Tobruk E-Book

William F Buckingham

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

The siege of Tobruk was the longest in British military history. The coastal fortress and deep-water port was of crucial importance to the battle for North Africa, and the key that would unlock the way to Egypt and the Suez Canal. For almost a year the isolated garrison held out against all attempts to take it, and in the process Tobruk assumed a propaganda role that outweighed its great strategic value, becoming a potent symbol of resistance when the war was going badly for the British. Goebbels referred to the garrison as 'rats,' and they proudly adopted the insult as a title, and became the 'Rats of Tobruk.' When it finally fell to German tanks on 21 June 1942 with the loss of 25,000 men, Churchill said it was 'one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war'. William F. Buckingham's startling account, drawing extensively on official records and first-hand accounts from both sides, is a comprehensive history of this epic struggle, and essential reading for anyone with an interest in the Western Desert Campaign.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

1 Lines in the Sand and Black Shirts: Egypt, Libya and the Horn of Africa, c.200 BC – 1940

2 Down the Slippery Slope, Ready or Not: Italy’s Entry into the Second World War, September 1939 – September 1940

3 Stroke and Counter-Stroke: The Italian Invasion of Egypt and Operation COMPASS, June 1940 – December 1940

4 Tobruk Captured: The British Advance into Libya, December 1940 – January 1941

5 COMPASS Concluded: The Conquest of Cyrenaica and the Battle of Beda Fomm, 22 January 1941 – 9 February 1941

6 Tobruk Menaced: The Arrival of the DeutschesAfrikakorps in Libya and the British Retreat from Cyrenaica, 7 February 1941 – 8 April 1941

7 Tobruk Invested: 8 April 1941 – 12 April 1941

8 Tobruk Attacked: 12 April 1941 – 18 April 1941

9 Tobruk Assailed: 19 April 1941 – 4 May 1941

10 Tobruk Besieged: 4 May 1941 – 25 October 1941

11 Tobruk Relieved: 25 October 1941 – 10 December 1941

12 Epilogue: Tobruk Taken: 10 December 1941 – 21 June 1942

List of Illustrations

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

Introduction

The Libyan port of Tobruk occupies a key place in the history of the Second World War in North Africa, largely due to the two hundred and forty day siege endured by the garrison composed of British, Australian, Indian and Polish troops between April and December 1941. This was the longest siege in British military history, and included a complete garrison relief carried out by sea in the face of overwhelming German and Italian airpower. Moreover, the series of deliberate attacks on the port by Rommel’s newly arrived Afrika Korps between 11 April and 2 May 1941 was the first time the German blitzkrieg technique employing Panzers and close air support had been held and successfully repulsed by defenders holding fixed defensive positions. The fact that the rebuff was delivered by an inexperienced and relatively poorly equipped Allied force made the event all the more noteworthy.

The defence of Tobruk was also one of very few bright spots in the dark days of 1941. At that time the German triumph in continental Europe and the Dunkirk evacuation were very fresh in mind, and German invasion of Britain seemed a very real possibility. The Blitz was at its height and the Axis tide of victory seemed unstoppable after the humiliating series of Allied reverses in Holland, Belgium, France, Greece and Crete. Tobruk thus joined the Battle of Britain and the stalwart defence of the Mediterranean island of Malta as a beacon of hope for the beleaguered British public, and the relief of the port in December 1941 was greeted with much jubilation. Its importance became unfortunate when on 21 June 1942, Tobruk’s new South African-led garrison surrendered to Rommel after less than a day of fighting with the loss of 30,000 Allied prisoners of war. Occurring a mere six months after the end of the great siege, the shock of this event was rendered all the more intense.

Published works on Tobruk tend to focus, to a greater or lesser extent, on the great siege and this event from the Allied perspective, with some more recent works covering matters from the Axis perspective as part of a wider examination. While these provide perfectly adequate and in some instances very detailed coverage, most focus narrowly on the siege and subsequent Axis recapture of Tobruk and thus do not fully address the crucial role the port played in a wider sense. The Desert War swung back and forth along a coastal strip running for a thousand miles of Egypt and the Italian colonial provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Operations were restricted to this narrow cockpit by the Mediterranean to the north and impassable terrain to the south, and Tobruk played a vital role in this operational ebb and flow, not only when the fighting came close by. The port was located virtually astride the road and rail links that ran through the coastal strip, which in turn meant that neither side could afford the luxury of ignoring it whether it lay in the immediate battle area or suddenly far to the rear of the fighting front as was often the case. Possession of Tobruk thus became a major preoccupation for both sides, and this imperative exerted a clear and overriding influence on the conduct of operations in the Western Desert throughout the whole of the period between September 1940, when the Italians launched their ill-fated invasion of Egypt, and the final German defeat at El Alamein in November 1942.

A second major omission in works on Tobruk concerns the portrayal of the Italian contribution which, wittingly or otherwise, tends to echo British and German wartime attitudes. The British view was shaped largely by wartime propaganda, with seemingly endless lines of Italian prisoners of war marching happily into captivity being among the most iconic images from the war. The German view is well illustrated by Rommel, who made no secret of his contempt for his Italian allies and took every opportunity to denigrate and humiliate them. As a result, the current casual reader could be forgiven for not realising that Tobruk was actually located inside an Italian colony, or that the Italian armed forces actually provided the bulk and backbone of the Axis effort at Tobruk and indeed North Africa generally. Without them Rommel would have been hamstrung: he was dependent on Italian logistical resources and Italian military units, which were largely less mobile but more numerous, to pin down his British opponents and guard the flanks of the fast moving armoured operations with which he is associated. Even more importantly, the Australian acquisition of Tobruk in January 1941 also involved a siege, for the Italians had invested much time and treasure in constructing the port’s defences. The quantity and quality of those defences is not only readily apparent from the effort which was required to overcome them. That those same defences played a key role in the subsequent Allied defence of Tobruk against Rommel is frequently overlooked, as is the fact that a British survey to establish a shorter defensive perimeter discovered that Italians had not only occupied the only feasible line of defence, but had done so with good deal of tactical expertise.

This work will therefore address these omissions as part of a wider and properly rounded account, that not only tells the story of the epic siege of Tobruk using official documentation, captured German records and participant accounts, but also provides the background that shaped events at Tobruk, thus placing the latter in its proper context. There will also be a deliberate emphasis on the Italian perspective in Libya, elsewhere in Africa and the Mediterranean region, again to set matters in their proper context and attempt to compensate for the neglect of this important angle in other accounts.

