Raid on Somaliland

As navies go, the one known as His Majesty's Kenya Ships is distinctly down-at-the-poop. It consists of a school of schooners, motorboats, whaleboats and dhows, manned for the most part by farmers and landlubbing natives from the interior who had never seen the sea before the war. But last week Kenya's Navy made up in gallantry for what it lacked in gear and seamanship. It embarked some Nigerian shock troops from a Kenya port, landed them efficiently in a mangrove swamp near the Italian Somaliland border. Marching all night through a deserted countryside, the Nigerians raided Ras Chiamboni, formerly an important base for Italian operations in Kenya but now nearly undefended. They burned the whole town except for a mosque, then returned to their colleagues in empire.

Land patrols based on Kenya continued to raid small Italian outposts in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Italian Somaliland. The South African air force bombed and machine-gunned forts and military buildings, and helped seize several vital waterholes.

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