it in front of their own people. But I am not sure even that would have worked, with the war drums beating as loudly as they were.
So the peace government of January became the war government of July – and in July, also, my Tewodros was taken from me. He was an emperor in the morning, but a stroke took him at noon, and at evening he was dead. We had been married thirty-two years, and it was not enough; as I sat by his bedside, feeling his hand grow cold in mine, I could scarcely see for my tears.
But a monarch can cry only in private, and I soon faced the matter of succession. Tewodros had made me Nigist in my own right, not only as his wife, and it was thought that I might now be sole ruler. But I knew that Egypt would see Tewodros’ death as the time to test us, and one pair of hands would not be enough to guide Ethiopia through war. Our son Menelik was of full age, experienced and strong, and the people would take comfort if a Menelik led them in wartime.
So Menelik was crowned Negus on August sixth, taking the throne beside me. Mother and son as monarchs together: how Egyptian of us, although few remarked on it at the time. And as we expected, the war drums in Cairo now became deafening, and we gathered our forces, knowing it was only a matter of time…
Mikael Garang, “War and Peace on the Nile,” African History Quarterly 53: 102-11 (Spring 1999)
… The Egyptian general staff had made a careful study of Alfredo Blanco’s tactics during the Venezuelan Wars [1], particularly his combined-arms invasion of Colombia. Blanco’s doctrine called for a massed assault of mechanized infantry, riders and artillery supported from the air, and the Egyptian commanders had refined this into a war plan they called
al-Harba - “the Spear.” The Colombian mountains had not been ideal for such tactics, but the lands along the White Nile were much more so, and the Egyptian staff hoped that they would result in a lightning advance up the river followed by peace on their terms.
They almost succeeded.
The Ethiopian army had expected an attack on the Amharic heartland, and aerial surveillance had confirmed Egyptian troops massing along that part of the border. The first troops to enter Ethiopian territory on October 3, 1935 indeed advanced on the highlands. But this attack was a feint, designed to pin down Ethiopian troops and draw them away from the White Nile. The troops designated for the
real attack were even then force-marching south from Khartoum, and on October 8, they smashed into the Ethiopian border defenses north of Malakal.
The defenders were heavily outnumbered – the bulk of Ethiopia’s riders and mechanized artillery were in the highlands – and were unprepared for the force and speed of this invasion. The Egyptian forces easily breached the Ethiopian lines, and advanced faster than the Ethiopian army could set up new defenses. In less than two weeks, Egypt seized the northern part of the Ethiopian kingdom of Kush, and the leading elements of the Egyptian attack were halfway to the southern border.
The Ethiopians scrambled to switch from a system of fixed defenses to a defense in depth. Tewolde Tadesse, who had been Valentin Mikoyan’s apprentice during the Great War and had developed many of the Ethiopian army’s raiding and mobile-warfare tactics, took over the White Nile theater, supported by Ras Valentin himself who came out of retirement at seventy-seven. The Ethiopian troops bypassed by the Egyptian advance abandoned their garrisons to act as raiders, hoping to tie down Egyptian troops in the rear and slow the movement of soldiers and supplies to the front. As the Indians had done, the Ethiopians mounted antiaircraft and anti-rider batteries on patrol boats, railroad cars, even delivery wagons. What riders were already in the theater were detached to support raiding operations, while the main Ethiopian forces gave way before the Spear’s point to attack its sides.
They succeeded only in slowing the Egyptian assault, and in late January 1936, the first troops reached the border with Buganda. But the Egyptians were forced to advance on a much narrower front than initially planned. They controlled the river itself and the land immediately adjacent to it, but not the outlying areas, leaving battalion and brigade-size Ethiopian detachments – many of them supported by riders – free to operate against their flank and keep supply lines open through the mountains. Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands more troops would be needed to consolidate Egypt’s gains, and these troops would have to be brought south and supplied by a long and fragile route.
Cairo did, as it had planned, offer peace terms the day after its troops secured the entire length of the Ethiopian White Nile. But this offer was met with defiant rejection by Anastasia, who promised that there would be no peace as long as one Egyptian soldier remained on Ethiopian soil and one Ethiopian remained to fight him…
… The Indian and Venezuelan wars had shown that, in an age of air power, no city can truly be behind the lines. Improvements in aircraft between 1927 and 1935 meant that this lesson was now driven home even further. Ethiopian bombers raided Khartoum and even farther north, and Egyptian bombs rained down on Gondar, Asmara and New Moscow. These raids were an occasion for defiance – Anastasia ordered an antiaircraft battery installed at the palace and personally joined its crew during raids, and New Moscow union boss Iosif Djugashvili [2] did similar duty while organizing the city’s defense – but were damaging to both war production and civilian morale.
