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Cesare Maria De Vecchi

1st Conte di Val Cismon
Cesare Maria De Vecchi
Governor of Italian Somaliland
In office
8 December 1923 – 1 June 1928
MonarchVictor Emmanuel III
Preceded byCarlo Ricci Riveri
Succeeded byGuido Corni
Quadrumvir in the
Grand Council of Fascism
In office
15 December 1922 – 25 July 1943
Serving with Michele Bianchi (d. 1930), Italo Balbo (d. 1940), Emilio De Bono
Commandant-General of the Blackshirts
In office
1 February 1923 – 10 July 1925
Succeeded byAsclepia Gandolfo
Personal details
Born(1884-11-14)14 November 1884
Casale Monferrato, Italy
Died23 June 1959(1959-06-23) (aged 74)
Rome, Italy
Political partyNational Fascist Party
Height1.63 m (5 ft 4 in)
Military service
Allegiance Kingdom of Italy
Branch/service Royal Italian Army
CommandsBlackshirts

Cesare Maria De Vecchi, 1st Conte di Val Cismon (14 November 1884 – 23 June 1959) was an Italian soldier, colonial administrator and fascist politician.

Biography

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De Vecchi was born in Casale Monferrato on 14 November 1884. After graduating in jurisprudence he became a successful lawyer in Turin. His stance on the First World War was interventionist, and he himself took part in the final events of the conflict, finishing the war with the rank of captain and various decorations for valour.[1] On his return to Italy, he gave his support to the National Fascist Party, in which he would consistently represent the monarchical and 'moderate' wing. He became president of the Turin war veterans and head of the local Fascist squadre. In 1921, he was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies.

De Vecchi became Commandant-General of the Milizia (see Blackshirts), was one of the quadrumvirs who organised the March on Rome, and sought to persuade Antonio Salandra to enter into Benito Mussolini's government. He himself became undersecretary at the Treasury and then at the Finance Ministry. In December 1922, he inspired the squadre of Brandimarte to the 1922 Turin massacre (Strage di Torino) and he became known as the most important of the Piedmontese squadristi.

From 1923 to 1928, De Vecchi was governor of Italian Somaliland, a role which took him away from the centre of the Italian political scene. He was made Count of Val Cismon (in memory of the battles fought by his arditi on Monte Grappa in 1918). During this time, De Vecchi presided over a war of pacification in Somalia. According to Tom Behan, De Vecchi pursued a "scorched earth policy" in Somalia from 1925 to 1927. The first war crime of fascist Italy, the killing of 100 civilians in Merca, was committed under his leadership.[2]

De Vecchi was appointed a senator by King Victor Emmanuel III. He became the first ambassador to the Vatican after the Concordat of 1929. During the 1930s, he chaired the Piedmont committee for the history of Risorgimento, organized events and lectured to celebrate the period.[3] Between 1935 and 1936, he was national Minister of Education: as such he promoted historiography which identified the House of Savoy as the link between Imperial Rome and the Rome of Fascism, and also worked for the centralisation of the administration of the school system.

On 20 June 1935, De Vecchi got approved the De Vecchi reform, a bill of law which abolished the distinction between high schools depending on the central government and secondary schools that could be financed by local comune and provinces.[4] The control of the whole high school education was centralized on the government which decided scholastic curriculums and applied censorship upon scholastic textbooks before and after their publication.

While serving as the Governor of the Island of Rhodes, was responsible for enacting the Italian racial laws, which restricted the civil rights of Italian Jews, banned books written by Jewish authors, and excluded Jews from public offices and higher education. Additional laws stripped Jews of their assets, restricted travel, and finally, provided for their confinement in internal exile, as was done for political prisoners. In 1935 De Vecchi forced the Jewish community to relocate their cemetery from its historical location in the old city to its current location on the road to the Kallithea neighborhood and forcibly required that they furnish the tombstones of their ancestors for rebuilding the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes.[5]

Writing in his War Diaries, (entry for March 6, 1940) Count Galeazzi Ciano, then Italy's foreign minister wrote: "For the first time I found a person who wants to declare War with the Germans against France and England. This person is no less than the intrepid Cesare Maria de Vecchi di Val Cismon! The Americans say that a sucker is born every minute; one only has to look for him. This time I have found one. Cesare Maria is, above all, a man of pomposity and vain illusions, who dreams of obtaining a marshal's baton and decorations and hopes to gain them through the blood of others." From 1939 to 1943, he was also president of the Italian Numismatic Institute.

