Vincere: The Italian Royal Army's Counterinsurgency Operations in Africa, 1922–1940

By Federica Fasanotti and John Rutherford Allen

Vincere! presents an overview of the counterinsurgency operations carried out by the Italian Royal Army from 1922 to 1941 in Libya and Ethiopia. Based on ten years of study conducted in the Italian archives and on the ground, this volume looks at a period when the Italian Royal Army faced significant new challenges in the conduct of war. Facing new challenges in an atypical theater of war, Italian Royal Army forces learned significant lessons that would shape the conduct of future combat. In the period covered in this work, Italian Royal Army forces had to adapt to new terrain, while modifying their techniques and methods in relation to the local populations and the overall characteristics of the territories in Africa. Moving away from a reliance on heavy, slow battalions formed for the most part by Italian troops, the Italians instead turned to mobile units, lightly armed and composed primarily by African troops who were able to respond quickly to the needs of this kind of war. Men coming from the loyal Eritrean colony, from Somalia, Libya, from the countries on the Red Sea and even from Ethiopia, progressively replaced Italian troops. In Libya, warfighting and counterinsurgency operations were conducted mainly by regular infantry (Libyan battalions, Méharists, Saharian) and cavalry units (Savaris and Spahis), while in Ethiopia, regular and irregular bands were used. Vincere! offers a look at some of the earliest irregular warfare and counterinsurgency operations the modern Italian forces ever conducted. Italian forces faced local populations while conducting counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in what was, for them, a new theater of war. In Libya, the rebellion was quelled in the space of ten years, at an admittedly high price for the regional forces. In Ethiopia, where COIN operations were interrupted by World War II, the available data suggests that military actions, accompanied by a more responsible policy toward the population, would have eventually defeated the insurgency. The use of airpower in Ethiopia made a huge difference, and its lessons were learned long before the French experience in Algeria. The Italians waged counterinsurgency operations over twenty years in two geographically separate theaters, and in two very different operational environments and much of value for current practitioners and scholars can be learned from these different experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781682474808

Book preview

Vincere!

Vincere!

The Italian Royal Army’s Counterinsurgency Operations in Africa, 1922–1940

Federica Saini Fasanotti

Foreword by Gen. John R. Allen, USMC (Ret.), Commander, NATO, and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, 2011–2013

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

Annapolis, Maryland

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2020 by Federica Saini Fasanotti

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Saini Fasanotti, Federica, author.

Title: Vincere! : the Italian Royal Army’s counterinsurgency operations in Africa, 1922–1940 / Federica Saini Fasanotti ; foreword by Gen. John R. Allen, USMC (Ret.) ; [translated by Sylwia Zawadzka].

Description: Annapolis : Naval Institute Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019029387 (print) | LCCN 2019029388 (ebook) | ISBN 9781682474280 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781682474808 (epub) | ISBN 9781682474808 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Italy. Regio Esercito—History—20th century. | Counterinsurgency—Libya—History—20th century. | Counterinsurgency—Italian East Africa—History—20th century. | Libya—History, Military—20th century. | Italian East Africa—History, Military. | Italy—History, Military—1914–1945. | Italy—Colonies—Africa.

Classification: LCC DT235 .S2462 2020 (print) | LCC DT235 (ebook) | DDC 961.203—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029387

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029388

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992

(Permanence of Paper).

Printed in the United States of America.

28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20 9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

