Amedeo, Duke of Aosta

Amedeo d’Aosta, the third Duke of Aosta, was a cousin of King Victor Emmanuel III, a soldier of the First World War, an airman and the last Viceroy of Ethiopia. In 1937 he replaced Marshal Rodolfo Graziani in Addis Ababa, to show a “gentler” face of Italian rule after years of terror. In 1940, when Italy entered the war, he commanded an empire in the Horn of Africa cut off from the mother country, and his troops took Kassala and British Somaliland. In 1941, after the lost East African campaign, he surrendered at Amba Alagi, and in March 1942 he died as a British prisoner of war in Kenya. Italian memory made him the “hero of Amba Alagi” and a model of the chivalrous prince. Historians point out that he was also a co-builder of the Fascist empire, whose darker sides he preferred not to see.

A prince of a cadet branch

He was born on 21 October 1898 in Turin, the son of Prince Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Aosta, later commander of the Third Army in the First World War and a Marshal of Italy, and of Hélène of Orléans. He was a great-grandson of King Victor Emmanuel II and a grandson of Amadeo I, briefly King of Spain. The Aosta branch of the House of Savoy stood close to the throne and made no secret of its ambitions, which caused tension with the King. As heir to the title he was styled Duke of Apulia until 1931. At the age of nine he was sent to school in England, where he learnt perfect English and acquired a taste for the British way of life, which lent his biography a curious dimension during the war with Britain. On his return he entered the Nunziatella military school in Naples. He stood almost two metres tall, and anecdotes about the contrast between him and the diminutive King circulated throughout Italy.

The Great War and Africa

When Italy entered the war in May 1915, the sixteen-year-old prince volunteered and served as a private in a horse artillery regiment. His father demanded that he be treated no differently from the other soldiers. He fought on the Karst and on the Asiago plateau, was commissioned for war services and promoted to captain while the war was still on, and received medals for gallantry. Discharged in 1919, he went with his uncle, Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, to Somalia, where the latter was establishing plantations on the River Shebelle.

In 1921 he vanished from court. According to the gossip of the time, he had offended the King with a malicious joke. For nearly a year and a half he worked under an assumed name as an ordinary labourer in the Belgian Congo, near Stanleyville. When he came back he returned to the army, and in 1924 he took a law degree in Palermo with a thesis on the legal relations between colonial states and native peoples. In it he argued that rule over a foreign people could be justified only by improving its lot.

From 1925 he served in Libya, where the Italians were waging a campaign to “reconquer” the colony against the Senussi rebels. As an officer of the meharisti, the camel troops, he took part in operations in Tripolitania and the Fezzan, and in January 1931 in the capture of the Kufra oases. Propaganda called him the “Prince of the Sahara”. Yet this was a war in which the Italians herded the population of Cyrenaica into camps and in which Graziani earned his notoriety. On 5 November 1927 he married his cousin, Anne of Orléans, in Naples. They had two daughters, Margherita and Maria Cristina. On his father’s death on 4 July 1931 he became Duke of Aosta.

The airman

In 1926 he obtained his military pilot’s licence. In 1932 he transferred to the Regia Aeronautica, the air force built up by Italo Balbo, and as a colonel took command of a reconnaissance wing at Gorizia, and then of a fighter wing. In 1934 he became an air brigadier general, and in 1936 he commanded an air division. He lived with his family at Miramare Castle near Trieste. During the war with Ethiopia he asked to be posted to the front, but the King refused, pointing to his place in the line of succession. In 1936 he visited Germany and met Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. According to his biographer Nicola Labanca, he responded evasively to German overtures, saying that Fascism and National Socialism were not goods for export.

Viceroy of Ethiopia

Ethiopia, which the Italians had occupied in May 1936, had been conquered only on paper. Graziani’s terror, and above all the massacre in Addis Ababa after the assassination attempt of February 1937 and the slaughter of the monks at Debre Libanos, had not broken resistance but strengthened it. In the second half of 1937 Benito Mussolini decided to change viceroys. The choice fell on the Duke of Aosta, who in November was appointed Governor-General of Italian East Africa and Viceroy of Ethiopia, and took office on 21 December 1937. Propaganda presented him as the colony’s good father. He tried to win over Ethiopian notables and to limit executions, and he invested in roads, hospitals and schools.