From 1936 to 1941, De Vecchi acted as governor of the Italian Aegean Islands promoting the official use of the Italian language.[6] In the following year he was appointed to the Grand Council of Fascism and on 25 July 1943, he voted in favour of Dino Grandi's order of the day which deposed Benito Mussolini of his role as Fascist Duce (leader). On 1 August 1943, he was promoted to Generale di Divisione and given command of the newly forming 215th Coastal Division in Florence. After the announcement of the Armistice of Cassibile on 8 September 1943, De Vecchi authorized German forces to enter the port of Piombino and forbade any act of resistance. Nevertheless, units of the Royal Italian Navy and Royal Italian Army supported by the local population prevented the Germans from landing at Piombino, killed about 100 and captured over 200 Wehrmacht soldiers. The following day De Vecchi ordered the freeing of the Germans and returning their weapons to them, after which he signed the surrender of his Division to the Germans. On 13 September, De Vecchi with a pass given to him by German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring left his positions and took refuge in Piedmont.[1]

In early October 1943, De Vecchi went into hiding with the help of the order of the Salesians of Don Bosco, who hid him from Mussolini's Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI), which condemned De Vecchi to death in absentia in the Verona trial in January 1944. The Salesians hid De Vecchi even after the war until 1947 when he escaped to Argentina on a Paraguayan passport.[1] After returning to Italy in 1949, De Vecchi supported the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI) together with Rodolfo Graziani. However, he refused to accept any political or institutional office within the MSI. De Vecchi died in Rome in 1959.

Campaign of the Sultanates

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Main article: Campaign of the Sultanates

The fascist government ordered occupation of all of Somalia by force through the Royal Corps of Colonial Troops, which led to armed resistance and rebellions across the country.[7] With the arrival of Governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi on 15 December 1923, things began to change in Somalia, Italy had access to these areas under the successive protection treaties, but not direct rule. The Fascist government had direct rule only over the majority of Benadir territory. Given the defeat of the Dervish movement in the early 1920s, and the rise of fascism in Europe, on 1925, Mussolini gave the green light to De Vecchi to start the takeover of the northern sultanates. Everything was to be changed and the treaties abrogated.[8]

To make the enforcement of his plan more viable, he began to reconstitute the old Somali police corps, the Corpo Zaptié, and the new Dubats as a colonial force. Who were mostly led by Capo Hersi Gurey, a major ally of Italy in this conflict.

Capo Hersi Gurey in Rome, 1938

In preparation for the plan of invasion of the sultanates, the Alula Commissioner, E. Coronaro received orders in April 1924 to carry out a reconnaissance on the territories targeted for invasion. In spite of the forty year Italian relationship with the sultanates, Italy did not have adequate knowledge of the geography. During this time, the Stefanini-Puccioni geological survey was scheduled to take place.Such, concluded that the Majeerteen Sultanate depended on sea traffic, therefore, if this were blocked any resistance could be “mounted” As the first stage of the invasion plan, Governor De Vecchi ordered the two Sultanates to disarm.

Italians swiftly invaded Hobyo, with Ali Yusuf Kenadiids surrender, victorious against the sultan's forces, the populace had yet to accept Italian rule without a fight. Commissioner Trivulzio, assigned with administering Hobyo, reported the movement of armed men towards the borders of the sultanate before and after the annexation. As preparations were underway to continue the Corpo Zaptié's advance into Majeerteen Sultanate, a new threat emerged. One of Sultan Ali Yusuf's commanders, Omar Samatar, attacked and captured El Buur on the 9th of November 1925. The local populace sided with Omar, and soon enough the Italians had a full-scale revolution on their hands after Omar followed up his previous success with the capture of El-Dhere. The Corpo Zaptié tried and failed to recapture El-Bur from Omar. By 15 November the Italians had fled to Bud Bud, ambushed by partisans the whole way and rather diminished in forces and resolve.[9][10]

A third attempt was planned, but before it could be executed the commander of the operation, Lieutenant-Colonel Splendorelli, was ambushed and killed between Bud Bud and Bula Barde. Italian morale hit rock bottom, and Hobyo seemed a lost cause as Omar Samatar stood poised to reconquer Hobyo itself. In an attempt to salvage the situation, governor De Vecchi requested two battalions from Eritrea and assumed personal command. The rebellion soon spilled over the borders into the Benadir and Western Somaliland, and Omar grew increasingly powerful. The disaster in Hobyo shocked Italian policymakers in Rome. Blame soon fell on Governor De Vecchi, whose perceived incompetence was blamed for Omar's rise. Rome instructed De Vecchi that he was to receive the reinforcement from Eritrea, but that the commander of the Eritrean battalions was to assume the military command and De Vecchi was confined to Mogadishu and limited to an administrative role. The commander was to report directly to Rome, bypassing De Vecchi entirely.[11]

