McCullagh included in his book an account of what happened from a Bersaglieri who survived. According to this informant, one Evangelista Salvatore from Ravanusa, Sicily, he and his colleagues were awakened just before dawn by the sound of the native dogs barking, particularly in that portion of the oasis outside the Italian line. At about 07:00 hrs this cacophony was drowned by the sound of coordinated rifle fire; a large number of assailants had surreptitiously approached through the ‘bewildering labyrinth,’ and opened close-range fire on the Italian positions. Though taken by surprise and outnumbered (estimates of the attackers vary greatly between 1,000 and 6,000), the 4th and 5th companies of Bersaglieri around Shara Shatt might well have held their own, had not another blow been planned for them. As they sought to defend themselves from the frontal attack they suddenly found themselves assaulted from the rear as well. As McCullagh’s informant put it: ‘The Saraceni seemed to rise out of the earth on every side of us.’9
Up to the point of the encirclement of the Bersaglieri most accounts are in broad agreement, but events afterwards were to become enmeshed in deep controversy and violently partisan disagreement. Basically put, the Italian version, one also propagated by those sympathetic to the Italian cause, was that the Arabs of the oasis had treacherously risen and, literally in some cases, stabbed their liberators in the back. The alternative account, which arose mainly from amongst the foreign correspondents based in Tripoli, was that the Ottoman forces had infiltrated the Italian lines and conducted a successful attack on the Italian rear. Whilst this distinction may appear to be academic, and arguments around it somewhat sterile, it was to become the very crux of the matter due to subsequent events. However, there now seems little doubt that the Italian version is correct and that at least some of the inhabitants of both Tripoli and the Oasis joined in the attack and that this had been carefully coordinated. According to Angelo del Boca:
The revolt involved men and women, old people and children, and it was as ruthless as any rebellion that mixed not only xenophobia but also religious fanaticism. The triggering event, though, was the blameworthy behavior of the Italian Bersaglieri toward Arab women.10
I quattordici strangolati in piazza del Pane (The Fourteen Hanged in the Bread Market) on 5 December 1911. They were: Hussein Ben Mohamed (22); Mohamed Ben Ali (22); Ismail Bahammed el Fituri (20); Mohamed Ben Salemi (50); Ali Ben Sala (50); Ali Ben Hussein (60); Mohamed el-Sium (50); Tahia Ben Tahia (50); Abdul Ben Abdall (45); Allin Ben Gassin (65); Mustafa Ben Glabi (40) and three others whose names are lost. They were seen as the ringleaders of the revolt of 23 October 1911 and were convicted by a court martial on slender evidence obtained from spies and informers. The corpses were left to hang for three days. Paulo Valera, ‘Le giornate di Sciarasciat fotografate’ in Antonio Schiavulli (Ed.), La guerra libica: il dibattito dei letterati italiani sull’impresa di Libia (Ravenna; Giorgio Pozzi, 2009) p. 158. Valera’s work was first published in 1912. (Author’s Collection).
An aerial view of the Italian lines to the southern edge of the Tripoli Oasis. Overlooking scrub and desert there were clear fields of fire, meaning that the opportunities for an enemy to concentrate and launch a surprise attack were limited. Despite this, the Italian line was effectively breached on 24 October 1911 and a number of the attackers, generally considered to be in the region of around 250-300 strong, were able to penetrate into the oasis. However the Ottoman Commander, Nesat Bey, was unable to get reinforcements through the gap due to their approach being interdicted by artillery and naval gunfire. It took the Italians two days to dislodge those attackers who had penetrated the line, with artillery and explosives freely utilised. (Author’s Collection).
