Annibale Bergonzoli

Annibale Bergonzoli was one of those Italian generals whose careers ran through all the wars of Fascist Italy: from Ethiopia through Spain to the Libyan desert. Brave, always in the front line, with a forked, bristling beard that earned him the nickname “Barba elettrica” (“Electric Beard”), he became a recognisable figure on both sides of the front. In 1941 the British and American press made him one of the best-known faces of the Italian defeat in North Africa. In December 1940 it was he, as commander of XXIII Corps, who shut the remnants of the Tenth Army inside the fortress of Bardia and promised Mussolini that he would hold out there to the end. His fate illustrates well the tragedy of an army in which the personal courage of its commanders could not make up for the lack of tanks, lorries and modern doctrine.

Youth and first wars

He was born on 1 November 1884 in Cannobio, a small town on Lake Maggiore in Piedmont, the son of Pompeo Bergonzoli and Francesca, née Branca. After finishing secondary school he entered the military academy in Modena in November 1904, and in 1906 he joined the 53rd Infantry Regiment as a second lieutenant. In 1909 he was promoted to lieutenant. He experienced his first war in Africa: from December 1911 to December 1912 he fought in the Italo-Turkish War with the 7th Infantry Regiment around Derna in Cyrenaica. Libya, which the Italians were then taking from the Turks, was to become, almost thirty years later, the scene of his greatest defeat.

When Italy entered the First World War in May 1915 he was a captain. He served in a regiment of the Chieti Brigade and then on divisional staffs. For bravery he received the Silver Medal of Military Valour and the British Military Cross. From August 1916 he was on the Macedonian front, and in 1917 he transferred to the General Staff Corps. In the autumn of 1917, after the defeat at Caporetto, he took part in the retreat to the Piave, and in February 1918 he was promoted to major for war service. In June 1918, in the battle on the Piave that the Italians call the “Battle of the Solstice”, he was seriously wounded while leading the infantry of the Bisagno Brigade into an attack. He ended the war with two silver medals and one bronze medal for valour.

Between the wars

In December 1918, as a lieutenant colonel, he became chief of staff of an assault division being prepared for the reconquest of Libya, where during the war the Italians had lost control of most of the interior. In February 1919 he spent a short time in Tripolitania before returning to Italy. In the 1920s and 1930s he climbed the usual rungs of a career: in December 1926 he was promoted to colonel, and he commanded the 56th Infantry Regiment in Conegliano, the 78th Infantry Regiment “Lupi di Toscana” in Bergamo and the reserve officers’ school in Palermo, and from September 1934 the 6th Infantry Regiment “Aosta”.

Ethiopia

On 12 April 1935 he was made a brigadier general and took command of the motorised 2nd Rapid Brigade “Emanuele Filiberto Testa di Ferro”, which was sent to Italian Somaliland. In the war with Ethiopia, which began on 3 October 1935, he fought on the southern front under General Rodolfo Graziani. In January 1936, in the battle on the Ganale Doria river, he commanded the right-hand motorised column, which routed the forces of Ras Desta Damtew and pursued them into the forests of Wadara while Graziani advanced on Negele. In this campaign the Italian air force also attacked Ethiopian troops with poison gas, in violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925. On 19 May 1936, after the capture of Addis Ababa, Bergonzoli was seriously wounded in a skirmish with the Ethiopian resistance and had to return home for treatment. Italian biographers date his nickname “Electric Beard” to this period, saying that it referred both to his beard and to his restlessness and courage; other authors believe it stuck to him only in Spain.

Spain

While Bergonzoli was recovering, civil war broke out in Spain. Mussolini answered General Francisco Franco’s request for help and from December 1936 sent ever larger contingents to Spain, which were formed into the Corpo Truppe Volontarie (Corps of Volunteer Troops). In February 1937 Bergonzoli landed in Spain and took command of the 4th Littorio Division, which, unlike the corps’ other divisions, consisted not of volunteers from the Fascist militia but of regular army soldiers. In March 1937 the division took part in the offensive against Guadalajara, which ended in a humiliating Italian defeat. The Littorio came out of it relatively well, and according to some authors Bergonzoli was the only Italian general in Spain whom Mussolini did not recall after Guadalajara.

In the summer of 1937 the Littorio fought in the campaign against the Republican north. In the battle for Santander in August 1937 it captured the Puerto del Escudo pass, which opened the road to the city, and this settled the Nationalist victory. For this Bergonzoli received the Gold Medal of Military Valour, Italy’s highest gallantry award, the Commander’s Cross of the Military Order of Savoy and promotion to major general. The Italians also took part in negotiations with the Basque units which laid down their arms at Santoña, relying on Italian guarantees of safety; Franco did not honour these arrangements, and many Basques ended up in prison and some before firing squads. In 1938 the division fought in the Aragon offensive. According to Italian biographers, Bergonzoli returned to Italy in April 1939, after Franco’s victory. After the war he wrote memoirs of the Italian legionaries in Spain, published in 1954 under the title Viva la muerte.

The advance into Egypt

On 15 October 1939 Bergonzoli took command of the newly formed XXIII Corps in Libya, with its headquarters at Al-Khums (Homs) in Tripolitania. The corps numbered about 45,000 men. When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, and the Governor of Libya, Marshal Italo Balbo, was killed a few weeks later, shot down by his own artillery over Tobruk, command in North Africa passed to Bergonzoli’s former superior from Ethiopia, Graziani. Bergonzoli moved with his corps to Cyrenaica, to the Egyptian border.

