Italy

Italy For the fighting in Italy, see Italian campaign and Sicilian campaign.

1. Introduction

A united kingdom under the constitutional monarchy of the House of Savoy, Italy had a population of 42 million in 1936. From 1861 until the advent in 1922 of the fascist regime and Mussolini's dictatorship, it was a parliamentary democracy with universal male suffrage since 1913. To its colonies (Libya, Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, the Dodecanese Islands) the fascist regime added Abyssinia in 1936 and Albania in 1939, so that Victor Emmanuel III, the sovereign since 1900, was also emperor of Abyssinia and king of Albania.

Mussolini moved into the Nazi orbit, first by means of a friendship between accomplices in 1936, then with the Pact of Steel in 1939, and finally by intervening in the war against the UK and France on 10 June 1940 (see also Axis strategy and co-operation). The central problem of the dictatorship lay in the relationship between the popular masses upon whom fascism had been inflicted and those sections of the bourgeoisie which had actively favoured it. The recipe—which was subsequently imitated beyond the Alps—involved the anaesthetizing of social conflict by means of a permanent mobilization of the masses in a fever of grandeur aimed at imperial expansion. Once this had taken place social problems would be resolved by means which were for the moment still invisible in the glowing light of the future.

The accent therefore had to fall on external action by the state, but of itself this did not require immediate and exact foreign policy choices. In part fascism built its strength on memories of slights to Italian national pride, still smarting from the humiliation meted out by Abyssinian forces at Aduwa in 1896, more recently from their defeat by an Austro-German army at Caporetto in 1917—not to mention the slender rewards of victory in 1918. However, international opportunities were blocked by Anglo-French dominance of the League of Nations which guaranteed the peace treaties of 1919 (see Versailles settlement); Italian imperialism more or less lapsed up to 1933, apart from some verbal tempestuousness on Mussolini's part and an attempt at violent action against Corfu in 1923 which was quickly abandoned.

The pragmatic and juridical construction of the fascist state (see government, below) was opposed courageously but to little effect by the clandestine remnants of the old political opposition (liberals, Catholics, and communists) and by new groups such as the liberal-democratic Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty). These domestic opponents were marginalized by a variety of means which included prohibition, intimidation, violence by the police and fascist squads, and finally imprisonment. Meanwhile the colonial territories inherited from pre-fascist Italy—Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya—were ‘pacified’ with the usual ferocity of colonial powers. In lieu of foreign policy successes, which were for the moment unattainable, government propaganda trumpeted the successes of the everyday administration and public works such as the reclamation of the Pontine marshes near Rome. Neither the recalcitrant masses of workers and peasants nor the bulk of the middle classes were much enamoured of the regime, although the bourgeoisie appreciated its maintenance of public order, the outlawing of strikes, and the keeping down of workers' wages.

The chance to pursue an active foreign policy came with German rearmament. The military conquest of Abyssinia in 1935–6 was the regime's greatest visible success. That the victory had been won despite the opposition of the 52 states in the League of Nations, led by the UK, was a cause of some pride. Opposition to the move, bland in substance but dramatic in form, in the shape of the arrival of the British Home Fleet in the Mediterranean, was astutely blown up for domestic purposes. On the evening of 9 May 1936 Mussolini appeared on the floodlit balcony of the Palazzo Venezia and proclaimed to a vast crowd the ‘reappearance’ of the old Roman Empire. This theatrical gesture seemed finally to reconcile to fascism some of those forces which, in pre-war liberal Italy, had at times pursued similar goals, albeit with greater prudence and less of an uproar. Moreover, just as the colonial policy of the years 1886–96 had kindled hopes in the starving masses of the south, so once again the myth of empire had its brief moment of popularity among the poor peasants of that region. But reality shattered these dreams quickly and even more bitterly than had been the case 40 years earlier: then it had been possible to emigrate, albeit at the cost of some hardship and risk, but now even that possibility was closed. The poorest Italians had no other means to earn a few lire than to enlist as ‘volunteers’ in the forces Mussolini was now sending to Spain to fight others as poor as themselves.

Historians differ in their interpretations of Mussolini's policy thereafter: his abandonment of the defence of the European status quo (Locarno 1925, the Four-Power Pact 1933, the reaction to the assassination of Dolfuss 1934, the Stresa Front 1935); his ever closer links with Germany, not only in the Spanish Civil War but also in abandoning the defence of Austrian independence in 1938; his open hostility to France and the UK, save for momentary alignments with the ‘appeasers’ ( January 1937, November 1938, the Munich agreement, the visit of Chamberlain and Halifax to Rome in January 1939); the occupation of Albania, the Pact of Steel with Germany ( April– May 1939) and the failure to intervene in the war alongside his ally in September 1939. In fact Mussolini's words and deeds were so contradictory as to justify many interpretations. This is not surprising when we consider the character and intellectual baggage of the man, soaked in Nietzschean and Sorelian sediments. His urge to dominate was manifest both in his socialist anti-war stance and his anti-German interventionism in 1914, and in his later promotion of war as an end in itself and noisy proclamation of a battery of different objectives.

It is probably not particularly important to establish whether Mussolini's true intention was to pursue a ‘pendulum’ policy, oscillating between Nazi Germany and the western democracies and selling himself to the highest bidder, or whether his choice of Hitler remained fixed, although subject to moments of doubt and worry. What is certain is that the convergence of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was not unnatural. Fascism and National Socialism shared much common ground: nihilistic violence, humiliation of their adversaries, imperialism, biological planning (the campaign for births) and finally racism. Fascism was not intrinsically anti-Semitic but from the outset it practised racism and colonial extermination; therefore no special exertions were necessary when, in 1938, Mussolini decided to persecute the Jews in tune with the German alliance.

The German victories in the spring of 1940 triggered a decision by Mussolini in which the wish to profit from Nazi power was mingled with the illusion of competing with it. Had Mussolini aligned himself with the democracies at any moment they would have accepted him and perhaps compensated him well, though not to the same extent as the power of Germany would allow; moreover, an alliance with the democracies would not have accorded him the super-hero status created by the German–Italian propaganda chorus—a newspaper could at any time have criticized him or ridiculed him in a caricature. As for internal consensus, although it did not diminish it became of greater concern to the regime from 1938 onwards. Intervention in Spain lasted too long; Germany gave cause for anxiety; the anti-Jewish measures were unpopular in one of the few European countries which lacked any tradition of anti-Semitism; and a policy of anti-bourgeois repression angered the educated classes without gaining fascism any sympathy from the proletaraiat.

In 1938–9 anxiety about the future touched the crown, the upper bureaucracy, and the class which controlled the economy. They might have tried to change things had not Hitler, by showing himself able to crush as prestigious a power as France in only a few weeks in 1940, appealed to their sense of ‘realism’—a feeling which had little to do with morality or with a well-balanced cultural life. Behind the ‘realists’ and a handful of fanatics stood the masses, muddled by propaganda and ready to acclaim successes, but preoccupied by the dangers and sacrifices which fell chiefly on them, just as they had during the First World War.

In June 1940 the small minority of Italians who were radically opposed to war were in exile abroad, in prison, banished to offshore islands, or reduced to silence and, if young, obliged to fight. Many feared for the future of those same western democracies (France and the UK) which, until directly threatened, had been so ready to praise Mussolini. But the sufferings of war and the humiliations of defeat rebounded on all Italians whatever their private thoughts.

2. Domestic life, economy, and war effort

The war cut deeply into domestic life in Italy. Apart from the foolish prohibition of dancing, both in public and in private, which was imposed at the outset, Mussolini sought to maintain the appearance of normality. As a result restrictions, when they belatedly came, were too harsh. In the autumn of 1941 tram services shut down at 10 p.m. and theatres closed early; however, blackout was not adapted until the summer of 1943 and then at varying times. In Rome, on moonlit nights even the miserable blue-coloured public lighting was switched off. At the end of 1941 petrol-driven motor cars were forbidden, but some public and private transport continued to run throughout the war, fuelled by methane from the Po valley.

From 1939 sugar and soap were rationed, and coffee was unobtainable. Fats were not rationed until the autumn of 1940, and other foodstuffs the following autumn though that did not mean that they were easy to find in the interim. Newspapers were limited to four pages, later reduced to two. One pair of shoes or a few articles of clothing could be purchased each year, but not both. Food intake was reduced to below 1,000 calories a day: 200 grams (7 oz.) of bread a day (later reduced to 150), and 400 grams of meat, 500 grams of sugar, and 100 grams of olive oil a month. Only those engaged in heavy physical labour were allowed more. Such a drastic diet, together with an absence of controls, the impossibility of pooling grain, and the fact that most urbanized Italians had lived in cities for only a few generations and maintained close connections with the countryside, meant that a well-organized black market flourished. Only those people with money could take advantage of it, though sometimes—even in illegal trading—there was a social equalizing and poorer quality food was sold at lower prices. Up to September 1943 the official price level never rose above 273 ( 1938 = 100); but on the black market bread reached 797, butter 1,054, and olive oil 1,387. Repeated increases in salaries and wages were absorbed by inflation; but even in the north, which was separated from the south after the autumn of 1943, inflation stayed at reasonable levels until May 1945.

As far as paying for the war was concerned, fiscal impositions contributed little except for tax on the exchange of goods and consumption, a policy which affected everyone but especially the working classes and minor employees. Otherwise fiscal pressures and new taxation (such as property taxes) failed because of the difficulties of assessment and also because, once introduced, they opened the doors to avoidance and evasion. A decisive contribution was made by the war loans to which the banks (which were owned by the state) had to subscribe and which also attracted private savers until 1942.

The state budget displayed fearsome deficits: from 29.4 billion lire in 1939–40, the deficit increased to 64.5 billion in 1940–1, 84.8 billion in 1941–2 and 109.8 billion in 1942–3. Circulation of paper money quadrupled between 1940 and 1943, while in Germany it doubled and in the UK it was less than double.

In order to assess Italy's military strength and its influence on the conduct of the war it is necessary to look back to the pre-war era. Notwithstanding fascist propaganda and a shrill foreign policy, the Italian economy and civil life remained semi-developed until the outbreak of war. Twenty years of fascism saw the average per capita earnings of 42,000,000 Italians increase very little, so that they only equalled those of the UK and the USA at the start of the 19th century and of France about 1850. Moreover, there were great inequalities in per capita income between north and south. Public works (land reclamation, roads, and railways), state aid to heavy industry (e.g. assistance to shipyards provided by modest naval rearmament in the 1920s), and the natural development of some sectors such as electricity and synthetic fabrics were not enough to compensate for the drying-up of emigration, now down from 600,000 a year to 60–70,000, which had made possible the development Italy had enjoyed before the First World War.

The entire fascist period was characterized by low incomes and unemployment, which was severe after the crisis of 1929 but less grave after partial rearmament began in 1935. The official figures for 1934 showed 961,000 unemployed (of whom 750,000 were in industry and commerce), approximately 10.7% of the male work force. From 1935–6 salary increases were largely absorbed by increased prices, while industrial profits grew: net interest relative to capital invested rose from 1.38% in 1932 to 5.74% in 1935 and 7.28% in 1936. Unemployment among the educated remained high. In 1919–20 of 53,670 university students only 33% were studying engineering, science, and mathematics; this percentage collapsed in 1939–40 to 13.6% of a university population of 85,535. Even in 1935, more than 50% of engineering graduates were unemployed. National illiteracy levels in 1931 amounted to 17%. The development of some areas of northern Italy was not typical of the whole: half the active population were engaged in small-scale agriculture and even in 1938 more than half of average family expenditure went on food. The regime preached the virtues of ruralism and sustained the uneconomical ‘battle for grain’ which sought to achieve self-sufficency by the inefficient transformation of pasturage into grain-producing areas with high duties and premiums.

The great crash of 1929 led to protectionism through the increase of customs barriers and an internal monopoly policy in which the domestic market was divided according to fixed quotas. Legal cartels—which existed alongside illegal or semi-legal ones—set prices according to the costs of marginal producers, assuring the others of excess profits. Laws passed in 1933 and 1937 required official authorization before new industrial plant could be created or existing plant expanded. Many manufacturers who at first opposed these measures soon perceived their advantages. To halt competition they put in many requests for new plant, the mere existence of which allowed official bodies (within which the big industrial trusts had their own men) to reject genuine applications as unnecessary duplication. The system could also be distorted in other ways: once a producer had gained a place in the consortium which controlled his area of production he enjoyed guaranteed advantages which were independent of the costs or quality of his product. Naturally, the consolidation of monopoly positions—which were at their greatest in military manufacturing—did not encourage the inventiveness, speed, and research indispensable for true economic progress. Instead it led to backwardness and provincialism.

