Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed F

Cambridge University Press 0521790476 - Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-43 MacGregor Knox Excerpt More information

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521790476 - Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-43 MacGregor Knox Excerpt More information

INTRODUCTION: DEFEAT ± AND HUMILIATION

Defeat was inescapable. Mussolini's associate and senior partner, Adolf Hitler, challenged by December 1941 the same world of enemies that had destroyed his royal predecessor, the Emperor Wilhelm II. For all its operational-tactical brilliance, stunning initial victories, and plunder, the Axis coalition of National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan possessed less than half the economic power of its enemies. Barring improbable levels of incompetence or irresolution in Britain and the United States, that crushing imbalance doomed the Axis in the intercontinental war of attrition that emerged from Hitler's failure to destroy Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and the FuÈhrer's immediately following and wholly eccentric declaration of war on the United States.1 In that global struggle, Hitler's Fascist allies were a pygmy among giants. The fatal consequences of the miscarriage of Nazi Germany's

1. Even a renewal of his 1939±41 alliance with Stalin might not have saved Hitler, for after mid-1945 the Americans could destroy cities ± or point targets such as Reich Chancellery and FuÈhrer headquarters ± with nuclear weapons. For a brilliant but ultimately unpersuasive effort to locate the war's turning point far later than December 1941, and in part at the operational-tactical level, see Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London, 1995).

Opposite: The Mediterranean and Africa, 1940±43.

2 Hitler's Italian Allies

``global Blitzkrieg'' would have destroyed them whatever their level of military and military-economic effectiveness.2 Yet Italy's record of defeat in 1940±43 was peculiarly humiliating. It had little in common with the heroic disasters of Benito Mussolini's German ally, whose GoÈtterdaÈmmerung was worthy in its pitiless and gleeful destructiveness of the Wagnerian myth its leader so admired. And Italy tasted defeat from the beginning; no years of striking victories delayed and cushioned its sting. The sources of the military misadventures that destroyed Fascism's prestige and internal cohesion, determined its bloodless collapse in July 1943, and foreshadowed the disintegration of the Italian armed forces that September have largely escaped comprehensive analysis. Partial answers, such as Italy's dependence on foreign energy and raw materials, the dictator's sovereign fecklessness, and the alleged absence of popular support for war, still dominate the field. What follows is an attempt to do justice to the complexity and interrelatedness of the causation and the sheer bulk of the accumulated evidence. The result emphasizes above all the cultural and organizational failings of Italian society and especially of its military institutions. However great the contribution of other factors, it was Italy's military culture that largely determined the technological imagination, force structure, and operational-tactical expertise of the armed forces with which Fascism sought to realize its wide-ranging ideological aspirations, both foreign and domestic. That insight ± and the wide variety of military pathologies evident in the Italian armed forces at war ± have a direct bearing on states and military institutions in other times and places. For regardless of the technological ingenuity

2. For details, see Mark Harrison, ``The Economics of World War II: An Overview,'' Table 1.3, p. 10, in Harrison, ed. The Economics of World War II (Cambridge, 1998), and Chapter 2, Table 2.3 of this work (``total industrial potential,'' 1938: USA Britain Soviet Russia 861; Germany Italy Japan 348). ``Weltblitzkrieg'': Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und KriegfuÈhrung1940±41 (Frankfurt a. M., 1965), p. 16.

Introduction 3

or economic brute force at a power's command, effectiveness in war ultimately depends upon the culture, command style, and professional ethos of its armed forces. That law is as true and as merciless in its consequences in the purported new era of ``battlespace information dom- inance'' as it was in the age of mass armies in which Fascist Italy fought and failed.3

The book's purpose has dictated a topical structure. The first chapter seeks to explain how and why Italy entered the Second World War as Hitler's ally, and the stages through which it descended into defeat and humiliation; a chronology at the book's end likewise offers narrative detail useful in situating events described in the topical sections. Chapter 2 analyzes the social and cultural bases of the Italian war effort, the regime's capacity to direct that effort, and the contributions of Italian industry. Chapter 3 sketches the three armed forces' visions of modern war. Chapter 4 investigates the enduring characteristics of Italian strat- egy. And the two final chapters chart the operational and tactical perfor- mance of the armed forces, the chief determinants of whether the Italian state would retain a measure of dignity in defeat.

3. For the contemporary implications of that insight, and trenchant application to the armed forces of the United States, see especially Williamson Murray, ``Does Military Culture Matter?,'' Orbis (Winter 1999), pp. 27±42.

