Military history of Italy during World War II

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This page aims to serve as a focal point for studying Italian military history during the era of World War II.

Contents

1 At the start of World War II
2 Italy enters the war: June 1940
3 Italian forces in France: 1940 - 1943
4 Hostilities commence in North Africa: 1940
5 Campaigns in East Africa: 1940 - 1941
6 Italian forces in the Balkans: 1940 - 1943
7 Italian troops on the Eastern Front: 1941 - 1943
8 The Italian Navy in the Mediterranean: 1940 - 1943
9 Italy on the defensive in North Africa: 1940 - 1943
10 \"The soft underbelly\": 1943 - 1945
11 References
12 See also
13 External links

At the start of World War II

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Following this event, Mussolini would change his mind repeatedly as to whether he intended to enter the war. The British commander in Africa, General Wavell, correctly predicted that Mussolini's pride would ultimately cause him to enter the war. Wavell would compare Mussolini's situation to that of someone at the top of a diving board: "I think he must do something. If he cannot make a graceful dive he will at least have to jump in somehow; he can hardly put on his dressing-gown and walk down the stairs again."

Mussolini's Under-Secretary for War Production, Carlo Favagrossa, had estimated that Italy could not possibly be prepared for such a war until at least October 1942. Italy was a minor industrial power (one of the poorest in Europe). One might not consider Italian industry to have equalled more than 15% of that of France or of Britain should one compare the number of automobiles in Italy (~372,000) to those of Britain and France (~2,500,000). The lack of a stronger automotive industry made it difficult for Italy to mechanize its military. Italy had also given tons of weapons and supplies to the Spanish Fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 - 1939.

The Italian Army (Regio Esercito) remained comparatively weak and had suffered while carrying out the April 1939 annexation of Albania. As Bierman and Smith wrote↑ , «the Italians were, militarily, barely on the same planet». The Italian tanks were of poor quality. Italian radios were virtually non-existent. The Italian artillery was of World War I-era quality. The Regia Aeronautica's primary fighter was the Fiat CR-42, a biplane. The Regia Marina had no aircraft carriers. Bierman and Smith state (pages 13 - 14) that the Italian regular army could field only about 200,000 troops at the start of World War II. They estimate the Regia Aeronautica could field approximately 1,760 aircraft, only 900 of them considered as "front-line machines".

Italy enters the war: June 1940

Despite Mussolini's description of the German-Italian alliance as an "Axis of Blood and Steel", he responded to the German invasion by declaring Italy neutral and a "non-belligerent". However, on June 10, 1940, as the French government fled to Bordeaux, declaring Paris an open city, Mussolini felt the conflict would soon end and declared war on Britain and France. As he said to the Army's Chief of Staff, Marshal Badoglio, "I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought." Mussolini had the immediate war aim of expanding the Italian colonies in North Africa by taking land from the British and French colonies.

Italian forces in France: 1940 - 1943

Despite the desperate military situation that France faced fighting the Wehrmacht in the north in June 1940, the Italian offensive stalled and the fortified Alpine Line. But on June 25, 1940, France would surrender to Germany. Italy occupied some small areas of French territory along the Franco-Italian border.

In November 1942 the Regio Esercito participated in invading south-eastern Vichy France and Corsica (Case Anton). Italian military government of French departments east of the Rhone continued until September 1943. (This had the effect of providing a de facto temporary haven for fleeing French Jews.)

Hostilities commence in North Africa: 1940

Within a week of Italy's declaration of war, the British 11th Hussars had seized Fort Capuzzo in Libya. In an ambush east of Bardia, the British captured the Italian Tenth Army's Engineer-in-Chief, General Lastucci. Mussolini ordered Marshal Graziani, commanding the Tenth Army in Libya, to mount an attack into Egypt. Graziani wondered how such an operation could possibly succeed, but he tried anyway. On September 13, 1940, the Tenth Army crossed the border and the assault would eventually carry through to Sidi Barrani, 95 Km inside Egyptian territory. The Italians then began to entrench themselves.

