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McCullaghs terrifying narrative has created a tremendous sensation. - Humanitarian Review 1911
One of the most brilliant and certainly the most trenchant of newspaper war correspondents. - Literary Digest 1913
McCullaghs book is the best and fullest account of these horrible deeds. -Morel, The Black Mans Burden (1920)
Hot Italian blood must have boiled repeatedly under the pitiless scourging administered by Mr. McCullagh. -The Nation, 1912

By 1911, Italy had been nursing a sentimental claim on the Turkish vilayet Tripoli for more than a generation, based on the fact that Tripoli is only a days sail from Sicily, and that it was formerly a Roman province. After an ultimatum was rejected by the Ottomans, Italy began an invasion of Tripoli in October 1911.

In his 1913 book Italys War for a Desert, seasoned Irish war correspondent Francis McCullagh does not spare the successors of Scipios Roman legions, whom he accuses of wanton cruelty and cold-blooded slaughter. His book is an emphatically anti-Italian account of the conflict between Italy and Turkey, illustrated and enforced by things seen and heard which certainly do not redound to the glory of those who undertook the pirate-raid, as Hamilcar Cipriani himself designated the Tripolitan expedition.

Both the bone of contention between the two disputants was of little worth to Italy, the author declares, and the manner of its snatching from its ancient possessor was disgraceful and, in some of its details, unspeakably revolting. Incidents in plenty are supplied to prove the inhumanity of the invading army.

In introducing his book, McCullagh explains that I may seem in the following narrative to be antiItalian and pro-Turk, but I believe that, on the whole, I am fairly impartial. I sympathise with the Arabs because they are fighting very bravely for their country.

In describing the aftermath, McCullagh writes:

In many humble families the bread-winner had been taken away, the little hut on the sea-shore or under the palm-trees had been burned, the little store of grain destroyed. Hardly had the massacres ceased when the Market Square and the courtyards of the mosques became crowded with the sick, the wounded, and the old. They had no food, no medicine, no resting-place save the bare ground. Cholera and other diseases made short work of them.

The result of the Italian colonisation for the Libyan population was that by the mid-1930s it had been cut in half due to emigration, famine, and war casualties. Outside the conscious pride of having recovered a part of one of the divisions of the ancient Roman Empire not much had been achieved.

About the author:

Francis McCullagh (18741956) was an Irish journalist, war correspondent, and author. He began his journalism career as a staff reporter at the Glasgow Observer (later Scottish Catholic Observer), and would continue writing for the newspaper through 1906-1937. From 1898, he was a correspondent for the New York Herald. In 1903, he was living in Japan, working for the English-language newspaper The Japan Times. Observing the growing tension between the Empire of Japan and the Russian Empire, he studied the Russian language. In 1904, he moved to Port Arthur, the major Russian military base in Manchuria, obtaining a post as a correspondent for the Novi Kra (New Land) newspaper of Port Arthur. At the start of the Russo-Japanese War, he became a non-military observer embedded within the Imperial Russian Army. In March 1905, he was evacuated as a prisoner of war, traveling from Dalny to Ujina on the Nippon Yusen liner Awa Maru.

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war-correspondent