FASCIST ITALY'S LAST WAR

War, a very great war, was from the beginning the essence of Mussolini's program. His final effort, the war of 1940±43, to his mortification destroyed the Fascist regime. But from the very beginning of his trajec- tory from 1914 to 1943, from Socialist fanatic to deposed Duce of Fascism, he had unhesitatingly invoked ``that fearful and enthralling word: war.'' Only war, he insisted in October±November 1914, could produce the genuine national integration missed during Italy's territorial unification in 1859±70. Only war could confirm Italy's membership in the charmed circle of dominant nations: ``Either war, or let's end this commedia of [claiming to be] a great power.''1 The war of 1915±18 that Mussolini and a motley coalition of interventisti helped to force upon parliament and nation through oratorical passion and street violence did not disappoint. The Great War ``completed the Risorgimento'' through the conquest of Trento, Trieste, and the Brenner frontier. It abolished Austria-Hungary, bled France white, and gave Italy far greater latitude to entertain the ambitions of Mediterranean domination long-current among its

1. OO 7:7, 197, 147; see also in general MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2000), Chapter 2.

The eve of disaster: a voluble Mussolini receives Hitler in Florence as Italian troops attack Greece, 28 October 1940 (U.S. National Archives 242-JRB-43-6).

6 Hitler's Italian Allies

governing elite. Above all, the Great War by delayed action made Mussolini himself Duce of Fascism and chief of government. He had preached war in 1914±15 as a revolutionary conflict that would overthrow ``this Italy of priests, pro-Austrians, and monarchists.''2 The 650,000 deaths, bitter defeats, and innumerable privations along the road to a victory bought too dearly, and Liberal Italy's predictable failure to achieve its inflated war aims in 1918±19 so unhinged the Italian establishment that in 1919±20 it lost command of government.3 War had indeed become a sort of revolution. Italy's socialists, under the impulse of the Soviet example but without Lenin's disciplined organization or ruthless drive, bid inchoately for power in the factories and countryside. By autumn 1920 they had failed. As their power receded, the paramilitary gangs of the fasci di combattimento, which Mussolini had founded in spring 1919 from shock-troop veterans, ex-socialist apostates, and nationalist university students, took the offensive with the complicity, open or tacit, of the Liberal governing class, police, and army. By summer 1922 Fascist violence throughout north Italy had destroyed both the rural and municipal ``baronies'' of the Socialist Party and the power-position of the Liberal state itself. At the center, in Rome, Mussolini's alternation of threats and blandishments paralyzed his Liberal and Catholic rivals. In the end, in October 1922, he forced the monarchy to choose between making him prime minister or fighting him in the streets. Yet the ``March on Rome'' by the blackshirted gangs that gave force to his claim to rule Italy only produced a peculiar condominium, a regime based on precarious compromises between Fascism and the monarchy, the royal army behind it, and the Italian establishment. The March on Rome, Mussolini conceded privately in 1924 to Party leaders, was ``a revolutionary deed and a victorious insurrection, [but] not a revolution.

2. OO 6:429 (10 November 1914); war as revolution: 7:139±41, 182, 251, 393±95. 3. For a comparative analysis of the path to dictatorship in Italy and Germany (1919±22/33), see Knox, Common Destiny, Chapter 1.

Fascist Italy's Last War 7

The revolution comes later.''4 The nature of that revolution emerged most eloquently from a December 1924 report assembled from conversations with Mussolini and members of his entourage by the German ambassador in Rome, Constantin von Neurath:

[Mussolini] was attempting to make the Mediterranean a mare italiano. In that effort France stood in the way, and he had begun to prepare for battle with that adversary. Hence ... the reversal in his attitude toward Germany. For that [change], as Mussolini has remarked both to his entourage and to me personally, his conviction of Germany's vitality and swift revival was decisive. On the other hand he also believed that the situation in Europe created by the Versailles Treaty was untenable. In the new war between France and Germany that would therefore break out, Italy, led by Mussolini, would place itself at Germany's side in order to crush France jointly. If that endeavor succeeded, Mussolini would claim as his booty the entire French North African coast and create a great ``imperium latinum'' in the Mediterranean. Then he might also judge the moment had come to have himself acclaimed emperor, and to push aside easily the unwarlike king.

