Eastern Front Africa at a cost of just 501 Allied dead Emperor Haile Selassie returned to his capital on May He had not seen Addis Ababa since fleeing the country during the Abyssinian War (1935–1936 ) He was escorted to Abyssinia by Orde Wingate at the head of a special forces unit known as Gideon Force The last Italian troops in the country holed up in a mountain fortified zone at Amba Alagi The British closed on them in two wide columns, accompanied by Abyssinian troops known locally and to the British as the “Patriots.” A siege of Amba Alagi lasted 25 days before the Italians surrendered on May 16 The last Italian resistance was made by a garrison that held out at Gondar in the northwest for seven months, until November 27, 1941 The East African campaign was the first real success for the British Army in World War II It came against a poorly equipped, badly demoralized, and poorly led Italian and colonial army supported by a single German motorized company Victory in East Africa provided a critical boost to British and Commonwealth morale Along with victories over Italian armies at Sidi Barrani and Bardia in North Africa, success in East Africa assured American leaders that Britain was prepared to fight on against the Axis Most importantly, it secured the Indian Ocean routes to and from India and the Far East, thereby permitting safer transit for Australian troops to Suez, thence to Egypt and into the fight for North Africa All that enabled President Franklin D Roosevelt to reclassify the Red Sea as no longer a war zone, despite the continuing presence of Axis submarines That legalism permitted American merchantmen to ply those waters and the Gulf of Aden In turn, that released more of the British merchant marine to bring crucial goods across the Atlantic The victory in East Africa also opened less critical overland and sea routes from South Africa to Egypt EAST CARPATHIAN OPERATION (SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER, 1944) See Czechoslovakia EAST CHINA SEA, BATTLE OF (APRIL 1945) See Okinawa campaign; Yamato, IJN EASTERN FRONT German and Western Allied term for the long battle line between Soviet forces and those of Nazi Germany and the minor Axis powers from the opening of BARBAROSSA on June 22, 1942, until the formal unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945 Some fighting continued in holdout pockets of resistance in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the east for another week after that At its greatest physical girth in late 1942, the Eastern Front stretched 1,900 miles (2,800 km), from the flat shores of the Barents Sea in the Arctic north, across the vast forests of Belorussia and northwest Russia, down through the steppe lands of Ukraine, to the mountains of the Caucasus in the south Maximum German penetration was also reached in 1942: at 1,075 miles inside the Soviet frontier At that extreme, the Eastern Front included rear areas that encompassed over 600,000 square miles, much of it marked by partisan 333