First printing

Translated by Sylwia Zawadzka

Map by Chris Robinson

Photos courtesy of Gian Carlo Stella Private Archive

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction

I. Libya (1922–1931)

1 -  The Fourth Shore

2 -  The Libyan Environment

3 -  The Doctrine

4 -  Libyan Insurgency, Italian Counterinsurgency

5 -  Garrison Network in Libya

6 -  Officers in Libya

7 -  Eritreans, Somalis, and Libyans: The Indigenous Units

8 -  Insurgents in Libya

9 -  Libyan Population

10 -  Military Organization of the Territory and a New Set of Rules

11 -  The Royal Air Force Contribution in Libya

12 -  Conclusions about Libya

II. Ethiopia (1936–1940)

13 -  Italian East Africa

14 -  A Restless Empire

15 -  The Ethiopian Environment

16 -  Ethiopian Insurgency, Italian Counterinsurgency

17 -  Garrison Network in Ethiopia

18 -  Officers in Ethiopia

19 -  Regular and Irregular Bands

20 -  Insurgents in Ethiopia

21 -  Ethiopian Population

22 -  The Royal Air Force Contribution in Ethiopia

23 -  Conclusions about Ethiopia

Glossary of Libyan Terms

Glossary of Italian East African (AOI) Terms

Glossary of Names

Notes

Index

Foreword

This study deals with two extremely complex counterinsurgency campaigns, which took place from 1922 to 1931 in Libya and from 1936 to 1940 in Ethiopia. These African countries had been conquered because of the power anxiety of the Italian political class. Initial operations in both theaters took on blitzkrieg-like characteristics, against the Ottoman Empire in Libya and against the armies of the Ethiopian emperor, called the negus, Haile Selassie. But soon after these decisive conventional operations had been concluded, it became clear to the relevant Italian military leaders—and then the political ones—that Libya and Ethiopia were not pacified as countries, nor were the populations subjugated as peoples. It became clear that counterinsurgency campaigns would be required, with the aim of gaining control of those vast, difficult, and hostile territories.

The occupation of this region by the Royal Italian Army had been reduced to a few centers on the coast following the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12. During this period, Italy’s and its army’s experience in war was shaped nearly entirely by World War I, during which it fought alongside the British, French, and American allies. The challenge of the Libyan campaign demanded not just a shift in character of the Italian way of war, but a shift in the manner and nature of how Italians would wage war after their experience in the Great War. And it is here, in the nature of colonial wars, where the reader encounters the turning of dark pages in Italian military and national history. Even so, Italian innovation and adaptability deserve study.

Despite the very different environmental context, the solutions adopted in the Horn of Africa followed the Libyan ones: a combination of mobility and firepower with greater use of airpower. The outbreak of the World War II and the drain on Italian military power into other theaters prevented the conclusion of the Ethiopian counterinsurgency operations conducted between 1938 and 1939, but there are important lessons to be learned here as well.

In years of study, Dr. Federica Saini Fasanotti has collected thousands of documents from the Italian archives, bringing unpublished details into this narrative. In this, she sheds light on the strategic criteria of the Italian military campaigns in the African colonies and highlights innovative aspects of those years, such as the innovative and effective coordination of ground maneuver and counterinsurgency operations with airpower. The Italian pioneering of air-ground operations in Africa found echoes in other postcolonial conflicts up to the current counterinsurgency operations.

There has been almost no principal treatment of the Italian counterinsurgency experience in Africa until now. It is an experience rich with lessons, which for a variety of reasons, mostly political, were lost to Italians and the wider community of students of military history. Thus, the work of Dr. Fasanotti on this book is of particular importance, not only because it provides two historical examples and models of counterinsurgency operations—always with the awareness of all the limitations and misdeeds made by the protagonists—but also because its writing and translation into English fills an important void in military history heretofore largely unknown to the English-speaking audience. In writing this volume, she has done us all a good service.

Since time immemorial, the histories of colonial wars, which invariably involved or were exclusively insurgencies, were stories of brutality on both sides. It is the nature of these wars, where the passions are running so high, that the actions of both sides can spiral downward, displaying some of the basest dimensions of humanity. The colonial insurgencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries particularly in Africa and Indochina were no different, as European powers sought to subjugate their respective colonies. Even the United States, never a real colonial power, had its own colonial insurgency experience in the Philippines, Haiti, and Central America.

