Among the many experiences of his adventurous life Camillo Ricchiardi also had that of a war correspondent journalist; when they brought before him an English “colleague” accused of espionage and destined to be shot, he gave the order to leave it alone. The colonel of the Italian Volunteer Legion, who with a lightning military operation had immobilized and captured a British armored train with a few rifle shots aimed at the windows, that 15 November 1899 spared a young man destined to make history: Winston Churchill, who would have turned twenty-five two weeks later.
He was in civilian clothes and had thrown away the Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol he was carrying with him at the sight of the rifles leveled by the Italians, but the move had not gone unnoticed: he had been searched and two magazines had turned up. The bullets inside were the infamous dum dum, explosive projectiles designed for hunting elephants and rhinos, repugnant to the soldiers who usually shot those caught using them (they will be prohibited in international conventions); the fact that he was in possession of a weapon, like the military, also made him considered a spy. Churchill strenuously denied being a secret agent and Ricchiardi had believed him, or had wanted to believe him.
In command of a Tricolor Legion deployed alongside the Dutch settlers
The Italian officer was 34 years old, had undoubted leadership skills and a lot of common sense. That day he was satisfied with the bitter defeat inflicted on the English with the capture of that armored convoy marching from Ladysmith to Colenso, in Natal, after his legionaries had blown up the tracks causing the derailment of the locomotive, and surprised the garrison who he had no choice but to give up.
In addition to the military there were also some civilians, including about sixty people in total the Daily Mail correspondent, who instead of being put against the wall he had been sent together with the others and the soldiers to a prison camp in Pretoria. From here Churchill would also have managed to escape, but in his memoirs, although he did not keep quiet about the episode, he strangely omitted to write that it was the Italian volunteers who had taken him prisoner. There weren’t very many, a couple of hundred, in an immigrant colony in South Africa of 5-6,000 people.
In the Second Anglo-Boer War the Italiaansche Verkennings Corp, as it was called in the Afrikaans language of the Dutch settlers, was a reconnaissance unit specializing in coups. The legionaries were in fact expert riflemen, excellent horsemen, with military experience, and moreover very skilled in handling explosives because many of them had worked in the Nobel factory in Avigliana, in the Turin area, and after the crisis many workers had found employment in the same sector in Johannesburg and other centres.
An adventurous life from Siam to the Philippines and then to South Africa
Ricchiardi was also Piedmontese, from Alba. Already a cavalry lieutenant in the Savoy army, after his discharge he reached distant Siam to enter the service of King Rama V, who in addition to training his army entrusted him with the education of his son and also with representing his country in 1893 at the Chicago Expo. Pursuing the spirit of adventure, as a journalist he had covered the war between China and Japan in 1895, and also the war in Abyssinia which culminated in the searing Italian defeat at Adua by Menelik.
After a brief experience in Shanghai on behalf of the Industrialists’ Union, Ricchiardi had actually made war fighting alongside Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipinos in the fight for independence from Spainand in 1899, having arrived in South Africa, he offered his sword to the Boer Republic whose cause he shared. With the rank of colonel he had led the Italian Legion in guerrilla operations, specializing in the tactics that would later be adopted by the English with the creation of the commando corps. During the war he met the granddaughter of the Boer president Paul Kruger, Myra Francisca Guttmann, who would become his wife and give him two daughters. Upon returning to Italy he dedicated himself again to commercial activities, then moved his residence to Monte Carlo and finally to Casablanca, Morocco, where he died in 1940.
From one concentration camp to another
The Anglo-Boer War ended in 1902 with the predictable British success, which had eliminated the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, but at a high price. The doors of concentration camps were opened for the Italians who had not been repatriated from the South African territories absorbed by the British Empire, as also happened to thousands of Boer civilians, also because the government of Rome was openly on London’s side in that conflict.
The Italian presence in South Africa will decrease significantly. The Italian soldiers will return during the Second World War to South Africa but how prisoners of war of the British led by Winston Churchill, former cavalry lieutenant and former journalist who became British Prime Minister and irreducible enemy of the Axis, who forty years earlier owed his life to the adventurous Colonel Camillo Ricchiardi.