Finally the author would like to thank Jonathan Reeve at Tempus Publishing for once again tolerating a sometimes elastic approach to deadlines, and the members of the Tanknet Internet Military Forum who provided invaluable help and advice, often at short notice.

William F. Buckingham

Bishopbriggs, Glasgow, February 2008

1

Lines in the Sand and Black Shirts: Egypt, Libya and the Horn of Africa, c.200 BC – 1940

At 17:30 Hours on 4 November 1942 Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel ordered his Panzerarmee Afrika to commence a general withdrawal from Egypt along the coast road running west toward the Libyan frontier. The withdrawal was prompted by Operation SUPERCHARGE, the second of two major British attacks that made up what has become known as the Battle of El Alamein. The first attack, codenamed Operation LIGHTFOOT, began on the night of 23–24 October 1942 after an intensive deception effort and preparatory artillery barrage. A two-pronged infantry assault, LIGHTFOOT was intended to breach the extensive Axis minefields and push the fighting into back into their carefully sited defensive zone. There the defenders could be worn down, a process referred to as ‘crumbling’, and Rommel’s mobile reserves drawn into the fight. With this achieved SUPERCHARGE was launched on the night of 1–2 November, aimed at the junction between the Deutsches Afrika Korps and the less well equipped Italian forces occupying the southern portion of the Axis line.

By 3 November SUPERCHARGE was exerting such pressure that Rommel issued a preliminary withdrawal order, but this was countermanded by Hitler via one of the grandiloquent statements that were to become increasingly common as the war tilted against Germany. Rommel was ordered to ‘…stand fast, yield not a yard of ground and throw every gun and every man into the battle.’1 During the morning of 4 November the pressure finally became too much. While elements of the British 1st Armoured Division fought German armoured units around Tel el Aqaqir at the northern end of the attack frontage,2 elements of the British 7th and 10th Armoured and 2nd New Zealand Divisions found their way through the Axis line at the south-west corner of the salient created by SUPERCHARGE. British armour swiftly cut the main Axis supply line, known as the Rahman Track, overran the Deutsches Afrika Korps battle headquarters complete with its commander Generalleutnant Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma and began pushing north and west into the Axis rear areas. Facing the imminent encirclement and destruction of his Panzerarmee, Rommel appealed to Hitler to rescind his no retreat order. When the Führer reluctantly agreed in the late afternoon Rommel immediately ordered a withdrawal to Fuka, almost fifty miles west of the fighting front.

Anxious to avoid giving their provenly resilient foes the opportunity to regroup, the British began a pursuit operation at dawn on 5 November. While this failed to yield the complete encirclement envisaged, it nonetheless prevented the retiring Axis forces from more than pausing at Fuka and extended Rommel’s initial withdrawal to Mersa Matruh, a further fifty miles or more to the west. The fuel-starved remnants of the 21 Panzer Division fought a successful delaying action just east of Mersa on 6 November. A series of similar actions were fought all the way along the North African coast, at Sollum and Halfaya on 11 November, just west of Tobruk two days later and near Derna on 15 November. The port of Benghazi fell five days after that, on 20 November 1942. The pace of the Allied advance then slackened as Axis resistance stiffened and the supply lines from Egypt lengthened. It took just under four weeks, from 25 November to 13 December, to overcome Axis defences near El Agheila and a similar period ending on 16 January 1943 to deal with a more extensive blocking position west of Buerat. Thus was Panzerarmee Afrika harried west out of Egypt, across the breadth of Libya and halfway into Tunisia before finally coming to a stop behind the Mareth Line, three months and over a thousand miles after Rommel had ordered the Axis withdrawal from El Alamein.

The remainder of the fighting in North Africa up to the final defeat and surrender of the Axis forces there in May 1943 was distinct in nature and geography from the earlier fighting in the Western Desert. In addition, with the exception of the short-lived Allied foray into Greece and subsequent debacle on Crete in 1941, the Western Desert campaign in Libya and Egypt was the sole focus of British and Commonwealth ground operations in the west from the evacuation of France in June 1940 until the TORCH landings in Algeria in November 1942. The campaign swung back and forth along a thousand-mile coastal strip of Egypt and Libya, trammelled by a combination of largely featureless and indefensible terrain and logistical limitations. The port of Tobruk played a crucial role in this operational ebb and flow. It was the principal logistic hub for the initial Italian invasion and occupation of western Egypt that sparked the campaign in 1940. More famously the port was also the scene of three separate sieges, one of which being not only unbroken but also, at 242 days, the longest in British and Commonwealth military history. Unsurprisingly therefore, possession of Tobruk was a major preoccupation for both sides that exerted a clear and distinct influence on the conduct of their operations. Consequently, while it may not have been apparent at the time, the Axis withdrawal past Tobruk on 12 November 1942 not only marked the point where the port sank back into military obscurity, but also ended a distinct chapter in the history of the Second World War.

The circumstances that led to the conflict which raged around Tobruk in the early 1940s went back the better part of a century, to the period of colonial expansion into Africa by the European Great Powers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Egypt was an Ottoman province until 1805, when civil war permitted Muhammad Ali Pasha to seize control. After gaining Ottoman approval for his semi-autonomous rule, Muhammad Ali launched a series of military campaigns into Arabia and Libya and embarked on a series of domestic reforms aimed at improving the Egyptian economy. These included establishing state monopolies over key commodities and manufacturing, and the cultivation of cotton in the fertile Nile Delta. International trade was also encouraged and the new regime actively promoted Egypt as a conduit for the transport of goods between Europe and India, through the ancient Mediterranean port of Alexandria, down the River Nile and overland to the Red Sea. The construction of a canal linking Alexandria to the Nile ordered by Muhammad Ali in 1819 was intended to assist this trade route.

Muhammad Ali died in 1849 but his successors continued his reforms and their associated development. In 1854 the French engineer and diplomat Vicomte Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps approached Said Pasha with the idea of constructing a new canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; a similar link had been constructed in the thirteenth century BC and maintained with varying degrees of success until finally falling into disrepair in the eighth century AD. International financial backing for the new project was secured via the Egyptian-owned Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez in 1858, with Egyptian and French backers owning most of the stock. Construction began on 25 April 1859 and was completed on 17 November 1869 at a cost of $100 million, the finished Canal running for just over a hundred miles from Suez at the head of the Gulf of the same name in the south to Port Said in the north. It did not follow the shortest route but instead linked three existing bodies of water, the Bitter Lakes, Lake Manzilah and Lake Timsãh, in order to minimise excavation. Construction was further simplified and speeded by the fact that the course of the Canal was virtually level, which meant there was no need for locks to carry the watercourse over topographical elevations.

