“Vincere!” The Italian Royal Army’s Counterinsurgency Operations in Africa, 1922-1940. Federica Saini Fasanotti. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020.

On 9 May 1936, after seven months of conventional warfare, the Italian Royal Army seized control of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and proudly announced the realization of an Italian empire in the Horn of Africa—Africa Orientale Italiana. In her new book, “Vincere!” The Italian Royal Army’s Counterinsurgency Operations in Africa, 1922-1940, military historian Federica Saini Fasanotti characterizes the declaration of empire as a “watershed event” for the Italian army, which subsequently faced a formidable Ethiopian insurgency. The Italian response to this insurgency, Fasanotti reasons, was in many ways influenced by the Italian counterinsurgency campaign in Libya between 1922 and 1931. In both conflicts, she explains, the Royal Army contended with hostile landscapes, limited infrastructure, and an elusive enemy in theaters many times the size of Italy. These conditions necessitated a new style of counterinsurgency, one that relied on a combination of mobile units made up primarily of African recruits—under the supervision of a small but skilled cadre of Italian officers—and on the increased role of the Royal Air Force to facilitate surveillance, reconnaissance, communication, and aerial attacks. 

Where the counterinsurgency in Libya played out over a decade, the Italian counterinsurgency in Ethiopia was cut short by the outbreak of World War II and transformed into a proxy war between the allied and axis powers in Europe. In January 1941, a few months after Italy tried to invade British Somaliland, the British military, with the support of the Ethiopian resistance, intervened to end what would have otherwise been, Fasanotti reasons, a successful counterinsurgency campaign. On 9 May 1941, exactly five years after the Italians first marched into the capital, Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa and assumed his former role as Emperor of Ethiopia. 

Fasanotti divides her slim volume into two similarly structured sections. The first traces the contours of the Italian counterinsurgency in Libya, from a survey of the environment to an overview of how  indigenous troops, Italian officers, the local population, and the Royal Air Force influenced the Italian counterinsurgency strategy. The second section provides the same analysis for the conflict in Ethiopia, acknowledging where and how the tactics used in the Horn differed from or built on those implemented in North Africa. 

In the case of Libya, the harshness of the desert landscape forced the Italian military to rely increasingly on local militias and lightly armed units of colonial soldiers, known as askari, who the Italians recruited from Yemen, Eritrea, and Somalia. To justify their reliance on these actors, the Italians constructed a narrative that celebrated the askari for their “perceived characteristics of frugality, endurance, mobility, and aggressiveness,” not to mention, their familiarity with the local environment.[1] While the askari became a pillar of the Italian counterinsurgency strategy in Africa, their success, Fasanotti notes, was enhanced by the actions and decisions of a small and elite group of Italian officers with years of experience in the colony. 

The hostility of the environment and paucity of communication networks in Libya also led to a more pronounced role for the Royal Air Force. In addition to enabling aerial bombardments, which terrified and demoralized the local population, airplanes were used to carry messages, materials, and the wounded. While the Italian military realized the value of aviation as a counterinsurgency tool in the course of the Libya campaign, the success of the Air Force in this particular counterinsurgency was circumscribed by the fact that, as described by Governor Mombelli in 1926, the Air Force was in “deplorable conditions in both personnel and material resources.”[2]

In 1935, a mere three years after the conclusion of the counterinsurgency in Libya, the Italian army invaded Ethiopia. Conveniently situated between Italian Somaliland and Eritrea, and with a land area roughly three times that of Italy, Ethiopia was to be, Mussolini reasoned, a source of natural resources for the metropole, and a demographic outlet for tens of thousands of unemployed Italian immigrants. With the declaration of Italian East Africa in May 1936, the invasion of Ethiopia became an insurgency, “a conflict of contrast that saw Italy involved against formerly armed dissidents and bandits and brigands who for centuries had rebelled against any form of power.”[3] Many of the men who made a name for themselves in Libya returned with enthusiasm to Ethiopia, where they employed a counterinsurgency strategy that similarly came to rely on units of askari reinforced by the Air Force. 

In Ethiopia, Fasanotti notes, the contribution made by the few elite officers “...was counterbalanced by a mediocre base of officers, incapable of being in tune with the troops and even less with the population.”[4] Poorly behaved officers were not the only problem. The Italian archives are rich with accounts of crimes committed by Italian workers and soldiers of every rank in the course of their daily interactions with the local population, from incidences of thievery, extortion and rape to so-called “acts damaging the prestige of the race.” The archives also contain an abundance of letters between officials in Italy and those in the Horn worrying about how the bad behavior of Italians in the empire could undermine notions of Italian racial and cultural superiority. In the summer of 1936, for instance, Mussolini wrote a sternly worded memo to Graziani warning him that the behavior of the metropolitan workers “must be beyond reproach.” There must be, he added, “no familiarity with the natives,” and, as the dominant race, “all Italians, starting with the workers, must learn to restrain themselves.”[5] While Fasanotti reasons that the Fascist administration decided to replace Italian troops with askari to convince the public in Italy that the war was over, I would contend that the decision was also made as a way to preserve the reputation of those Italians remaining in—and trying to rule—the colony. 

