In the brief pause that followed, Singh collected his surviving men and got them back into reasonable shape. Then the whistles blew. He led them back over the crest into an assault on the Italian line. Once again, the positions just over the crest had been abandoned and lay temptingly open, but the Sikhs had learned from their previous mistakes.
They kept going.
This time, without pre-registeration on carefully defined targets, the light Italian mountain guns were much less effective; they were an annoyance more than anything else. The Indian artillery observers had caught up with the infantry. They directed fire from the comparatively heavy 4.5-inch howitzers on to the Bersaglieri positions in the rear. The 35-pound shells had an authority that the 9-pound Italian projectiles lacked; the barrage suppressed the Italian infantry fire long enough for the Indians to close.
The fight was bitter. The Bersaglieri had no intention of giving
ground without making their opponents pay dearly for it. By the time they were driven out of their defenses, Singh’s unit had lost yet more of his men. He doubted the ability of the remainder to advance further without rest and reinforcement. He was slightly surprised to see one of the Bersaglieri officers advancing with a white flag. Surely they are not surrendering now, after the brave and honorable fight they put up?
It was with an anomalous sense of relief that he got the message from the company headquarters. “There will be a three-hour truce so that the wounded can be collected for care and the dead recovered for burial.”
A few minutes later, whistles blew on the Indian side to announce the start of the truce. Singh was amused to hear the same message being given on the Italian side by a trumpet fanfare. His men started to lay the Italian bodies out where the Bersaglieri could collect them and get their own wounded ready for carriage back to the battalion lines. Half way through the process, a stretcher team from the Italians turned up and started to pick up the Italian wounded. An Italian officer with them noted the first-aid work carried out on the Italian wounded by the Indians and caught Singh’s eye. Singh himself had seen the Italian medics and stretcher bearers treating the Indian wounded and returned the glance. Two professional soldiers who didn’t even begin to speak each other’s language reached an understanding without any problems. There was a time to fight and a time to give aid and comfort. This was the latter and that it was being respected as such gave honor to them both.
The eighteen Wellesleys were formed into three flights of six and lined up on the Italian Air Force base at Asmara. 47 Squadron had been assigned the base as its primary target, mostly to persuade the Italian Air Force not to come back north. As far as Squadron Leader Sean Mannix was concerned, the absence of Italian fighters was an entirely good thing. His Wellesley had been a remarkable aircraft once; long ranged and capable of carrying what was, for then, a heavy bombload. Now, it was painfully obsolete, slow and very poorly armed. His aircraft’s only real defense was a single .303 Vickers machine gun aft and that had a very limited field of fire. The fact that he and his gunner sat in separate cockpits made coordinating defense very difficult. All in all, it was fortunate that the Italians had moved all their fighters south, where the South African Tomahawks had cut a swathe of destruction through them.
Mannix peered over the nose, trying to see the airfield that he was supposed to be approaching. It was hard to make out the runway against the prevailing yellow-gray color of the bare African soil. Even black-topped runways quickly adopted the universal khaki color as they absorbed the windblown dust. The airfield was supposed to be south of the town, but he couldn’t see anything.
It didn’t help that he was his own bomb-aimer. He had to fly the aircraft, search for his target, keep in formation with the other aircraft in his flight and watch out in case any enemy fighters were around. He swept his eyes quickly around the sky before transferring attention back to the ground. That was when he saw two large, square buildings with a long, straight patch of desert in front of them. Hangars, runway, south of the town. This has to be it.
It took a minor change of course to line up his aircraft on the target. Around him, the other five members of his flight saw the change and adjusted their own path accordingly. Their pilots watched his aircraft with their thumbs on the bomb release. As soon as he dropped, they would do the same. His was the only flight in 47 Squadron trained that way; the other two flights both relied on individual bomb-aiming. There had been long arguments over the technique Mannix had come up with. The other flight commanders pointed out that if he missed badly, everybody would. His counter-argument was that his flight would at least get a nice tight bomb pattern and damage something. Underneath him, the hangars he had spotted entered his bombsight. He waited a second, allowing the cross-hairs to pass just over the target. Then he pressed his release. In the streamlined bomb panniers under his wings, the racks released the ten 100-pound bombs contained in each. They hit the bungee-loaded bomb pannier doors, knocking them open and then falling clear to rain down on the target below. The ground around the buildings erupted in a tight pattern of explosions, the buildings vanishing under the clouds of black and red smoke.
“Fighters; fighters.” The voice from his gunner came over the speaking tube clearly. Mannix looked around and saw a flight of CR.32s descending on the British formation.
“Everybody, keep it tight.”
Mannix tried to stay calm. They promised us there wouldn’t be any fighters here. Behind him, he heard chatter; his gunner opened fire on a pair of
CR.32s that had picked his flight. The other gunners in his formation did the same. Between them, the display of firepower looked impressive. Mannix was painfully aware of how ineffective it really was. In contrast, the other flights had dispersed as each aircraft made its own run. Now the fighters had a spread-out series of targets, instead of the compressed mass offered by Mannix’s group. They went for the easiest targets: picking an isolated bomber, diving down and coming up from below, gutting them with their machine guns. Mannix saw one Wellesley break up. Its long wings folded around it as it started to spin down. Another developed a trail of black and orange flame; two parachutes separated from it.
There was more chattering from his formation. A CR.32 tried an upand-under attack, but the aircraft were able to cover each other. The fighter pilot obviously decided easy kills were better and left them alone. Mannix’s decision to keep a tight formation paid of in ways he had never expected. By the time the CR.32s pulled away, seven of the 18 Wellesleys had been shot down, not one of them from his flight.
“They all escaped?” Colonel Duilio Loris Contadino looked at the destruction and shook his head. The prison on the outskirts of the town had been the center of the attack and the bombers had done appalling damage. The walls had been knocked flat; the baked-mud bricks powdered by the bombs. The walls of the cell blocks had collapsed as well, leaving the cells inside exposed. The occupants of those cells took the opportunity the British bombers had so generously provided and fled. A handful had died from the bombs; the majority of prisoners, almost all leaders of the resistance to the Italian occupation of Eritrea and Ethiopia, had escaped.
“All of them, except the few we see in the ruins, sir.” Captain Crescenzo Rico surveyed the destruction and whistled. “These must be the very best crews the British had. Just to hit a target like this from so high showed great skill and to get a close pattern like this, all around the prison but so few hits on it is truly remarkable. Our airmen could never do such a thing. And the way the other bombers drew our fighters away from the attack formation. I hope these were the elite British crews; because, if the rest of the British bombers are as skilled and ruthless as this, we will have much to fear.”