—John R. Allen

General, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Commander, NATO International Security

Assistance Force, and U.S. Forces Afghanistan

Mount Vernon, Virginia, 2019

Acknowledgments

When, more than twelve years ago, the Italian Army General Staff commissioned me to write what would have been the first study of a long series on Italy’s African colonies, I knew little about Libya. And I did not have a clear idea of what constituted the counterinsurgency operations that the Italian Royal Army had done earlier on that chessboard and then in the Horn of Africa. If I had known what was waiting for me, perhaps I would have let it go because of the enormity of the challenge. I studied Ethiopia for four years, going every day to the Italian archives and wherever I could find original and unedited material. My studies of Libya and Ethiopia did not stop at the archives. Rather, I studied all the Italian and foreign bibliographies on the subject, I spoke with the few living veterans and their families, and I traveled to Africa. I knew, in fact, that if I had not trod the same paths on which the Italian soldiers operated almost a century ago, if I had not observed the distances, the deserts, the plateaus, and above all, the people of those places, I could never have written a credible book of military history. I had to understand with my own eyes.

Inevitably, my research taught me so much about the art of war and challenges faced by the Italian troops of this era. Everything was obscure, and there were times when—between my ignorance and the infinite number of documents (for the first study on operations in Ethiopia I took just over a million photographs)—the work seemed overwhelming. But I was not alone in my work. The general of the Italian Army, Mario Montanari—a real icon in the Italian military history community—followed and supported me at the beginning, teaching me much of what I know today, as did Gian Carlo Stella, renowned connoisseur of the Italian colonial period. I also owe a great deal to the general inspector of the Italian Air Force, Basilio di Martino, and the colonels who opened the doors of the Archives of the Army General Staff in Rome: Roberto Di Rosa and Filippo Cappellano, as well as Alessandro Gionfrida and all the archives staff. Thanks also to Professor Ivano Granata and to Professors Luigi Goglia and Giorgio Rochat; they represent my academic role models. My debt of gratitude to Gen. John R. Allen can never be repaid, as no one like him believed in what I had to tell. If today, almost a century after the facts, the story of the counterinsurgency operations carried out by the Italian armed forces can also be read in English, it is thanks to him, who put me in touch with Rick Russell of the Naval Institute Press and his team of great professionals. Special thanks also go to Gen. Jim Mattis, who in all these years has been a lighthouse in the storm and to my family in trying to understand my passion for military history and the great commitment that follows from it.

This book summarizes the strategies and operational tactics put in place by the Italian commands—first in Libya, then in Ethiopia—to suppress widespread, deep-rooted rebellions during the period from 1922 to 1940, when Italy entered World War II. It is a story of war with a scientific cut, but this is a story mostly of men. On the one hand, it is about Italian soldiers who fought, making great sacrifices, for years, away from their families and the Motherland, committing many errors but also many acts of heroism. On the other hand, it is about Libyan mujahidin and Ethiopian arbegnà: hard, courageous, resilient men who never stopped fighting for freedom for their land and who often died for it.

In the long years I spent on these documents, I discovered two things: first that the Royal Italian Army proved to be much better—in military terms—in fighting irregular wars than in fighting regular ones (and I refer above all to World War II); second that the Italian soldiers—officers and troops—who fought in those distant lands considered their Libyan and Ethiopian adversaries a brave and respectable enemy that should never be under estimated. Finally, my thoughts and prayers go to all the civilian populations who were affected by Italian counterinsurgency operations. Their sacrifices and suffering are not forgotten in Italy.

This study is dedicated to the memory of Enrico Fasanotti, my grandfather’s brother, who at the age of twenty-two, on 31 January 1943, perished on the eastern front in Russia along the River Don, immediately after the Battle of Nikolayevka, a part of the Stalingrad campaign. Grief and sorrow really do transcend the generations.

We have not forgotten you.

—Federica Saini Fasanotti, 2019

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Author’s Note: In writing this book, the author faced the expected challenges associated with the transliteration from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet, a task that was further complicated because many of the Arabic words were translated into Italian at the transliteration. The Italian then needed to be translated into English. To the maximum extent possible, the author has sought to be consistent throughout this three-way process that included both transliteration and translation. For example, the Warfalla tribe is translated as Orfella in Italian. In fact, the documents analyzed show the names only in Italian. General Graziani, for instance, writes about the Orfella tribe in each document, not the Warfalla tribe. So the author had to take this into account.

