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Hello and thank you for downloading witness history from the BBC World Service with me Simon

Watts. Today I'm taking you back to the fighting in East Africa during World War II.

Eighty years ago, Italy's colonial rule in the region ended after its troops surrendered

in the Ethiopian city of Gondar.

I've been listening to a firsthand account of the battle in the BBC Archive.

Thousands of fierce, heroic fighting men were maskeded in the peaks thousands of feet above Gondar, which lay

on a lower step of the mountain staircase. I'd already seen the Patriots in action, and it was

a site which still makes my blood run cold when I think of it.

In November 1941 a British Army officer called Renee Cutforth was with a large unit of Ethiopian patriots loyal to the Emperor

Hilele Salasi. These irregular forces were Shifter, the local word for bandits. In the middle of the night they lay poised to attack

Gondar, a historic city which was now Italy's final colonial garrison.

There in the open, in the dark, they built themselves a dry stone wall, behind which they lay and

waited for the dawn, teeth chattering, all through the night the tension built up in their

nerves until their charge when it came

was a thing almost unbelievable in its speed, its ferocity, its complete disregard of cover or

field tactics of any kind. It was as if a long line of leopards suddenly saw their prey.

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