A Box of Sand

by Charles Stephenson

  The other major Italian miscalculation was that it would be fairly simple to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and when this element of strategy misfired the Italians were left at a strategic loss. The whole operation to take Tripoli had been predicated on it not disturbing the ‘balance of power’ in Europe, particularly in the Balkan region, and so attempting to find somewhere where pressure could be applied on the Ottoman government, but not cause intervention by either of the Great Power blocs or their members, became a priority. For want of better the Dodecanese were eventually chosen, and the operation to occupy them proceeded smoothly. Indeed, the amphibious capability displayed during the several joint army and navy operations undertaken was, by any standards, impressive. One of the factors that made such operations possible was the withdrawal of the inferior Ottoman Navy into the Dardanelles at the very beginning of the war, leaving the Italian fleet with total command of the sea. Whilst the lack of an opponent left the navy in a state of frustration at being unable to give battle, which it would undoubtedly have won, it did allow it to land military forces more or less where it chose. That virtually none of these landings was against significant opposition, and an opposed amphibious landing was always, and remains, one of the most hazardous operations of war, was deliberate on the part of the Italians. Where there was opposition, or the likelihood of it, then landings were either not attempted or abandoned; the abortive attempt at Zuwarah in late December 1911 being one such example. When the time came to attempt the operation again in April 1912 it was a much more sophisticated affair, with feints and ruses to confuse any potential defenders. Not all the Italian amphibious operations were successful. The flanking operation attempted on 6 November 1911 to retake Fort Hamidije for example had been foreseen and a force deployed to counter it. Some 200 Italians managed to disembark, but they were immediately attacked and very few escaped alive. The operation against the Dodecanese also involved deception as did that to take Misrata in June 1912, when the landing force was put ashore some 12 kilometres to the east of the target – where the enemy were not in other words. Once firmly ashore, and protected by the guns of the fleet, the Italians could not be dislodged and they only had to wait to build up their strength before moving on their objective.

  Though the Italians could hold the coastal enclaves that they conquered relatively easily, attempts to occupy territory inland were fraught with danger. Conversely, the guerrilla style of resistance envisaged by Enver Pasa, whereby attempts to lure Italian detachments from behind their defences in order that small numbers of them could be overwhelmed, was not entirely successful. This was largely due to the Italian policy of risk avoidance; the affair at Bir Tobras of 19-20 December 1911 had demonstrated the dangers of attempting to project power into the desert using unsupported columns. Only the cool-headedness and leadership skills of Colonel Gustavo Fara had averted disaster on that occasion and, whether coincidentally or not, Italian operations thereafter operated on the principle of minimum risk. This meant the use of large forces that were strong enough to defend themselves against anything that the Ottoman led resistance might assemble against them. The inevitable corollary of this was that, tactically, Italian moves were ponderous. Junior officers were prevented from being, as the Italian phrase has it, impetuoso. On the rare occasions when one did act impetuously, such as demonstrated by the now Major-General Gustavo Fara on 9 July 1912 during the operations to take Misrata, the result was an unacceptably high casualty list; another demonstration of his supposed ‘inclination to rashness’ and a ‘failure to see difficulties’ perhaps.

  Fighting in desert conditions is, in any event, a specialised business because of the hostility of the environment. This is an enduring situation, and though the advent of mechanical vehicles did much to alleviate it the nub of the problem remained. As well as the difficulties of terrain there are factors such as the extreme heat and insect life – flies, sand flies, ticks, lice, and fleas – to consider. The question of water is paramount, and this matter can perhaps be encapsulated in a quote from a late 20th century study:

  Inhabitants of temperate zones do not appreciate the importance of water to everyday life as do the inhabitants of equatorial deserts. For example, there is no one word in the English language that means ‘to die of thirst,’ yet in Arabic there are eight degrees of thirst […] Arabs express thirst in terms of simple thirst, burning thirst, vehement thirst, burning thirst with dizziness, and lastly excessive thirst – the thirst that kills.8

