Italo Gariboldi

Italo Gariboldi was an Italian general whose career spanned all the wars of Fascist Italy. In 1936 his division entered Addis Ababa; in June 1940 he commanded an army on the border with French Tunisia; and in February 1941, after the defeat of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, he took over the supreme command in Libya. This made him the formal superior of General Erwin Rommel and the first Italian commander who had to deal with a German ally doing in Africa whatever he himself thought right. After a few months of quarrels he was recalled, and in 1942 he took command of the 8th Army sent to the Eastern Front. Its destruction on the Don in the winter of 1942–1943 was the Italian army’s greatest defeat of the Second World War. After Italy’s capitulation he refused to collaborate with the Germans and was sentenced by a court of the Italian Social Republic.

Early life and the First World War

He was born on 20 April 1879 in Lodi in Lombardy, the son of Ercole Gariboldi and Maria, née Crocciolani. At the age of twelve he entered the military college in Milan and later the one in Rome. From 1896 he studied at the infantry and cavalry academy in Modena, from which he graduated in October 1898 as a second lieutenant of infantry. As a captain, after completing the war college in Turin, he took part in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912, in which Italy took Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from the Ottoman Empire. It was his first encounter with Libya, to which he would return almost thirty years later as its governor.

When Italy entered the First World War in May 1915, he served on the staff of the 4th Army. In 1915–1917 he belonged to the general staff officer corps and was twice promoted for war merit. In January 1918 he became a colonel. As head of the 4th Army’s operations section he went through its retreat from the Cadore after the defeat at Caporetto and the fighting on the Grappa massif, which in the autumn of 1917 and in 1918 halted the Austro-Hungarian offensive. He received the silver Medal of Military Valour and the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Savoy.

Between the wars

In 1918 he was quartermaster of a corps intended for an expedition to the Caucasus, which was eventually abandoned. In 1919, as chief of staff of the 77th Division at Volosca near Fiume, he found himself at the very heart of the crisis caused by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who in September that year seized the city in defiance of the government in Rome. In the early 1920s he chaired the Italian delegation charged with demarcating the border with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. This was one of the fruits of settlements meant to end the dispute over the eastern Adriatic coast, which in practice left a sense of grievance on both sides.

In 1926 he took command of the 26th Infantry Regiment and later lectured at the war college. In 1931 he became a brigadier general and successively commanded the 5th Infantry Brigade in San Remo, the military academy in Modena and the infantry school of application in Parma. From 1935, by then a divisional general, he sat on the Army Council. He was not a political general in the mould of Pietro Badoglio or Graziani, but a loyal and solid staff officer who rose through an army obedient to the regime of Benito Mussolini.

Ethiopia

In the war against Ethiopia he commanded the “Sabauda” Infantry Division in General Ruggero Santini’s I Corps on the northern front. His troops fought in the battles of Amba Aradam and Tembien in early 1936. In the spring, in the last phase of the war, Gariboldi’s division, carried in hundreds of lorries, was the main force of Badoglio’s column in the “march of the iron will” from Dessie to the capital. On 5 May 1936 it entered Addis Ababa without meeting resistance.

After the war Gariboldi became Governor of Addis Ababa and chief of staff of the government of Italian East Africa. The conquest was still incomplete at the time and resistance continued in the country. Gariboldi’s biographer, Lucio Ceva, writes in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani that the general was involved in suppressing the Ethiopian resistance, a campaign in which mustard gas was used and summary executions were carried out. According to other sources, in the autumn of 1936 the Minister of the Colonies, Alessandro Lessona, reprimanded him for being too lenient towards the population, and Gariboldi fell into line with the guidelines. On 19 February 1937 he was slightly wounded in the attempt on the life of the Viceroy, Graziani, in Addis Ababa. According to Italian biographers, Guido Cortese, secretary of the local Fascist Party organisation, who then unleashed the massacre of the capital’s inhabitants, did not even ask for his opinion. In February 1938 he returned to Italy. For Ethiopia he received a second silver medal, promotion to corps general “for exceptional merit” and the rank of Commander of the Military Order of Savoy. In March 1939 he took over V Corps in Trieste.

Libya: from the 5th Army to the supreme command

On 11 June 1940, the day after Italy entered the war, he took command of the 5th Army in Tripolitania, facing French Tunisia. Together with the 10th Army on the Egyptian border, it made up the whole of the land forces of Marshal Italo Balbo. After Balbo’s death – he was shot down by mistake over Tobruk – Graziani took over command in Libya, and on 2 July Gariboldi became his deputy. After the armistice with France the threat from Tunisia disappeared, and the 5th Army became a reservoir of men and equipment for the 10th Army, which was preparing the invasion of Egypt.

When the British launched Operation Compass on 9 December 1940, the commander of the 10th Army, General Mario Berti, was on sick leave in Italy and Gariboldi was standing in for him. Over the following weeks he watched the army being smashed in one camp and fortress after another, from Sidi Barrani through Bardia to Tobruk. On 7 February 1941 its remnants surrendered at Beda Fomm. Graziani asked to be relieved, and on 11 February Gariboldi succeeded him as commander-in-chief in North Africa, and on 24 March also as Governor-General of Libya.

