British army officer who scored important victories over Italian forces in eastern Africa during World War II, enabling the exiled emperor Haile Selassie to return to power in Ethiopia.

A commissioned officer from 1906, Cunningham had been promoted to major general by November 1940, when he took command of British troops (recruited mainly from various parts of Africa) in Kenya. Marching north into Italian Somaliland in February 1941, his force showed remarkable mobility despite great geographical and administrative difficulties. After occupying the Red Sea ports of Chisimaio (now Kismaayo) and Mogadiscio (Mogadishu), he pursued the Italians into the mountainous interior, and on April 6, 1941, he entered the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. On May 20, 1941, in cooperation with General Sir William Platt's army advancing from the north, he received the surrender, at Amba Alagi, of the main Italian armies under Amadeo di Savoia, Duke d'Aosta.

In August 1941 Cunningham went to Egypt to lead the 8th Army in the first phase of General Sir Claude Auchinleck's Libyan Desert offensive, beginning November 18 of that year. The early failures in this campaign led him to advocate its termination, whereupon he was relieved of command and returned to England. He was knighted in 1941.

After the war he served as high commissioner in Palestine during the last years of the British mandate, from 1945 until the proclamation of the independent nation of Israel in 1948. He became a full general in 1945.