Le guerre italiane 1935-1943: Dall'impero d'Etiopia alla disfatta (review)

Giorgio Rochat, Italy's most accomplished military historian, has brought together forty years of work on the Italian armed forces into this comprehensive survey of the wars waged by the Fascist regime. It is a melancholy story with few successes and many failures. Rochat carefully analyzes them all, assessing the state of military preparedness of the Italians and the conduct of the individual campaigns. The book covers the conflicts from Ethiopia to the loss of North Africa, the invasion of Sicily, the ouster of Mussolini in July 1943, and the terribly botched surrender to the Allies on 8 September, but the author actually begins his study with the brutal repression in Cyrenaica (Libya) in 1930 and 1931 under the direction of General Rodolfo Graziani. As Rochat points out, one of the nastier aspects of the Fascist regime was the implementation of extraordinarily cruel measures in the colonial wars. For instance, Mussolini specifically authorized the use of poison gas and even bacteriological weapons against the Ethiopians.

In contrast to the many compromises that the regime made with domestic economic, religious, and cultural power centers, the Duce's authority in matters of foreign policy was largely unchecked, but Rochat notes that the Italian armed forces were essentially the same military machine that fought in the Great War. Two key decisions shaped the future. In 1925 Mussolini, faced with resistance from the high command, sacrificed his reformist War Minister Antonino Di Giorgio, ensuring that the old military establishment would remain in place. Although Marshal Pietro Badoglio was nominally and briefly both head of the army and of the joint high command, he made no effort to force cooperation among the various service branches. The situation was made worse by the fact that Mussolini, unlike other major leaders, had no military cabinet of his own. With the military left in charge of its own sphere in exchange for integrating itself into the regime, a real disconnect developed between political decisions on war and the readiness of the armed forces.

Rochat shows how the regime made a significant commitment of military power in East Africa, Libya, and Spain with very little return. Entry into the Second World War only made things worse. New weapons were planned but very few were delivered before the outbreak of the war. Despite relatively large military budgets, Italy went to war alongside Nazi Germany in June 1940 woefully unprepared. The air force lacked a modern fighter plane, the navy failed to develop radar, lacked an air arm, and failed to coordinate with the air force. Even Italy's large submarine fleet proved totally ineffective.

Italy's declaration of war was really predicated on the calculation that Britain would collapse after the defeat of France. When this did not happen, the Italians could neither control the Mediterranean Sea nor contend with British power in North Africa. As Rochat shows, the so-called parallel war did not last long. Italy's war was soon subordinated to that of Nazi Germany.

Rochat's book does not pretend to break new ground but it is a clear and coherent presentation of all the existing research on the war. It deserves to have an English-language edition, if only to bring the work of a notable historian to English-language readers.