Italy was poorly off for raw materials. In 1938 it produced one million tons of hard coal (and had to import another 12,000,000 tons each year) compared with 47,000,000 tons produced by France, 186,000,000 tons by Germany, and 230,000,000 tons by the UK. It produced 2,300,000 tons of steel in comparison with more than 6,000,000 in France, more than 10,000,000 in the UK, and 23,000,000 tons in Germany. A total lack of petroleum stimulated the development of the electricity industry: in 1939 Italy produced more than 15,000,000 kWh, compared with more than 22,000,000 kWh in France, almost 36,000,000 kWh in the UK, and 61,380,000 kWh in Germany. Shipbuilding enjoyed some expansion, but production in 1939 amounted to only 135,000 tons against a productive capacity of 300,000.

The automobile industry was good but small; in 1939 it produced 71,000 vehicles (of which only 12,000 were commercial), against 227,000 in France (45,000 commercial), 445,000 in the UK (104,000 commercial), and 338,000 in Germany (63,000 commercial). In that year there were 372,000 vehicles on Italian roads, compared with 2,269,000 in France 2,527,000 in the UK, and 1,656,000 in Germany. The modest scale of the automobile industry affected the armed forces by limiting the numbers of drivers and mechanics available.

The aircraft industry enjoyed a wholly unjustified reputation founded largely on international record-breaking, which did not entail comparisons of series-manufacturing capacity or of originality of design. Italian aero engines, in particular, were poor copies of foreign models.

Military expenditure, which had been effectively held in check between 1922 and 1926, began to increase and in 1935–9 it reached a level equivalent to 89.5% of that of the UK and 22.8% more than that of France. This figure is particularly striking when it is related to an Italian national income which was less than half that of France and less than a quarter that of the UK. The enormous costs of conquering and ‘pacifying’ Abyssinia, of intervention in Spain, and of the occupation of Albania absorbed 77 billion lire out of a total of 116 billion allocated to the armed forces and the colonies between 1935 and 1940.

Costs were inflated by the need to import primary materials and to use high-cost national industries which, after Mussolini proclaimed economic autarky in 1936, charged very high domestic prices for their products. Synthetic petrol cost four times as much as imported petrol; and the costs of Italian steel and coal were respectively double and triple those in the UK, while metallurgical products were between 50 and 100% dearer. It has been calculated that if the battleship Littorio (built between 1934 and 1940) had been constructed in France it would have cost only half as much. In 1935–6 automobiles cost 18–20 lire/kilogram to manufacture, as compared to 17 lire/kg. in Germany, 11–12 lire/kg. in the UK, and 6–8 lire/kg. in the USA. However, salaries were on average 56% of those paid in Germany and 27% of those paid in the USA.

In order to assess the state and character of Italian military strength in the Second World War, it is necessary to examine the evolution of relations between state and industry, as well as within industry itself, during the fascist period and in comparison with the First World War. Between 1915 and 1918 the growth of Italian industry and the results on the battlefield (e.g. 12,000 guns, 79,000,000 shells, 12,000 aeroplanes, 37,000 machine guns) was a consequence not only of assistance from the Entente in the shape of raw materials and loans but also of the efficiency of the office of under-secretary for armaments and munitions (which subsequently became a ministry) under General Alfredo Dallolio (1853–1952), who shared out orders and raw materials for the army and the navy between some 1,500 factories and 600,000 workers under a disciplined system of industrial mobilization. However, although appreciating such measures as the forbidding of strikes, industry accepted Dallolio's strict controls only under sufferance and in 1918 subjected him to a trial from which he emerged victorious but embittered. Big business would have preferred to deal individually with each of the armed services; and they, divided as they were by rivalries and intolerance, had no desire to combine in their dealings with industry.

Thus when fascism came to legislate on these matters after 1923–5, a tacit understanding grew up between industry and the three armed forces (the air force had become an independent arm in 1923). A system of ‘civil mobilization’ involving six ministries in addition to the armed ' the militia, and the Fascist Party, was overseen by the old Supreme Commission for Defence, a Committee for Civil Mobilization (CMC), a permanent secretary, and in time some 20 other offices with thousands of functionaries. Their different spheres of authority were so varied, so minute, and so extensive that it is simpler to note not what they had but what they lacked, which was fundamental power over the orders given to industry; here each of the three armed forces acted independently.

Since everything had officially to be controlled by the state, a National Council for Research (CNR) was set up in 1923, under the chairmanship in its early days of Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937). Although on paper the CNR possessed very extensive powers, it does not seem to have interested itself very much in the preliminary results of experiments in nuclear fission, carried out by Enrico Fermi in 1934, or later in radar or jet engines. Dallolio chaired the CMC, aware of the inadequacy of his powers but probably hoping that at a suitable moment Mussolini would reinforce them. This occurred in small part when in 1935, as a consequence of the Abyssinian crisis, the General Commissariat for War Production (COGEFAG) was set up and given to Dallolio under the ‘direct and exclusive’ authority of the Duce. However, all purchasing orders remained within the sphere of authority of the armed forces. Even the limited powers of COGEFAG, which related chiefly to the distribution of raw materoused protests from the navy, an example of the strength of sectional interests in fascist Italy.

Dallolio's thoughts on the problem of artillery equipment were disregarded. He had hoped to stimulate high-quality output by building a pilot plant at Terni the workforce of which would in due course become instructors for others. However, in 1929 the army preferred to pursue the ideal of a gigantic programme of complete re-equipment, amounting to 15,000 guns and 58,000,000 rounds of ammunition, which was approved in principle but remained a paper scheme owing to lack of money. When, in 1938, alarmed by the possible consequences of his foreign policy, Mussolini wanted to undertake a serious rearmament programme he had to meet the wishes of industry and above all of the two leading manufacturers, Ansaldo and Terni (which had in the meantime been taken over by the state), who obtained an advance against losses of 15% of the 0alue of future orders for plant renewal. The way was opened to what could have been the achievement of a major programme of artillery rearmament by 1943–5.

Dallolio retired in August 1939, aged 87, and was replaced by General Carlo Favagrossa who, with the same powers but less prestige, was unable to impose his personality on the industrialists. They had begun to replace old plant, but the military preferred to use raw materials for armoured vehicles rather than artillery (save only for the 90 mm./3.5 in. anti-aircraft gun and the 47 mm./1.8 in. anti-tank gun, which was inferior to the British two-pounder). As a result large factories such as OTO, equipped to manufacture artillery but not tanks, remained almost unoccupied whilst Ansaldo, which made both, had too much work. More far-sighted programmes which aimed only at what was strictly necessary, like updating the gun-carriages of the huge stock of First World War artillery (much of which was good Skoda-built stock), would have produced better results in terms of both economy and efficiency. As for rearmament of the infantry, which had begun in the early 1930s, its outcome was by no means perfect but no worse than that of other countries; here the greatest problem was the lack of training, notwithstanding the succession of wars and expeditions in which the country had been engaged since 1935.

Until 1923 there were few changes in the nature of industrial capital; thereafter while some munitions manufacturers were taken over by the state (such as the Cogne steel works in 1923), many large firms fell into the hands of the banks which had financed them. However, from 1929 onwards the banks failed to match the time limits on ordinary credits with the needs of industrial credit and, faced with the prospect of major collapses, radical public intervention became necessary. Between 1933 and 1937 the state debarred the banks from owning industrial property, reformed them, and restricted them to ordinary credit operations while itself taking over a majority shareholding in industry and starting to finance and administer it through the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI). This body controlled most of the arms-producing metallurgical, armaments, and shipbuilding firms and, when other sections of industry are taken into account, represented the most extensive experiment in state control outside the USSR.

However, appearances of unity were deceptive: in reality each IRI enterprise developed its own policy like a private company while at the same time enjoying the benefits of public ownership (the impossibility of bankruptcy, guaranteed work, and so on). The IRI industries should, at least in theory, have respected not only state laws but also the rules of the market-place. They did not. Even in the 1920s the main manufacturers of artillery (Ansaldo, Terni, and others, all still at that stage private companies) operated cartels to keep prices high. Similar practices, which touched the limits of legality and damaged the military administration, continued after the advent of IRI. Corruption was widespread and included state enterprises: in 1933–4 Ansaldo (a member of IRI) and Fiat (privately owned) reached an agreement to exclude other companies from the construction of tanks.

It was this oligopoly, al"-th the political weakness of the army, which produced the situation whereby up to 1939 Italy had built only the small CV3 tanks of three tons, without radio communications, with poor visibility, and carrying only two machine-guns. The disastrous inefficiency of these machines, which were derived from the British Carden Lloyd tank of 1928, was demonstrated in Abyssinia and Spain; even so, up to September 1943 Fiat and Ansaldo only manufactured medium tanks of 11, 13, 14, and 15 tons (some in a self-propelled gun version). The M11 has been called the worst tank of its day and the various versions of the M series were all inferior to British Cruiser tanks in armament, weight of armour, and especially in speed.

After the early disasters of the Western Desert campaigns, culminating in Beda Fomm ( February 1941), Italian tank troops of the Ariete Division learned to use the mediocre M13s more effectively and combine them with artillery, producing some successes during the battles of the British CRUSADER offensive in late 1941. The tanks themselves received some savage criticism: Rommel said they would ‘make one's hair curl’. As a minimum improvement, engines were requested that matched those of the British Cruisers whose speed allowed them to withdraw whenever necessary. The war ministry tried to interest other companies in manufacturing tanks, hoping to improve their quality. The army proposed adopting a Czech tank which Skoda were ready to make, and licences were obtained to build Panzer III and IV models; but all these attempts failed, and after tortuous manoeuvrings the army had to accept Fiat–Ansaldo products. The company even refused requests to adapt their tanks by using Fiat aero engines. In fact there were engines in store, or mounted on aeroplanes such as the Fiat CR42 biplane and Fiat G50 which were by now useless in combat, derived from the Liberty, Continental W670, and Wright Continental R975 engines which the British and Americans adapted for use on their Cruisers, Grants, and Shermans. But rather than use others' products, Fiat preferred to improve its own versions.

Competition was by no means the whole story. Italian aviation adopted different aeroplanes according to the outcome of public competitions; but the best aeroplane did not always win, a phenomenon not unknown outside Italy. The custom developed of asking small companies to produce perhaps 40 or 50 examples of a model so that all the manufacturers were able to survive. This system, which had some logic in peacetime, was continued during war. The smallest companies were sometimes requested to manufacture aeroplanes which were not of their own design but were thought useful. However it was not possible to compel Fiat to build Macchi 202 or 205 fighters; the company promised its own G55 which was not ready until the eve of the armistice in September 1943, to the benefit not of Italy but of Germany, and meanwhile continued to produce its outdated CR42s and G50s.

Among the many reasons for the inferiority of Italian warplanes was the fact that in 1927 a law supported by Italo Balbo (1896–1940), Mussolini's minister of aviation from 1929 to 1933, had deprived the technical branch of the air force of the authority to choose prototypes and had passed that power to an office (the Direzione Generale) from which technical experts were excluded in favour of ministerial cronies. The air engineering branch continued to voice its opinions on the quality and defects of prototypes, as in the competition in 1939 in which it recommended the Re2000 fighter. But the Direzione Generale made the choices, and in 1939 it preferred the inferior Fiat CR42 and G50.

The quality of naval armaments was influenced not only by very high costs but by scientific backwardness in respect of radar and radio communications in general and by the excessive ‘tolerance’ allowed in shells, which had disastrous effects on naval gunfire. However, many deficiencies derived from defective strategic concepts (up to 1935 and in part afterwards the standard of comparison for the Italians was the French Navy) and from a tendency to fake the results of trials, according to which the navy claimed to be able to reach speeds much higher than were really possible. In addition, rivalry with the air force hindered the development of aircraft carriers. Finally there was much hidden mismanagement. For example, a large fleet of outdated submarines was built (113 by 1939) while between 1935 and 1938 midget submarines, which became the most effective arm of the Italian Navy, were neglected (see Tenth Light Flotilla).