However, by the time the Canal was complete Egypt was heading for a financial crisis. Said Pasha was succeeded by Ismail the Magnificent in 1863, who became Khedive in 1867. Ismail paralleled construction of the Suez Canal with an ambitious civil engineering programme that included extending the breakwater at Alexandria and modernising the harbour at Suez, improving coastal navigation with additional lighthouses and extending railway and telegraph networks across the country. The work was initially financed with profits from the sale of Egyptian cotton, which boomed when the American Civil War interrupted supply from the US southern states in the 1860s. By the end of the decade, however, this windfall was running out, foreign investors were becoming wary of extending additional credit to the Egyptian government and Ismail began to accrue a formidable national debt. As a result the financial burden of Ismail’s extensive reforms began to fall disproportionately on the impoverished general population. The overall result was to render Egypt increasingly vulnerable to external interference.

The British initially opposed the construction of the Suez Canal, and their objections delayed finalisation of the agreement between Said Pasha and de Lesseps for two years. They also exploited the situation to gain favourable concessions for the British-owned Eastern Telegraph Company and the establishment of a British-influenced Bank of Egypt. The completion of the Canal increased British interest, for it offered a way of avoiding the lengthy voyage around Africa to reach India and other British colonies in the Far East. This was not merely a matter of length of journey, for the passage could also be extremely hazardous, as shown by the example of HMS Birkenhead. One of the Royal Navy’s first iron-hulled vessels, the Birkenhead was carrying troops from Portsmouth to Algoa Bay in the Western Cape when she struck an uncharted rock in the early hours of 26 February 1852. The ranking officer aboard, Lieutenant-Colonel Seton of the 74th Regiment of Foot, mustered the personnel on deck and ordered them to stand fast as the few boats available were loaded with dependants. The soldiers obeyed the order as the ship broke up under them, and only 193 of approximately 640 souls aboard survived, the remainder being drowned in the rough sea or taken by sharks. The incident inspired Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the ‘Birken’ead Drill’, and it is also widely acknowledged as the root of the maritime tradition of women and children first in times of emergency.

Egypt’s financial straits gave the British the opportunity to make up for their earlier disinterest in the Suez Canal and to extend their involvement in Egyptian domestic affairs. In 1875 Ismail was obliged to sell Egyptian shares and thus control of the Canal to the British for £976,582, and within four years Egypt was being governed by an Anglo-French partnership labelled Dual Control. The latter forced Ismail from power as Khedive in favour of his son Tawfiq in 1879.3 A short period of relative stability degenerated into widespread unrest against foreign interference in Egyptian affairs led by an Egyptian Army officer named Ahmed Urabi. The British, concerned for their huge investments in Egypt, sought support for military action from the French and Italians and when the latter declined, decided to go it alone. On 11 July 1882 Royal Navy vessels bombarded the Egyptian gun batteries at Alexandria and the port itself in an effort to quell an open revolt. The exchange cost the British two ships, and a large naval landing party only succeeded in occupying the city two days later after fierce resistance. The episode prompted Tawfiq to seek British protection, leaving Ahmed Urabi as the de facto ruler of Egypt, and persuaded British Prime Minister William Gladstone to despatch an expeditionary force to restore the situation.

The British assembled a 24,000 strong force on Cyprus and Malta, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley. Wolseley was not only a veteran of the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and numerous other colonial campaigns but had also been instrumental in Cardwell’s Army reforms in the early 1870s. His successful campaign against the Ashanti in what is now Ghana in 1873–74 won him promotion, the GCMG and KCB, a grant of £25,000 and made him a household name in Victorian Britain; the term ‘all Sir Garnet’, referring to his painstaking preparations for the Ashanti campaign also became a national catchword for efficiency and competence. As Urabi’s forces were blocking the western route from Alexandria, Wolseley opted to approach the Egyptian capital Cairo from the east via the Suez Canal instead. The force from Cyprus and Malta thus entered the Port Said end of the Canal while an additional 7,000 strong force despatched from India via Aden did the same at the Suez entrance, all supported by forty Royal Navy warships. Landings at Ismailia, roughly midway along the Canal and just under a hundred miles east of Cairo, began on 20 August 1882.

On 26 August a British force seized Kassassin, twenty miles from Ismailia, to secure fresh water supplies and captured seven Krupp guns and a large quantity of stores at a cost of five dead and twenty-five wounded. After two unsuccessful attempts to retake Kassassin the Egyptians fell back to a blocking position at Tel-el-Kebir on 10 September 1882. After a careful reconnaissance Wolseley decided on a dawn surprise attack with a night approach march beginning on the night of 12–13 September. The force was guided across the open desert by Royal Navy Commander Wyatt Rawson using the stars and his naval navigation training. This succeeded in placing the attack force undetected within 300 yards of the Egyptian positions, and the attack began as dawn broke at 05:40 on 13 September 1882. The resulting battle lasted under an hour and ended with an Egyptian collapse but was nonetheless hard-fought, costing the lives of 2,000 Egyptians and 480 of Wolseley’s men.4 British cavalry entered Cairo the on 14 September and Khedive Tawfiq was restored to power twelve days later. Ahmed Urabi was captured, tried and sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to banishment to Ceylon. Direct British involvement in Egypt was supposed to be short-term, but control of the area proved simply too important to British Imperial interests. Thus Egypt became a British Protectorate in 1914 and when the Protectorate ended on 28 February 1922 and Egypt became a nominally independent state again, the British retained control of defence and Imperial communications among other specific responsibilities. In the event, direct British involvement in Egypt did not end until 1956, after the ill-fated invasion of the country with the French prompted by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The beginning of British involvement in Egypt coincided with the arrival of Italy on the European imperial stage, following the unification of the country brought about by the events of the Risorgimento (Resurgence) between 1859 and 1871. As possession of overseas colonies was then a major indicator of great power status, the new Italian state displayed an understandable interest in joining the ‘scramble for Africa’, focussing attention on the Red Sea coast where Italian merchants had been plying their trade for some time. In 1885, with the tacit consent of the British, Italian forces occupied the Red Sea port of Massawa and began to extend their influence into Eritrea. Local opposition was not especially formidable; in March 1885 an Italian force used balloons to throw a body of tribesmen into panic, and on another occasion a night attack on Italian troops was routed with electric searchlights, to the amusement of the troops involved. Events did not always end with such merriment, however. In January 1887 an Italian force moving to relieve a besieged garrison was ambushed and wiped out at Dogali, losing 430 dead and eighty-two wounded from a force of 550. Nonetheless, by the end of the decade Italy was the proud possessor of the colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland in the Horn of Africa.

