Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 Read online

  Mussolini held these fears in contempt. He was aiming at war, not peace. In a far-reaching speech–an updated version of a long-held vision–to the Fascist Grand Council on 4 February 1939, he envisaged a war with the western powers to attain the Italian version of Lebensraum. Italy, he said, was effectively landlocked by British domination of the Mediterranean, blocking access to the oceans (and prosperity) through control of the Strait of Gibraltar in the west and the Suez Canal in the east. Encircled by hostile countries and deprived of scope for expansion, Italy was ‘a prisoner of the Mediterranean’. The task of Italian policy was, therefore, to ‘break the bars of the prison’ and ‘march to the Ocean’. But whether this ‘march’ was to the Indian or the Atlantic Ocean, ‘we will find ourselves confronted with Anglo-French opposition’.8

  He was soon enough given another reminder that he could only march to Germany’s tune. The German occupation on 15 March of what was left of Czechoslovakia, as usual without prior notice to her Axis partner, showed where the power lay. The Munich settlement brokered by Mussolini had simply been ripped up by Hitler. When Hitler’s emissary presented a verbal message of explanation and gratitude to Mussolini, a despondent Duce wanted to withhold the news from the press. ‘The Italians would laugh at me,’ he lamented. ‘Every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message.’9 However, he saw nothing for it but to accept the German fait accompli with good grace. He even initially resisted the suggestion of Count Galeazzo Ciano, his Foreign Minister since 1936 and married to his daughter, Edda, to annex Albania to give the Italian people some ‘compensation’ for their humiliation. The annexation of this corrupt and backward little kingdom, already heavily under Italian influence, was, however, only deferred. It took place three weeks later, on 7 April 1939. Albania now became little more than Ciano’s ‘grand duchy’, as the Foreign Minister–young, dashing, but vain, corrupt and lightweight, preferring golf and womanizing to hard work at the diplomatic desk–called it.10 Compared with Hitler’s spectacular coups, it was small beer indeed. But Mussolini saw it merely as a staging post. Already by May he was contemplating using Albania for an attack on Greece to ‘drive the British from the Mediterranean basin’.11 As Ciano told Hitler (who allegedly listened with enthusiasm and managed to keep a straight face), the Italian programme was to make ‘Albania a stronghold which will inexorably dominate the Balkans’.12

  But, immediately, the British guarantee for Greece and Romania that had followed the Italian takeover in Albania had the effect of driving Italy even closer to Germany through a military alliance, the ‘Pact of Steel’, signed on 22 May 1939.13 The two countries pledged mutual military assistance and support in the event of one or other power becoming involved in war. It was a case of ‘Fascist diplomacy at its sloppiest’:14 Italy had committed herself to unconditional backing of Germany even in a war entirely of German making.

  The Italian understanding, as Mussolini soon reminded Hitler, was that war should not be unleashed before 1943 at the earliest, when Italian preparations would be complete.15 But the very day after the signing of the ‘Pact of Steel’, Hitler was telling his generals to prepare for war at the first opportunity against Poland.16 By mid-July, rumours about German intentions towards Poland had hardened into alarming reports from the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico, that Germany was preparing to strike at Danzig the following month.17 Ciano started to worry that Italy would be drawn into the war ‘in the most unfavourable conditions’, with gold reserves and metal stocks almost at zero-level and military preparations woefully incomplete. He was adamant that war must be avoided.18 Mussolini wavered between the idea of another ‘Munich’–an international peace conference with the aim of postponing war for another three years or so–and the desire to fight alongside Germany, for honour, and to grab ‘his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia’, as Hitler was tempting him to do. When Ciano met Hitler and Ribbentrop at the German dictator’s Alpine residence, the Berghof, in the mountains above Berchtesgaden, on 11–13 August 1939, he was left in no doubt that Germany was set on military action. Italy had been kept in the dark once again about German intentions, and Hitler had ‘decided to strike, and strike he will’. Ciano returned to Rome ‘disgusted with the Germans’, who had ‘betrayed us and lied to us’ and were now ‘dragging us into an adventure which we do not want’. He felt Italy’s hands were free, and fervently recommended keeping out of the war.19 Mussolini’s nervousness continued. But his strong instincts were to fight alongside the Germans if it came to armed conflict. There was still a chance, he imagined, that the western democracies would not march. In that case, he wanted to profit from the cheap gains that would be on offer. But should it come to war, as seemed likely, he thought Italy would look cowardly in the eyes of the world if she backed away. Another point weighed with him, according to Ciano: his fear that Hitler, in rage at Italian non-compliance with the ‘Pact of Steel’, might ‘abandon the Polish question in order to square accounts with Italy’.20