The widespread assumption that Italy's shortage of raw materials was the primary cause of its defeat is therefore incorrect. Certainly Italy had no Ruhr or Caucasus and just as this prevented it from becoming a Great Power ab origine so it would also have made its effects felt had Italy's war continued much beyond September 1943. Metallurgical output was modest; but in September 1943 the Germans sei three times as much steel as was available in 1940. It would not have been possible between June 1940 and August 1943 to armour more than approximately 3,054 tanks of all types, which was the maximum number that the small monopoly plants could have built. If more tanks had been provided than was actually the case, but only in variants of the M series, the problem of poor quality which was not tackled until 1942 would not have been ameliorated. The need, until then, was not for more tanks but for better ones.

Much the same is true of the artillery: some 7,000 guns were provided for the army between June 1940 and June 1943, and they would have had a much greater effect had not 51% been the 47 mm. model which was inferior to every British anti-tank gun. The 60–65,000 motor vehicles supplied to the army between spring 1940 and spring 1943 would have been far from insignificant if they had been concentrated in North Africa instead of being scattered between the Eastern Front, the Balkans, and France. The modest increase in warships between 1940 and 1943 (a battleship, 3 light cruisers, 5 destroyers, 16 torpedo boats, and 39 submarines) represented an increment to a not inconsiderable force but one which was hamstrung by technical and scientific inferiority, a lack of aircraft carriers, and by the adoption of economic rather than military criteria.

Between January 1940 and April 1943 the aeronautics industry manufactured 10,545 aircraft (4,510 fighters, 2,063 bombers, 1,080 reconnaissance planes, 468 transports, 1,769 trainers, and 655 of various minor types); monthly production amounted to 271 machines in 1940, 292 in 1941, 235 in 1942, and 241 in 1943. The 8,000 aircraft sent to the Mediterranean up to mid-1942 would have represented a serious problem for the Allies had they included more modern bombers than the S79 and Fiat BR20 and rather more than the 250 to 300 Macchi 202 and Re2001 fighters which were the only ones able to compete with the Curtiss P40 and the Hurricane.

Had more petroleum been available, Italian tank forces might have had a more timely and less disastrous training than that which they received on the field of battle. However, it would have been difficult before the war to convince the High Command of the pressing need for training, a need which (as the Balkan campaign showed) was felt even by the infantry, who had received many of the 16,800 mortars and 125,000 machine guns produced between 1939 and 1943. It is possible to imagine that with more coal and rubber supplies the temporary closures of factories in wartime would not have been necessary. But such impediments did not have dramatic effects on the quantity of vital arms produced until at least mid-1942. After that time, Anglo-American and Soviet production would have crushed Italy as it subsequently crushed Germany.

However it is difficult to imagine a rational and calculated use of raw materials, whether abundant or not, when the state lacked the power to impose the necessary changes in production upon industry. The defeat of Italy occurred before the point was reached at which her lack of raw materials became the determining factor.

The material costs of the war were considerable: on average, 8% of industrial plant was destroyed (25% in the engineering sector and 16% in textiles); 2,000,000 rooms were destroyed out of a total of 36,000,000 (the worst damage being suffered in the cities); and the railways were especially badly hit (60% of railway engines and 50% of goods wagons destroyed), along with automobiles (90% of lorries, 30% of buses, and 50% of motor cars) and ports and merchant shipping (which were reduced by some 90%). Shipbuilding and metallurgical manufacturing capacity was reduced by half; 5,000 bridges were destroyed; and heavy losses were suffered in the agricultural sector, productivity falling by 60% with serious damage to 770,000 hectares of cultivated land and 67,000 hectares of woodland and the destruction of 135,000,000 vines and fruit trees.

3. Government and legal system

(a) Up to 25 July 1943

The triumph of the fascist movement in 1922 was the product of three years of political instability which was caused by the end of liberal hegemony, signalled in the 1919 elections, and by the absence of any accord between the two major parties, the socialists (from whom the communists seceded in 1921) and the Catholics. The ‘red’ agitation, which culminated in the occupation of the factories in September 1920, was overcome by violence by the squads of the Fasci di combattimento founded by Mussolini in 1919. These fascist squads, or squadristi, were aided by elements of the armed forces and by some sections of liberal society, who nursed the illusion of being able to use them as an instrument to combat the ‘red’ threat. After a lengthy period of ungovernability the armed fascist movement occupied the key points of the state without any real resistance, and this provoked the king in October 1922 to invite Mussolini to form a cabinet. The fascist government had the support of parliament and, as visible proof of its alliance with crown and armed forces, it had as ministers for the army and navy the victors of the First World War, General Armando Diaz and Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel. The transformation from democracy to fascist regime took place between 1925 and 1926 after the political crisis of 1924, during which crown and army supported Mussolini when he might have been unseated by the wave of anger following the assassination of the Socialist leader, Giacomo Matteotti, by fascists.

By the eve of the Second World war, the transformation was long established. Mussolini, as well as being Duce of fascism, was head of government and responsible onlythe king. Ministers were responsible to him and not to parliament, which lacked power and was nominated by fascist organizations with the approval of rigged plebiscites which were themselves abolished after 1934. Mussolini nominated the members of the Fascist Grand Council, which he alone could call together in secret session to debate specific issues or so that he could learn their opinions on the most important topics of the moment. Among these, according to a law of 1928, were the powers of the crown and the succession to the throne—a warning of some significance to the ruling house of Savoy. However Mussolini declared war on the UK, France, the USSR, and the USA without ever consulting his Grand Council.

Local administration was nominated and directed from above. There were no other parties apart from the fascists and there was no freedom of speech. The press, and subsequently the cinema and the radio, were controlled by an under-secretary of state's office (which became a ministry in 1935). The secret police (OVRA) operated without restrictions, using informers, wire-tapping, and intercepting mail. Opponents of the regime were tried by a special tribunal formed from officials of the fascist militia. Working through provincial commissions, the government could put anyone into political confinement, which meant exiling them to the most isolated localities on the mainland or to one of the small islands in the south. There were no trials and sentences were decided and prolonged arbitrarily. The death penalty was reintroduced for both civil and political crimes. Workers' and owners' organizations were ‘fascistized’ and conflicts of authority resolved through the so-called ‘corporations’. Schools, universities, and leisure organizations were also ‘fascistized’. The youth movement Gioventú Italiana del Littorio (GIL), later imitated in Germany by the Nazis, controlled young males between the ages of 6 and 21, using uniforms, rifles, and the trappings of the military to inculcate ideas of discipline. GIL was divided into the Figli della Lupa, for those from 6 to 9, Balilla from 10 to 13, Avanguardisti from 14 to 17, and Giovani Fascisti from 18 to 21. There were also two female sections, the Piccole Italiane (9–14) and the Giovane Fasciste (15–17). The appearance of consensus was organized through mass rallies, sports, gymnastics, hikes, and camps and orchestrated according to a liturgy derived in part from Bolshevik models and in part from the inventions of the celebrated soldier-poet Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938).

Despite all this control absolute totalitarianism, in the sense of absorbing within the state every morsel of national life, was never attained. Many institutions which predated fascism were not replaced by party structures, not only because Mussolini had perforce to rely on elements such as the Catholic Church, the crown, the upper bourgeoisie, and the higher levels of the state bureaucracy which were difficult to bring within the ambit of party hegemony, but also because of calculations which were, at least in the short term, quite astute. Mussolini imposed his personal dominance on a balance between the old and the new without allowing the forces on either side to claim him. In general he preferred to entrust himself to the old state structure and to traditional economic forces and gain their trust, allowing them a good deal of autonomy in exchange for noisy servility. Dictatorship often meant high-level mediation, and was least controlled in the field of foreign policy where even before fascism the economic establishment had intervened only rarely and then never directly.

The many fascist organizations, which were always multiplying and expanding, served two main purposes. Above all they were a potential threat, a social wild card which only the Duce could tame or unleash. Then, and increasingly as time went on, they acted as a form of social outlet—a means of employment and profit for the great and the humble. The characteristics of fascist dictatorship, which was both cunning and compromising, were evident too in its military organization, perfect for the exercise of power but ruinous in terms of combat effectiveness.

The fascist militia or ‘Blackshirts’, established in 1923 to absorb the squadristi, was a typical compromise. Astutely, Mussolini made the militia into a bogey for his opponents but also an opportunity for many ex-officers who had been unemployed since 1918. After 1924, during the early years of the fascist regime, the militia owed its loyalty not merely to Mussolini but also to the king. On paper is was the ‘armed guard of the revolution’; in practice it was the worst face of the armed forces. Its members, old soldiers who had already seen service, were disliked by the army because they were paid slightly more. Between 1940 and 1943 a proportion of conscripts were directed into the militia, which thereby lost its volunteer character (see 5(c) below). Militia officers were usually of the lowest quality and when, during the Abyssinian war, militia divisions were created they were given regular army commanders, as well as regular artillery. During the Spanish Civil War, and notwithstanding its political character, the role of the militia was subordinated to that of the army, especially after the defeat at Guadalajara in 1937. The militia had no influence on the younger officers coming into the army and it produced no new military concepts. No real parallels can be drawn between the fascist militia and Hitler'sWaffen-SS, just as there were only superficial points of resemblance between the fascist squads and the Freikorps in the years immediately after the First World War.

In 1940–1, despite military defeats and M collapse of fascist prestige, there still prevailed among the Italian population a feeling of apathy and a sense of inevitable German supremacy. The somewhat artificial Balkan ‘conquests’ seemed to prefigure the future status of Italy as a satellite of the Third Reich. But by the spring of 1942, despite the successes of the Axis and the Japanese, the mood had changed. The German defeat before Moscow in December 1941, US intervention in the war, and the increasing shortages of food combined to create a feeling that in the long run Germany must lose. Among the economic élite the fear spread that the USSR would interpose between the defeat of Germany and the Anglo-Saxon victory with consequences which would be felt both inside and outside Italy. Lower down the social scale, a revival of sympathy for communism was accompanied by an awareness of the power of the USA, something which decades of emigration had fixed firmly in the popular consciousness.

Scheming between Marshal Badoglio and Princess Maria José of Savoy, the daughter-in-law of King Victor Emmanuel, to make contact with the British and Americans began in August 1942; by that time the most cunning leading fascists such as Grandi and Giuseppe Bottai were also trying to get into the crown's good books. Old, and new, parties began to be active underground. In the summer of 1941 the Communist Party rebuilt its rank and file and the clandestine edition of its newspaper L'Unità appeared the following year. In July 1942 the Party of Action was formed as heir to the democratic ‘Justice and Liberty’ group whose leader, Carlo Rosselli, had been assassinated in France in 1937 on Mussolini's orders. Catholics, too, reorganized in what would become the Christian Democrat party, and exiles were active abroad: in Toulouse secret accords between the socialists and ‘Justice and Liberty’ were reached in 1941 and a liberal and republican congress took place in Montevideo on 27 August 1942.

The turning-point came in 1942–3 with Stalingrad, the bloody defeat of the Italian Army on the Eastern Front, and the American landings in North A The RAF DD thern Italian cities led to a flight from the towns into the countryside which gave rise, on trainsn factories, to a freedom of discussion not seen or dared for years. All strata of society were affected by these changes. Some soldiers and politicians, anticipating the wishes of the crown, sought contact with the Allies, but were obstructed by what seemed to Italians to be an ambiguous posture. Churchill never departed from his theme that ‘one man alone, Mussolini’ was responsible for Italian disasters, but in January 1943 the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, rejected feelers put out via Switzerland for unseating the Duce.

At first industrialists were interested in the ferment among the fascist leaders, not only because of the opportunities it offered for personal survival but also because of the possibility of political reincarnation. In November– December 1942 Alberto Pirelli, the rubber magnate, recorded in his dary the mixture of euphoria and animus being shown by Bottai, Dino Grandi, Galeazzo Ciano, and Luigi Federzoni, and by Giuseppe Volpi ‘who has hopes of succeeding Mussolini’. Very shortly afterwards Pirelli saw the possibility of a different outcome when, on 26 March 1943, he talked with Cardinal Luigi Maglione, a close collaborator of Pope Pius XII, who spoke of the communist threat and of resolving the situation not by means of discredited fascist relics but through ‘the monarchy, the crown, the church, the army and the leaders of the economy’.