Their colonial appetite suitably whetted, the Italians set about extending their control over the neighbouring and independent Kingdom of Abyssinia, later known as Ethiopia, ruled by King Menelik II from his capital at Addis Ababa. On 2 May 1889 the Italians succeeded in obtaining Menelik’s signature to the Treaty of Wichale. However, the wording of the Abyssinian Amharic language version differed significantly from the Italian. The former bound Menelik to nothing more than the option of voluntary co-operation with the Italians at his discretion, whereas the latter effectively made him an Italian vassal; Menelik was understandably less than impressed on discovering the Italian duplicity and began planning to overturn his agreement with them. A premature Abyssinian invasion of Eritrea was repulsed and Italian forces took the opportunity to pursue the retreating invaders into Abyssinia; their occupation of a number of towns then sparked what became known as the First Abyssinian War. The Italians appear to have assumed that the Abyssinians could also be cowed with balloons and electric spotlights, but their new adversaries turned out to be rather more resilient and sophisticated. King Menelik had spent the first half of the 1890s obtaining modern small-arms and rifled artillery for his army; ironically his armoury included 2 million rounds of small-arms ammunition obtained from the Italians as a bribe for earlier co-operation.

The Italian Governor of Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, travelled to Rome to receive parliamentary plaudits for his invasion of Abyssinian territory, and somewhat rashly promised to not only finish the job, but to also capture King Menelik and parade him in a cage, before returning to Eritrea to supervise operations. As the Abyssinians lacked a regularised supply system to complement their modern weaponry, Baratieri’s initial strategy was to wait until they had denuded the area around their camp of food before moving against them.5 This took rather longer than expected, however, and by early 1896 a combination of his own failing supplies and political pressure from Rome obliged Baratieri to make the first move. On the night of 29 February – 1 March 1896 a force of 10,600 Italian infantrymen and 7,100 native Askari,6 divided into four brigades and with fifty-six artillery pieces embarked on a six mile march from their base at Sauria to secure high ground overlooking the Abyssinian positions at Adowa.

They covered around two miles before running into a force of around 196,000 Abyssinians, around half of whom were equipped with modern firearms including magazine rifles. By the late morning Baratieri was obliged to order a retreat that swiftly degenerated into a rout, and by nightfall his force had been annihilated, losing 3,207 Italian and 2,000 Askari dead, 1,428 combined wounded and 954 missing. Abyssinian losses are estimated at 7,000 dead and 10,000 wounded. 700 Italian soldiers and 1,800 Askari were captured; seventy of the former and 230 of the latter were tortured to death before Menelik personally intervened. The surviving prisoners were later released for a ransom of 10 million Lire, although 800 of the captured Askari had their right hands and left feet amputated in the traditional local punishment for disloyalty. Baratieri’s force also lost all fifty-six of its guns, 11,000 rifles and all its transport and supplies. Baratieri himself escaped but was relieved of his command and tried for dereliction of duty. The resultant furore also brought down the Crispi government, while Menelik shrewdly refrained from invading Eritrea and thus turning the Italian setback into an excuse for a national crusade for revenge. On 26 October 1896 the new Italian government signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa that ended the First Abyssinian War and recognised the continuing autonomy of Menelik’s kingdom. Adowa remains the greatest military defeat inflicted on a Western power by an indigenous native force, and 1 March is the National Day for Abyssinia’s successor state Ethiopia.7

The humiliation meted out in Abyssinia did not cure the Italian hankering for African colonies, it merely shifted the focus further west. The ancient North African territories of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania belonged originally to the Greeks and Phoenicians respectively and fell to the Romans in the second century BC, who were in turn supplanted by Islamic Arab invaders in the decade following AD 640. In the sixteenth century a temporary power vacuum resulted in the Libyan coastline becoming a haven for the Barbary pirates until the Ottoman Turks occupied Tripoli 1551 and spread their influence across the region. The Ottomans divided their new acquisition into three provinces based on Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, and a semi-autonomous Pasha was appointed to govern the area from Tripoli in 1565. Ottoman control was far from rigid, however. The activities of the Barbary pirates were still tolerated to an extent and the Ottoman authorities operated a profitable sideline charging foreign traders protection money. In 1801 this practice rebounded on Pasha Yusuf Karamanli when he tried to raise the charge agreed with the newly independent United States of America in 1796. The Americans not only refused but retaliated by blockading Tripoli, as commemorated in the line of the US Marine Corps Hymn referring to the ‘Shores of Tripoli’; the resulting war ended with a treaty signed on 10 June 1805.

More importantly for the future, the decentralised and haphazard nature of Ottoman rule also permitted the Senussi to establish a strong presence in the desert hinterland of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. The Senussi was an Islamic political order established in Mecca by Sheikh Muhammad bin Ali al Senussi in the 1830s, which mobilised the indigenous desert tribesmen against Ottoman rule. By the 1880s the Senussi were virtually running a state within a state, complete with a capital at the oasis town of Kufra in the far southeast of Cyrenaica and a network of religious teaching establishments that spanned the Sahara. Despite their best efforts the Senussi were unable to totally expel the Ottomans and the territories remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1911, when the Italians arrived on the scene.

The Italian claim to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica went back to an Anglo-French appropriation of Ottoman territory via the 1878 Congress of Berlin, with the French giving tacit approval for a future Italian seizure of Tripoli as a quid pro quo for their occupation of Tunisia. In the event the Italians did not act until 1911, when political agitation resulted in considerable support for an invasion among the Italian public based on the twin assumptions that it would be easy and that the value of Libyan resources were worth the effort. The Italian government thus issued the Ottoman authorities with an ultimatum on the night of 26–27 September 1911 and, ignoring Ottoman proposals for a peaceful transfer of power, declared war two days later. Italian warships bombarded Tripoli on 3 October 1911, a 1,500 strong naval landing party secured the city and a 20,000 man Italian Army expeditionary force arrived on 10 October. The Cyrenaican capital of Derna and port of Tobruk were rapidly seized, but the port of Benghazi proved a tougher nut to crack and Ottoman resistance stiffened thereafter.