His power, however, was limited. Operations against the rebels were directed by General Ugo Cavallero, appointed by Rome, who conducted them in his own way and often against the Viceroy’s wishes, until he was recalled in the spring of 1939. According to historians, among them Angelo Del Boca, in the first years of the Duke’s rule Italian troops continued to use poison gas against the rebels, and permission for its use remained in force – according to some researchers with the Viceroy’s approval – until 1939. Labanca observes that the new Viceroy’s intentions pointed in the right direction, but that their implementation must be judged with caution, and that on some matters the Duke simply kept silent. This applied above all to the racial laws, which in the colony banned unions between Italians and African women and separated the white population from the native one, and from 1938 also targeted Jews. In 1938, on Mussolini’s orders, his administration even surveyed areas where Jewish immigrants might be settled. The guerrilla war could not be stamped out, and the patriot movement survived until 1941.

The war

When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, the Duke, appointed air force general (generale d’armata aerea), took supreme command of the armed forces of Italian East Africa. He had about 290,000 men under his command, most of them colonial troops, and after mobilisation in August more than 370,000. It was an army without a rear base: British Egypt and the Suez Canal cut the colony off from Italy, and every lorry and every litre of fuel was irreplaceable. Rome ordered him to stay on the defensive and make only limited attacks. On 4 July 1940 General Luigi Frusci’s troops took Kassala and Gallabat in the Sudan, in July other units captured Moyale in Kenya, and in August General Guglielmo Nasi’s troops occupied British Somaliland. British Somaliland was the only British colony the Italians conquered in this war. The Duke drew up plans for further offensives, even against Nairobi, but noted in the margin that extreme caution was needed. He made further action dependent on the Italian offensive in Egypt, and when that failed, defence was all that remained to him.

According to Labanca, in December 1940 one of his generals, Gustavo Pesenti, suggested to the Duke that he admit defeat and seek a separate agreement with the British that would save the colony. The Duke replied that he could not betray the King and Mussolini. In January 1941 the British advanced from the Sudan and from Kenya, and Emperor Haile Selassie I entered Ethiopia. After the fall of Keren in March 1941 Eritrea was lost. The Duke, wishing to spare Italian civilians, did not defend Addis Ababa, which British troops entered on 6 April. Before leaving the capital he thanked the British for looking after the women and children. He concentrated the remnants of his forces in a few mountain strongholds. He himself, with some seven thousand men, including sailors, airmen and carabinieri, shut himself up on the Amba Alagi massif in northern Ethiopia. Surrounded by British, Indian and South African troops and Ethiopian partisans, and cut off from water, he agreed, with Mussolini’s consent, to capitulate. The terms were settled on 17 and 18 May 1941; on 19 May the garrison came down from the mountain and the British accorded it military honours. The last Italian garrison in Ethiopia, at Gondar, surrendered under Nasi’s command on 27 November 1941.

Captivity and death

The Duke, prisoner number 11590, was sent to a camp for senior officers at Donyo Sabuk in Kenya. He pressed the British for better conditions for Italian prisoners and for the repatriation of civilians, but had very little freedom himself. At the end of 1941 he fell ill. The doctors diagnosed malaria and tuberculosis, and according to some sources typhus as well. He died on 3 March 1942 in the military hospital in Nairobi, aged 43. In accordance with his wishes he was buried in the Italian military cemetery at Nyeri, among his soldiers. The Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his diary that a prince and an Italian had died, simple in manner, broad in outlook and humane. As he had no sons, the title passed to his brother Aimone, who in May 1941 had been proclaimed king of the puppet Independent State of Croatia, although he never went there.

Memory and assessment

In Italy the Duke became one of the few wartime figures remembered with respect even after the fall of Fascism. An air force regiment, streets and a bridge in Rome were named after him, and a monument to him was erected near Gorizia. Even Haile Selassie appreciated that the Viceroy had respected his private property in Addis Ababa. The British remembered him as a gentleman and a worthy opponent. This image, built by propaganda in his own lifetime and kept alive by monarchist circles, is nonetheless incomplete. Nicola Labanca, author of his entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, points out that the Duke took part in the conquest of Libya, lent his name to the credibility of the Fascist empire in Ethiopia, kept silent about the colonial racial legislation and fought to the end for a regime from which he differed in temperament but not in loyalty. He calls him “a victim, but a complicit victim”.

For the history of the Second World War the Duke of Aosta is a symbolic figure. His army, larger than the enemy’s but cut off from everything it needed to fight, won a few easy victories in 1940 and in 1941 succumbed to the forces of the British Empire and Ethiopian partisans. Defeat in East Africa meant the loss of the first part of the Italian empire and the return to the throne of the Emperor whose fall in 1936 had been one of the milestones on the road to war.