Word: berbera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Giggiga, 50 miles east of Harar. Its supply lines were then about 600 miles long, and were potentially threatened from the east by Italians garrisoning British Somaliland, which the Italians occupied last summer. The threat was removed at the strategic moment by a British naval force which appeared off Berbera, British Somaliland's capital and main port, one midnight, and landed men and machines in two places near the town. By 9:30 a.m. they had taken it. They pushed inland at once, and by week's end had very nearly made contact with the inland column...
...fire, nearly surrounded, some 35,000 Italians showed that they could be as stubborn as the rocky buttes they defended. They resisted British attacks, and countered with their own-losing in one a brave general named Orlando Lorenzini. General Lorenzini, who led a brigade in the Italian assault on Berbera last August, died on the day the British won it back last week...
...From other quarters, other spurs drove in for the encirclement. This week the British announced that a naval force had made a landing and captured Berbera, capital of British Somaliland. While this did not mean that all British Somaliland was again in British hands, it did mean that the column advancing on Harar was comparatively free to go ahead without fear of being hit on the flank. The Italians were expected to resist at Harar. If the British could break that resistance, they could probably go on to Addis Ababa without taking Cheren. But now they will have to hurry...
Reports that British planes were bombing and ranging wide over such scattered points as Hargeisa and Berbera in Italian-held British Somaliland, Agordat and Gurá south of Asmara in Eritrea, and, more particularly, over the oasis of Siwa deep in the desert near the Libyan frontier, and at Metemmeh in Ethiopia near the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan border, indicated the British were keeping their air eyes open for signs of any new thrust toward the heart of the Nile Valley...
...Indian troops, about 7,000 strong, sent belatedly to reinforce the 560-man Somaliland Camel Corps, failed to stem Italian columns pressing along the coast from the west and through the mountains from the south, in temperatures of 120° Fahrenheit. The British made two stands outside of Berbera and then departed. Great Britain, with only 120,000 troops in the Middle East and with a situation in India too delicate to permit heavy troop withdrawals from there, was in no position to pour in enough men for a real defense. The Italians viewed Berbera as one more base from...