As in Abyssinia fifteen years earlier, the subsequent campaign proved a little more difficult than the Italians had envisaged. An Italian force was almost surrounded near Tripoli on 23 October, and an outright defeat at Tobruk on 22 November wiped out a large portion of the original expeditionary force and obliged a reinforcement to expand it to 100,000 men. The war then developed into a positional stalemate, with the Italians holding Tripoli and a number of besieged enclaves along the coast. Italian attempts to carry the conflict into the Aegean and Dardanelles had little effect, and the stalemate continued until Turkey was distracted by the outbreak of the First Balkan War at the beginning of October 1912. The Italians seized the opportunity to press their advantage and a treaty ceding control of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica to Italy was signed at Lausanne on 18 October 1912. Given that the conflict had cost the Italians over 3,000 dead and around 80 million lira per month, it is ironic that the terms of the Treaty were virtually identical to those the Ottomans had offered at the outset.

However, the treaty was not recognised by the Senussi, who continued their struggle against foreign domination with some success. By the outbreak of the First World War the Italians had failed to quell the unrest in Cyrenaica and were obliged to restrict their presence to coastal areas and the ports of Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk, leaving the bulk of the territory to the Senussi. A truce that recognised this de facto separation brought a measure of peace in 1917, and on 25 October 1920 the Italians regularised the arrangement with the Agreement of Ar-Rajma. This conferred the title of Emir of Cyrenaica upon the Senussi leader, Sheikh Sidi Idris, and recognised his authority over Kufra and the other oasis towns in the interior of the territory. The peace was short-lived, however, once the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne removed the Ottoman Turkish claim to their North African territories. This was a welcome development for Mussolini’s Fascist government, newly installed following his March on Rome in October 1922. Il Duce was an enthusiastic proponent of Italian imperial ambitions and authorised his military commanders to take advantage of the situation. Italian troops thus occupied Senussi territory near Benghazi in early 1923, sparking the Second Italian-Senussi War. Emir Idris fled to Egypt, leaving an experienced commander, Sheikh Omar Mukhtar, to lead the resistance.8

Troops under Generale Pietro Badoglio, a veteran of the Italian campaign of 1911–1912, quickly brought northern Tripolitania under control and gradually extended Italian control into the south of the territory. Cyrenaica proved more difficult than envisaged however, and bands of Senussi waged a successful guerrilla campaign against Italian supply lines, outposts and isolated units until a short-lived truce was established on 3 January 1918. The following year Badoglio was promoted to Governor of Libya and military command in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica passed to Generale Rudolfo Graziani, who according to one account made being permitted to operate unfettered by Italian or international law a condition of accepting the command. Thereafter the campaign assumed a far more ruthless and brutal character. Italian motorised columns supported by aircraft ranged far and wide searching for the bases used by the Senussi bands, backed up by a concerted effort to cut their sources of supply. This included sealing wells, slaughtering livestock and clearing the population from the arable Jebel Akhdar region in the north of Cyrenaica; over 100,000 inhabitants were incarcerated in camps at Suluq and El Agheila where thousands died. In 1930 the blockade was extended to cut the Senussi off from external support, with the construction of a 320 kilometre barbed wire barrier running along the Egyptian border from the Mediterranean coast to the oasis at Al Jaghbub. The barrier was patrolled by armoured vehicles and aircraft, which were authorised to attack anyone approaching the barrier or even spotted in the vicinity. All this had the desired effect. Kufra, the last Senussi stronghold, fell to the Italians in 1931 and Omar Mukhtar was captured on 15 September the same year. His execution by hanging before an assembled crowd of 20,000 at Benghazi effectively marked the end of Senussi resistance.

Flushed with success, Italians turned their attention to similarly unfinished business in the Horn of Africa, where the drubbing they had received at the hands of the Abyssinians at Adowa in 1896 still rankled. The Italo-Abyssinian Treaty signed on 2 August 1928 was supposed to guarantee friendship and co-operation for twenty years and fix the border between Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland. However, the Italians then repeated their trick of reinterpreting the terms of the Treaty, this time to shift the new border further into Abyssinian territory; and in 1930 an Italian military garrison was established at the Walwal oasis inside the disputed zone. A survey of the border by the Anglo-Abyssinian Border Commission at the end of November 1934 was abandoned when it happened upon the fort at Walwal; a subsequent clash there at the beginning of December cost a total of 200 casualties, three-quarters of them Abyssinian. The latter appealed to the League of Nations for arbitration on 3 January 1935 but this proved of little practical benefit as the League merely exonerated both parties of blame for the incident after eight months of deliberation. The Italians, meanwhile, had put this hiatus to good use, securing French non-involvement in return for a pledge to support the latter against resurgent Germany, while moving 100,000 troops into Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.

The Italians attacked without a formal declaration of war on 3 October 1935, earning a censure from the League of Nations in the process. The initial invasion was carried out by a 125,000 strong force equipped with aircraft, armour and motor vehicles under Maresciallo Emilio De Bono, which advanced south from Eritrea. Within three days Adowa was in Italian hands but the town of Mekele, only seventy-five miles from the Eritrean border, was not secured until 8 November. The Abyssinians had mobilised around 500,000 men, but this vast host was poorly equipped; many warriors were armed with firearms that dated back to the First Abyssinian War, and others were reliant on spears and bows. Given favourable conditions they were still capable of inflicting serious damage on the invaders, however. On 15 December 1935 a 1,000 strong force of Eritrean troops supported by nine Italian CV33 light tankettes pulling back from a threatened forward position at Mai Timkat ran into a large Abyssinian blocking force at the Dembeguina Pass. An attempt to force the pass with the tanks failed when the vehicles ran into impassable terrain and their accompanying infantry were overrun and wiped out by a pursuing force of Abyssinians; the latter then eliminated the tanks and killed their crews after disabling their running gear and machine-guns. An Italian relief column with a further ten CV33s was ambushed and bottled up by the simple but effective expedient of rolling large rocks onto the trail in front and behind the column. Attempts to manoeuvre around the roadblock led to some tanks slipping off the trail and down a steep slope where they overturned; two vehicles that made a stand permitting some of the accompanying infantry to escape were finally knocked out by Abyssinian warriors climbing onto their rear deck and setting fire to their fuel tanks.9