  Given the difficulties of conducting desert warfare against a foe that was, literally, quite at home there, and noting that for political reasons avoidance of casualties and therefore risk was of paramount concern, then the apparent ineffectiveness of the Italian Army is explicable. The extreme difficulties experienced by the Italian military in physically traversing the desert terrain wherein the enemy lived was a problem further compounded by the amorphous nature of the foe they sought to fight. The Ottoman formations had, as General Caneva acknowledged within three weeks of the initial landings, become ‘meagre detachments’ some six hours march from the main Italian position at Tripoli City. The ability of such ‘detachments’ to concentrate if required, and then disperse again when necessary, was an enduring problem. The answer, from the invaders side, was to be found in vehicular technology. This however was not far removed from its infancy in 1911-12, but nevertheless the Italians were not slow in making the attempt to utilise it. Mobility in desert terrain would eventually be conferred by the use of motorised vehicles, and these were first used in military operations on a significant scale during the advance on Zanzur of 8 June 1912. Armoured cars were also developed, and from these beginnings more powerful and reliable models would evolve. The circa 400-kilometre round trip made by the Duke of Westminster’s command of forty-three vehicles through the desert on St Patrick’s Day 1916, to rescue the shipwrecked prisoners from Tara and Moorina, demonstrated how far the potential of such methods had developed in just a few years.

  The same might be said of aircraft. The Italians were the first to use aircraft in a military context, though of course the models available were extremely basic. Nevertheless the experience of, and developments in, aerial warfare were of much value to them. Aircraft were used initially in the context of reconnaissance, and as deserts are mostly devoid of vegetation and offer virtually no natural concealment from aerial observation they were fairly effective in that role. With rather less success they were also used for bombardment. There were 712 sorties by aeroplanes during the course of the war, whereby ‘several hundred’ bombs were dropped, whilst the airships sortied on 136 occasions and released 360 bombs.9 The conclusion in respect of aviation reached after the conflict was that aeroplanes, although representative of a younger and less proven technology, were nevertheless faster, more manoeuvrable, and much more versatile than airships, and thus had more to offer in the field of war in the future.10 This was prophetic, and when combined with armed, and armoured, vehicles able to traverse the terrain they were to provide the key to successful penetration of the desert. Indeed, drawing on their experiences, the Italians were the first to use integrated mobile air and ground units, dubbed compagnie auto-avio sahariane for desert warfare in the 1930s.

  Another technology that was to become vital to successful desert warfare was radio, or wireless telegraphy as it was termed at the time. Guglielmo Marconi, the father of the science, was deeply interested in this development and noted in an interview in 1912 how advances in the technology had begun to make it semi-portable:

  When the Italian warships bombarded the Turks, scouting parties equipped with wireless apparatus were sent ashore. The sending instruments that they carried were no bigger than [a medium sized travelling bag] and the masts and their antennae were no bigger than fishing rods. Yet with this apparatus the scouts sent messages five and eight miles [8-13 kilometres] – the range of modern naval guns.11

  The science had not yet advanced to a stage where the sending and receiving appar
atus were combined in one unit, and neither was the equipment entirely reliable, but undoubtedly the ability to give targeting instructions in real time to artillery beyond the line of sight was another valuable addition to Italy’s war-making capability. The Italian forces were not the pioneers in respect of using radio in war; that had been done in 1900 during the Boxer War in China. It had also figured in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and had been used in colonial warfare by the German army in German South-West Africa (Namibia) during the 1904-09 campaign against the Herero and Nama people.12

  It is also worth recalling that during the South-West African campaigns the German Army – which was, contemporaneously, the ideal against which others were measured – found itself stymied. According to the East German historian, Horst Drechsler, the leader of the resistance, Jacob Morenga, ‘[…] stood head and shoulders above the Germans in the art of guerrilla warfare, and even the Kaiser’s top brass had to acknowledge his tactical skill.’ He quotes Hauptmann M Bayer who served on the General Staff on the matter:

