Nicolangelo Carnimeo

Nicolangelo Carnimeo was an Italian general whose name is bound up with a single battle: the defence of Keren in Eritrea in the winter and spring of 1941. For most of his career he was an ordinary infantry officer, without fame and without colonial experience. He arrived in East Africa only in 1940, and a few months later, as a newly appointed brigadier general, he was in command of the defence of a mountain position on which for eight weeks he held up the two Indian divisions of General William Platt. The Battle of Keren ended in Italian defeat and the loss of Eritrea, but both Italian and British writers came to regard it as one of the finest performances of the Italian army in the whole war. After the war Carnimeo, a lawyer by training, returned to his profession and sat on the Council of State, Italy’s highest administrative court.

Youth and first wars

He was born on 6 July 1887 in Bari in Apulia. He completed degrees in law and in political and social sciences. According to some biographical data he studied at the University of Turin and at the Istituto Cesare Alfieri in Florence, a school that trained diplomats and civil servants. In 1909 he was commissioned as an infantry officer in the army of the Kingdom of Italy.

The first war in which he fought was the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912, in which Italy took Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, later Libya, from the Ottoman Empire. He then went through the First World War on the Italian front. The available sources give no details of his service in those years. After 1918 he remained a regular officer.

Between the wars

In the interwar years he followed the usual path of an infantry officer. According to lists of Second World War generals, in October 1934 he took command – at first in an acting capacity, and from December as a colonel – of the 5th Bersaglieri Regiment, a light infantry formation. He commanded it until October 1936. He then spent more than two years attached to the army corps at Bolzano in the Alto Adige, and from February 1939 commanded the 15th Territorial Defence Sector. In May 1940, just before Italy entered the war, he was promoted to brigadier general with seniority from 1 January that year.

When Italy declared war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940, Carnimeo was attached to XVIII Corps. At the end of July he was transferred to the disposal of the Ministry of Italian Africa and from there sent to Italian East Africa, a colony cut off from the mother country by British control of the Suez Canal.

Eritrea

In Eritrea Carnimeo took command of a colonial division, made up of brigades of Eritrean askari under Italian officers, and of the 10th Territorial Defence Command. The sources differ on the division’s number: the British official history speaks of the 1st Colonial Division, which covered the Red Sea coast and the road from Karora, while Italian and some English-language studies speak of the 2nd Colonial Division. In the autumn of 1940, apart from the fighting for the fort at Gallabat in November, the northern front was relatively quiet. The Viceroy, Amedeo d’Aosta, and the commander of the northern sector, General Luigi Frusci, nonetheless expected a British attack from the Sudan and were preparing the defence of the Eritrean highlands.

The attack came in January 1941. Platt’s troops entered the abandoned town of Kassala and after several days’ fighting took Agordat and Barentu. Beyond them the only road to Asmara ran through the Dongolaas gorge below Keren, ringed by granite peaks. Frusci decided to fight the decisive battle there, and when the first Indian units arrived before Keren at the beginning of February, Carnimeo, whose two brigades were approaching from the direction of Karora, was given command of the whole front. Under his orders came the 11th Savoy Grenadiers Regiment and an Alpini battalion brought up from Addis Ababa, Blackshirt battalions, the remnants of the brigades shattered at Agordat, and further colonial brigades drawn in from all sides. His closest collaborator was Orlando Lorenzini, commander of the 2nd Colonial Brigade, a veteran of the wars in Libya and Ethiopia whom the askari surrounded with the legend of the “Lion of the Sahara”.

The Battle of Keren

Carnimeo’s defence rested on a simple principle: hold the peaks above the gorge and immediately counter-attack any that the enemy took. The Italians blocked the road in the gorge with boulders and placed artillery, mortars and machine guns on the peaks and behind the ridges. When Indian soldiers, exhausted by the climb, reached a summit, they were met with grenades, mortar fire from concealed positions and counter-attacks by grenadiers and askari. In February the defenders threw back two waves of attacks by the 4th Indian Infantry Division on Brig’s Peak, Sanchil and the Acqua Col pass, and forced Platt to suspend operations for more than a month. In the process Italian battalions dwindled to the size of companies, while the British air force bombed the positions, the supply lines and Asmara ever more heavily.

On 15 March 1941 Platt sent two divisions into the attack. At Sanchil the Italians again repulsed the attackers, but on the night of 15–16 March soldiers of the 5th Indian Division captured Fort Dologorodoc above the gorge. Between 18 and 22 March the Italians tried seven times to retake it and suffered heavy losses in doing so. On 17 March Lorenzini was killed by a shell splinter. According to the British official history, by 20 March the strength of the Italian units had fallen by a third. On 25 March the British took the heights above the roadblock in the gorge, and their sappers cleared the road for tanks. On the night of 26–27 March, when further defence had become pointless, the Italians skilfully withdrew most of their troops and guns, leaving only a covering force. Some of the grenadiers and Bersaglieri on the Sanchil ridge were cut off and surrendered in the morning.

Counting from the first clashes, the battle lasted 56 days. According to the British official history the attackers lost 536 killed and 3,229 wounded, and the Italians, according to General Frusci’s reports, about 3,000 killed. On 27 March 1941 Carnimeo was promoted to major general for war merit. After Keren fell, resistance in Eritrea quickly collapsed: on 1 April the British entered Asmara, and on 8 April Massawa capitulated. Carnimeo was taken prisoner by the British and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.

His opponents were generous in their recognition. British writers praised the defence of Keren, conducted for almost two months in worse conditions and in the face of the enemy’s air superiority, and Carnimeo himself paid tribute to the courage of the Indian soldiers he had fought against. In 1950 he published a book on the battle in Naples, entitled Cheren. 1 febbraio – 27 marzo 1941.

After the war

After returning from captivity Carnimeo remained in the army and rose to the rank of army corps general. After retiring he went back to the law he had studied years before: he became a councillor of the Council of State, Italy’s highest administrative court, and worked in its third advisory section in Rome. English-language sources state that he was also a member of the parliament of the Italian Republic, but Italian biographies make no mention of this. On 28 November 1957 he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He died on 10 August 1965 in Naples.

Significance

Carnimeo was one of those commanders whose fame came from a lost battle. In Italy the defence of Keren became a symbol of the valour of Italian soldiers and Eritrean askari in a war that for Italy consisted mainly of defeats, with Carnimeo and Lorenzini as its chief heroes. For the course of the Second World War, however, something else mattered. The Battle of Keren was the hardest engagement of the East African campaign and cost the British eight weeks at a time when Archibald Wavell needed troops for Greece and for the defence of Libya against Erwin Rommel’s forces. It delayed but did not prevent the collapse of Italy’s empire in East Africa: after Keren, Asmara and Massawa fell, the Red Sea was opened to shipping, and the 4th Indian Infantry Division could return to Egypt.