Such outcomes were more the exception than the rule, however, and the Italians had no intention of retiring as they had done in 1896. De Bono was relieved for his tardiness on 6 November 1935. He was replaced by former Libyan Governor Badoglio, whose former Libyan subordinate Graziani led a second invasion of Abyssinia from Italian Somaliland six days later, and once again the conflict rapidly assumed a more brutal complexion. Mussolini had authorised the use of poison gas in October 1935 in defiance of Italy’s signature to the Geneva Protocol of 1925, and Badoglio’s forces began dropping mustard gas bombs and spraying the gas from the air onto Abyssinian troops, civilian villagers and Red Cross encampments from December 1935. This was subsequently augmented by a deliberate terror campaign authorised by Mussolini in June and July 1936 that included firebombing villages and towns, executing prisoners, taking and executing civilian hostages and forcing the civilian population into labour camps. 1936 opened with a series of military engagements. Graziani’s forces destroyed a large Abyssinian force at Ganale Dorya between 7 and 10 January, and the Italians inflicted 8,000 casualties on another Abyssinian force at Tembien thirteen days later. An Abyssinian counter-attack was defeated with heavy casualties at Amba Aradam on 10 February, and another clash at Tembien ended with the same result on 27 February.

The end came at Maychew on 31 March 1936, when the Italians annihilated a 40,000 strong Abyssinian force led by Emperor Haile Selassie in person. The Italians emphasised their ascendancy with a concerted drive on the Abyssinian capital. The ‘March of the Iron Will’ saw a 12,500 strong force mounted in 1,785 vehicles including tanks and motorised artillery advance 200 miles in ten days, although the bulk of the opposition came from bad weather and the terrain rather than the Abyssinians.10 Addis Ababa was occupied on 5 May 1936, Abyssinia was officially annexed two days later, and King Victor Emmanuel was its proclaimed Emperor two days after that on 9 May. The territory was merged with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland on 1 June 1936 to become Italian East Africa, but this did not mark the end of the fighting. An Abyssinian force unsuccessfully attempted to liberate their capital on 28 July 1936, leading to the execution of the Archbishop of Dessie for alleged complicity, and the surrender of an Abyssinian force on 18 December led the Italians to declare the territory pacified. This did not prevent an attempt on Graziani’s life as he was made Viceroy of the new colony on 19 February 1937, which led to an estimated 30,000 executions. The final clash in the field took place on the same day near Lake Shala, when Italian forces destroyed the last remnants of Haile Selassie’s army and killed two of the three surviving resistance leaders; the third was captured and executed five days later.

Back in North Africa the Italians spent the 1930s consolidating their grip on Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In 1934 the territories were reorganised into the new province of Libya, which was sub-divided into the provinces of Benghazi, Darnah, Misratah and Tripoli; a fifth area in the south-west dubbed South Tripolitania remained under military control. The new colony was governed by a civilian Governor-General, a post retitled First Consul in 1937, via a General Consultative Council that included Arab representation. The focus of the Italian colony also diverged markedly over this period, in comparison with what had gone before and with its Egyptian neighbour. As we have seen, the British presence in Egypt was essentially strategic in nature, being concerned largely with maintaining control over Imperial communication links with India and other British colonies in the Far East. Some Italian development work in Libya was carried out in the same vein. For instance in March 1937 Mussolini opened the Via Balbia in person, a tarmac road running the entire 935 mile length of the Libyan coast from Egypt to Tunisia. Primarily, however, the new colony was seen as a solution to overpopulation and unemployment in Italy proper via a process referred to as demographic colonisation, the ultimate goal of which was to transplant half a million Italians to Libya by the 1960s. Libya was thus to become Italy’s ‘Fourth Shore’ in the Mediterranean and the settlers were given access to the most fertile land and government assistance via the state-run Libyan Colonisation Society, which provided credit and oversaw the necessary civil engineering work. The first 20,000 settlers, dubbed the ventimilli, arrived en mass in October 1938 and by 1940 their numbers had swollen to 110,000, comprising around twelve per cent of the total Libyan population.

Thus by the late 1930s, Italy had succeeded in attaining the overseas colonies it had sought since the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. Italian East Africa dominated the Horn of Africa, dwarfing and virtually surrounding British Somaliland and thus dominating much of the southern shore of the Red Sea and access to the Suez Canal. Farther west Libya, nestling between French North Africa and the British Mandate of Egypt, provided Italy with its ‘Fourth Shore’ in the Mediterranean and an outlet for Italy’s surplus population. Opposition to all this was restricted largely to protests and ineffective sanctions from the League of Nations, as the attitude of the other major European colonial powers, Britain and France, was rather more ambivalent. The latter actively co-operated to limit the scope of the anti-Italian sanctions and unsuccessfully attempted to appease the Italians by offering them Abyssinian territory, most notably via the secret Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935. Named for the British and French foreign ministers that drew it up, the Pact conceded two-thirds of Abyssinian territory to the Italians without troubling to consult with the Abyssinians themselves but was stymied when the details became public knowledge in December 1935, in part via publication in a French newspaper. The subsequent scandal caused some embarrassment to the British and French governments, prompted the resignation of both foreign ministers and led to the abandonment of the Pact.

However, finally meeting Italy’s long-held colonial aspirations was not an end in itself, but merely part of a wider, ongoing process. This is clear from Mussolini’s personal definition of Fascism published in the Italian Encyclopaedia in 1932: ‘…For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of [national] vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence.’ It was this Darwinian impulse that shaped and drove Mussolini’s domestic and foreign policy. In the former sphere, the prestige afforded by colonial success bolstered Fascist standing in Italy proper, where the irreligious nature of Fascism sat uneasily with the devout Catholicism of the bulk of the populace, and supported Mussolini’s long-term aim of displacing and superseding the Italian crown. In the foreign policy sphere, warfare was the preferred method of generating and demonstrating national vitality and spreading Fascist ideology, and a new outlet appeared just as military operations in Abyssinia were winding down.11

On 17 July 1936 years of political unrest in Spain sparked a military revolt by right-wing Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, against the government of the Spanish Second Republic. While the bulk of the army rallied to Franco, the Spanish navy and air force remained loyal to the government. This presented the Nationalists with a serious problem, for large numbers of their troops were stationed in North Africa and other overseas garrisons. Franco thus appealed separately to Rome and Berlin for assistance, simultaneously providing Mussolini with the opportunity to support political fellow-travellers and to establish a friendly power on France’s western border. A volunteer Avazione Legionaria drawn from the Regia Aeronautica landed in Spain on 27 July 1936, and a Luftwaffe detachment arrived the following day. The transport mission lasted until September, during which the latter alone lifted almost 9,000 men, forty-four artillery pieces and well over a hundred tons of ammunition and other equipment.12 The aircraft involved were also configured as bombers, and Italian aircraft began bombing Republican forces on the island of Majorca from 16 August 1936, while the transport mission was still underway. Neither was the bombing restricted to military targets. Attacks began on Madrid shortly thereafter, and air attacks on the Spanish capital became a regular occurrence; a Luftwaffe raid on 27 October 1936 killed sixteen civilians and wounded a further sixty.

Franco’s initial plan was to seize Madrid and Nationalist troops reached the outskirts of the city at the beginning of November 1936. They then launched a series of abortive attacks supported by Italian aircraft dropping leaflets urging the inhabitants to rally to the Nationalist cause or face the consequences. The fighting petered out in mutual exhaustion on 23 November, and the Nationalists began redrawing their plans for a longer war of attrition. This prompted Mussolini to commit Italian ground troops to Spain, following a conference with his senior military commanders on 12 December 1936. The first detachment of 3,000 volunteers from the Regio Esercito landed at Cadiz eleven days later, and by February 1937 the force had grown to 44,000 organised into four divisions, the fully motorised Army division Littorio and three partly motorised Camicie Nere (Blackshirt) or CCNN divisions made up of regular soldiers and volunteers from the Fasci di Commbattimento militia. Renamed the Corpo Truppe Volontarie or CTV at the end of February, the force was fully supported with tank, armoured car and field, anti-tank and anti-aircraft artillery units. The CTV played a major role in the battle of Guadalajara in March 1937 and subsequent fighting until Franco’s Nationalists finally triumphed in February 1939, and at its peak deployed 50,000 men. Mussolini thus achieved his aim, but at considerable cost in lives, material and treasure. Of the 78,500 Italian volunteers that served in Spain, 3,819 were killed and a further 12,000 wounded, and all the military equipment deployed including 120 tanks, 760 aircraft and 6,800 motor vehicles, was written off. The equipment loss costed between six and eight and a half billion lire, which equated to between fourteen and twenty per cent of annual Italian government spending over the period.13

Mussolini’s involvement in Spain had a another, further reaching consequence. Before 1933 the relationship between the Italian dictator and Adolf Hitler was one of mutual admiration. The successful Fascist March on Rome in October 1922 that put Mussolini in power was the inspiration for Hitler’s less successful Munich Putsch in November 1923, and Mussolini supported Hitler’s rise in the early 1930s in the press and among his Fascist contemporaries. Relations cooled drastically after Hitler’s unsuccessful attempt to bring Austria into the National Socialist fold via a coup in July 1934, which prompted Mussolini to mass troops on the Brenner Pass. They warmed again after following the League of Nations imposition of economic sanctions on Italy following the latter’s invasion of Abyssinia, when Hitler increased coal exports to Italy to offset their impact on Italian industrial activity; these tripled from twenty-three per cent of Italian consumption in 1933 to sixty four per cent by 1936.14 The relationship became increasingly close thereafter. A formal alliance, dubbed Rome–Berlin Axis, was concluded in November 1936 and Italy joined the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact a year later, on 25 November 1937. On 22 May 1939 the Italian and German foreign ministers, Count Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the Pact of Steel that bound the signatories to render immediate military support to one another in the event of war. With hindsight, co-operation in Spain can be seen as the beginning of a process that drew Italy into increasingly closer co-operation and ultimately a subordinate relationship with Hitler’s Germany. The final step came with Ciano’s signature of the Tripartite Pact on 27 September 1940, alongside that of Hitler himself and the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, Saburo Kurusu. By that time Italy had been at war with Britain for just over four months, and the port of Tobruk had been acting as the main supply conduit for Maresciallo Graziani’s invasion of Egypt for fourteen days. It is doubtful that anyone at the time fully appreciated the crucial role the port was to play in unfolding events.

Notes

1 Cited in Barrie Pitt, The Crucible of War VolumeIII: Montgomery and Alamein, p. 217

2 Sometimes rendered as Tel el Aqqakir or Aqqaqir

3 Sometimes rendered Tewfik

4 Figures cited in Field Marshal Lord Carver, The Seven Ages of the British Army (London: Grafton, 1986), p. 169

5 Sometimes rendered as Aduwa or Adwa

6Askari: East African term for soldier or policeman

7 All figures cited in Greg Blake, ‘[The] First Italo-Abyssinian War: Battle of Adowa’, Military History Magazinehttp://www.historynet.com/magazines/military_history/3028431.html

8 Sometimes rendered Umar al Mukhtar

9 Ian W. Walker, Iron Hulls Iron Hearts: Mussolini’s Elite Armoured Divisions in North Africa (Marlborough: The Crowood Press, 2003), p. 36

10 Ibid., p. 36

11 MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime and the War of 1940-1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

12 For figures and details of the Luftwaffe effort see Captain F.O. Miksche, Paratroops: The History, Organisation and Tactical Use of Airborne Formations (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), p. 22

13 Figures cited in Walker, p.17

14 Figures from Knox, p. 11

2

Down the Slippery Slope, Ready or Not: Italy’s Entry into the Second World War, September 1939 – September 1940

At 04:40 on 1 September 1939 Luftwaffe aircraft began bombing targets inside Poland, marking the beginning of the German invasion codenamed Fall Weiss (Plan White). Planning for this had begun on Hitler’s order immediately after the dismemberment and occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. By 5 September the three-pronged German attack had thoroughly penetrated the Polish border defensive zone, and three days later elements of one German unit had reached the outskirts of the Polish capital Warsaw, after an advance of 140 miles. Ground attacks on the city began on 9 September, and by 13 September the city was surrounded and besieged. The Battle of Bzura, a Polish counter-attack west of Warsaw on 9 September, ended after ten days with the encirclement and destruction of the Polish force; German dive-bomber units alone expended almost 400 tonnes of ordnance in the course of the battle.1 The effective end came on 17 September when Soviet forces invaded Poland from the east, as agreed in a secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed only seven days before Hitler launched Fall Weiss. The Poles nonetheless fought on doggedly for another nineteen days; the last operational Polish unit surrendered near Lublin on 6 October 1939.