On 12 February, the day after taking command, he received Rommel in Tripoli. The German general remembered him as a man “very discouraged by the defeat”, who accepted with evident scepticism a plan to defend far to the east of Tripoli, in the Sirte area, and advised the newcomer to get to know the terrain first. The plan, however, was approved by Mussolini, and Gariboldi carried it out. Formally Rommel was subordinate to him, and the Italian motorised units passed under German tactical command.

The real conflict broke out at the turn of March and April 1941. Gariboldi wanted to wait for the arrival of the 15th Panzer Division and Italian reinforcements before going over to the offensive. Rommel attacked without waiting and without his consent, and on 3 April, when Gariboldi accused him of acting against orders from Rome and demanded that the advance be halted, the two men had a heated exchange. The dispute was settled by a signal from the German high command giving Rommel complete freedom of action. Rommel’s success – within a couple of weeks he had recovered almost the whole of Cyrenaica except Tobruk – left Gariboldi without arguments. He complained to the Chief of the Supreme General Staff, General Ugo Cavallero, about the directives arriving from Berlin from the Chief of Staff of the German Army, General Franz Halder. At the request of the Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, General Mario Roatta, he was replaced by General Ettore Bastico and General Gastone Gambara. On 19 July 1941 Gariboldi returned to Italy and was attached to the Supreme Command without any specific duties.

Russia: the 8th Army on the Don

In the spring of 1942 Mussolini, who wanted a stronger position at Hitler’s side in the war against the Soviet Union, decided to expand the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia, in action there since 1941, to the size of an army. Command of the new 8th Army, also known as ARMIR, went to Gariboldi. In May he was received by Adolf Hitler, and in July the general left for the front. The army numbered some 229,000 men, including three Alpine divisions, and according to Ceva was better equipped than many German infantry divisions, but had almost no armour, which Italy was sending to Africa. Gariboldi insisted that the Alpine Corps, which the Germans wanted to use in the Caucasus, should remain part of the army. In October 1942 he was promoted to army general.

In the summer of 1942 the Italians were strung out in a thin cordon along some 270 kilometres of front on the Don, between the Hungarian and Romanian armies, covering the flank of the Germans advancing on Stalingrad. Ceva calls the density of troops “ridiculously small” and the German armoured reserves that were supposed to compensate for it “hypothetical”. In November 1942, after sharp disputes with Gariboldi, General Giovanni Messe, commander of the former expeditionary corps, left the army. After the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad had begun, in mid-December the Red Army struck the Italian corps in Operation Little Saturn. The German command refused the withdrawal for which Gariboldi timidly pleaded, and after a week of fighting two-thirds of the army had been destroyed. In mid-January 1943, after the collapse of the Hungarian 2nd Army, Soviet forces reached the rear of the Alpine Corps. The Alpini fought their way out on foot across hundreds of kilometres of steppe in a bitter winter. According to Ceva at least 74,800 Italian soldiers lost their lives in Russia; other estimates of the dead and missing are higher still.

Ceva judges Gariboldi severely: army headquarters neither prepared the retreat, although it still had thousands of lorries and stocks of fuel, nor used aircraft to show the Alpini the way. The general was accused of passivity, even though the overall situation at the front and the decisions of the German command gave the Italian army little chance. In the spring of 1943, during efforts to hold the alliance together, Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. According to accounts from Hitler’s entourage, the dictator agreed to this reluctantly, since he blamed Stalingrad above all on the Romanians and the Italians. Sources differ on the date of the award.

Italy’s capitulation, imprisonment and last years

When the armistice between Italy and the Allies was announced in September 1943, Gariboldi was in Padua, commanding the 8th Army, which was being rebuilt and whose units were scattered from the Brenner Pass to Venezia Giulia. On 15 September he surrendered to the Germans but refused any further collaboration, and among his soldiers there were acts of spontaneous resistance. He was interned in Germany and then handed over to the authorities of the Italian Social Republic. In early 1944 a court in Verona sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment. Some sources speak of a death sentence and of his release by the Allies, but Italian biographical studies record a ten-year sentence and an escape from prison before the liberation.

After the war he lived in Rome, away from public life. In 1946, in a report on the Russian campaign, he accused the Germans of “malice, injustice” and “falsehood”, and of thinking only of saving themselves. He died in Rome on 9 February 1970 at the age of 90 and was buried in the family grave in Lodi. His son Mario, who as a young officer had fought in Russia and been awarded the silver medal for valour, later became a general and deputy chief of staff in a NATO command.

Significance

Gariboldi was a typical member of the Italian army’s senior ranks under Mussolini: educated, experienced in the First World War, obedient to the regime, but lacking the initiative and vision that modern warfare demanded. His career traces Italy’s path from colonial victory in Ethiopia to the disasters in North Africa and Russia. In Libya he found himself in a role that became a symbol of the whole alliance: formally he was in command, but in practice the decisions were taken by a German general backed by Berlin. On the Don he commanded an army that Mussolini had sent so as to have a say in the division of spoils after the expected German victory, and which paid for it with the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers.