was postponed and on 2 April the last five destroyers left to attack Port Sudan and then sink themselves. Heath telephoned Bonetti with an ultimatum to surrender and not block the harbour by scuttling ships. If this was refused, the British would leave Italian citizens in Eritrea and Ethiopia to fend for themselves. The 7th Indian Infantry Brigade Group sent small forces towards Adowa and Adigrat and the rest advanced down the Massawa road, which declined by in . The Indians rendezvoused at Massawa with Briggs Force by 5 April, after it had cut across country. Bonetti was once again called upon to surrender but refused and on 8 April, an attack by the 7th Indian Infantry Brigade Group was repulsed by the Massawa garrison. A simultaneous attack on the west side by the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade and the tanks of B Squadron, 4th RTR, broke through. The Free French overran the defences in the south-west as the RAF bombed Italian artillery positions. In the afternoon, Bonetti surrendered and the Allied force took and The harbour was found to have been blocked by the scuttling of two large floating dry docks, ships and a floating crane in the mouths of the north Naval Harbour, the central Commercial Harbour and the main South Harbour. The Italians had also dumped as much of their equipment as possible in the water. The British re-opened the Massawa–Asmara railway on 27 April and by 1 May, the port had come into use to supply the 5th Indian Infantry Division. The Italian surrender ended organised resistance in Eritrea and fulfilled the British strategic objective of ending the threat to shipping in the Red Sea. On 11 April, the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, rescinded the status, under the Neutrality Acts, of the Red Sea as a combat zone, freeing US ships to use the route to carry supplies to the Middle East. Western Ethiopia, 1941 Gideon Force was a small British and African special forces unit, which acted as a Corps d'Elite amongst the Sudan Defence Force, Ethiopian regular forces and Arbegnoch (Patriots). At its peak, Orde Wingate led fifty officers, twenty British NCOs, Sudanese troops and trained Ethiopian regulars. He had a few mortars, no artillery and no air support, only intermittent bombing sorties. The force operated in the difficult country of Gojjam Province at the end of a long and tenuous supply-line, on