The reaction of the Western Allies to all this was swift and unequivocal, particularly given their previous appeasing behaviour when Hitler had re-militarised the Rhineland, carried out Anschluss with Austria and annexed Czechoslovakia. After delivering an ultimatum, Britain and France declared war on 3 September. The reaction of Hitler’s Axis partner was more circumspect. Although Article III of the Pact of Steel stipulated that the signatories were to come to each other’s assistance in the event of war, Mussolini proclaimed Italy a non-belligerent power on 2 September 1939 and remained aloof. This was in line with a specific exclusion to the Pact should any conflict involve Britain and France, not least due to the latter’s ability to sever Italy’s vital overseas trade links. Mussolini’s appetite for new territory may also have been sated somewhat by his recent conquest of Albania. In March 1939 the Italians presented King Zog of Albania with a list of impossible demands, which were duly rejected on 6 April 1939. The following day the Italian fleet appeared off the Albanian coast and landed an expeditionary force under Generale Alfredo Guzzoni at Durazzo, St. Giovanni de Medua and Valona. Further landings were carried out on 8 April, prompting King Zog to flee to Greece the same day, and the Albanian state and crown were incorporated into Italy on 16 April 1939. More importantly, in September 1939 Italian public opinion was opposed to war and King Victor Emmanuelle III forced Mussolini into declaring non-belligerence by exercising his veto over political decisions on 1 September 1939.2 While Mussolini styled himself Il Duce, his regime nonetheless remained subordinate to the Italian crown.

However, in practical terms a key factor in Mussolini’s wish to avoid conflict with Britain and France was the condition of the Italian armed forces. Mussolini was well aware that Italian forces were poorly prepared to fight a full-scale war against a first-rank foe, and that the situation would take at least three or four years to rectify. Indeed, this was the understanding on which the Pact of Steel was signed, and it was also cited to Hitler in as an explanation for Italy’s declaration of non-belligerence; Mussolini reinforced the point by appending a huge list of the materials and equipment the Italian armed forces required in order to go to war with any prospect of success.3 Planned measures for the three- to four-year period included expanding the Army by a further 500,000 men, totally modernising its artillery arm, building a further six battleships and modernising existing units. Given all this, it might be illuminating at this point to examine the Italian military in a little more detail.

Superficially, the Italian armed forces appeared to be the perfect tool to support Mussolini’s conflict-oriented Fascist ideology, and Fascist propaganda made much of the image of a modern, well equipped, highly efficient and ruthless military machine. There was an element of truth in this portrayal. Italian equipment was generally equal to that produced elsewhere in the inter-war period, and world class in some instances. The tri-motor Cant Z506 established eight separate world records for range, payload and altitude in 1936 and 1937, for example, and the Breda Ba88 Lince set two world speed records in April 1937. The Italian military could also be innovative in employing their technology, and proved capable of learning from experience. The deployment of largely motorised forces like the CTV in Spain, for example, was novel for the time. Even more so was the large scale use of motor vehicles in difficult terrain, such as the 1,785 assorted vehicles deployed in the1936 advance on Addis Ababa, and the experience thus gained led to the formation of an experimental all-arms Regimento Misto Motorizzato (Mixed Motorised Regiment) in Libya, consisting of motorcycles, tanks, infantry and heavy weapons.4 The Italians were also pioneers in the development of airborne forces, after perfecting the Salvatori static line parachute. Thus equipped, Italian troops carried out the world’s first collective parachute drop at Cinisello airfield near Milan on 6 November 1927. The paratroopers were graduates of the world’s first formal parachute training school, established earlier that year, and by the end of the 1930s the Italians fielded a number of parachute battalions, which participated in manoeuvres in Libya in 1937 and 1938.5 The Italian airborne force thus preceded that of the Soviets by several years, of the Germans by almost a decade, and the British and Americans by over a decade.

However, the reality behind the propaganda images was somewhat different, and these examples were largely the exception rather than the rule. In part this was due to a paucity of funding. Although Italian military expenditure in the inter-war period was greater than that of France and three quarters that of Britain, it represented only a small fraction of Italy’s gross national product and peaked at only twenty-three per cent of the latter in 1941.6 More important, however, were the shortcomings of Italian weapon manufacturers and Italian industry in general. The Fascist regime nationalised between a fifth and a quarter of Italian heavy industry during the Great Depression, more than any other Western state. At the same time the Fascist authorities permitted, if not openly encouraged domestic manufacturers to establish an unchallenged monopoly in weapon and equipment manufacture. The deleterious effects of this ideologically driven policy were exacerbated by industry preference for artisanal methods rather than mass production and corrupt, inefficient procurement procedures that vastly inflated costs; Italian manufactured steel cost four times the world market price, and warship production costs were at least double those of other national shipbuilders, for example. At best, all this resulted in poorly framed specifications, stultifying bureaucrat approval processes, extended delays between prototype approval and mass production, and long production runs of equipment optimised to suit the manufacturer rather than the end user. At worst it resulted in the Italian military being supplied with sloppily manufactured aero engines that routinely failed in flight, armour plate with falsified proof tests, poorly manufactured naval propeller shafts with covertly welded cracks and tank armour that shattered like glass when struck by projectiles.7 As one writer on the subject succinctly summed up, ‘Italy’s weapons and weapon systems were the least effective, least numerous, and most overpriced produced by a major combatant in the Second World War’.8

These were serious handicaps by any standard, but they might have been offset to at least an extent with some of the dynamic thinking and energetic action extolled as virtues by the Fascist regime. Unfortunately these attributes were not particularly noteworthy in the Italian military, and especially with regard to largest of the three services, the Regio Esercito. Indeed, the army’s general philosophy can be summed up as consisting of three assumptions, namely that men were more important than machines, mind would invariably triumph over matter, and sheer numbers counted for more than quality. At the top the army’s main preoccupation appeared to be creating jobs for the largest number of officers possible, in part as a reaction to cuts in the size of the officer corps in the early 1920s. One scheme implemented in 1938–39 addressed this and the preoccupation with numbers by simply reducing the strength of divisions from three to two component regiments; this not only allowed a near doubling of the number of divisions in the Army’s order of battle, but also created numerous additional command and staff posts. The War Ministry was also a rich source of less than onerous posts for officers, not least because the Ministry reverted to ending the working day at 2:00pm in July 1940, only a month after Italy’s declaration of war on Britain and France. Many of the officers employed in the Ministry were involved in adding an additional set of obstacles to the design and procurement process, via a tortuous procedure that required every new weapon and piece of equipment to be approved individually by the Army General Staff training section, the Ministry secretariat, the appropriate Ministry department, the relevant service branch technical office, and the relevant branch inspectorate. Modifications at any stage required the item to undergo the whole protracted process all over again.9