Introduction

Much has been much written about Italy’s military presence in Africa in the years prior to World War II, and from multiple points of view. But it was only in the early 1970s that the approach to this controversial topic changed and a more systematic method used. A further leap in quality occurred in the mid-1990s with the opening of the Italian archives. The Archive of the Historical Office of the Army contains several collections that cover the colonization of Africa by Italy. It also contains thousands of papers, telegrams, and reports that, when taken together, constitute a treasure trove that enables the examination of the two faces of Italian commitment in Africa: the bold and adventurous one, as well as the darker and more dramatic one. There has not yet been, nor is there likely to be, a vision of the other side of the hill in scholars’ views of this topic. Thus, in the absence of any documentation in years past, previous scholars had to base their studies on relatively recent memoirs, oral histories, and indirect sources, with all the limitations that these methods involve. In this context, the archives of nations such as Britain, France, and Turkey, spectators at the time, added little to the scholarship, with the contributions constituting briefings, reports, and bits of analysis.

This work covers the strategies and the organizational and tactical solutions used by the Italian Royal Army in colonial counterinsurgency, a form of nonlinear conflict. The insurgents were driven by factors such as the desire to reject foreign domination, as well as religious fervor. The indigenous units were supervised by Italian officers using the latest technical and logistical techniques. In the 1920s, in the dunes of the endless Libyan desert, the idea of using local militias was crafted, but Eritreans, Somalis, and Yemenis were also used. Owing to their perceived characteristics of frugality, endurance, mobility, and aggressiveness, they allowed the Italians to take a different approach to counterinsurgency operations, offering up a solution that had already been implemented by other colonial powers.

The Great War, the first technological conflict in history, had seen the large-scale use of rapid-firing artillery, machine guns, and wireless stations that, in the colony, would have hastened the opportunities for action of the indigenous units, regular or irregular, while the domain of the sky would have given the military operations a previously unimaginable pace. In Libya, the dramatic situation of 1915, when the Italian occupation was reduced to just a few coastal towns, was overturned in the space of a decade between the spring of 1922 and the first months of 1931, despite the difficulties caused by the terrain and a tenacious and courageous opponent. The Libyans, albeit in a confused and disorganized way, fought against a domination that they considered worse than that of the Ottoman Empire, which was also based on a commonality of faith.

If in Tripolitania the rebellion was quelled within a few years and by 1925 the region could be considered largely pacified, in Cyrenaica, where the mystical-religious organization of the Sanusi brotherhood was a unifying and motivating factor, the clash was much worse. It continued unabated from 1923 until 1931, when the leader Omar al-Mukhtar was captured and hanged after a mock trial. The turning point of the Italian counterinsurgency in Libya can be well represented by the action of a group of officers who, despite the experience of the Great War, had been learning the art of war after many years of service in the colony. They were to form the backbone of the colonial departments in the subsequent campaign in Ethiopia. The Italian response to the Sanusi challenge saw the use of mobile units driven and supported by aviation, which proved particularly successful. Two parallel measures aimed to deprive the insurgency of its sources of internal and external power: the construction of 170 miles of barbed wire along the Egyptian border and the displacement of 100,000 seminomadic tribes of the Gebel in about fifteen concentration camps on the Cyrenaica coast. This was more or less the same formula adopted by other nations with their colonies, and it had more or less the same level of success as other counterinsurgency campaigns, from the one against the Boers in South Africa and also in Algeria, Malaysia, and even Vietnam. In 1931 the revolt in Libya could be said to have finally been tamed.

