Giuseppe Tellera

Giuseppe Tellera commanded the Italian 10th Army in its last weeks, from the defeat at Sidi Barrani to the surrender at Beda Fomm. A staff officer of the old school and for two years chief of staff to Marshal Italo Balbo in Libya, he was one of those Italian generals who said openly that Italy was not ready for war, especially a war in the desert against the British. When in December 1940 he was given an army that was being shattered in Operation Compass, he knew he was receiving a hopeless task. He was killed in February 1941 while personally leading tanks in a last attempt to break through the British block. He is considered the highest-ranking Italian general to be killed in action in the Second World War. His letters to his wife, published in extracts only in the 21st century by the historian Angelo Del Boca, are among the most revealing testimonies of how Fascist Italy entered a war its own soldiers feared.

Youth and the First World War

He was born on 14 March 1882 in Bologna. After completing a classical lyceum he entered the military academy in Modena at the age of eighteen, graduating in 1902 as a second lieutenant of infantry. In 1905 he was promoted to lieutenant, in 1909 he was admitted to the War School (Scuola di Guerra), which trained general staff officers, and in 1912 he became a captain.

When Italy entered the First World War in May 1915, Tellera was sent to the Karst Plateau near Monfalcone, facing the Austro-Hungarian positions on the Sei Busi hills. For ten months he took part in the first three Battles of the Isonzo and was awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valour. In the summer of 1916, by then a major, he became chief of staff of the Tanaro Division, stationed in southern Albania, which Italy was then occupying. According to an Italian biographical note, he prepared the bloodless seizure of the bay of Porto Palermo on the Albanian coast and then spent a year and a half as chief of staff of the troops in southern Albania. The front there was quiet, so he also concerned himself with building a road from Santi Quaranta (Sarandë) to Korçë, an aqueduct in Gjirokastër, and medical care for soldiers and civilians.

In March 1918 he returned to the Italian front as deputy chief of staff of VI Corps, which was defending the Grappa massif. After the Battle of the Piave in June 1918 he became chief of staff of the 22nd Division, and in October he was promoted to colonel at the age of 36. For the fighting on the Grappa he received the Bronze Medal of Military Valour.

Between the wars

On 3 March 1919 he married his cousin Zete; they had two children, Gianna and Luigi. His inter-war career took him through garrisons at Postojna, in the territory annexed by Italy after the war, Bologna and Bergamo. He commanded the 78th Infantry Regiment “Toscana”, worked in the operations department of the General Staff, and in 1932 took over the Central Military Schools at Civitavecchia and was promoted to brigadier general. In November 1935, by then a major general, he took command of the 14th Infantry Division “Isonzo” at Gorizia, on the Yugoslav border.

In September 1937 he was transferred to Libya as commander of the 60th Infantry Division “Sabratha”. He was proud of having turned it into an efficient unit within a few weeks; in November 1937 the division was inspected by Balbo and by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. In his letters to his wife he described Tripoli as Balbo was rebuilding it, and the arrival in November 1938 of thousands of families of Italian settlers sent to Libya as part of a great colonisation drive.

Balbo’s chief of staff

On 1 August 1938 Balbo, Governor of Libya, chose him as chief of staff of the Supreme Command of the armed forces in North Africa. At the turn of 1938 and 1939 Tellera was promoted to corps general (generale di corpo d’armata). Balbo thought highly of him and in a report of July 1940 praised his wide military knowledge and his openness to modern concepts of warfare. Tellera himself often flew in person to distant oases to inspect the garrisons.

As war approached, the chief of staff, together with Balbo, warned Rome that the troops in Libya lacked tanks, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, lorries and modern aircraft. In May 1940 Balbo sent him to Rome to set out the shortcomings once more. According to his family’s recollections, he came back from the ministry reassured: Marshal Pietro Badoglio is said to have told him that King Victor Emmanuel III would never sign a declaration of war. A few days later Italy entered the war. Tellera’s criticism aroused resentment in Rome; his family believed that the Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry, General Ubaldo Soddu, tried to have him removed, but Balbo protected him.