World war had made Mussolini head of government. It had flattened the Socialists, as he had foretold when they had expelled him in November 1914. Yet war had not decapitated the state, as it had in Germany; the travails of 1915±18 had merely shaken rather than destroyed an establishment that retained under its hesitant master, King Victor Emanuel III, a degree of cohesion sufficient to block the claims of Fascist Party and Duce to total power. Fascism for its part fell far shorter than its German counterpart and eventual ally in its attempt to create an all-embracing and all-explanatory system of belief, a militant ideology that linked the dictator's goals to the historical pro- cess and inspired fanatical commitment. And as in Germany, despite valiant Mussolinian efforts at the indoctrination of the young and the

4. OO 44:10 (emphasis added).

8 Hitler's Italian Allies

``fascistization'' of the masses ``so that tomorrow Italian and Fascist, more or less like Italian and Catholic, will be the same thing,'' only another great war could make the regime total. Demography ± another vital ideological ingredient in the Duce's program ± likewise demanded and made possible violent expansion: ``numbers are strength.'' And only war could achieve for Italy the true great-power status grasped at but demonstrably missed in 1915±18.5 Geography predetermined Fascist Italy's enemies: Britain's command of the distant choke points at Gibraltar and Suez, and the threat of close blockade from British and French naval and air bases ± Malta, Bizerte, Corsica, Toulon ± almost within sight of Italy, galled the Italian navy. Its foremost Great War leader and Mussolini's navy minister in 1922±25, Grand Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, trumpeted repeatedly in parliament that Italy ``instead of dominating [it], would remain a prisoner in the Mediterranean'' unless the navy rather than the army secured priority in armaments.6 Mussolini made this doctrine his own, and by 1926±27 had enunciated a geopolitical dogma that fused navalist geo- politics with the Italian establishment's post-Risorgimento aspiration to great-power status:

5. ``Italian and Catholic'': OO 21:362 (22 June 1925). For an effort to understand the disparate natures and differences in motivational force of the ideologies of the Italian and German dictatorships, see Knox, Common Destiny, pp. 59±78, 231±32, which also includes discussion of Mussolini's demographic fantasies (see also Carl Ipsen, DictatingDemography:The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy [Cambridge, 1996]). 6. Atti del Parlamento Italiano, Camera dei Deputati, 1925, vol. 3, pp. 3151, 3171 (30 March 1925); for other Di Revel sallies, ibid., Senato, 1921±22, vol. 3, pp. 3833± 34 (14 August 1922), vol. 4, p. 4651 (16 February 1923); 1924, vol. 1, pp. 915±16 (20 December 1924); also Thaon di Revel to Mussolini, 28 March 1925, in Giovanni Bernardi, Il disarmo navale fra le due guerre mondiali (1919±1939) (Rome, 1975), p. 217.

Fascist Italy's Last War 9

A nation that has no free access to the sea cannot be considered a free nation; a nation that has no free access to the oceans cannot be considered a great power.7

In July 1927 ± scarcely a year before the Kellogg-Briand Pact through which the guileless Americans sought to ``outlaw'' war ± he informed his principal military advisers with evident satisfaction that war was inevi- table: ``soon or perhaps less soon, but it will certainly come.'' War against Yugoslavia for a start ± ``the attack must be aggressive, unexpected.''8 But war must ultimately also embrace France and Britain, Italy's ``jailers'' in the Mediterranean. GeographyandthealignmentsandresentmentsoftheEuropeanpowers also determined Fascist Italy's choice of allies. Only one great power ± potentially the very greatest ± opposed France and Britain: Germany. It had already bidfor Europeanand world mastery in 1914±18,and had failed narrowly; only its strategic lunacy in challenging the United States and in refusing in winter 1917±18 to trade Belgium and northern France for a peace that gave it mastery of eastern Europe to the Urals and Caucasus had brought it down. But abortive attempts to enlist the German army and Right in the 1920s led to nothing: Germany, Mussolini confided to his undersecretary for war in 1929, was ``disarmed ± we cannot negotiate for possible cooperation against France.'' The coming to power of the German Right, Mussolini foresaw, would nevertheless make Germany a fit ally for Fascist Italy by the mid-1930s and open the road for the ``revolutionary

7. Mussolini, speech to military leaders, autumn 1926±early 1927 (source: General Arturo Vacca-Maggiolini, quoted in Emilio Canevari, La guerra italiana [Rome, 1948±49], vol. 2, p. 211). Giorgio Rochat, Badoglio (Turin, 1974), pp. 557±58, places the speech in autumn 1926; see also OO 40:51±52. 8. Antonello Biagini and Alessandro Gionfrida, eds., Lo Stato Maggiore Generale tra le due guerre (verbali delle riunioni presiedute da Badoglio dal 1925 al 1937) (Rome, 1997), p. 105.