Things went differently in Ethiopia because the action of counterinsurgency required time, and this was lost owing to the rapid deterioration of the international situation and the outbreak of World War II. The Italian Eastern Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI) region became a peripheral scene of that terrible conflict that, even in this context, required solutions different from the operations of "di grande polizia coloniale" (counterinsurgency) that had captured the attention of the military leadership until the spring of 1940. The Libyan experience had been crucial in the preparation of cadres trained to tackle the issue of counterinsurgency using the latest technology. The airplane was in particular a major tool, and not only, as often believed, for the fire support it could provide, especially over long distances, but especially because of its use in information and logistics tasks: recognition, surveillance of the road routes, transportation of men and materials, and the launching of supplies to troops operating in remote areas without roads, as happened in a large part of the Ethiopian empire. The troops, like those in the Libyan theater, consisted mostly of regular and irregular indigenous units, and indeed the latter—the so-called bande (bands) under the command of Italian officers—were to occupy center stage. In front of them, a melting pot of races and aspirations mingled with what was left of the army of the negus and its commanders, with local lords and their own followers, accustomed to a state of perpetual confrontation, and with marauding gangs, the endemic scourge of those regions. If methods of confinement were also used in Ethiopia, as in Libya, for the notables considered more dangerous, it must be said that there were neither barbed-wire fences nor camps comparable to the Libyan ones. The counterinsurgency actions continued for four years using, especially in 1937, brutal methods—including poison gas—and this left little room for any kind of negotiation. After 1938 the trend improved, but the outbreak of war did not allow for any peace process, even though one was beginning to bear fruit. If in moral terms the Italian experience of colonial counterinsurgency had many dark sides, as would be inevitable in such a conflict, it can be considered a success in technical terms. But the fact remains that the populations, crushed between the Royal Army, which demanded complete submission, and the insurgents, ruthless against those who took sides with the occupier, paid the ultimate price.

PART I

Libya

(1922–1931)

1

The Fourth Shore

The Adwa defeat had deeply moved the collective imaginary. As a demonstration of this sentiment, after that fateful day, 1 March 1896, strong opposition emerged in both Parliament and in public opinion to any further effort in Africa, along with the suggestion to cede Eritrea to another European nation. The negotiations would be entrusted to Ferdinando Martini, a politician of undeniable substance. So why did Italy then consider a further colonial challenge? If it was in order to venture inland in East Africa, it was crucial to deal with Ethiopia, because disembarking in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica would mean a confrontation with the declining Ottoman Empire and also (and especially) with the Arab-Muslim community. Considering the strong internal opposition (in which ranks there was the young Mussolini), the question of why Giolittian Italy launched itself into this adventure could be raised. At present it could be said that—as often happens in Italian foreign politics—the Libyan challenge was wanted for the prestige and social class it would give to Italy rather than for economic reasons. Even if late in comparison with the other European countries, the possession of Libya would have given Italy the position it was aspiring to in both the Mediterranean and international contexts and would also help Italy recover from the shame of Adwa defeat. The same motivations were the grounds for the relaunch—in the postwar period—of a policy of penetration in Libya even before the coming to power of a fascist party, which would have completed the reconquest as a point of honor. In such a situation, Italy would act no less aggressively than other European nations.

After putting boots on the ground in Libya in October 1911, Italy succeeded in forcing Turkey to cede the region through the Treaty of Ouchy, signed in October 1912. At that stage an unexpected scenario appeared: the insurrection of the majority of Libyan tribes against the infidel invader, a development not considered by Italian politicians.¹ Hence what should have been an easy military operation became a long march lasting almost thirty years.² When asked about the signature of the Italian-Turkish agreement, Sulayman al-Baruni—deputy of what had been the Tripoli parliament—declared that the resistance of Berbers was starting at that precise instant. It was November 1912 and only the major localities and some coastal areas of the immense Libyan territory would have been under Italian control.

From the three historical regions—Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan—only the first one was relatively fertile, even if only in the coastal belt. The remaining regions were even less tempting. The Gebel Plateau was the only habitable area in Cyrenaica, and it was a territory not easy to control. It was barely accessible by mechanical means and represented the perfect environment for guerrillas. The whole region was deeply influenced by the Sanusi religious brotherhood established at the beginning of the 1800s with a strong political component. The brotherhood had quickly spread with its zauie at the same time as Koranic schools and emporiums. The presence and growing strength of the Sanusi brotherhood represented a significant difference from Tripolitania, where nomad tribes constituted a sort of anarchic archipelago.

This situation fostered the Italian penetration, which in less than three years—the period between the treaty of peace of Lausanne and May 1915—spread to