Mussolini appeared indecisive and impotent. He urged Hitler to make a separate peace with the USSR in December 1942 and April 1943, and tried to distract public opinion by changing his entourage: the head of the Comando Supremo was replaced on 31 January 1943, and Ciano, the foreign minister, and other members of the government were sacked on 5 February. In fact, the Duce was living from day to day and had completely lost his willpower. He failed to grasp the significance of the major strikes which took place in Milan and Turin in February 1943 (after Amsterdam, the first in Hitler's Europe); and after the Allied landings in Sicily he agreed to the calling of the Fascist Grand Council which had not met since 1939) on 24 July, even though he knew it was likely to be hostile. The meeting was requested by Grandi, Bottai, Ciano, and others who hoped that the king would get rid of Mussolini and put them in power, possibly under a military presidency.

The meeting lasted well into the night and witnessed a noisy quarrel which left Mussolini isolated. In fact the king, after long hesitation, had just accepted a military plan masterminded by Vittorio Ambrosio, the new head of the Comando Supremo, to arrest Mussolini as he left a royal audience, after which he could be replaced with Marshal Badoglio. The vote of the Grand Council offered the king the cover of constitutional legitimacy for this move: Mussolini was arrested on 25 July and secretly transported to a series of hideaways at Ponza, La Maddalena, and then in the mountains of Gran Sasso. (See Map 55.)

(b) From 25 July 1943

Badoglio immediately formed a government of soldiers and technocrats which excluded any of the conspirators on the grand council. Popular demonstrations in support of the change were tolerated for a few days and then viciously repressed when they crossed the boundary of political demonstration and began to demand social reforms and immediate peace, which made them immediately suspect in German eyes (100 were killed, 536 wounded, and thousands arrested, chiefly in Turin, Milan, Reggio Emilia, and Bari). Badoglio was backed by the army, the church, and the leading economic elements. Many fascist leaders hid, fled to Germany, or took refuge in neutral countries; but Enzio Galbiati, head of the fascist militia, and Carlo Scorza, secretary of the party, quickly adapted to the new conditions. After the initial period of repression anti-fascists cautiously re-grouped and gradually succeeded in freeing some political detainees, including communists: more than 3,000 were freed and most became the core of the resistance (see below).

Badoglio wanted to negotiate secretly with the Allies while holding the Germans at arm's length and hoped to make an armistice coincide with a major Anglo-American landing backed by Italian troops. Apparently the Germans played along in order to win time to reinforce their forces in Italy, which were increased from six divisions in July to eighteen in September with four more on their way. At meetings in Bologna and Treviso, Ambrosio and Raffaele Guariglia (at that time foreign minister) tried vainly to resist these reinforcements which were officially described as being for the common defence. Also the dealings with the Allies were compromised as a result of mistakes and improvisations by the Italians who hoped for an Allied landing of fifteen divisions—more troops than the British and Americans had in the whole of the Mediterranean and more than they were able to land in Normandy the following year (see OVERLORD).

On 3 September the ‘short’ armistice terms were signed at Cassibile. General Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander, agreed to send an airborne division to aid in the defence of Rome but the Italian general staff said they were unable to take the measures necessary to secure a landing for it. The clandestine negotiators, who reached Rome at considerable risk on 7 September, had therefore to return with the message that help could not be accepted. The armistice was announced on 8 September. While the Allies landed at Salerno, against fierce German resistance, Badoglio and the general staff fled south, abandoning millions of soldiers without any orders. There were a number of heroic episodes. On Cephalonia the Acqui Division held out against the Germans from 15 to 22 September; 1,250 Italian troops died in the battle and a further 4,750 were subsequently shot. On Leros, aided by the British, the Italians held out until November 1943. In Rome the High Command used only a few of the available troops, but the Granatieri (grenadier) Division, with the armoured cars of the Montebello Regiment (of the Ariete Division) and aided by armed civilians, put up a stiff defence of Porta San Paolo. Nevertheless within only 24 hours the Italian Army disintegrated. Some 650,000 soldiers were deported to Germany. The fleet reached Malta, en route losing the modern battleship Roma to German guided weapons. The air force saved perhaps 400 planes and the army 16 divisions (7 of them coastal divisions) which were located in the far south and Sardinia.

After September 1943 Italy became a country fought over by foreign powers. National political organizations were shaped by military events: in the south, the Badoglio formula under close Anglo-American supervision and in the north the creation of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), or Saló Republic, under German domination and led by Mussolini, who had been freed by Skorzeny. This return to the past, which used Gargnano on Lake Garda as its headquarters, was immediately challenged by a popular armed revolt co-ordinated by the clandestine Committees for National Liberation (see resistance, below). The resistance movement opposed not only the Germans and the fascists but also—with the exception of a few moderate groups—the monarchical regime which seemed to be prevailing in the south.

The RSI made much of the supposedly republican and socialist origins of fascism, reviving the name of Mazzini and accusing the monarchy, the generals, and the industrialists of betrayal, the latter after having enjoyed 20 years of preferential treatment. Mussolini's speeches on German radio on 18 September, and at the congress which met at Verona in November 1943, were revolutionary tirades on the decadence of the monarchy, the enforced nationalization of industry, and the need to fight alongside the German ally. Mussolini thought to demonstrate his ‘Roman’ character by having Ciano and th(c)e ‘traitors’ of the Grand Council on whom he could lay hands shot on 11 January 1944 (see Verona trials).

At first support for the RSI and enlistment into the military forces headed by Marshal Graziani (which included much of the Tenth Light flotilla commanded by Prince Borghese) was quite considerable, due to a combination of fear, disorientation, the desperation of old fascists who had been compromised, and a certain determination on the part of the young not to abandon at a time of misfortune a system which they had applauded while it was successful. However it rapidly became apparent that the Germans saw the RSI as no more than a tool of occupation. The provinces of Trento, Bolzano, Belluno, Gorizia, Trieste, and Pola passed under direct German administration (see 1Map 56). The country was systematically plundered, beginning with the gold in the Bank of Italy (see also loot). More than 100,000 workers were deported to Germany, while a special German office took over control of Italian industry solely for the benefit of the German war, completely disregarding Mussolini's ‘socialization’. The workers showed their lack of enthusiasm for Mussolini's belated socialism and for measures nominally taken on their behalf by going on strike: more than 500,000 downed tools in Turin and Milan in November 1943 and March 1944, Conscription, attempted by the RSI, raised a few units, including four divisions which were trained in Germany, but pushed tens of thousands of young men into the burgeoning ranks of the partisans.

Important though the partisan war was, it is important not to overlook the non-fascist political developments both in the north and in the south, which were of great significance for Italy's post-war development. In the south the king and Badoglio, supported by the Allies and especially by the British, moved against the anti-fascist parties who opposed them (for the most part republicans) and who, like Count Sforza, were generally disinclined to reach a compromise with the old ruling classes. This split risked compromising the small share in military operations which the Allies were prepared to allow the Italian forces in the south.

The situation persisted until April 1944 when, after the USSR had recognized Badoglio on 14 March, and Palmiro Togliatti had arrived back in Italy from the USSR as Stalin's agent, the communists decided to collaborate with the king. Their sole condition was that Victor Emmanuel would step down once Rome was taken, naming his son Umberto as his ‘lieutenant’, and that the future of the monarchy would be decided once the war was over. The arguments over this move (known as the ‘Salerno turn-around’) still persist today. Togliatti undoubtedly obeyed Moscow's orders, following a united front policy and breaking up the cohesion of the anti-monarchist bloc, as well as angering intransigent elements in his own party. On the other hand, the ‘turn’ was a realistic move. From the communists' point of view, dreams of revolution did not mesh with Anglo-American predominance and it was more important to integrate the party into post-war politics. From the national point of view, this ended the immediate struggle and created a common body of anti-fascist feeling which lasted into the Cold War and beyond.

The formation of a government which included the main parties of the Committees for National Liberation, under the leadership first of Badoglio and then, from June 1944, of Ivanoe Bonomi, won support from the Allies and the Soviets, thereby allowing the artful Badoglio the opportunity sometimes to play one side off against the other.

4. Defence forces and civil defence

Until the end of the 19th century, the Italian alpine and maritime frontiers were defended by a combination of permanent fortifications and fixed artillery. After the First World War, new corps and new specialist bodies were formed to fulfil these tasks (and the new duty of anti-aircraft defence): these included the Frontier Guard (Guardia alla Frontiera, or GAF), made up of nine regiments of artillery and one of infantry as well as a number of smaller detachments, which was divided among eleven army corps districts as well as being assigned to special defensive zones. In addition there were specialist militia units which included MILMART (Milizia Marittima Artiglieria), or coastal artillery and DICAT (Difesa Contraerea Territoriale), the country's anti-aircraft command which had many machine-guns and, by 1940, consisted of some 200 batteries armed at times with good guns but lacking fire directors. In 1940–3 these units, along with some 400 battalions of territorial and coastal troops, were divided among the fifteen regional army corps commands. The whole was commanded by a chief of staff for territorial defence, responsible sometimes to the war minister and sometimes to the army chief of general staff. In addition to these forces, all military units which were permanently or temporarily stationed in command districts were available for territorial defence duties. Fortified naval bases and selected tracts of coastline had special defences.

This organization was extended and strengthened during the war, partly by adding to fixed units and partly by stationing mobile units in such a way as to secure the defence of the most threatened zones, commencing in 1940–1 with the major islands. Gradually the islands and the peninsula itself were divided into military districts allocated to the various armies (Sixth Army in Sicily, Seventh Army in the far south, Fifth Army for a large part of the Tyrrhenian coast and Sardinia). The exact number of troops involved is impossible to determine but by the summer of 1941 it exceeded half a million. This figure increased to approximately 1,500,000 men when the 25 to 30 mobile divisions stationed in Italy were also taken into account; these included units assigned to armies in the course of formation, those preparing to go to the Eastern and African fronts and those earmarked for special duties such as the planned landings on Corsica and Malta, as well as the Fourth Army which was stationed on the French frontier. In the summer of 1941, 350 anti-parachutist groups (Nuclei anti Paracadutisti, or NAP) were also created and spread throughout the country. Formed from army units, and sometimes from the fascist militia, they numbered 20–35 men each and were equipped with a lorry and sometimes with bicycles and motor cycles. These units seem to have done good service; and their creation avoided the need to have recourse to the carabinieri (see 5(c) below) and security guards as had happened when a group of British parachutists had successfully been hunted down and eliminated in the Calabrian region (see Tragino).

The most important innovation, however, was the publication of regulations for the defence of the maritime frontier in the autumn of 1941, following which 20 divisions and ten coastal brigades were created in the succeeding 12 to 16 months. A protective cordon of units comprising infantry, machine-gun detachments, old artillery, and extremely primitive communications was set up, starting with the most exposed zones (Sicily and Sardinia). These divisions and brigades, which eventually amounted to more than 600,000 men after absorbing pre-existing units with similar functions, were assigned to the various armies garrisoning the peninsula. Their task was to delay any attempted enemy landing for long enough to allow the mobile units stationed in the interior to intervene. The structure, sensible enough in itself, would have functioned well had the armament and communications of the coastal units been better and had the interior forces consisted of strong armoured and motorized forces; however, most were infantry divisions, moderately well equipped but at best only transportable by motor vehicles in relays. Their artillery was mostly of pre-First World War vintage; and their transport, a motley collection of mules, horses, bicycles, motor cycles, and a few lorries, belonged in a museum. Given this state of affairs, it is remarkable that some of the coastal units in Sicily (for example, the 202nd Division) gave the Anglo-American forces such a good run for their money at the start of the Sicilian campaign, albeit briefly.

Anti-aircraft defences were allocated to different localities according to available resources. Many of these locales were simply ‘spotting zones’, with personnel equipped only with a pair of binoculars and a telephone. More effective were the improvised arrangements made at the time when the RAF launched its major raids on the northern cities from autumn 1942 to summer 1943 (see strategic air offensives, 2). Since the British bomber formations almost always flew over Switzerland, Italian diplomats and consuls there were able to telephone warnings to military commanders who then had sirens sounded. The air force took no part in anti-aircraft defence: it exercised autonomous control over fighter interceptions, which were almost always launched on the return routes.