The first Ethiopian counteroffensive was thus directed at both the troops in the White Nile and the airfields in central Sudan. The intention was to strike west from Tigray and Eritrea, attacking through the point on the border where Egyptian forces were weakest. It was hoped that, in a single move, such an offensive would push the airfields farther from the Ethiopian heartland and threaten to cut off the forces on the upper Nile.
The offensive made gains during March and April 1936, but did not achieve its objectives. The Ethiopians’ advance went slowly in the mountains, and the Egyptian armies, which had spent more time developing a defense in depth, were able to prevent it from breaking through in force to the Sudanese plains. Also, Egypt’s preparation for the war had included construction of military roads through the mountains of western Sudan, and the troops in Kush were not in serious danger of being cut off even if Khartoum were taken.
Nonetheless, the counterattack was successful enough that Egypt felt compelled to respond with one of its own. It, too, was frustrated with the course of the war: it had hoped to knock Ethiopia out quickly, but had instead become mired in a long slugfest, and mounting casualties were feeding discontent at home. After some debate, the Egyptian president, a former army general, decided to take personal command of an offensive in Tigray. This would be the knockout blow, separating the Amharic heartland from the industrial cities of Eritrea and surrounding Gondar itself.
Like many decisions taken out of frustration, this proved to be a major miscalculation. The mountains forced the Egyptian column to advance on a narrow front, with its flanks and supply lines vulnerable to raids, and on the highlands, Ethiopia was able to bring the full force of its rider corps to bear. The First Battle of Tembien (July 5-7), fought near the town of Adua, was a tactical Egyptian victory but a strategic defeat, with the Egyptian army taking heavy losses and being delayed long enough for the Ethiopians to reinforce their front. At Adigrat (July 11-15), the Egyptians tried for four days to break through the Ethiopian defenses, but instead were nearly enveloped by riders and retreated only with difficulty. At the Second Battle of Tembien (July 17-18), by which time Emperor Menelik had arrived to take command of the Ethiopian forces, an Egyptian attempt to regroup was defeated, and at Shire (July 23-26), the Egyptian offensive was shattered and forced to beat a retreat through the mountains.
The failure of the Egyptian assault provided a much-needed boost to Ethiopian morale and was also a personal humiliation for Egypt’s president, who soon found himself sidelined in favor of a committee of generals. But the White Nile was still occupied, Ethiopian casualties had been heavy, and other dangers would soon arise…
Khaled Abdel Nour, Africa’s Great War (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2005)
… From the beginning, there was a risk that the Nile War would expand into a great-power conflict. Egypt was still a nominal Ottoman vassal, and although the Sultan had no actual authority in the Egyptian republic, he was still its diplomatic patron. Ethiopia had been a Russian ally for two generations and was home to a Russian population in the hundreds of thousands, with many thousands more having partial Russian ancestry. Neither the Russian nor the Ottoman government wanted a general war, but sympathy for their respective clients was strong, and minority factions in both nations saw the conflict as a chance to take care of unfinished business.
Prior to the war, both countries had attempted to restrain their allies, and even after war erupted, they still tried to broker a peace. But at the same time, both powers began supplying their clients with aid. By the spring of 1936, Egypt was receiving much-needed fuel and war materiel from the Ottoman Empire, and Russia was providing similar goods to Ethiopia, shipping them across the Afghan Road to Karachi and thence by sea.
It was the sea lane to New Moscow that became a bone of contention between the powers. Neither Egypt nor Ethiopia had a large navy, but the Egyptians did attempt to blockade Ethiopia’s Red Sea ports and prevent Yemeni troops from crossing to fight for Menelik and Anastasia. The Russian warships that escorted the lend-lease shipments refused to honor the blockade and, on several occasions, fired on Egyptian cruisers to warn them away from New Moscow. While Russia insisted that it was only protecting freedom of navigation, its actions made it a belligerent in the eyes of many Ottoman citizens, and the Porte faced growing calls to provide naval reinforcements to Egypt.
Matters took an even more dangerous turn when a Russian escort inadvertently intruded on Ottoman territorial waters, and exchanged fire with an Ottoman patrol ship before realizing its mistake. There were no casualties, and in ordinary times the incident would have been resolved with an official apology, but these were not ordinary times, and the Porte responded by closing the Bosporus to Russian shipping “while the incident was under investigation.”
Under international law, it was debatable whether the closure of the straits was an act of war. Russian naval officers overwhelmingly thought of it as one, though; there were several incidents between Russian and Ottoman warships in the Black Sea during July and August 1936, and the Odessa naval command drew up plans to open the Bosporus by force. Both governments still hoped the situation could be resolved by diplomacy, however, and stopped short of an outright declaration of war.