There are hints of this ‘blameworthy’ attitude to be found in McCullagh, who recounts an example of a young lieutenant attempting to assist a young woman who had fallen ill, but who was ‘unaware of the fierce jealousy of the Moslems in everything which regards their women.’11 What can be stated with certainty is that, caught between two fires, the men of the 11th Bersaglieri suffered badly and the attackers penetrated the Italian lines and began to fan out. A detachment, mainly of Ottoman regulars, moved to the south to attack the strongpoint at al-Hani, whilst the rest, mainly tribesmen, moved into the oasis. The Bersaglieri HQ at al-Hani was one of the few points in the Italian line through the oasis to be well fortified. It also had a battery of machine guns, making it a formidable position for what were, in effect, unsupported light infantry to attack. Indeed, the Ottoman troops were unable to make an impression and the successful defence of the HQ, under the command of Colonel Gustavo Fara, was, from the Italian perspective, one of the few bright spots of the whole episode. Given it was the only ‘success’ it is unsurprising that Italian propaganda accorded it a level of importance.
Communications between the Italian formations, including GHQ at Tripoli and the advanced HQ at Bumeliana, seem to have failed or been cut, inasmuch as Colonel Fara and his unit were left unsupported for around six to eight hours. In any event there was no general, centrally directed, reserve as all available units were deployed to the defensive perimeter. Two of the three companies of the 2nd Battalion, the 4th and 5th, between al-Hani and the sea were shattered by the attack, whilst the reserve company, the 6th, attempted to fight its way towards Fara’s position. They were severely hampered in this, because the fighters that had broken through the lines now interdicted all Italian movement within the oasis. They had spread throughout it up to the edge of Tripoli itself:
[…] the whole intervening country between the Bersaglieri front and the town was alive with armed Arabs, who shot every uniformed Italian on sight. The roads running from the town to the outposts were naturally full of men on various fatigues connected with supply, and these unsuspecting escorts were the first victims.12
When it was finally realized that a serious battle was in progress on the eastern flank of the occupied zone, reinforcements were dispatched. The nearest were the reserve companies of the 82nd Infantry Regiment (1st Brigade) manning the defences immediately to the right of the Bersaglieri. These had been moved close to the front, lured there by the earlier demonstrations, but eventually one of them, later reinforced by three more, attempted to move to support their comrades. However, they were unable to make fast progress through the labyrinthine terrain and were eventually stopped at the village of Feschlum until evening. By then the attackers had begun to withdraw from the oasis, and it became possible for troops to move around in comparative safety; sniping continued but at a much reduced level. Having held out all day Colonel Fara at al-Hani was then relieved and the gaps in the line were filled.
Several hundred Italians had been killed (later established as 21 officers and 482 other ranks)13 or gone missing during the attack, but what changed the course of the whole occupation was the psychological jolt: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the events of 23 October shocked the Italian army of occupation from top to bottom.’14 The battle was the first serious fight of the war, and the first in which Ottoman regular forces fought side by side with irregulars, thus dissipating in no uncertain terms all Italian illusions concerning the local population, both inside and outside the zone of occupation. Believing, seemingly genuinely, that his force had been subject to ‘treacherous attacks’, Caneva gave orders the next day that the inhabitants of the Oasis were to be disarmed and, where necessary, punished: ‘[…] ordinary methods of enforcement against the animosity and ferocity of the rebels [being ineffectual] we were obliged to have recourse to severe and energetic measures […].15
What this translated to in effect was a house-to-house search of the Oasis by detachments of soldiers and sailors. Though the Italians, both officially and unofficially, strenuously denied it, this turned into a wholesale massacre of the Arab inhabitants of the Oasis, which, unfortunately for the deniers, was witnessed by the many correspondents present. The massacre of peoples believed, rightly or wrongly, to be hostile to the ruling power, in whatever context, was hardly a novel facet of moder
n warfare. All powers had been guilty at some point, and the Italians were certainly not the first, and definitely not the last, to indulge in methods of barbarism in furtherance of, as they perceived it, civilisation. From contemporaneous accounts it is probably the case that Caneva and his subordinates lost control of their soldiers:
Caneva and his Staff, however, had not calculated upon what this order meant to troops that had just seen their mutilated dead, who believed that they were again about to be attacked treacherously in the rear, and who had ever over them the shadow of Adowa. The carrying out of the duty necessitated the breaking up of the troops into small detachments, which loosed the control upon the inflamed passions of the soldiery. Nor did the Staff know how or when to place a period upon the licence they thus gave the troops. The result was a retribution upon the Arabs which will live in the memory of the Tripolitaine for generations, and which will react for many a year upon the perpetrators themselves.16
The results were horrific. Thomas E Grant, correspondent of the Daily Mirror, rode through the oasis and his description of what he observed appeared in the 2 November edition of his newspaper:
The two-mile ride to the cavalry barracks was a perfect nightmare of horrors. To begin with, one had to pass a huddled mass of some fifty men and boys, who were yesterday herded into a small space enclosed by three walls and there fired upon until no one was left alive.