  […] a major European power, with about 15,000 soldiers in the field, was locked for years in a struggle with what were even initially only 1,000 to 2,000 and later no more than some hundred Nama whose methods of warfare proved unanswerable.13

  In contradistinction to the Italian example, this apparent failure of arms did not lead to accusations of military ineptitude. Neither have the German commanders in South-West Africa, Major-Generals Lothar von Trotha and Berthold von Deimling successively, been charged with timidity and incompetence (as opposed to barbaric brutality and genocide). Nor was the overall reputation of the German Army called into question by its inability to prevail in the given circumstances. Of course the German Army, or at least its Prussian predecessor and allies, had not fought since 1871 if one discounts the contribution made to the Boxer War in China, but had then done so with great success against France. No such success had attended Italian efforts which had experienced some spectacular failures at Custoza and Adowa as ruefully noted by Luigi Cadorna.

  Though Cadorna, and Capello, wrote with hindsight and most certainly had an axe to grind, both were no more than reflecting a good deal of contemporary domestic criticism of the apparent timidity of the Italian Army during the Italo-Ottoman War. This was however dwarfed by foreign criticism, which was sometimes nasty in the extreme and reached denigratory levels. Indeed, great indignation was expressed by Italian, and pro-Italian, commentators and journalists on the scathing criticisms of Italian military prowess made by some foreign writers in their accounts of the campaign. Many of these, both Italian and Italophile, stressed the martial qualities of the Italian soldiers and General Emilio De Bono, who served on the General Staff during the conflict and was appointed Governor of Tripolitania in 1925, argued in 1931 that the successful outcome of the campaign had a morally uplifting effect; ‘after more than forty years non-commissioned officers and soldiers with medals on their breasts could be seen again.’14 The vast majority of the soldiers who fought in Italy were poorly educated conscripts and probably had little motivation for the conflict over an immense and valueless box of sand (immenso ed inutile scatolone di sabbia) as Gaetano Salvemini, and then other opponents of the war, termed it.15 Many tried to escape military duty and, as has been noted, the Italian community in Australia ‘increased markedly during the course of the conflict especially as a result of an influx of men trying to avoid call up.’16 Enver Bey, whose forces fought against them for nearly the whole course of the campaign, considered that the ordinary Italian soldiers were cowardly and ‘unwilling to fight [kampfunlustig]’ but he considered the junior officers that led them admirable and willing to ‘sacrifice themselves.’17

  The contemporaneous reporting of the war, as has already been shown, became extremely partisan, and opinions of the effectiveness of the Italian Army likewise. Francis McCullagh, probably the most prominent of all the critics of the Italian venture, condemned the Italians as possessing ‘the one and only European army which ever showed twenty thousand clean pairs of heels to niggers.’18 This was vicious stuff, and almost explicitly propounded the concept that there was something inherently unmilitary about Italy and Italians.19 Such nationalist stereotyping would be dismissed without further argument by the late 20th century, but at the time and later was held to have some validity. It should have been completely discounted during the First World War. The numerous gruelling battles along the Isonzo between 1915-1917, when the Italian army attempted to breach the Austro-Hungarian defences first begun by Conrad von Hötzendorf in the Dolomites before the Italo-Ottoman War, proved this. Despite the near impossibility of campaigning in the hostile Alpine territory, the Italian army fought eleven major battles in an attempt to breach the enemy lines. They were unsuccessful, incurring huge casualties, and during the twelfth battle, the Italians were severely defeated by a combined Austro-Hungarian and German offensive. This was, according to Gaetano Cavallaro, an ‘army that knew how to fight and how to die.’20