In September 1940, when Mussolini forced Graziani into an offensive against Egypt, XXIII Corps was to deliver the main blow. Together with Graziani, Bergonzoli changed the plan: instead of a manoeuvre through the desert, for which there were not enough vehicles or maps, the army was to advance in a compact mass along the coast, through Sollum and the Halfaya Pass, like the Italian columns in Ethiopia. On 13 September his divisions crossed the border and, after a four-day march during which Bergonzoli was in effect directing the advance and, according to Italian accounts, showed great energy, they halted at Sidi Barrani. For the next three months Bergonzoli’s corps, with its headquarters at Sollum, stood in the second line behind the camps at Sidi Barrani: the 2nd Blackshirt Division “28 Ottobre” held Sollum and the Halfaya Pass, the 62nd Marmarica Division the Sidi Omar area, and the 1st Blackshirt Division “23 Marzo” Bardia.

Bardia

On 9 December 1940 the British under General Richard O’Connor launched Operation Compass and within three days destroyed the camps at Sidi Barrani. Graziani, against his own doubts but in accordance with Mussolini’s wishes, decided to defend the fortresses of Bardia and Tobruk. On 15 December Bergonzoli reported that he could not hold Bardia without the troops from the frontier, and on 16 December his units abandoned Sollum, Halfaya and Fort Capuzzo and shut themselves inside the fortress. According to the British official history, he assembled there all or part of five divisions, some 45,000 men in total and more than 400 guns, although many of the guns were obsolete and much of the ammunition old and unreliable. Mussolini wrote to him that he was entrusting him with the difficult task of defending Bardia to the end and was sure that “Electric Beard” and his soldiers would hold out at any cost. Bergonzoli replied: “In Bardia we are and here we stay.”

He knew that if Bardia and Tobruk held out long enough, the British advance would collapse under the weight of its supply difficulties. Not knowing how long he would have to hold out, he rationed food and water, which, together with lice and dysentery, undermined the morale of a garrison already shaken by the defeat at Sidi Barrani. On 3 January 1941 the 6th Australian Division, supported by Matilda tanks and naval gunfire, broke through the defences from the west and destroyed the garrison within three days. Some 36,000–40,000 Italians were taken prisoner. When Bergonzoli judged the situation hopeless, he left the fortress with his staff and a group of soldiers and walked some 120 kilometres across the desert to Tobruk, which he reached, according to different accounts, on 7 or 9 January. For some time the British did not know that he had slipped away, and the British press, which called him “Electric Whiskers”, wrote at length about his escape.

Beda Fomm and captivity

From Tobruk, where there was no task for him, he flew west. At the end of January 1941 he commanded XX Corps around Derna and Mechili, which tried to halt the British on the eastern edge of the Jebel Akhdar mountains. When the Tenth Army began its retreat from Cyrenaica along the coast road, the British 7th Armoured Division cut across the desert and on 5 February blocked the road at Beda Fomm, south of Benghazi. For two days Bergonzoli organised attempts to break through the British blocking positions. The army commander, General Giuseppe Tellera, was mortally wounded, and on 7 February 1941 Bergonzoli surrendered with the remnants of the army. In the two months of Operation Compass the Tenth Army lost, according to British figures, more than 130,000 men taken prisoner.

As a prisoner of war he was held first in the camp for Italian officers at Yol in India and then in the United States, in camps at Monticello, Arkansas, and Hereford, Texas. According to the British historian Roderick Bailey, in 1942, in the secret soundings that the circle of Marshal Pietro Badoglio conducted through the British Special Operations Executive in Berne, his name came up as one of Italy’s possible leaders after the overthrow of Mussolini. After Italy’s surrender in September 1943, Bergonzoli refused to cooperate with the Allies, as some Italian prisoners did. According to Italian biographers, he was punished for this by being confined for about two and a half years in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital on Long Island. He returned to Italy in March 1946.

Last years and significance

After his return he was briefly restored to active service. In 1947 he was promoted to general of army corps (generale di corpo d’armata) and retired. He settled in his native Cannobio, served as president of the association of Italian veterans of the Spanish war, and died there on 31 July 1973. He was buried in a modest grave in the local cemetery.

Bergonzoli was neither an outstanding strategist nor the author of the defeat of which he became a symbol. He was a brave officer of the old school, popular with his men, who in Ethiopia and Spain had won successes against more weakly armed opponents, and who in Libya faced a motorised British army with infantry that had no transport, obsolete artillery and few tanks. His promise “In Bardia we are and here we stay” captures well Mussolini’s way of waging war: gestures and slogans in place of a realistic assessment of strength. The fall of Bardia and Tobruk and the defeat at Beda Fomm, in which Bergonzoli played a leading part, cost Italy its independence of action in North Africa and brought the Germans of General Erwin Rommel to Libya. In the English-speaking countries “Electric Beard” himself became an almost legendary figure: allusions to his nickname appeared in an American film and in Saul Bellow’s first novel, and according to Italian sources his photograph from captivity is displayed in the Imperial War Museum in London.