While the Italian military started to realize the potential of air power as a counterinsurgency tool in Libya, by the time of the invasion of Ethiopia, the Air Force was ready to assume a more decisive role in both the conventional war and the counterinsurgency—one that included, in the course of the 1935-36 invasion, dropping mustard gas on military and civilian targets. Fasanotti has remarkably little to say about the use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia other than to concede that Italy used them in the conventional phase of the war but considered incendiary bombs more effective in the context of the counterinsurgency. She ultimately leaves the reader with an unsatisfactory account of an extremely controversial aerial campaign that saw the Italian Air Force drop some 1,972 C 500-T bombs, or roughly three hundred tons of yperite, in the initial years of the war.[6]

Much like her narrative of the role of aerial bombardments in Ethiopia, Fasanotti has a tendency to explain away or exclude the details of many of the more violent and inhumane aspects of the Italian counterinsurgency campaigns in Africa, from the use of concentration camps in Libya, to the 1937 Addis Ababa massacre that saw thousands of Ethiopian civilians indiscriminately killed by soldiers, Fascist Blackshirts, and militarized laborers after the failed assassination of Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani. Fasanotti is particularly dismissive of historian Ian Campbell’s recent book on the Addis Ababa massacre, which draws on extensive archival research and oral interviews with survivors.[7] Fasanotti refers to his analysis of events as “fallacious and misleading,” and yet, non-Italian archival records corroborate many of the atrocities Campbell describes. Take, for example, an extract of a confidential memo sent by the British Consulate General in Addis on 1 March 1937, a few weeks after the massacre: “The immediate crisis over, there followed for two and a half days, by way of reprisals against Ethiopians wherever found and however occupied, an orgy of murder, robbery and arson on the part of the Italians that, if the facts were known abroad in every disgusting detail, should make the name of Italy stink in the nostrils of the civilised world. No one was spared.”[8]

While Fasanotti concedes that the Italians committed “similar or even greater sins” than the Ethiopians in the course of their counterinsurgency in the Horn, these sins, she contends, were to a certain extent inspired by the brutality of the Ethiopian resistance.[9] She explains, “The terror for Italians was to be captured alive, tortured, and literally cut into pieces. Therefore, we can imagine that behind a certain Italian hyperactivity there was a very human feeling: fear.”[10] Both sides committed atrocities in the course of their operations.

For readers unfamiliar with the history of Italian colonialism in Africa, this book provides a detailed examination of Italian counterinsurgency strategy but an incomplete picture of the consequences of that strategy for the local populations in Libya and the Horn. For a more comprehensive account of the nature of Italian warfare in Africa (including a discussion of Italian-initiated atrocities), I would direct readers to the works of Angelo del Boca and Alberto Sbacchi, and for those interested in the social and cultural legacies of Italian colonialism, to an anthology of essays edited by Mia Fuller and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.[11]

Caitlin Collis is a PhD Candidate studying history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Have a response or an idea for your own article? Follow the logo below, and you too can contribute to The Bridge:

Enjoy what you just read? Please help spread the word to new readers by sharing it on social media.

Header Image: Italian artillery in Tembien, Ethiopia, in 1936 (Wikimedia)

Notes:

[1] Ibid, 1. For more on the role of the askari in the Italian campaigns in Africa, see Fabienne Le Houérou, “Les ‘Ascari’ érythréens créateurs de frontières,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 63 (1999); Arielli, Nir, “Colonial Soldiers in Italian Counter-Insurgency Operations in Libya, 1922-1932,” British Journal for Military History 1:2 (2015); and Massimo Zaccaria, Anch’io per La Tua Bandiera: Il V Battaglione Ascari in Missione Sul Fronte Libico (1912) (Ravenna: Giorgio Pozzi Editore, 2012).

[2] Ibid, 68.

[3] Federica Saini Fasanotti, “Vincere!” The Italian Royal Army’s Counterinsurgency Operations in Africa, 1922-1940 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2020), 79.

[4] Fasanotti, “Vincere!” 138.

[5] Telegram from Mussolini to Graziani, 4 August 1936, Gabinetto 18, Archivio Storico dell’ex-Ministero dell’Africa Italiana (ASMAI).

[6] Alberto Sbacchi, “Poison Gas and Atrocities in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936),” in Italian Colonialism, eds. R. Ben-Ghiat and M. Fuller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 48.

[7] Ian Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[8] Confidential Letter, No. 46 (147/29/37), 1 March 1937, The National Archives, UK.

[9] Fasanotti, “Vincere!” 80.

[10] Ibid, 80.

[11] Angelo del Boca, I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1996); Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza, Italy: Neri Pozza, 2005); Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985); Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fullers (eds), Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).