سير دونالد هولي يحاكم إسماعيل الأزهري ومحمد نور الدين وإبراهيم المحلاوي

Quote: FORWARD by GENERAL SIR WILLIAM PLATT Commander Troops in the Sudan Defence Force 1938-41 ON 4 July 1940 columns of Italian Infantry, Artillery and Tanks crossed the frontier of Eritrea in a con¬verging attack on Kassala, a small trading town close to the eastern border of the Sudan. There cannot have been less than ten thousand troops under the I talian General. To resist this onslaught there were three Motor Machine Gun Companies and one Mounted Infantry Company of the Sudan Defence Force, whose heaviest l~ weapons were the .303 Vickers Machine Gun and the 1938 model of the Anti-Tank Rifle. The strength of these four Companies did not exceed six hundred, led by a sprinkling of British OffiCerS"• From dawn to dusk the Italian attackers were supported without break by fighter and bomber aircraft .•• The nearest British aircraft were active about the Red Sea: not one was in the Kassala sky to gladden the hearts of soldiers sweating in the desert. True to their training the Sudanese Companies kept continuously on the move, darting in to sting like mechanised mosquitoes and extricating themselves before the Italians could take effective counter-action,repeating the process swiftly in another place, perhaps minutes, perhaps an hour later. News of the action filtered in bits to Headquarters in Khartoum across two hundred and fifty miles of flat and open desert. I t reached eager and anxious hands by erratic wireless or railway telegraph. Much was vague. Much was out of time. 'Fog' descended. Demands for an aeroplane to 'Go and Find Out' were frequent. There were only four at call- four Vincents, built about 1928, capable of 100 m.p.h. with the wind and 80 m.p.h., with luck, against. All four might have to go out the next day in the hope that one would get back with news. This was not the day for sacrifice: but it was the night for speculation. Would the Italians, having nibbled at the crust, embark on a great strategic offensive to fulfil their dream of an All-Green Italian North-East Africa from Tripoli to the Indian Ocean? Or would they content themselves with the gain of a few miles of desert sand, and wireless cackle? And if they came boldly on, would they strike West for the capital of Khartoum, North-West for the railway heart at Atbara, or North for the one and only Port Sudan? Along a thousand miles of frontier, attacked at Kassala and at Gallabat, actively threatened at other points, there was a thin, very thin, line of Sudanese soldiers, with wide open gaps in which Sudanese police and enthusiastic District Commissioners, with begged and borrowed rifles, played their gallant part. Behind this fringe there were three Regular English Battalions from Yorkshire, W orcestershire and Essex. For more than two months, until reinforcements began to arrive in August and September, the Sudan was held, and held firm as in a vice, by six thousand Sudanese and two thousand Englishmen, amongst all of whom there was not one tank, not one gun, and precious few automatics. Have any soldiers in history been tested more severely than those Sudanese? Not since Omdurman had they been engaged by an attacking force. Occa¬sional internal troubles or sporadic tribal revolts had been the summit of their practical experience. They had neither seen nor suffered the horror of modern war. Their name was that of a 'Defence' Force. Their test came with the invasion of their country, one episode of which is outlined here. That episode was no isolated incident. It is an example that was followed and repeated in style and fashion, in courage and endurance, whenever and wherever the call of battle and of duty sounded. It was their answer on the shore of the Red Sea; among the rocks and spear¬grass of the escarpment about Keren and Chilga; on the wet and cold ambas of the Gojjam; in the swamps of the Baro Salient; in the mountains and forests of the near-Equator; and in the plains and jebels close to home. They stood each test triumphant, earning and deserving the name given to them so justly, and so proudly, by Mr. H. C. Jackson - 'The Fighting Sudanese' .