Word: somaliland
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...been consolidating themselves there ever since. The British were 80 miles east at Mersa Matruh, the outpost to which they had decided to retire, with tip & run tactics, whenever the drive from Libya materialized. To south and east, the Italians had already wiped out French Djibouti and British Somaliland, so as to clear the rear. This gave the Italians a strong clutch on the Red Sea's mouth and western coast. In order further to dominate that sea, through which British supplies and reinforcements were still running last week, the Italians were preparing to hop on to Britain...
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...
...Polignac on Lake Rudolf in the north and Buna, a British air base 60 miles south of Moyale, one of the preliminary keys to the capture of Nairobi. The British retorted with a satisfying raid by the South African Air Force, which swooped on Mogadiscio, main port of Italian Somaliland, and blasted "hundreds" of military trucks assembled there for the Kenya push...
Contingents of Rhodesian and 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...
...British War Office made the best of it by declaring that its purpose in defending Somaliland at all was "to inflict the maximum losses on the enemy until withdrawal became inevitable. ... All guns except two . . . have been embarked. A great part of the materiel, stores and equipment has also been evacuated and the remainder destroyed. Our wounded have been safely brought away. . . . Enemy losses, particularly among the Blackshirt units, have been heavy and out of all proportion...