At this time Britain had only 30,000 troops available to defend Egypt against 250,000 Italian troops, though note that the Italians had not concentrated their troops in one place — rather they remained spread out from the Tunisian border in western Libya to Sidi Barrani in Egypt. Graziani, not knowing the British lack of strength, chose to stockpile fuel and ammunition, a task which the Royal Navy forces operating in the Mediterranean tried to obstruct by attacking Italian supply-ships. At this stage Italian losses remained minimal, but the efficiency of the British Royal Navy would improve as the war went on. In addition, Graziani lacked faith in the strength of the Italian military, one of his officers wrote: "We're trying to fight this...as though it were a colonial war...this is a European war...fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts...We are not fighting the Abyssinians now."

Campaigns in East Africa: 1940 - 1941

In addition to the well-known campaigns in the western desert during 1940, the Italians opened an additional front in June 1940 around their colonies of Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland and Eritrea in east Africa.

As in Egypt, the Italian forces with ~70,000 Italian soldiers and ~180,000 native troops outnumbered their British opponents, but Ethiopia stood isolated far away from the Italian mainland, and thus cut off from re-supply, which seriously limited what operations the Italians could undertake.

The initial Italian attack in East Africa took three different directions; into Sudan, Kenya and British Somaliland. The British in Somaliland had to evacuated their garrison to Aden. In Sudan and Kenya Italy captured a few tens of miles of territory. The Regio Esercito then adopted a defensive posture against an expected counterattack.

The Italian Navy (Regia Marina) had only a small squadron in the area — based at Massawa in Eritrea, and consisting of a few destroyers and submarines. Nonetheless, and despite a shortage of fuel, it posed a threat to the British convoys heading up the Red Sea. An attack on a British convoy resulted in the sinking of most of the surface ships of the Italian squadron. The submarines escaped and made an epic voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to return to Italy.

The expected British counter-attack arrived in the shape of the Indian 4th Infantry Division, which made a thrust from Sudan, with supporting attacks from Kenya and an amphibious assault. The Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa fell in May 1941. The Regio Esercito in East Africa made a final stand around the town of Gondar in November 1941.

Italian forces in the Balkans: 1940 - 1943

In October 1940, Italy invaded Greece from the Italian colony of Albania. In part, the growing influence of Italy's Axis partner Germany in the Balkans encouraged this attack. Both Yugoslavia and Greece had governments friendly to Germany, and Italy launched the invasion of Greece hastily after Romania had allied itself with Germany.

However the assault went badly, and the Greeks counter-attacked into Albania. After British troops arrived in Greece in March 1941 British bombers operating from Greek bases could bomb the vital Romanian oil fields. Hitler decided that he could not allow his ally to suffer a defeat and committed German troops to invade Greece via Yugoslavia (where a coup had deposed the German-friendly government).

The Wehrmacht invasion, Operation Marita, started on 6 April 1941, and ended with a complete Axis victory in May (some 28 Italian division participated in this invasion). Although the Italians thus evaded defeat, the Germans now assumed control of Greece. An Italian-dominated Mediterranean Sea now appeared much more difficult to achieve. Italian troops would occupy parts of Greece and Yugoslavia until the Italian surrender to the Allies in September 1943.

Italian troops on the Eastern Front: 1941 - 1943

In July 1941 some 62,000 Italian troops left for the Eastern Front to aid in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). In July 1942 the Regio Esercito expanded this expeditionary corps to a full army (200,000 men), which took part in the outskirts of the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 - February 1943), where it suffered heavy losses (some 20,000 dead and 64,000 captured). By the summer of 1943 Rome had withdrawn the remnants of these troops to Italy. Many of the Italian POWs captured in the Soviet Union died in captivity due to the harsh conditions in the Soviet prison camps.

The Italian Navy in the Mediterranean: 1940 - 1943

The Regia Marina (Italian Navy) could not match the overall strength of the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean Sea, and wisely declined to engage in a confrontation of capital ships. Since the British navy had as a principal task the supply and protection of convoys supplying her outposts in the Mediterranean, the mere continued existence of the Italian fleet (the so called Fleet in being) caused problems to Britain, which had to utilise warships sorely needed elsewhere to protect Mediterranean convoys.

