Battle of Annual, 1921: Spain's disaster in the Rif

Britannica calls Annual the worst military disaster suffered by a colonial power since the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. In a few weeks Spain lost all the territory it had occupied around Melilla since 1909, and the Spanish press gave the defeat the name it still carries: the Disaster of Annual.²

Background: a protectorate that was never pacified

Spain took charge of a protectorate over northern Morocco in 1912, a strip along the Mediterranean coast next to its old enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Much of it was the Rif, a mountainous country of Berber peoples who were nominally subjects of the sultan but kept their own autonomy and had no wish to be ruled by Spain. From the start Spain struggled to control them, and clashes that cost the lives of thousands of Spanish conscripts were constant.³

In 1919 the Spanish government told the high commissioner, General Dámaso Berenguer, to bring more of the protectorate under control. Berenguer worked cautiously in the west from Tetuan; in the east his more aggressive subordinate at Melilla, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre, aimed to reach the bay of Alhucemas in the central Rif and subdue the Beni Urriaguel, the strongest of the Rif peoples. The plan was to push west from Melilla and leave a chain of fortified posts behind.⁴

The Abd el-Krim family were leading figures among the Beni Urriaguel and had worked with the Spanish authorities in Melilla for years. That changed when they saw that Spain meant to occupy their land. After his father's death in 1920, Muhammad Abd el-Krim and his brother set out to unite the Rif against the Spanish advance, hoping to drive Spain out of the protectorate altogether.⁵

Armies and commanders

The numbers on the Spanish side depend on the count. The Spanish Army's history center in Melilla gives 13,363 men in the posts, mobile columns and reserves of the Melilla command in July 1921, 10,973 of them Spanish and 2,390 Moroccan; El Debate puts the command at about 14,000 men spread through 135 posts, and EBSCO speaks of a Spanish army of 20,000. Many of the posts were small, isolated and short of water.⁶

In January 1921 Silvestre occupied Annual, far out in the Rif, as the forward base for the drive on Alhucemas. Several officers advised against it, El Debate notes, and the camp depended on long, exposed supply lines. On the other side, Abd el-Krim had turned the fighters of the Rif into a force that, in the words of the Melilla history center, now attacked in disciplined groups and fired in volleys.⁷

The battle in phases

Igueriben, 21 July

In June Silvestre pushed forward again and fortified Igueriben, a post ahead of Annual with a grave weakness: it had no water. The Riffians soon surrounded it. On 21 July they overwhelmed it, after a relief column sent out from Annual was thrown back, and Annual itself, without supplies or support, was now in danger.⁸

The retreat from Annual, 22 July

On 22 July Silvestre ordered the army to withdraw east toward Ben Tieb and Melilla. The road was in enemy hands. Britannica calls the decision ill-considered and the evacuation hasty; the troops panicked and fled from Annual and from one fallback position after another. The Melilla history center describes Riffian columns falling on the camp, the desertion of the Moroccan police and the panic that followed, and post after post along the line was abandoned or overrun.⁹

The two Spanish accounts read the collapse differently. The Melilla history center, the army's own institution, stresses that reinforcements and road works had been refused and offensive action forbidden from above, and that Silvestre organized the withdrawal of more than 6,000 men in barely 24 hours; by its table about 2,900 men were in the camp of Annual itself. El Debate stresses instead that Silvestre acted in practice independently of the high commissioner, that his plan had been advised against, and that the retreat was organized fast and badly. In the days that followed Spain lost some 120 positions in the Rif.¹⁰

Silvestre died at Annual. How is still uncertain: EBSCO says he killed himself, El Correo Gallego that he most likely took his own life, though he may have been killed, while El Debate holds that beyond speculation nobody knows. His body was never found.¹¹

The Alcántara charges

Not every unit collapsed. The cavalry regiment Cazadores de Alcántara, under Lieutenant Colonel Fernando Primo de Rivera, covered the withdrawal in charge after charge, opening the way for General Felipe Navarro's column toward Monte Arruit. The royal decree of 2012 that finally awarded the regiment the collective Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand records its fighting from 22 July to 9 August 1921 and its losses: 28 of 32 officers and 523 of 685 men.¹²

Monte Arruit

Navarro gathered what men he could and on 29 July fell back to the fortified post of Monte Arruit, about 30 kilometers south of Melilla, with some 3,000 men by El Debate's count, 4,000 by El Correo Gallego's. Aircraft dropped food, water and ammunition to the besieged posts until 9 August. The garrison held out for about ten days without drinking water and then agreed to surrender on the promise that its men would be spared. When the disarmed troops came out, the Riffians fell on them, the sick and wounded included; only a few survived, Navarro among them as a prisoner.¹³

Turning point: Melilla holds

For a few days Melilla itself lay open. When Berenguer received Silvestre's last message, El Debate writes, he ordered General José Sanjurjo to embark every available soldier at Ceuta for Melilla, and the city did not fall. The Melilla history center follows Sanjurjo's troops as they secured the approaches to the town and began the reconquest.¹⁴

Aftermath

No one agrees on the toll. The Melilla history center compares the 10,973 Spanish soldiers in the posts in July with the 3,098 who reached Melilla afterward and arrives at 7,875 Spanish losses. Britannica gives 8,000 to 10,000 dead and more than 300 prisoners; El Debate cites the Picasso report's count of 13,000 Spanish dead in little more than three weeks while noting that other sources put it below 8,000; EBSCO gives 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers and civilians.¹⁵

When Spanish troops retook Monte Arruit on 24 October 1921, General Miguel Cabanellas found the dead still lying where they had fallen. The photograph at the top of this page shows the fort from the air after its reoccupation.¹⁶

The prisoners held by Abd el-Krim, General Navarro among them, spent about eighteen months in captivity before Spain paid their ransom. Ramón Díez Rioja's study gives the price as 4.3 million pesetas; El Correo Gallego gives four million, with a further 270,000 added at the moment of release, and dates their liberation to January 1923.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

The news stunned Spain. Besides the word “disaster,” the press made “responsibilities” a political battle cry. A commission under General Juan Picasso was set up in August 1921 to investigate, and its report, Britannica writes, was damning: it exposed poor leadership, poor morale and training, broken logistics and shoddy equipment in Spain's colonial army. The crisis fed directly into General Miguel Primo de Rivera's coup of 13 September 1923, and El Correo Gallego goes further, counting the quarrel over responsibilities among the roots of the Civil War of 1936.¹⁸

For Abd el-Krim, Annual was the beginning. He proclaimed a Republic of the Rif in 1923 and by early 1925 controlled most of the protectorate. It took a joint Spanish and French campaign, with a Spanish landing at Alhucemas Bay on 8 September 1925, to defeat him. He surrendered to the French in 1926 and was exiled to Réunion. EBSCO sees him as a symbol of resistance to European rule across North Africa.¹⁹ › The Rif War, 1921 to 1926

Spain's own memory settled on the few who held. In 2012, more than ninety years later, the Cazadores de Alcántara received the collective Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand, Spain's highest military award, for their charges during the retreat.²⁰