It must have been a veritable carnival of carnage. The heap of cartridge cases in the road is evidence of how the execution was bungled. A fellow correspondent witnessed this, and his description of the ghastly scene is too shocking to write down.17
That they did not explicitly order a massacre does not excuse the Italian commanders in general and Caneva in particular. As the American general and lawyer Henry Wager Halleck had stated in 1861: ‘Unless [the commander] can control his soldiers, he is unfit to command them.’18 The principle of Command Responsibility, though the term was not itself used until 1921, had been enshrined in International Law in 1907 under the auspices of the Hague Convention. This entered into force on 26 January 1910 with Italy as a signatory, and thus by not controlling his subordinates properly and allowing the massacres to take place, Caneva had almost certainly violated International Law. This might seem like an academic point inasmuch as there was no authority to prosecute him at that time. In this he was perhaps lucky; Yamashita Tomoyuki, the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, best known for accepting the surrender of 130,000 British Imperial troops at Singapore in 1942, was held to have violated the principle during his trial in 1945, and was hanged the following year.19
Caneva also had other matters on his mind. Fearing further external attacks, he ordered that the defensive perimeter be strengthened. The troops in the oasis were reinforced by marines and sailors, and the personnel from heavy artillery batteries, whose guns had yet to be landed, were pressed into service as infantry. The unloading of field and mountain batteries was expedited and the heavy units of the ‘Training Division,’ the battleships Sicilia and Sardegna to the east and the Re Umberto with the armoured cruiser Carlo Alberto to the west, were anchored close inshore to provide heavy fire support on the flanks. The existing trenches and earthworks were also expanded and reinforced with machine gun positions.
That Caneva’s fears were justified was confirmed by the observations of Captain Carlo Piazza and Captain Riccardo Moizo. Piazza was the commander of the ‘air fleet’ that had become active at Tripoli on 21 October – a ‘fleet’ that consisted of nine aircraft; two each manufactured by Blériot, Farman and Etrich, together with three Nieuports. Piazza had made aviation history on 23 October when he made the first ever combat flight, reconnoitring Ottoman positions during an hour-long sortie. On 25 October Piazza and Moizo, in a Bleriot and Nieuport respectively, observed three columns of enemy troops, which they estimated as some 6,000 men in total, approaching Tripoli from the south.20 Later that day an Ottoman officer approached the Italian lines under a flag of truce and demanded, dependant upon which source one believes, either the surrender of the whole occupied zone, or the eastern area of the oasis. This approach was rebuffed, with the officer allowed to return unharmed.
The first wartime aviators. The airmen that went with the Italian expeditionary force to Tripoli became the first to ever participate in combat operations. Aviation history was thus made on 22 October when Captain Riccardo Moizo performed a reconnaissance flight over enemy positions in a Bleriot. Moizo is second from the right. (Author’s Collection).