The fact that, from 1941 to 1943, there were never less than a million and a half men stationed in Italy, a figure which eventually rose to over two million, raises a number of important issues. For one thing, Italy never had any equivalent to the British Home Guard. The only comparable body of which any traces remain is the National Union for Anti-Aircraft Protection (Union Nazional Protezione Antiacrea, or UNPA), whose activities involved fining those who broke the blackout regulations and collaborating with the fire brigade in putting out incendiaries and helping the population during and after bombing attacks. Finally it is worth noting that in order to maintain the appearance of normality, Mussolini authorized large public works programmes as late as 1942. None was ever completed, but some were begun using valuable concrete which the military had requested for coastal fortifications.

5. Armed forces and special forces

(a) High Command

From 1925 Mussolini was minister for all armed forces, save for a brief interlude between 1929 and 1933. He acted through three under-secretaries who were almost always also chiefs of staff of their respective branches of the armed forces. These officials, who enjoyed a large measure of autonomy in exchange for public servility to the Duce, were generally switched every three years or so. This system gave Mussolini the advantage of dealing with each of the armed forces separately; for him this advantage outweighed the consequent inefficiency and lack of co-ordination. The post of chief of general staff of the armed forces (see Comando Supremo), created by laws of 1925 and 1927, was held by Marshal Badoglio, one of the heroes of 1918. He was a meticulous, professional soldier but one whose mind was entirely closed to modern ideas, and he was little more than a figurehead.

Badoglio, who had no staff to head, acted as an adviser to the Duce and could only correspond with the chiefs of staff of the three arms through their respective ministries—which almost always meant going through Mussolini. He lacked any real powers but served to calm the anxieties of the crown and the public who, ignorant of the true state of affairs, saw him at the head of the armed forces and trusted him. Badoglio accepted this role and also took on other lucrative tasks: he was governor of Libya 1929–33 and commanded in Abyssinia in 1935–6. In 1938 Mussolini, wishing to give himself high military rank (notwithstanding his legal powers, he was still only a sergeant in the light infantry, or bersaglieri), passed a law making himself and the king ‘first marshals of the empire’. In 1940, on the eve of war, he persuaded the king to delegate overall military command to him personally.

As supreme commander, Mussolini was assisted by Badoglio, chief of the armed forces general staff, whose powers in relation both to the Duce and the three services were ill-defined. At the end of 1940 Badoglio was replaced by Ugo Cavallero who completely reformed the post in June 1941 (see below), before being replaced by Vittorio Ambrosio in 1943. The navy and the air force were both commanded by chiefs of staff who also retained the powers of ministerial under-secretaries (Mussolini himself being the minister in both cases); they were respectively Admiral Domenico Cavagnari (replaced in December 1940 by Arturo Riccardi and in 1943 by Raffaele De Courten) and General Francesco Pricolo (replaced by Rino Corso Fougier in 1941 and Renato Sandalli in 1943). From November 1939 the posts of chief of staff and under-secretary of the army, which had previously been combined, were separated and given respectively to Marshal Rodolfo Graziani and General Ubaldo Soddu. Soddu, who in June 1940 also became deputy chief of the armed forces general staff (and therefore Badoglio's deputy), briefly commanded the Italian troops in the Balkan campaign before being retired in December 1940. The post of deputy chief of the armed forces general staff was abolished by Cavallero as part of his reforms, while the under-secretaryship of war was held first by General Antonino Squero ( 1941) and then by General Antonio Sorice ( 1943). Despite being put in command of Libya after the death of Marshal Balbo on 28 June 1940, Graziani remained the army chief of staff until march 1941, aided as deputy chief of staff by Mario Roatta who himself assumed the post in 1941, being succeeded in January 1942 by Vittorio Ambrosio and in February 1943 by Ezio Rosi; finally in June 1943 Roatta returned once more.

This complex pyramid, complicated from the first months of the war by shifts in function and authority both in Rome and at the various military fronts, encouraged Mussolini's—and Ciano's—natural tendencies to intervene at all levels of the hierarchy with verbal, written, and telephoned orders which were often contradictory.

In the winter of 1940–1, disasters on land and at sea put an end to the ‘parallel’ war which Mussolini had hoped to win with only indirect German assistance. Hitler now intervened directly in the battle for the Mediterranean, not to win the conflict there but only to help his ally. Rommel's small but highly effective force stabilized the position in Libya while large German forces overawed Romania and Bulgaria and by June 1941 had conquered Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete. In Germany's wake, Italy gained large but unpacified territories in Dalmatia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Greece.

The substantial Italian forces detached to the Balkans from 1941 onwards were naturally involved in the anti-partisan campaigns, which were especially bitter in Yugoslavia, as were the units in France although to a much lesser extent. Alongside the excesses of these campaigns should be set the fact that the Garibaldi Division fought with Tito and the partisans and that the Italian military authorities saved some 600,000 Croatian Jews from the Ustašas and as (in 1942–3) protected approximately 240,000 French Jews from capture by the Germans and the Vichy police.

While the bulk of the German forces then turned on the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), and were employed almost exclusively on the Eastern Front until the summer of 1944, there began for Mussolini what was called—though not by him—the ‘subaltern war’, which aimed at currying favour with Germany. With the end of the Balkan campaign, which was at once followed by a guerrilla war, the structure of the Italian High Command settled down a little. Cavallero had replaced Badoglio in December 1940 but until May 1941 he had remained in Albania commanding the Italian Forces fighting the Greeks. He then returned to Rome and set up a real Supreme Command, somewhat larger and better organized than Badoglio's which even by December 1940 had numbered only a few more officers than the 26 of the previous June. He was unable to make himself the only intermediary between Mussolini and the armed forces because the heads of the navy and the air force, who as under-secretaries were part of the government, continued to deal directly with the Duce. However he did improve inter-service collaboration and he tried to improve protection for naval traffic with Libya, now being held to ransom by the British thanks to ULTRA intelligence. However his efforts to improve the quality of Italian equipment were still hampered by inefficiency and vested interests (see domestic life, above).

(b) Army

From 1937 the organizational target was an army of 126 divisions (see Graph for numbers actually achieved, and type). These formations—called ‘binary’ divisions as they had two regiments of three battalions each instead of the previous three of three—were really mixed brigades which included two regimental batteries of pack artillery of eight 65 mm. (2.5 in.) guns and two of 81 mm. (3.1 in.) mortars (12 guns), a divisional battalion of 81 mm. mortars (18 guns), a divisional regiment of artillery of 24 75 mm. (2.9 in.) guns and 12 100 mm. (3.9 in.) guns (all horse-drawn or pack) and sometimes in addition an anti-tank company of eight 47 mm. (1.8 in.) guns (not self-propelled), one anti-aircraft company of eight 20 mm. (0.8 in.) machine-guns and a somewhat shabby force of fascist Blackshirts (two small battalions).

The so-called ‘self-transportable’ divisions had a regiment of truck-drawn artillery and could move their infantry on specially assigned trucks. Motorized divisions had three motorized regiments (six battalions in all), and motorized artillery. Light divisions (celeri) consisted of two regiments of cavalry, one of bersaglieri on trucks, motor cycles, and bicycles, and a regiment of artillery which was partly horse-drawn and partly motorized. Armoured divisions had one regiment of infantry consisting of 184 light tanks, a regiment of bersaglieri (two battalions in trucks, the third on motor cycles) and a regiment of motorized artillery of 24 75 mm. guns. Alpine divisions consisted of two regiments of alpini and a regiment of artillery of 24 75 mm. pack guns. Anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons were slightly increased in the motorized and light divisions, while in the armoured divisions only the 20 mm. guns were doubled in number. Alpine divisions had neither anti-aircraft nor anti-tank guns. Colonial divisions could be transported by truck but had particularly antiquated weapons.

Infantry divisions functioned as ‘attack columns’, which were easily self-transportable, to create and exploit any tactical opportunity, and control both of the movement of individual divisions and of the medium calibre guns was retained by army corps headquarters. Replacement of the First World War artillery was planned to start only in 1942–3. Automobiles were few and tanks, other than the 24 very poor M11s in Abyssinia and another 72 quickly sent to Libya, were always the feeble CV3 (see domestic life, above). Radio communications were generally backward, and no tanks were equipped with radios. The so-called ‘binary division’ can fairly be criticized because it served chiefly to increase the number of generals in the army. However, during the war almost every army lightened its divisions and Italy had to do so in the Western Desert campaigns in 1941–2, diminishing the infantry component yet further by increasing anti-tank and anti-aircraft units. The failure of the binary division in the Balkan campaign of 1940–1, which was fought in First World War style, was due above all to the fact that Mussolini had just sent 600,000 men out of a total force of 1,100,000 on leave for political reasons and, not wanting to recall them, filled the divisions with untrained men who were unfamiliar even with basic infantry weapons.

On 10 June 1940 the army numbered 1,600,000 men (600,000 overseas and 1,000,000 in Italy, to whom a further 100,000 were added during the summer), with 19,500 regular and 37,000 reserve officers. Excluding Italian East Africa, which had a separate organization, it comprised 26 army corps: one armoured, one self-transportable, one light, one alpine, and 22 ordinary corps. There were 73 divisions in the army: 3 armoured, 2 motorized, 3 light, 5 Alpine, 43 marching infantry, and 17 ‘self-transportable’. Of these, 14 self-transportable divisions (including 3 Blackshirt and 2 colonial divisions) were in Libya (Fifth and Tenth Armies), 5 in Albania (1 armoured, 3 infantry, and 1 Alpine), one infantry division was in the Dodecanese and the remaining 53 divisions were in Italy.

These forces were divided into three army groups. Army Group West (commanded by Umberto of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont) contained the First Army under General Pietro Pintor and the Fourth Army under General Alfredo Guzzoni and numbered 22 divisions, four of them Alpine. Army Group East (commanded by General Camillo Grossi) comprised the Second Army under General Ambrosio, the Sixth Army, the Po, under General Mario Vercellino, and the Eighth Army under the Duke of Bergamo. Army group South (commanded by Marshal Emilio De Bono) was composed of the Third Army under General Carlo Geloso, two army corps scattered on the larger islands, and the Albanian command. The Seventh Army (commanded by the Duke of Pistoia) formed a general reserve. Outside Italy there was an Aegean Islands Command under General Cesare Maria de Vecchi, while in Libya first Balbo and then Graziani commanded the Tenth Army under General Mario Berti and the Fifth Army under General Italo Gariboldi which amounted to fourteen infantry divisions, three of which were Blackshirts and two were colonial divisions.

During the course of the war the army groups and armies were frequently dissolved and reconstituted with varying shapes and contents. During 1940–1 the three army groups and First, Third, Sixth, and Eighth Armies were dissolved and a special army group was created for the Balkan campaign comprising two new armies, the Ninth under General Vercellino and then Alessandro Pirzio Biroli, and the Eleventh under General Geloso. After May 1941 they garrisoned Albania and Greece respectively. Yugoslavian territory was occupied until 1943 by the Second Army commanded by General Ambrosio, then Roatta, and finally Mario Robotti with a special corps in Montenegro under Pirzio Biroli. The Fourth Army under General Vercellino was stationed on the French frontier and in November 1942 occupied large areas of Vichy France. The Eighth Army, reconstructed in 1942, was sent to the Eastern Front (see below), while the Sixth Army under General Guzzoni, now with a very different composition, was in Sicily at the time of the Allied landings in July 1943. After the destruction of the Tenth Army in the Western Desert campaigns and the dissolution of the Fifth Army in Libya in 1941, Italian forces operated alongside Rommel's divisions only up to corps level; commanded first by Gariboldi and then by General Ettore Bastico, they included an armoured corps (commanded successively by Generals Gastone Gambara, Francesco Zingales, Ettore Baldassare, and Giuseppe De Stefanis). In 1942 these corps were incorporated into Rommel's German—Italian Panzer Army. This in turn was transformed into the First Italian Army in Tunisia (though it retained the German forces) and this force, under the orders of General (later Marshal) Messe fought bravely at Mareth, Wadi Akarit, and Enfidaville during the last phase of the North African campaign. Meanwhile other Italian troops fought in Tunisia under the command of the Fifth German Army.