On 28 June 1940 Tellera was flying with Balbo over Tobruk. At the last moment the marshal told him to change to a second aircraft. When the aircraft came in over the airfield just after a British raid, the Italian anti-aircraft guns opened fire. Tellera’s aircraft managed to get away and land elsewhere, but Balbo’s went down in flames. Tellera, an eyewitness of the marshal’s death, had to break the news to his wife. The new governor, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, took command in Libya and kept Tellera on as chief of staff, though at first, as the general himself wrote, he did not trust him and rarely spoke to him. That changed after the September offensive into Egypt, which came to a halt at Sidi Barrani.

Commander of the 10th Army

On 9 December 1940 the British launched Operation Compass and in three days smashed the 10th Army’s camps around Sidi Barrani. On 22–23 December, with Bardia already surrounded, Graziani relieved the army commander, General Mario Berti, and gave the command to Tellera. According to an Italian account, the general then told a colleague: “I know I am going to my death, but I would at least have preferred to lead an army I had trained myself.” To his wife he wrote calmly that the command was as good as a promotion. On 31 December, however, he sent her a long letter, carried by an officer returning to Italy so that it bypassed the censor, which his family called his testament. In it he wrote that Italy had entered the war “in total and complete unpreparedness”, that Badoglio had assured him personally that there would be no war before 1942 or 1943, and that against a thousand British tanks and armoured cars the army had about sixty serviceable tanks. These figures exaggerated the British strength, but they conveyed well the Italian command’s sense of helplessness.

From the remnants of the army Tellera tried to build successive lines of defence. Bardia fell on 5 January, Tobruk on 22 January. On the line from Derna to Mechili he deployed the fresh Sabratha Division and General Valentino Babini’s Special Armoured Brigade. On 23 January he ordered a counter-attack at Mechili intended to prevent General Annibale Bergonzoli’s corps from being outflanked from the south. But he had no freedom of action: Graziani issued him detailed and often contradictory instructions, and the military historian Mario Montanari wondered why Tellera had not been entrusted with directing the whole battle in western Cyrenaica. After Derna was abandoned on 2 February, Graziani handed him, from 3 February, command of all the forces in eastern Libya and the task of bringing them back to Tripolitania, and himself left for the west.

Beda Fomm

Tellera brought up the rear of the retreat. According to Italian accounts, he left Benghazi on the evening of 5 February, when a British column of General Richard O’Connor’s forces, having taken a short cut across the desert, had already been blocking the road south for several hours. In the Battle of Beda Fomm a long column of troops and fleeing civilians was pinned against the coast road and attacked from the flank by British tanks for two days. According to the report of an Italian chaplain, on 6 February the general left his shelter in a roadman’s house, climbed into one of the surviving M13 tanks and tried to reach Bergonzoli’s tanks to lead a last attempt to break through. He ran into British tanks, and a shell splinter pierced his lung. According to a letter from an Italian army doctor, Lieutenant Mauro Sabiani, he died in his arms at 2 a.m. on 7 February 1941 near Soluch (Suluq); in British accounts he appears among the prisoners as mortally wounded, dying shortly after the battle. A few hours later the remnants of the 10th Army surrendered.

The British allowed the doctor to escort the body to Benghazi, and The Times reported that the funeral in the cathedral there was held with full military honours.

Memory

Tellera was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour, Italy’s highest award for gallantry. The death of an army commander in a lost battle was, however, an embarrassment to the regime. The medal was presented at a ceremony in Rome at the Altare della Patria; his widow did not attend, and the King pinned it on the breast of his twenty-year-old daughter, Gianna. According to the family’s recollections, Benito Mussolini offered the widow a million lire to take part in a scene filmed for propaganda, in which she was to enter his office crying “We shall win!”, whereupon the Duce would strike the table with his fist and reply “We have won!”. The family refused, even though the general’s pension went unpaid throughout the war.

Tellera’s letters to his wife, some 150 letters and cards from 1937–1941, are kept by the family of his son-in-law in Castiglione delle Stiviere. In 2006 Angelo Del Boca published extensive extracts from them. They show a general who was a loyal soldier but would not be carried away by propaganda: he predicted that the British would strike first in Africa, where Italy was least prepared, and that war with Britain would be a catastrophe for his country. His fate illustrates well the drama of the Italian army in North Africa in 1940–1941: the courage of its commanders could not make up for the lack of tanks, lorries, communications and sensible direction from Rome. The defeat of the 10th Army, of which he was the last commander, brought General Erwin Rommel’s Germans to Libya.