On November 11 1940, Britain launched the first carrier strike of the war, using a squadron of Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers. This raid at Taranto left three Italian battleships crippled or destroyed for the loss of two British aircraft shot down. Some claim that the success of the raid on a fellow Axis-member led the Japanese to plan the Pearl Harbour attack of [7 December]] 1941, while others claim that the Japanese had at least considered this very operation earlier. In any case, Japanese military planners studied the attack on Taranto with great care.

The Regia Marina found other ways to attack the British. The most successful involved the use of frogmen and riding manned torpedoes to attack ships in harbour. The 10th Light Flotilla, which carried out these attacks, sank or damaged 28 ships from September 1940 to the end of 1942. These included the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant (sunk in the harbour of Alexandria on 18 December 1941), and 111, 527 tons of merchant shipping.

Italy on the defensive in North Africa: 1940 - 1943

On December 8 1940 the British Operation Compass began. Planned as an extended raid, it resulted in a force of British, Indian and Australian troops cutting off the Italian troops. Pressing the British advantage home, General Richard O'Connor pressed the attack forward and succeeded in reaching El Agheila (an advance of 500 miles) and capturing tens of thousands of enemy. The Allies virtually destroyed the Italian army in North Africa, and seemed on the point of sweeping the Italians out of Libya. However Winston Churchill halted the advance be stopped and ordered troops dispatched to defend Greece. Weeks later the first troops of the German Afrika Korps started to arrive in North Africa (February 1941) to reinforce the Italians.

German General Erwin Rommel now became the leading Axis commander in North Africa. Italian and British troops continued to fight each other. Under Rommel's direction the Axis troops pushed the British and Commonwealth troops back into Egypt; however at the Second Battle of Alamein (October/November 1942) General Bernard Montgomery halted Rommel's advance and the Allies assumed the offensive. After the Operation Torch landings in the Vichy French territories of Morocco and Algeria (November 1942) brought the arrival of American forces, the Allies defeated the Axis armies in North Africa by May 1943.

\"The soft underbelly\": 1943 - 1945

A combined force of American and British Commonwealth troops invaded Sicily in Operation Husky, 10 July 1943. German generals again took the lead in the defence, and though they lost the island, they succeeded in ferrying large numbers of German and Italian forces safely off Sicily to the Italian mainland. With the loss of Sicily, popular support for the war diminished in Italy. The Grand Council of Fascism ousted Benito Mussolini (25 July 1943), and the new government began secret negotiations with the Allies to end the fighting and to come over to the Allied side.

British troops crossed the short distance from Sicily to the 'toe' of Italy in Operation Baytown on 3 September 1943. Two more Allied landings took place on September 9 at Salerno (Operation Avalanche) and at Taranto (Operation Slapstick). The Allies negotiated the Italian surrender, signed an armistice (September 3) and announced it on September 8; however German troops moved quickly to disarm Italian forces and take over critical defensive positions, including Italian-occupied south-eastern France and Italian-controlled areas in the Balkans. The surrender meant that the Allied landings at Taranto took place unopposed, with troops simply disembarking from warships at the docks rather than assaulting the coastline.

On September 9 1943 a German Fritz X guided bomb sank the Italian battleship Roma as it moved to its surrender point.

After the surrender and the disarming of Italian troops by the Wehrmacht, the multi-national Allied armies continued to advance through Italy, despite the opposition of the German army of occupation. Such Italian troops as the Allies could reorganize fought alongside the Allies for the rest of the war, while some troops loyal to Mussolini's northern Italian Social Republic continued to fight alongside the Germans. From this point on a large Italian resistance movement in the north fought a guerrilla war against the Germans and Mussolini's forces.

Winston Churchill had long regarded southern Europe, militarily, as the "soft underbelly" of the continent (note his advocacy of the Dardanelles operation in World War I and of the invasion of Italy in World War II). But Italy itself proved anything but a soft target: the mountainous terrain gave Axis forces excellent defensive positions and it also partly negated the Allied advantage in motorized and mechanized units. The final Allied victory over the Axis in Italy would not come until the spring of 1945 after Allied troops breached the Gothic Line.

References

↑ John Bierman and Colin Smith, , (2002)

External links

[Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia (CSIR) (Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia)], by Shawn Bohannon.

History of World War II by nation

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