Springboks, Troepies and Cadres. David Williams

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.