Word: eritrea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Last week the campaign in Eritrea began to look like another Italo-British speed contest (see above). From Kassala, a few miles inside Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the British pursued Italians 68 miles to Biscia, head of a railway running down to the Red Sea port of Massaua. Operating here in rough foothills covered with dry six-foot scrub where lions and elephants are more at home than tanks, the British, although forced for the most part to hug the roads, kept so hot after the retreating Italians that the latter scarcely fought even rear-guard actions, until they were within...
...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...
...actual destruction accomplished was the propaganda value of the raid. Loudly Rome boasted that the bombers had set a new distance record, covering 2,800 miles on the outgoing trip from bases in Libya or Italy. It was a lot more probable that they had taken off from Eritrea, or that the Italian military mission had won the use of an air base from the French in Syria. But Italy stuck to its story, declared the planes had been refueled from submarine tankers. The warning to the U. S. and the Near East was clear...
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...