Shortly after 05:00 hrs the next morning, Francis McCullagh was awoken in his room at the Hotel Minerva (a part of the Bank of Rome-funded hotel business, Societa Albergo Minerva) by the ‘roar of the naval guns.’ Through the pre-sunrise half-light he saw that the whole of the Italian line was in action but discerned that the firing was heaviest at the eastern side of the oasis around Shara Shatt and al-Hani. Accordingly, he set off through the oasis towards the sound of the guns, noting as he went how empty it appeared following the depredations of the last two days:
I walked along a street of houses which had just been looted and destroyed. I was alone, and the echo of my own footsteps resounded as if I were walking in a tomb. This suburb, so filled with noisy life four days earlier, was now as uninhabited as Pompeii. I did not see a single Arab all the way, nor did I meet with a single Italian.
The oppressive solitudes of the oasis were heavy with a sense of tragedy. The stillness was hostile, the very air was dense with unutterable menace. The shattered doorways and windows gaped like the mouths of dead men. Black with blood and pitted with bullets, the naked walls exhaled the quintessence of malignity and hate.21
A Farman aeroplane at Derna. On 15 October 1911 elements of an aviation battalion, designated the First Aeroplane Flotilla, arrived in Tripoli under the command of Captain Carlo Piazza. He had command of eleven officer pilots, 30 ground crew, and nine or ten aeroplanes: two Blériot, three Nieuport, two (some sources say three) Etrich Taube, and two Farman biplanes. With this unit being the first ever deployed in an active theatre of war, it was inevitable that it recorded several aviation ‘firsts’ whilst carrying out its missions. Aviation history was made on 22 October when Captain Riccardo Moizo, an artillery officer, performed a combat reconnaissance flight over enemy positions. The Second Aeroplane Flotilla was sent to Cyrenaica with three aircraft. To provide reinforcements recourse was made to civilian resources, and eight civilians together with eight army pilots, were deployed to Tobruk and Derna along with nine Blériot and one Farman aircraft. One of the civilians, the sportsman and politician, Carlo Montu, who was given the rank of captain, made aviation history on 31 January 1912 when he became the first casualty of anti-aircraft fire. (Author’s Collection).
If the Ottoman assault at the eastern end of the oasis seemed to occasion the greatest amount of fighting, this may well have been a feint on their part, or they might have been probing for a weak point. If the latter then it was on the south-eastern front that they found it and where a breakthrough was made. Tullio Irace was with the Bersaglieri around al-Hani and he recounted the switch of emphasis:
Towards 9 o’clock the enemy on our front had lost all combined action, and was now carrying on a desultory fight in various scattered detachments under cover of the palm trees. About this time the main body of Turks and Arabs had shifted westward, pressing heavily on the centre of our lines between Messri and Bu-Meliana.22
The weak point revealed was around a position centred on a large two-storey building, known to the Italians as Kemal Bey’s House, which was complete with an overgrown garden totalling a little over a hectare. Situated some 1.5 kilometres to the west of Fort Sidi Mesri (for which the battle is often known, though it is also named Henni-Bu-Meliana in some accounts), this position was held by the 7th Company of the 84th Regiment under the command of Captain Hombert. It appears that the defenders were deployed mainly in the building as a group of attackers, numbering around 250, was able to approach them unseen via the garden. The raid
ers were able to get into the property seemingly unobserved and, in a near repeat of the events of three days before, take the defenders unawares. There is some evidence that the area had been selected as a potential weak point previously and the defenders subjected to crude, though seemingly effective, attempts at psychological warfare. Amongst the attackers was a British officer, Lieutenant Herbert (sometimes rendered as Harold) Gerald Montagu of the 5th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. Quite what impelled Montagu, an officer of Jewish extraction, to travel to Tripoli and join the Ottoman effort is obscure.23 He later furnished an account of the preparations for the assault:
On the night before [the attack] six Arabs sallied out of the city with a quantity of cord, with which they secretly looped up a dense plantation of prickly pear bushes, joining up the cords to a main rope, which they entrusted to an Arab urchin of 11 years. During the night the urchin, acting on instructions, pulled the rope vigorously for some time, causing the bushes to rustle. This scared the Italian troops in the vicinity, and they fired on the bushes for six hours, literally blowing the jungle away and leaving themselves without ammunition.24
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