In June 1940 some 30 divisions (First, Fourth, and Seventh Armies and part of Sixth Army), under the command of Prince Umberto, the heir to the throne, attacked through the French Alps with little success. Then 40 divisions were concentrated in the Veneto (the three regions of Venezia, Venezia Tridentina, and Venezia Giulia) for an attack on Yugoslavia, but this was forbidden by Hitler in August 1940. In the Western Desert Marshal Graziani, who had taken over command after Marshal Balbo had been shot down over Tobruk by Italian anti-aircraft fire, advanced 100 km. (62 mi.) into Egypt, using 72 M11 tanks alongside his infantry columns, but was subsequently defeated at Sidi Barrani, Bardia, and Beda Fomm.

From Italian East Africa, where the Duke of Aosta commanded 352 obsolescent aircraft, and 91,000 Italian and 200,000 native troops (divided into 2 divisions, 29 colonial brigades, and 34 other battalions), excursions were made into the Sudan and Kenya (see East African campaign), and British Somaliland was captured. But by mid-1941 these early victories had been turned into defeat.

Despite these commitments, Mussolini still had sufficient resources to take part in the German–Soviet war, even though the Germans had not initially asked for Italian assistance. An army corps made up of three divisions (Torino, Pasubio, and 3rd Light) was sent to the Eastern Front in 1941 and, under the command of Messe, fought well both on the offensive (at Petrikowka on the Dnieper, Stalino, and elsewhere) and on the defensive (in the Donetz basin). In 1942, this time at Germany's request, Italian forces were greatly expanded. The Eighth Army, now under the command of Gariboldi ( Messe was repatriated in October 1942), now had a further seven divisions in addition to the original three: Ravenna, Cosseria, Sforzesca, and Vicenza (infantry), and Julia, Tridentina, and Cuneense (Alpine) as well as some Blackshirt units. In total the force, which had numbered 60,000 under Messe, now amounted to 220,000 men. The air component, which in 1941 had amounted to some 90 fighter, reconnaissance, and transport planes, was expanded in 1942 by the addition of more modern fighters (MC202s), several reconnaissance and bomber squadrons (twin-engined Fiat BR20s), and other transport aircraft. Most importantly, the very few modern heavy and anti-tank guns went to the Eastern Front—36 of the 48 available 149 mm. (5.8 in.) guns, all 12 210 mm. (8.1 in.) howitzers and the only 36 75 mm. (2.9 in.) guns—as well as over 16,000 motor vehicles, more than would have been necessary to motorize all the Italian forces in North Africa. The Italian Army advanced to the Don where it was partially destroyed by the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad which crushed the entire German southern wing of the front. Some midget submarines and small surface units of Italy's most successful special forces unit, the Tenth Light Flotilla, had a number of successes in the Black Sea, and on Lake Ladoga during the siege of Leningrad. But it was the employment of the Italian land forces on the Eastern Front which helped to frustrate a sketchy and ill-thought-out Mediterranean strategy pursued by the Axis in the spring of 1942.

In fact the matériel destined for the Eastern Front was collected together at a time when the efforts of the Italian fleet and German U-boats, together with the temporary air reinforcements granted by Hitler, would have allowed the shipment of more stores to Libya for several months. At the same time preparations were made during the siege of Malta for an amphibious attack on the island, in which the crack Folgore Parachute Division and a number of other, better adapted, units were scheduled to take part. All this was in vain when, after the capture of Tobruk on 21 June 1942, Hitler abandoned the Malta project in favour of pursuing the retreating British forces deep into Egypt. The epilogue occurred at El Alamein in October 1942, where the Italians sacrificed the Trento, Bologna, Brescia, and Pavia infantry divisions, the Folgore parachute division, the Sabratha Division (lost at the end of July), and most of the two armoured divisions (Ariete and Littorio).

By this stage, with the German failure in the east, which also shook the Italian Army, and with the North African landings heralding the start of the North African campaign, the Axis Mediterranean strategy had become simply one of survival. Fierce resistance was put up in Tunisia to this end, resulting in the loss of the last armoured division (Centauro), the Giovani Fascisti and Trieste infantry divisions (formerly motorized, they had survived Siwa and El Alamein respectively), and a number of other units initially destined for Malta (Pistoia, La Spezia, and Superga). Also destined for Malta was the Livorno Division which instead fought bravely in Sicily in July and August 1943. If the 20 coastal divisions, which were of little account, are subtracted from the 90 divisions—now totalling about three million men—which existed in 1943, along with the remnants of the 10 divisions lost on the Eastern Front, 10 lost in Sicily (of which 6 were coastal divisions), and the 40 or so divisions divided between the Balkans and France, there remained only about 15 divisions, some of whom opposed the German occupation after the armistice on 8 September 1943 and later fought with the Allies. In fact, despite Anglo-American lack of enthusiasm, Italian participation in the Italian campaign grew. Until the summer of 1944 the Italians were only permitted a ‘motorized group’ (a reinforced regiment), which fought at Monte Cassino, and the Italian Corps of Liberation (equivalent to a division) which operated chiefly in the Adriatic sector.

However, the transfer of some Allied forces from Italy for the French Riviera landings in August 1944 forced Alexander to arm six Italian divisions, of which four were used, although they were called ‘combat groups’ and not allowed to combine into a single corps for fear of political repercussions. The soldiers who made up these ‘groups’ (which were deployed from January to April 1945 in the front between Bologna and the Adriatic) fought bravely and at some cost: 1,868 died, 5,187 were wounded, and 443 were listed as missing, mostly killed.

To these losses, and those of 8 September 1943 (19,000 dead and wounded) may be added those suffered in the war against the Allies: some 200,000 dead (80,000 on the Eastern Front, more than 50,000 in the Balkans, 20–22,000 in Africa, some 40–50,000 at sea, in the air and in minor episodes), a larger but unknown number of wounded, and more than 600,000 taken prisoner. Even today there are no exact figures, but it is reasonable to estimate the total number of dead, including those who fell in the partisan war and the victims of Allied bombing, reprisals, German deportations, and so on, at above 300,000.

(c) Fascist Militia and Carabinieri

By 1940 the fascist militia or Blackshirts amounted to 177 legions (39 of which were attached to infantry divisions of the army while another six formed three divisions in Libya), as well as about 200 battalions (of which 132 were territorials and 30 were in Italian East Africa), and a number of specialized units which included DICAT anti-aircraft units (22 artillery legions with 228 batteries and 4,206 machine-gun squads) and MILMART coastal artillery (seedefence forces, above). Discounting militia units with non-military roles (roads, forests, post and telegraph), there were in Italy and its colonies more than 300,000 Blackshirts. The militia divisions in Libya were comparable to the ‘self transportable’ infantry divisions of the army. In addition, the fascist organizations formed battalions of fascist youth, some of whom were incorporated into the army and performed well in the Western Desert and in North Africa from the autumn of 1941 until May 1943.

The carabinieri, founded in Piedmont in 1814, came under the war ministry for their organization and equipment and under the interior ministry for their employment. They functioned as military police and sometimes formed combat units. There were also two other less important police forces: the public security police and the customs police (guardia di finanza). In 1940 the carabinieri amounted to 7 brigades, 28 territorial legions (the equivalent of militia regiments), one school, one pupil legion, and a number of overseas detachments in East Africa, Libya, Albania, and Egypt. It had also formed three administrative divisions, and by the summer of 1943 numbered 156,000 men.

(d) Navy

The Italian Navy was every bit as fiercely independent as the air force. As its head, Admiral Cavagnari served as chief of staff and under-secretary for seven years—an exceptionally lengthy period of command during the fascist regime. Its 6 battleships (2 modern and 4 re-built), 19 cruisers (7 of 10,000 tons), its 100 smaller surface vessels (which included three auxiliary cruisers), and 113 submarines were built on the basis of two erroneous suppositions: that Italy's enemy would be France alone and that the First World War naval battle of Jutland would remain the eternal model for all naval actions. The 168,614 officers and men of the Italian Navy in June 1940 (a number which had risen to 259,000 by August 1943) formed a separate body, perhaps better trained than the two other services but still a long way behind other navies in respect of its technical development. Leaving aside the lack of radar and ASDIC and the absence of aircraft carriers, it may be noted that naval gunnery put a premium on muzzle velocity and range rather than on accuracy, that speeds reached during trials could not be maintained on active service due to poor sea-keeping ability, and that night fighting was regarded as an improbability. Supplies of oil were limited from the start, amounting to only 1,700,000 tons which had been stockpiled before the war started and which, from the summer of 1941 onwards, had to be supplemented by a monthly supply from Romania. More serious was the attitude that large and expensive warships should not be risked lest Italy end the war without a navy. It was almost as though the naval High Command wanted to preserve its fleet even at the cost of losing the war.

It was this outlook, and not any lack of courage, which led to no risks being taken in the summer of 1940 when fuel was still abundant but peace seemed close at hand. However the fleet was employed at the end of 1941 and during the first half of 1942, despite the shortage of fuel, when Malta and the situation in the Western Desert made it inescapable. It was once again kept from danger in 1942–3 when, with peace looming, conserving a navy seemed more important than making a grand gesture; by this time, a shortage of light shipping exacerbated the problems of lack of fuel and air cover. Paradoxically, it was the British—the defenders, not the aggressors—who attacked first when they raided Taranto on 12 November 1940. Three Italian battleships were disabled by their antiquated Swordfish biplanes and the prudence with which Cavagnari had restrained his admirals during the summer, directing their operations from the navy staff war room at admiralty headquarters in Rome, went for nothing. Taranto cost Cavagnari his job (he was replaced by Admiral Arturo Riccardi), but the more determined deployment of surface vessels terminated in disaster at Cape Matapan ( 28 March 1941).

The most notable Italian achievements in the war at sea were attained by small submarine units; by torpedo bombers operating against the Malta convoys, especially during August 1942; and by Tenth Light Flotilla attacks on warships and merchant ships in British harbours at Alexandria, Suda Bay, and Gibraltar.

All in all, the navy performed well in supplying Italian troops in Libya for three years despite British intervention from Malta and above all the effects of ULTRA intelligence from the summer of 1941. The sacrifice of both men and ships was considerable: some 15,000 of the 33,859 men in the navy died and over 800,000 tons of merchant shipping was lost (see below). But when regarded in aggregate terms the results of this effort were remarkable: 91.7% of the 206,202 men and 84.6% of the 2,844,698 tons of stores and fuel sent to North Africa were landed there. Many more men were transported by plane, although capacity was limited by the need to carry fuel for the return trip. However, although the loads successfully carried by sea and air were large in percentage terms, they were much less than what was needed. Traffic was protected partly by mining the Sicilian straits and the confines of Tripoli using German mines; this contributed to the partial destruction of Force K in December 1941.

By the time of the armistice of September 1943 the navy had preserved six battleships and nine cruisers after sacrificing many smaller ships and submarines—the latter taking part in the battle of the Atlantic from 1941. Having possessed about 680,000 tons of shipping at the start of the war, to which were added 136,234 tons of new construction and 62,453 tons of seized foreign shipping, the navy had lost 334,757 tons (265,392 tons of surface shipping and 69,365 tons of submarines). Three cruisers, 11 destroyers, 6 torpedo boats, 15 smaller vessels, and 11 submarines had been sunk by gunfire; a battleship, 6 cruisers, 11 destroyers, 7 torpedo boats, 7 smaller ships, and 41 submarines had been sunk by aerial or naval torpedoes. The battleship lost was the Cavour, damaged at Taranto and not fully repaired by 8 September 1943. Aerial bombing accounted for 2 cruisers, 9 destroyers, 10 torpedo boats, and 98 smaller vessels. Mines sank 6 destroyers, 12 torpedo boats, 12 smaller ships, and 3 submarines. Finally a cruiser, 7 destroyers, 6 torpedo boats, 66 smaller ships, and 20 submarines were lost to unknown causes.

(e) Air Force

The Italian Air Force, the pride of fascism and greatly overrated by outsiders, comprised 23 flights of land bombers, 2 flights of naval bombers, 1 group of dive-bombers, 1 assault flight, and 2 combat groups; 6 flights, 8 groups, and 2 squadrons of fighters; 56 reconnaissance squadrons and 2 colonial groups. In all, these formations amounted to 1,753 front-line aircraft, of which only 900 were modern machines. The Fiat CR42 biplane fighters, which were even inferior to the British Gloster Gladiator biplane, and the bombers dating from 1936 which had operated in Spain, were counted as ‘modern’. Not all planes had radios and aerial inter-communications did not exist until well into 1942; few planes were equipped for night flying and torpedo bombers were not yet organized. The theories of strategic bombing propounded by General Giulio Douhet (1869–1930) were paraded by the air force, but only to justify its complete independence from the other services, an independence which prevented the manufacture of aircraft carriers and destroyed any hopes of air–navy collaboration. Germany's apart, Italy's was the only major navy which did not control its own aviation.