No one can be sure where matters would have ended if not for the Ottoman war party’s impatience. On September 13, 1936, a group of Ottoman officers supported by hawkish politicians, calling themselves the “Lions of Crimea,” attempted to seize Stamboul and install a pro-war government. They took control of key government buildings and besieged the parliament – the photograph of a cigarette-smoking Lev Pasha manning a machine-gun nest in defense of the
Meclis building has become an icon of Ottoman journalism – but this wasn’t 1911, and there was no popular revolutionary movement for the dissident officers to ride to power. Once it became known that the parliament was still holding out, the majority of the army stayed loyal, and by the evening of the 14th, the coup had been defeated and the constitutional government was securely back in power.
The coup attempt would have long-term ramifications for the autonomy and political role of the Ottoman military. In the immediate term, it acted as a bucket of cold water in the Ottomans’ and Russians’ faces. Both sides took rapid steps to de-escalate the situation: the Porte announced that its investigation of the Red Sea incident was complete and that the Bosporus was reopened, and Russia agreed to pay reparations to the Egyptian and Ottoman sailors who had been killed in action. More importantly, it was tacitly agreed that the Nile War would stay on the Nile, and that volunteers and material aid would be the most each side would provide to its client…
… The war being contained in the Nile Basin did not, however, mean that it would stay confined to Egypt and Ethiopia. The Egyptian president saw to that during a visit to the White Nile front in early October 1936. In a bid to regain relevance from the junta that now held real power in Cairo, he gave a speech outlining his plans for the region. He praised the troops for their tenacity against Ethiopia, promising victory in the near future, and told them that their efforts would ensure that “the whole of the Nile watershed” was preserved for Egyptian use. The sentences that followed made clear that, once Ethiopia was overcome, he believed it would be a simple matter to intimidate the Great Lakes states into signing treaties that prohibited them from reducing the Nile’s flow.
The Great Lakes countries already feared Egypt’s ambitions for the Nile Basin, which asserted ownership not only over the Nile itself but the Nalubale lake [3] and the rivers that fed it. They were now on unmistakable notice that, if Ethiopia fell, they were next on the menu. It took little time for them to fall into line: on October 20, Buganda and Bunyoro joined the war on the Ethiopian side, and by mid-November, the others had done the same.
By themselves, the Great Lakes armies added little to Ethiopia’s strength; they were small, designed for defensive warfare in hill country rather than large-scale battles in the open, and poorly equipped compared to their Egyptian and Ethiopian counterparts. Nonetheless, their entry into the war gave the Ethiopian army a larger rear in which to operate, and they proved effective raiders in the White Nile hinterland.
Egypt responded by extending the White Nile front southward, hoping to achieve a quick knockout and obtain control all the way to Nalubale. Kampala and even Kigali came under attack from the air, and massive columns of troops and riders pressed the assault. In Bunyoro, it succeeded: the home army was no match for the Egyptian attack, and Mparo fell barely a month after its entry into the war. But the better-equipped Buganda forces proved more tenacious, and although the Egyptian troops pushed slowly southward, the White Nile front became even more overextended. And in the meantime, decisions were being made in Zanzibar.
The Omani Empire, too, controlled part of the Nile watershed, and it was concerned not only with its water supply but with its political integrity: many of the northern provinces were anxious for independence, and the government in Zanzibar feared that Egypt might try to peel them off and turn them into puppet states. It hesitated about going to war, because it also feared that war itself might be the event that caused the empire to break up, but when an Egyptian deep-raiding team was captured near the northern border, it decided that Egypt was the more immediate threat. On November 30, 1936, Zanzibar declared war on the Egyptian Republic.
This was not a killing blow by any means; some of Zanzibar’s elite Yao, Swahili and Arab regiments were as well equipped as Ethiopian or Egyptian units, but most of its army was not. Still, Zanzibar’s entry added significantly to the forces on Ethiopia’s side, and quantity sometimes has a quality all its own. By mid-December, the Yao regiments had stabilized the Buganda front and were beginning to push the Egyptians northward, and the addition of Great Lakes and Zanzibari raiders (including the famous Swedish-Masai “Carlsen Battalion”) threatened Egyptian supply lines not only in Kush itself but in the Nuba Mountains. The allies were operating deep in the Egyptian rear, tying down an increasing number of troops, and just after the new year, they began a concerted offensive along the upper White Nile.
The attack began with tragedy. The Battle of Juba (January 4-9) would be Valentin Mikoyan’s last; he was killed by artillery fire early on the sixth day as he led a rider battalion to roll up the Egyptian flank. But the battle was a major Ethiopian victory, with 50,000 prisoners taken, and as the allied forces advanced on Bor, it seemed that the tide of war was turning…
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[1] See post 4462.
[2] See post 4177.
[3] OTL Lake Victoria.