  Italian military incapacity was again amplified by British propaganda during the Second World War following the defeat of the unmotorised and unarmoured Italian forces in Cyrenaica and in Somaliland. No doubt Japanese propaganda made many of the same claims following the defeat of the British in Malaya and Singapore in 1942 – the ‘largest capitulation’ in British history according to Churchill.21 The causes of the debacle in both cases were much the same; the defeated were poorly trained and ill-equipped to fight the type of campaign imposed upon them by their enemies and their own political leaders. The belittling of Italian military prowess did not of course go down too well with the British forces that had fought them, whose achievements were correspondingly downgraded ‘and whose experience often suggested otherwise.’22 As the historian John Whittam put it: ‘the fighting qualities of the Italian soldier have been very severely judged in the twentieth century.’ Whittam went on to argue that this judgment has to be considered in relation to a defective high command, inadequate economic resources and a sometimes inept political leadership.23

  Major Eric G Hansen of the US Marine Corps, in studying the subject of Italian military capabilities and performance, is much in agreement, arguing however that the ‘most important aspect’ lay in Italy’s political system: ‘Throughout her history, this confused governing body has been responsible, in large part, for getting Italy involved in conflicts which she was not prepared to fight.’24 That it was the government of Giolitti and San Giuliano that plunged the Italian Army into just such a conflict in 1911 has, hopefully, been demonstrated.

  Giolitti and San Giuliano retained complete control of military and naval strategy throughout the course of the war with the Ottoman Empire, steering a narrow course between bringing pressure to bear on the enemy and bringing on Great Power arbitration. The impetus behind the decision to invade the Ottoman vilayet was a form of social imperialism, inasmuch as Giolitti and his Foreign Minister hoped to outflank, and indeed harness, a growing right wing nationalist current as expressed by various organisations and press organs. Having made the move however, the two politicians found themselves captured by the jingo right and unable to adopt any policy other than outright military victory over the Ottomans and the inhabitants of the Tripoli province. Conversely, and no doubt with the example of Francesco Crispi and Adowa some fifteen years before firmly in mind, they exercised a close control over the Italian Army and ensured that it followed a tactical no-risk policy.

  Although this was a case of making a virtue out of a necessity, inasmuch as the army was neither equipped nor trained for desert warfare, it was largely successful since it prevented any disasters that might have attended a bolder policy; the near miss of Bir Tobras being an object lesson in this regard. On the other hand, the apparent passivity of Italian arms, and the protracted resistance of the Ottoman Empire and the inhabitants of Tripoli, led to criticism of Government policy for not being bold enough. Indeed, the unexpected difficulties that arose from what had been expected to be a wa
lkover completely paralysed Italian strategy. As the Ottoman politician interviewed by the British journalist W T Stead put it in 1912: ‘a war with Italy […] costs us nothing and cannot possibly do us any serious harm.’25

  It was, of course, an attempt to indeed cause ‘serious harm’ to the Ottomans that led to the decision to widen the war into the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean, utilising the Italian naval supremacy that could not be challenged. This was though a course fraught with difficulties, particularly in respect of Italy’s partner in the Triple Alliance, Austria-Hungary, who had effectively vetoed earlier action in the Adriatic. France too had been provoked by the attack at Beirut in February 1912. Any such action also had the potential to, at the very least, annoy the British who were very sensitive to any latently hostile naval presence on the flank of the Suez Canal route. Sir Edward Grey, in whose hands British foreign policy lay, was determined to maintain strict neutrality between the combatants, whilst San Giuliano was able to get Germany, the senior partner in the Triple Alliance, to apply discrete pressure on the Austro-Hungarians to allow Italy to widen the conflict. Being seriously disadvantaged by their lack of a navy, the Ottomans had attempted to get the Great Powers involved, and, when diplomatic attempts had proven unsuccessful, had sought to provoke such intervention by closing the Dardanelles following the half-hearted Italian attack. Britain and Russia, the two powers most directly affected, had taken differing positions on this closure, with Britain complaining to Italy whilst Russia held the Ottoman Empire to blame. Neither power made any move to directly intervene though, to Italian satisfaction and Ottoman disappointment.