Between 8 and 15 July 1940, 490 triple-engined bombers attacked British naval squadrons in the Mediterranean using level-flight bombing tactics. Their bombs—50 kg. (110 lb.), 100 kg. (220 lb.), and a few 250 kg. (550 lb.)—were too small to have any effect even when, as happened only rarely, they hit their target. The pilots were brave but they did not have the same level of training as their opponents. Some squadrons bombed Gibraltar and even the Persian Gulf. When 200 planes were transferred from Italy to Belgium to take part in the Blitz against the UK, 20% of the force was lost or damaged in error during its flight over friendly territory. However, by the end of 1941 some fighter squadrons, flying Macchi 202s fitted with German Daimler Benz engines, began to show evidence of their effectiveness. Before then torpedo bombers had been introduced and pilots, operating slow and large S79s and S84s, attacked British convoys sailing to Malta with great tenacity in 1941–2, sinking or damaging a number of mechantmen and warships, among them the battleship Nelson ( 27 September 1941). But by the summer of 1943 the Italian Air Force numbered fewer than a hundred modern fighters and perhaps a thousand more older planes which were almost valueless.

(f) Special Forces

Amid their dreams of greatness, the Italians had forgotten the insidious means by which they had achieved their naval successes with light motor torpedo boats and human torpedoes during the First World War. Neglected until 1930 and then revived in 1940, too late to make a major impact when Italy entered the war, this type of operation, mounted by Tenth Light Flotilla, was especially suitable for employment by an under-developed country because it was economical in everything but courage. However, despite the valour of its crews, the novelty of its equipment, and the efficiency of its organization it had to wait many months for its first successes.

The Italians also operated a number of other special forces. The 10th Arditi Regiment's two battalions were trained in sabotage, either as parachutists or using jeeps, the former having some success when US aircraft were attacked on Benina airfield near Benghazi in June 1943. The Sahara companies, a rare example of effective co-operation between the Italian Air Force and the army, were under the command of air force officers. Used to defend the southern regions of Libya, they were eventually bested by Leclerc's French troops in the Fezzan campaigns. Other special units included the San Marco Landing Regiment, the Monte Cervino Alpini Ski Battalion, and the Libyan Carabinieri Parachute Battalion.

6. Intelligence

Neither the Italian High Command nor Mussolini, who retained direct personal responsibility for the preparation and co-ordination of the armed forces, ever understood the importance of a single unified system of military intelligence which was both authoritative and properly resourced. In consequence, both in peace and in war Italy had a number of intelligence services whose respective areas of competence were never clearly defined and which were riven with bitter rivalries, at considerable cost to their efficiency and credibility. (It should be noted that reliable studies of them are few since their archives remain closed.)

The most important agency was SIM (Servizio Informazioni Militari), a branch of the army. Technically the most efficient at intercepting and decrypting enemy communications, it was active both inside Italy and abroad but lacked overseas centres and spy networks. In the years before the Second World War SIM had shown a marked propensity to play a political role under the wing of Galeazzo Ciano, being extremist in the Spanish Civil War and anti-German in the period 1939–40. In 1940 it numbered 150 officers, 300 non-commisioned officers, and 400 other ranks. Alongside SIM there existed other military intelligence agencies: naval intelligence (Servizio Informazioni Segrete, or SIS) was very efficient, while air force intelligence (Servizio Informazioni Aeronautica, or SIA) was of minor significance. In addition overseas theatres of operations—East Africa, Libya, the Aegean, and Albania—each had its own autonomous military intelligence service.

Inside Italy intelligence functions were also carried out by the carabinieri (see 5(c) above) which, besides acting as military police, also operated against general crime and political opposition and furnished SIM with many of its personnel; and by the police, the fascist regime's preferred instrument in the suppression of opposition and the maintenance of order. The intelligence services of minor branches of the regime such as the fascist militia and the customs police (guardia di finanza) also played a part in counter-espionage. The ministry of foreign affairs, the governor of Albania, and the Italian African police also had their own intelligence services which dealt in part with military matters.

There was no co-ordination whatsoever between all these arms. Mussolini never acknowledged the necessity for such co-ordination since his own role as dictator was strengthened by rivalry between various organs of the state. The inefficiency of the military intelligence services was therefore only one facet of the general lack of military preparation for war. The extent to which the Comando Supremo, the Italian High Command, underestimated the importance of an up-to-date intelligence service is evident in the fact that SIM was dismembered in April 1940 as a consequence of a power struggle within the army, counter-espionage being detached from it until 1941. As a consequence of this situation SIM's evaluations of the strength of Allied forces in 1940 were vague and inaccurate and almost always greatly overestimated their powers. In any case Mussolini's decisions were always made without taking any account of the findings of his intelligence services. His decision to attack Greece in October 1940 was taken as a result of information from political and military sources in Albania that the Greek Army was about to disband; in fact SIM had contrary information which was more accurate but it was not consulted by Mussolini and the military chiefs, nor did it seek to challenge the dictator's decision.

Though their co-ordination and their influence on politico-strategic decision-making did not improve during 1941–2 the organization and general efficiency of the Italian intelligence services did (see below for two examples). However their work continued to be of marginal importance in the Mediterranean, not only because of the lack of co-ordination and therefore of general credibility but also because of the complete absence of any modern concept of intelligence in either the military and political hierarchy or among the secret services themselves. SIM and the other intelligence services were expected to provide concrete information in a restricted frame of reference, and not to incorporate it into an overall analysis of the strategic situation and of enemy strength, tasks which the operational command kept to itself. The main objective of the secret services remained the brilliant coup rather than the systematic collection and correlation of every scrap of information about the opposing side. As a result their work failed to make a major impact; the operational commands took whatever account of intelligence they thought fit in the absence of any synoptic intelligence appreciations. Overall, the organization and the activities of the Italian military intelligence services showed a cultural backwardness at all levels, since they were generally limited to traditional espionage and police-style counter-espionage and never developed the sophisticated role that intelligence work acquired in the UK and the USA.

A few examples of SIM's work are significant. In April 1941 it succeeded in penetrating the Yugoslavian radio communications system, thereby generating much confusion and disinformation. In so doing it helped to prevent a sudden attack on Italian troops in Albania who would have had to improvise a hasty deployment in the Scutari region with units switched from the Greek Front. More important was the successful microfilming of an American cipher, known as the Black code, in Rome in September 1941. For six months, between 18 December 1941 and 29 June 1942 (when SIM was commanded by General Cesare Amé), the daily situation reports on the Eighth Army transmitted by the American Colonel Bonner Fellers from Cairo to Washington were deciphered and passed to the Germans in Rome who then re-ciphered them and transmitted them to Rommel using the ENIGMA machine.

This episode raises some questions about the range of the ULTRA Intelligence derived from the British decipherment of ENIGMA radio messages. How did this escape being noticed for a good six months? For a long time some British writers claimed that the leak came to light on 9 July 1942 following the capture at El Alamein of documents belonging to a German advanced tactical radio interception unit. This does not seem credible since the leak had already been identified by the British on 29 June. Probably this explanation was one of those cover stories not infrequent in matters where national security is involved.

Among Italian intelligence failures was the exaggeration of the size of British and French forces in the Mediterranean in the spring of 1940. It has been claimed that the basis for this deception was an understanding between Badoglio, Ciano, and the then commandant of SIM, General Giacomo Carboni, to dissuade Mussolini from entering the war. However, even after war had been declared Badoglio insisted that Italian strategy be tailored to this ‘fact’. This was not the only time that SIM exaggerated the size of Allied forces; there were at least two other such episodes. The first related to Anglo-American forces in the Mediterranean in the spring and summer of 1943. The second, in August– September 1943, had to do with the German detachments deployed around Rome, which were credited with a tank strength approximately ten times larger than was actually the case. By this time SIM was once again under the command of General Carboni, who had taken up the post on 18 August 1943.

7. Merchant marine

In 1939 the Italian merchant fleet (counting vessels of over 100 gross tons) amounted to 3,448,543 tons. It was thus some 16% larger than the French and Dutch fleets and fifth in size after the British (over 21,000,000 tons), the USA (over 12,000,000 tons), the Japanese (over 5,500,000 tons), and the Norwegians (over 4,800,000 tons). The greatest loss was inflicted on it by Mussolini on the afternoon of 10 June 1940 when, in order not to miss the ‘historic moment’, he declared war, forgetting that there were 218 Italian ships totalling 1,215,000 tons in neutral or enemy ports outside the Mediterranean. This figure represented 35% of the total fleet and more than 50% of the losses due to the war, and was never made good.

Not all of what remained could be used to transport men and supplies to Libya, various Mediterranean islands, and Albania: many liners could not be used because of their excessive draught, among them the Rex (51,000 tons) and the Conte di Savoia (48,000 tons). Other passenger ships were used, however: conversion of the Augustus and the Roma into aircraft carriers (re-named the Aquila and the Sparviero) began in 1941 but was not finished by the time the armistice was signed in September 1943. In all, 597 ships (over 500 tons) totalling 2,190,857 tons were lost in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea along with another 1,278 ships (under 500 tons) amounting to 81,850 tons (see Table).

Out of a total loss of 2,272,707 tons, surface units sank 6.4%, submarines 36.5%, planes 33.9%, mines 6%, 9.5% scuttled themselves, and 7.7% sank due to natural or unknown causes. Over 800,000 tons of shipping of all types was lost on the routes to Libya and Tunisia; and the tonnage sunk while in port, although it cannot be ascertained with accuracy, was undoubtedly very high. Between June 1940 and September 1943 Italian shipyards produced 305,733 tons of shipping of all types. Figures for captured shipping incorporated into the Italian fleet are not complete. The main gain in the Mediterranean was represented by the 289,210 tons (of ships over 500 tons) seized from the French after Axis forces occupied the whole of France in November 1942 and shared between Germany and Italy.

Losses suffered between 9 September 1943 and 8 May 1945 can be calculated only for ships entered in the Italian Naval Register and do not include foreign ships incorporated into the Italian fleet. They amounted to 220 ships of over 500 tons, totalling 888,853 tons, and 994 smaller ships amounting to 88,049 tons. It is impossible accurately to identify the proportions lost to different causes, but it seems likely that most were scuttled to avoid seizure by the Germans: many liners, including the Rex and the Conte di Savoia, were sunk for this reason.

Italy, 7: Merchant shipping lost during hostilities

	Ships over 500t.	Ships under 500t.
Source: Contributor.
1940	186,631 t.	4,326 t.
1941	714,410 t.	20,935 t.
1942	522,082 t.	16,834 t.
1943 (to August)	767,734 t.	39,755 t.
total:	2,190,857 t.	81,850 t.

8. Resistance

Following the German occupation of northern Italy, the Committees for National Liberation (CLN) from Tuscany northwards functioned as clandestine local and regional governments, forming the backbone of an event which was without precedent in Italian history: a patriotic and political war in which bourgeois élites, workers, and peasants fought alongside one another. As was perhaps inevitable the myth of the resistance, which spread beyond the geographical and social boundaries of the area, combined with the international post-war situation to create a great many misconceptions.

The earliest bands were formed of soldiers who refused to obey the Germans and Mussolini's Italian Social Republic (RSI); many were men who at the armistice found themselves far from their homes and could only live outside the law. Ferocious German repression (as at Boves in Piedmont on 19 September 1943) and Nazi–fascist persecution of those who had helped thousands of Allied prisoners or groups of Jews whom the SS were hunting down, led to a rapid expansion of what was initially a spontaneous phenomenon. A measure of popular anti-German feeling which went back to the Risorgimento and the First World War was revived, especially by the survivors returning from the Eastern Front who had direct experience of German arrogance and of the systematic ferocity with which they had treated the Soviet population. Finally, military call-up by the RSI and the search for labour by the Todt Organization also played their part: men did not care to work for Germany and sheer survival then dictated that they fight against her.

