Word: eritrea
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...long tentacles of empire wrapped, the complexity wriggled, and the small eyes in the compact head stared defiance. In Libya the Axis fought against Australians, the tough colonists of empire (see p. 22), and against Free Frenchmen, auxiliary believers in empire (see p. 24). In Eritrea the Axis fought against imperial experience, which used religion as a weapon (see p. 22). In Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, the Axis faced black men as well as white (see p. 24). The Axis knew that the only way to kill this thing before it was itself dismembered by the tentacles...
British Empire forces, which had driven 70 miles into Eritrea from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, last week took Agordat (see map, p. 23). This town, 2,000 feet up on the Eritrean plateau, is strategically placed at the junction of a railway to Massaua on the Red Sea and a new highway to Addis Ababa. Agordat was defended by one Italian division. In taking the town, the attackers claimed "many hundreds of prisoners," but the Italians were not entirely surrounded, and the main body retreated into increasingly mountainous country behind Agordat...
Strategic Barentu, 70 miles inside Eritrea near the Ethiopian border, fell barely 24 hours after the British capture of the railroad town of Agordat, 40 miles northward, after fierce fighting that cost the Italians heavily in dead, wounded and prisoners...
...estimated half of Mussolini's East African army--about 100,000 troops --were said to face entrapment in Eritrea, while other Italian forces were reported in retreat from Western Ethiopia and from Ethiopia's southern frontier...
...different tone from that of all other Ethiop chiefs; the blacks know it well). At the same time the British sent "military missions" among their would-be allies, to persuade them to rise up against the Italians. But there is no persuasion like apparent success. The campaigns in Eritrea and Kenya were the final signal for action. From the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan the British struck into Ethiopia, near Metemmeh...