After the end of the second world war, several of Mussolini’s generals said that they believed that Il Duce had been “mad for four years”. Others claimed that he was incompetent, wayward and with no grasp of strategy. A few allowed him moments of brilliance. All agreed that his great mistake had been to think that the army could be led by men appointed for their politics rather than their military skills. And, as John Gooch spells out again and again in his scrupulous account of Mussolini’s wars, Italy at every stage lacked resources, which made her ever more fatally beholden to Germany, her dangerous and untrustworthy ally.
In 1922, Mussolini inherited a country with a troubled history and reputation when it came to fighting. Having vacillated over which side to join in the first world war, then sided with the Entente, Italy suffered a catastrophic defeat at Caporetto, her reputation barely redeemed by later bravery, and came away from the Paris Peace Treaty humiliated. It was, as Gabriele D’Annunzio famously put it, a “mutilated victory”. What Mussolini instinctively understood was that to win a place at the top table of the Great Powers he needed to forge a “new resurgent state”, while modernising his inadequate military. What he really dreamed of was a new Roman empire, full of italianità and romanità, one that would cover the Mediterranean and north Africa, include a generous slice of the Balkans and open gateways to the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
His first test, retaking Libya, conquered and then mostly lost in the first world war, succeeded largely through brutality and the merciless hunting down of rebels. It brought to the fore two men, Rodolfo Graziani and Pietro Badoglio, who emerged as ruthless if conservative soldiers and who would have a hand in most of Italy’s warfare in the years to come. For Mussolini, the experience was nothing but positive. It had shown Italy to be effective and tough, his soldiers possessed of spirit and will, which was exactly what he wanted from his “new Fascist man”. When, in 1935, he advanced on Abyssinia, he was undeterred by the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, and though victory came with yet more savagery – and the use of poison gas – it gave him the empire he craved.
All this, however, used men and materiel. Support for Franco in the Spanish civil war ate up planes, trucks, ammunition and left Italy with a deficit of over 40 billion lire, but did not stop Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, from proclaiming it to be “a new formidable victory for Fascism: perhaps up to now, the greatest”.
The top table beckoned, but it was clear that to sit at it Mussolini would need friends. On 22 May 1939 he signed the “Pact of Steel” with Hitler, committing their two countries to each other’s aid if either was at war, while at the same pointing out that Italy, depleted by Abyssinia and Spain, would not be ready to fight until 1943. When Germany went to war without him, he sat out an uneasy year of neutrality, but once the French Maginot line was breached, he sensed that he could wait no longer without forfeiting his share of the spoils.
In 1940, Mussolini knew perfectly well that Italy lacked the manpower or resources – tanks, mortars, rifles, iron, copper, steel, nickel, rubber and oil – for more than a single short campaign. But he never much liked his senior fascists, the gerarchi, or the generals who surrounded him and never believed in experts unless they agreed with him. As the war in Europe spread, Italy was sucked into campaigns across north and east Africa, Russia and the Balkans, so the only way that Fascist Italy could earn her place was by depending ever more on Germany. Some historians have maintained that Italy really became subordinate to Germany only when Rommel arrived in north Africa in February 1941, but Gooch believes it was inevitable from the start. He is good on the meetings between Mussolini and Hitler, when the Führer harangued a partner whose feebleness he increasingly deplored and whose needs he seldom met. Italian soldiers sent to the Arctic Russian plains to crush, so they were told, the barbaric Bolshevists, sometimes marched on paper boots. At every turn, Italy’s equipment was inferior and scarcer than that of its ally. “Fascist Italy,” Gooch writes, “continued on its chosen path towards defeat.”
Over much of Gooch’s long and fascinating book hangs Mussolini’s personality. By turn gungho and monosyllabic, truculent and cheerful, he changed his senior soldiers around, issued orders and then cancelled them, committing Italy to battles she could not win. Gooch is skilful at carrying his narrative forward, through painful campaigns and quixotic tactics, through advances and retreats, victories and losses.
And the losses were indeed overwhelming. By the time Tunis fell to the allies in May 1943, and all north and east Africa was lost, some 400,000 Italians had been taken prisoner, and almost 30,000 were dead. The 17-month Russian campaign saw a third of the army of quarter of a million soldiers die, and 70,000 taken prisoner, many soon also to die on forced marches and in camps.
By the spring of 1943, Mussolini was running out of time. Rome was awash with plots to topple him and there was talk of a separate peace deal with the allies. The value of the lira had collapsed, food prices kept rising and there were strikes across the industrial north. Italians were exhausted, hungry, angry and longing for peace. The Duce’s sudden end, ousted by his gerarchi, arrested by the king, then rescued by a squadron of German gliders from the top of a mountain in the Abruzzi, is only briefly touched on by Gooch. It is enough to know, perhaps, that the final peace treaty, signed in Paris in 1946, did not bring glory to Italy, but rather further humiliation. Forced to pay heavy reparations and give up its empire – along with Istria and Dalmatia which it had won in 1918 – Italy could not quite escape the contempt of the allies for having so willingly tolerated 20 years of fascist corruption, incompetence and greed. But by now, Mussolini himself was dead, shot and hanged upside down by partisans from the roof of a petrol station in Milan.
Mussolini never lost faith in what he regarded as an Italian army composed of “well trained troops nourished by a strong combative spirit”. A few were indeed just that, fanatic fascists, loyal to the end. But for the most part, Mussolini’s armies, as Gooch meticulously chronicles, were badly trained, confusingly and ineptly led, imbued by a culture of cruelty, insufficiently fed and lacking in almost everything they needed to confront the allies and stand up to the Germans. It is hard to imagine a finer account, both of the sweep of Italy’s wars, and of the characters caught up in them. That Mussolini’s soldiers fought for so long, against such odds, often with such tenacity and courage, is what really stands out.
• Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935-1943 is published by Allen Lane (RRP £30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
