By John W. Osborn, Jr.
ONE of World War II’s least known campaigns was fought over one of the most desolate places on earth. For a few August days it was Britain’s only battlefield, apart from the very sky above it. Yet it produced one of the war’s most unique victories, and its only land victory for Fascist Italy.
“Six feet up the Empire’s geographical orifice,” a colonial official unlucky to find himself there called those 68,000 square miles dismally, drearily dumped on the southern entrance to the Red Sea, 200 miles across the Gulf of Aden. But it was precisely that strategic location along the route to India that led the British to bother signing treaties of protection with the tribes there between 1884 and 1886.
Even for them the area “is hard to love,” the only author to bother writing about the British presence there commented. “Six inches of rain makes an abundant year, and as little as two paltry inches are possible.” It had absolutely no natural resources or industry of any kind, and on the outbreak of war in 1939 the European population of the capital and port, Berbera, stood at only 100.
The British in Somaliland at the outbreak of World War II faced Fascist Italy along a 750-mile border with Italian Somaliland, Eritrea, and recently conquered Ethiopia, with no more to defend themselves than the Somali Camel Corps under Lieutenant Colonel Reginald Chater, Captain Eric Charles Twelves Wilson, a dozen other British officers, 400 men, and 150 reservists. The persistent, petty, pence-pinching of peacetime for the protectorate perilously persisted when Chater’s appeal for 12,000 to 15,000 pounds to improve defenses at first got him only 900 pounds.
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