As the situation was extremely confused, De Vecchi took former Sultan Ali Yusuf Kenadiid with him to Mogadishu. Mussolini vowed to reconquer all of Hobyo and move on to Majeerteenia by any means necessary. Even reinstating Ali Yusuf was considered. However, the clans had already sided with Omar Samatar, so this was not as viable an option as it would appear. Before the reinforcements arrived, De Vecchi chose the age old tactic of divide and rule, and offered great rewards, money and prestige to any clans who chose to support the Italians, notably the Habar Gidir, who were long enemies of the Hobyo Sultanate.

Considering the eons-old clan rivalries which have been the bane of Somali states from time immemorial, it turned out to be far more successful than the Eritrean regiments in reversing the rebellion, the Habar Gidir were led by commander Hersi Gurey.[12]

Habar Gidir cavalry in Hobyo

With the steam taken out of the rebellion, and the military forces heavily reinforced with the battalions from Eritrea, the Italians retook El-Buur on 26 December 1925, and eventually compelled Omar Samatar to retreat into Western Somaliland, although these fumbles against Hobyo, had been disastrous for the Italians, and Mussolini’s pride.[13][14]

Honors and awards

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Italian

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Foreign

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Notes

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  1. ^ a b c "De Vecchi, Cesare Maria". Treccani Dizionario Biografico. Retrieved 11 November 2021.
  2. ^ Behan, Tom (15 July 2009). The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies. Pluto Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-7453-2695-5.
  3. ^ Graglia, Giovanni (1 October 2013). Fascistizing Turin: compromising with tradition and clashing with opposition (PDF). London School of Economics. p. 92. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 December 2022. Retrieved 10 May 2021.
  4. ^ H. Arthur Steiner (1 March 1937). "The De Vecchi Reform of Higher Education in Italy". The Journal of Higher Education. 8 (3): 141–144. doi:10.2307/1974610. ISSN 0022-1546. JSTOR 1974610. OCLC 7348842603.
  5. ^ Hasson, Aron (2012). A Guidebook To The Jewish Quarter of Rhodes. Los Angeles, CA: Rhodes Jewish Historical Foundation. pp. 52–55. ISBN 9780983196815.
  6. ^ Marc Dubin (July 2002), Rough Guide to Dodecanese and the East Aegean, Rough Guides, p. 436, ISBN 978-1-85828-883-3
  7. ^ Yuusuf, Muuse (20 May 2021). The Genesis of the Civil War in Somalia: The Impact of Foreign Military Intervention on the Conflict. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7556-2710-3.
  8. ^ "27 febbraio 1927: In Somalia si concludono le operazioni per la pacificazione dei sultanati". Italia Coloniale (in Italian). 27 February 2023. Retrieved 2 August 2025.
  9. ^ "27 febbraio 1927: In Somalia si concludono le operazioni per la pacificazione dei sultanati". Italia Coloniale (in Italian). 27 February 2023. Retrieved 4 August 2025.
  10. ^ Tripodi, Paolo (1999). The Colonial Legacy in Somalia: Rome and Mogadishu. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780312221576. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
  11. ^ Ciisa-Salwe, Cabdisalaam M. (1996). The Collapse of the Somali State: The Impact of the Colonial Legacy. HAAN. ISBN 978-1-874209-27-0.
  12. ^ Bollettino ufficiale delle nomine, promozioni e destinazioni negli ufficiali e sottufficiali del R. esercito italiano e nel personale dell'amministrazione militare (in Italian). Ministero della Guerra. 1940. p. 2968.
  13. ^ Ciisa-Salwe, Cabdisalaam M. (1996). The Collapse of the Somali State: The Impact of the Colonial Legacy. HAAN. ISBN 978-1-874209-27-0.
  14. ^ Njoku, Raphael Chijioke (20 February 2013). The History of Somalia. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 979-8-216-09799-0.
  15. ^ Royal Decree of 8 April 1925, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d'Italia ("Official Gazette of the Kingdom of Italy") Number 94 of 26 April 1926, p. 1704.

References

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  • This article originated as a translation of its counterpart in the Italian Wikipedia as retrieved on 2007-03-18
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cesare Maria De Vecchi.