The Italian who saved Churchill

On November 15, 1899, a British armored train cautiously travels towards Colenso, in the colony of Natal.

On board the train, on a reconnaissance mission, is a 24-year-old journalist who, despite his young age, has already participated in several military campaigns in Cuba, India, and Sudan. His name will soon become famous, but for now, few know Winston Churchill.

Boer troops

 After months of tensions and failed mediation attempts between the British Empire and the Boer republics (South African Republic and Orange Free State), just over a month before, words gave way to arms. Things were not going well at all for Queen Victoria’s troops.Underestimating the enemy led to repeated defeats and forced the British onto the defensive. In this front area, Boer Commandos besieged a concentration of British troops.

Perfectly camouflaged in the veld, the South African steppe, about 200 men from the Italiaansche Verkennings Corps (Italian Reconnaissance Corps) await the order of their commander, Colonel Camillo Ricchiardi. There were not many Italians in South Africa at the time, no more than 5,000, who had arrived following the discovery of rich gold deposits in the Witwatersrand area, where Johannesburg now stands. The new mines desperately needed explosives experts and a significant number of immigrants came from Avigliana, in the province of Turin, where the local Nobel Dynamite Factory was going through a crisis that led to many layoffs.

Colonel Ricchiardi was also from Piedmont. Born in Alba, he embodied the figure of the nineteenth-century adventurer perfectly.Trained as an officer in the Royal Army, he joined a superior officer, Gerolamo Emilio Gerini, and in 1889 resigned to move to Siam, where Sultan Rama V assigned him the task of military advisor for reorganizing the local army and educating one of his sons, before sending him as Siam’s representative to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He later pursued a career as a war reporter, covering the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and later the Italo-Ethiopian war (1896) up to the Battle of Adwa (according to some sources Ricchiardi was present), where the Italians suffered a heavy defeat by Ethiopian troops. The following year he returned to Asia, appointed as an agent for the Union of Italian Industrialists in China, relocating to Shanghai, but civilian life was too confining, and by 1898 he joined Emilio Aguinaldo Famy as a mercenary in a guerrilla war to liberate the Philippines from Spanish and later USA rule.

He arrived in South Africa a few months earlier but quickly rose through the ranks due to his experience, being promoted to colonel and placed in charge of that small corps specialized in reconnaissance and sabotage actions called the Italian Volunteer Legion.

When the train reached the top of a hill, Camillo ordered fire, and the locomotive was hit by intense rifle fire. The engineer did exactly what the Italians had planned: he accelerated down the slope, at the bottom of which debris and rocks had been piled.

The locomotive and first carriage miraculously passed, but derailment was inevitable. The Rooinek, or “rednecks” as the Boers contemptuously called the English because of the frequent sunburns inflicted by the harsh African sun, organized a resistance that, although brief, allowed part of the convoy with some soldiers aboard to escape.

Churchill was not among those who escaped, and after the firing stopped, the young journalist quickly discarded the Mauser pistol he was carrying. His movement was noticed by the commanding officer of the attackers: it was Ricchiardi himself, who found on him two magazines of expanding bullets, the famous dum-dum bullets that had been banned by the Hague Convention in July of that year (though it would take effect only the following year).

The situation was tense, and many soldiers, enraged by the discovery of those bullets, hated by all combatants because of the terrible wounds they cause, and excited by the recent fighting, wanted to execute the civilian they considered a British spy.

But, perhaps due to their shared journalistic profession, or maybe because of the possible political repercussions that could arise from killing the heir of one of the leading figures of the British aristocracy, Ricchiardi opposed the immediate execution of young Winston in the South African veld.

Churchill was then interned in an officers’ prison camp, from which he soon escaped to take refuge in a diamond mine owned by a British sympathizer, before clandestinely boarding a train that took him to the then Portuguese East Africa, today Mozambique.

Winston Churchill in South Africa.

Winston Churchill in South Africa

Back in Natal, Churchill joined the English troops, this time as a lieutenant, until the conquest of Pretoria before returning home in 1900 to find that his daring escape had made him famous in British public opinion, a fame that would boost his political career culminating in his becoming Prime Minister.

Ricchiardi, after the defeat and a short stay in Italy, moved to Argentina, where many Boer soldiers who refused to accept British rule had taken refuge. He devoted himself to various commercial activities until 1923 when a stroke partially disabled him. He finally died in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1940, after an intense and incredible life.