In the cities resistance was organized by the political parties, above all the communists: it ran the gamut from military sabotage to attempts to assassinate the supporters of the ‘new fascism’ (some of them small fry, others well-known such as the philosopher Giovanni Gentile), and to acts which not everyone supported, such as the killing of 32 German soldiers in Rome which in turn triggered the Ardeatine massacre.

The war in the mountains was almost entirely in party hands. The largest groups were the ‘Garibaldi’ (communist) and ‘Justice and Liberty’ (Party of Action) formations, but there were also some autonomous apolitical groups, sometimes monarchist, socialist (‘Matteotti’), or Catholic (‘Green Flames’). However by no means all the leaders or followers in partisan bands owed their loyalty to the parties with which their names were associated; motivated by patriotism and nationalism, they made up the base on which the Italian resistance rested.

The Allies dropped supplies and missions (see also Balkan Air Force) to aid a movement which had already assumed a size and a character somewhat different from their own preference for a net of saboteurs on the lines of the French resistance. There was no lack of saboteurs, but from the spring of 1944 the mountain groups began to swell in size and by the autumn they numbered over 100,000 men. Aided by geography (the Alpine and Apennine valleys radiate from the main communication centres), these bands created military difficulties for the Germans, the seriousness of which is only now becoming fully apparent with the release of Wehrmacht documentation. Then there were the ‘republics’, vast tracts of land occupied by the partisans and governed by the CLN which restricted the area under RSI control to the plains. These ‘republics’ stirred up a violent reaction on the part of the Germans and the fascists—some, such as Ossola on the Swiss border, because of their political significance and others, such as those in Liguria and Emilia (Bobbio, Oltrepò, and so on) or in Piedmont (Langhe, Monferrato, Cuneese after the French Riviera landings), because of their military importance.

The political unity which prevailed in the south was reflected in the north. From June 1944 all the partisan forces (Voluntary Freedom Corps, or CVL) were co-ordinated into a collective command structure; at its head was the moderate General Raffaele Cadorna (parachuted in from the south), with two joint deputies, Luigi Longo (communist) and Ferrucio Parri (Party of Action). The second winter in the mountains was the worst. The Allied push came to a halt 15 km. (9.3 mi.) outside Bologna and, in a radio announcement which was also heard by the Germans, Alexander announced the suspension of operations for the winter, an error which the communists subsequently, but incorrectly, claimed had been a deliberate ploy by the British to rid themselves of politically inconvenient allies. Nevertheless, the Nazis and the fascists, who had already undertaken bloody reprisals against the civilian population (see Marzabotto massacre), then unleashed a terrible offensive against the Italian resistance (see Map 56) making considerable use of Soviet troops—chiefly two Cossack cavalry divisions (see Soviet exiles at war) and 162 infantry division commanded by General Oscar Ritter von Niedermayer. The CVL lost almost all the territory it had formerly controlled, its forces were decimated, and the population suffered terrible reprisals. But in February 1945 the great Soviet victories, followed later by those in the west, revived the movement, which acted vigorously and with considerable military effect.

The partisans knew nothing of the inconclusive surrender negotiations being conducted in Switzerland with SS Lt-General Wolff. By now the ‘republics’ had been recreated and at the first signs of the Allied spring offensive the partisans began operations which liberated Genoa, Milan, Turin, and other northern cities on 25– 26 April 1945, ahead of the Anglo-American forces. The final act was the shooting of Mussolini and the leading fascists after negotiations for their surrender to the resistance, using the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, as an intermediary, had failed. The CLN became the de facto government of the north and put itself forward as spokesman for the Allies and the government in the south. As was inevitable, victory vastly increased the number of partisans, though in fact their formations in the mountains were weaker on the eve of liberation than they had been the previous autumn (70–80,000 men).

The Italian resistance, of whom some 40,000 died (including the victims of reprisals), was one of the strongest in Europe. Its military successes did not, however, eradicate its internal divisions, of which the most significant was the split between the democrats and a Communist Party which, while highly intellectual and flexible, always remained subservient to the wishes of Moscow. Furthermore, notwithstanding popular participation, the resistance was a minority activity which had a limited impact on Italian secular backwardness which was so strongly in tune with the reactionary conservatism sustained by the Catholic Church and by the structure of agriculture and industry.

On foreign policy the resistance had no impact. Neither the Anglo-Americans nor the Soviets accorded it any importance and the punitive nature of the peace treaty and its enforcement were shaped by the Cold War and not by any recognition of the efforts of the Italian partisans. The resistance itself, Italy's detachment from Nazi Germany in 1943, and before that the struggles of the anti-fascists, were mistakes or pointless risks in so far as the Second World War witnessed a clash of powers which differed from what had occurred before only in terms of size. In fact, everything which had not been shattered by the time that the Cold War started (such as the Franco dictatorship, Hirohito's throne, and German rearmament), had a prosperous future. The resistance and the fight against fascism were regarded as obligatory by the minority who, in Italy as elsewhere, saw the upheavals which culminated between 1939 and 1945 in a world war as moral and political issues, but not necessarily national struggles. The few Italians who were ashamed of the alliance between their government and Nazism were part of the many who had fought against that government.

9. Culture

Before the war education, culture, and the arts were superficially ‘fascistized’. The Accademia d'Italia, set up in 1929 in imitation of France, never had any real prestige or significance although it numbered among its members a few men of real merit. Some, among them the philosopher Benedetto Croce and the playwright Roberto Bracco, refused to join it. In 1931 only thirteen university professors (out of a total of 1,200) refused to take a political oath of loyalty and forfeited their chairs; but those who took the oath did not teach from a fascist perspective if they were not themselves already fascists. Thus levels of moral and scientific learning remained high, as exemplified in the work of the jurists Piero Calamandrei and Arturo C. Jemolo, the philosophers Guido De Ruggiero and Guido Calogero, the historians Adolfo Omodeo and Federico Chabod, and the men of letters Concetto Marchesi and Luigi Russo.

The two reforms of secondary education (by Gentile in 1923 and Bottai in 1939) did not solve the problem of graduate unemployment, which was the result of an imbalance between education and the labour market. In different ways both sought to focus demand on professional and general education, discouraging access to those schools which could lead on to university. They failed because the social response was to reject this pattern of education and to continue to seek access to the universities. Nevertheless under Gentile's system the upper schools were of solid merit, although it is doubtful whether they would have maintained their standards had not Bottai's reforms been broken off due to the collapse of fascism. Bottai still had time to apply the racial laws to education, throwing out more than 200 teachers and some 5,000 Jewish students.

Failing to ‘fascistize’ the schools as a result of popular resistance to change, the regime had to limit itself to setting up a youth organization alongside them which sought to militarize all those between the ages of 6 and 21. This manufactured consensus was often so clumsy as to make fascism look ridiculous, while similar organizations for civil servants and workers (dopolavoro), with their trips, tours, films, and other functions, had a modest success, especially among the young.

All in all, though, fascism seemed to live from day to day without any deep foundations. Although it obsessively proclaimed its intention to last it did nothing to organize its own renewal, either at the centre or on the fringes. Thus no mechanism of succession to Mussolini existed and nothing was done to ensure that a genuine fascist technocracy, public or private, was created. There were transfers to and fro between party and technocracy, especially at the higher levels, but no institutions existed which could select and shape new political cadres and thereby compensate for the failure of the state educational system to produce such people.

In culture and the arts the war both accentuated existing trends and created new ones. The few opposition intellectuals who were at liberty included Croce, whose philosophical review La Critica had 3,000 subscribers in 1943. Alberto Moravia stayed on in Italy, though affected by the racial laws; in 1929, as a young man, he had published the nonconformist novel Gli indifferenti. Among those working in exile or abroad were the historian Gaetano Salvemini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, and writers and scholars such as Ignazio Silone, G. Antonio Borgese, Lionello Venturi, and Emilio Lussu. The writer, Lauro de Bosis died in an aircraft in 1931 after having dropped anti-fascist leaflets on Rome. In 1937 the historian Nello Rosselli was murdered in France by fascist thugs, along with his brother Carlo. Antonio Gramsci died in prison that same year; and among those who worked from prison or confinement were the economists Ernesto Rossi and Pietro Grifone, the music critic Massimo Mila, and the painter Carlo Levi.

By and large, however, Italian intellectuals (save for a few fanatical fascists) switched between periods of support for and detachment from the regime, deluding themselves that by doing so they kept their work above everyday events; examples include the poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, the playwright Luigi Pirandello, and the painter, Giorgio Morandi. The words of the famous poet Eugenio Montale, written in 1925, certainly did not apply everywhere and to everyone: For this alone can we tell you today:
What we are not, what we want not.


On the other hand, in a totalitarian regime any speaking out was immediately suspect. With the outbreak of war opposition journals appeared, among them Oggi, edited by Mario Pannunzio and Arrigo Benedetti and suppressed in 1942, and Primato, actually produced by the minister for public education Bottai, an expert at playing the double game who combined flirting for moderation with a background as boss of a gang of fascist thugs. The list of contributors to Primato includes many noteworthy intellectuals; some were anti-fascists, such as Luigi Salvatorelli, Cesare Pavese, and Sergio Solmi, others non-fascist, among them Montale, Umberto Saba, Cesare Zavattini, and Giaime Pintor who later died in the resistance.

The parts played by Pavese, an anti-fascist, and Elio Vittorini, a left-wing fascist, were particularly important. It was through their efforts that American literature ( Faulkner, Dos Passos, Saroyan, Steinbeck, Melville, Gertrude Stein, and others) was translated and distributed through Italy. It was work which encouraged doubt, dissent, criticism, and renewal, carried out under the noses of fascist censors who were too ignorant to recognize its subversive character. Both deserve to be remembered not only as translators but as authors. Whatever may be said about their dependence on American models, they found tones which today can be interpreted as alarm calls. Thus in the allusive voyage of Conversazione in Sicilia (Vittorini, 1941) ‘abstract furies’ and the invocation of ‘new duties’ were based on the desperate wretchedness of Sicilians and on a mythical America, a ‘heavenly kingdom on earth’ where everyone ate several times a day. Much of the Italian literature, poetry, criticism, and historiography of subsequent decades was genetically linked to the war: examples include Pavese, Massimo Mila and Carlo Levi, Vittorio Sereni, Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, Beppe Fenoglio, and Franco Venturi.

In the world of music the operatic style of the 19th century came to an end with Puccini's Turandot ( 1924), and during the war composers destined to influence future generations such as Giorgio F. Ghedini, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Goffredo Petrassi (the latter two working with the twelve-tone scale) managed to continue producing work. Jazz, which was banned by fascism, had little influence on the mediocre Italian light music of the day. Regional folk music persisted, but aroused no particular interest.

There was much noteworthy activity by architects, painters, and sculptors. Leaving aside the vexed question of which of the contemporary schools they belonged to, an incomplete list would include: Giuseppe Terragni, Edoardo Persico, Marcello Piacentini, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio de Chirico, Arturo Tosi, Felice Casorati, Alberto Savinio, Filippo De Pisis, Ottone Rosai, Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Bruno Cassinari, Giacomo Manzù, Marino Marini, and Alberto Viani.

Despite fascist censorship, the war stimulated a renaissance in film-making (examples include Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, made in 1942, and Vittorio De Sica's I bambini ci guardano, made in 1943) which exploded in 1944–5 with the first breath of freedom and opened the era of neo-realism. Early post-war products of this cinematic flowering include Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà and De Sica's Sciuscià, Ladri di biciclette, and Umberto D. Its rapid spread world-wide was a sign that Italy had emerged from her period of tyranny and suffering and that one of the world's oldest civilizations still had new things to say.

Lucio Ceva, Giorgio Rochat, and Lucio Ceva (Intelligence), ( andTr. John Gooch)

Bibliography

Knox, M. , ‘The Italian Armed Forces, 1940–1943’, in A. R. Millett and W. Murray (eds.), Military Effectiveness, Vol. III (Boston, 1988).
—— Mussolini Unleashed (Cambridge, 1982).
Lamb, R. , War in Italy: 1939–45 (London, 1993).
Mitchell, B. R. , European Historical Statistics, 1750–1950 (New York, 1975).
Sullivan, B. R. , ‘The Italian Armed Forces, 1918–1940’, in Millett and Murray, op. cit., Vol. II.
On the Italian historiography of the Second World War, see also Mussolini , note at end.