  The stunning news late in the evening of 22 August of Germany’s imminent Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union–another surprise for Italy–was a blow for the western democracies that gave Mussolini a fillip. His belligerent mood was encouraged by the sycophantic (and wholly misleading) report of Alberto Pariani, the Under-Secretary for War, of the good state of readiness of the army. This was utterly contradicted by the forthright opinion of King Victor Emmanuel III himself, when Ciano conferred with him on 24 August, that ‘we are absolutely in no condition to wage war’, and that ‘the Army is in a "pitiful” state’. The officers were not qualified, the equipment was old and obsolete, and public opinion was hostile to the Germans. The King was adamant that Italy had to stay out of the war, at least for the time being, and await events. Most importantly, he insisted upon being involved in taking any ‘supreme decisions’.21 It was tantamount to a veto on Mussolini taking Italy into the war.

  Next day, Ciano relayed the King’s views to a ‘furiously warlike’ Mussolini, who felt duly deterred from taking the country to war and compelled to accept non-intervention. On receipt of a letter from Hitler asking for ‘Italian understanding’ for imminent action, Mussolini was forced to admit that ‘it will be opportune for me not to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations’, adding that intervention was dependent upon immediate delivery of military supplies and raw materials to withstand an attack by Britain and France.22 A list, extraordinarily exorbitant in its demands, was eventually put together on 26 August. It was embellished still further by Attolico, acting on his own initiative in order to discourage any possible German compliance with the requests by asking for immediate delivery of all supplies requested before Italy could enter the war. That did the trick. The requests were totally impossible for Hitler to fulfil. He let Mussolini know he understood Italy’s position and asked only for a continued friendly stance. He proposed, Ciano noted, ‘to annihilate Poland and beat France and England without help’. It was a blow to Mussolini’s prestige. Hitler had taken his country to war within six years of attaining power, while he, the Duce, was in no position to take Italy to war after almost seventeen years in power. That rankled. He told Hitler on 26 August: ‘I leave it to you to imagine my state of mind in finding myself compelled by forces beyond my control not to afford you real solidarity at the moment of action.’23 His own wishes had been plain. But he had been forced to bow to pressure from within his own regime not to embroil the country in war. For now, he had to swallow the bitter pill and accept the novel status, unknown to international law, of ‘non-belligerence’–less demeaning, certainly, than ‘neutrality’, but falling far short of what Fascist martial values demanded.24

  It would be ten months before the opportunity arose to make good the climbdown of late August 1939. This time the opportunity would be too good to miss.

  II

  That in August 1939 Mussolini’s wish to take Italy into the war had to yield to pressure to
stay out of it, not least because of the King’s hostility to intervention, demonstrates real limits to the dictator’s power. Mussolini’s German counterpart was in a much stronger position. After Hitler became head of state on the death of President Hindenburg at the beginning of August 1934, at which point the army swore an oath of allegiance to his person, his power was absolute in the sense that no individual and no body or institution could pose any constitutional challenge and there was no base of alternative loyalties. He tightened his hold over the armed forces in February 1938 in a reorganization of the central control structure under his own direct leadership. In Italy, by contrast, almost seventeen years after Mussolini had taken power following the ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922, that power, if not to be underestimated, remained far from total. Though the diminutive King cut an unimpressive figure and seemed a puny makeweight to Mussolini’s domineering presence, he remained the head of state, and with more than merely titular powers. Ultimately, as the events of July 1943 would show, just as he had appointed Mussolini to head the government in 1922, he retained the prerogative of removing him from office. And he offered an alternative focus of loyalty. This was particularly important in the case of the armed forces. Most notably, the officer corps of the army and navy retained a strong sense of allegiance to the monarchy. Their prime loyalty, as they for the most part saw it, was to the King, the head of the armed forces. Whatever combination of bribery and browbeating Mussolini deployed in his dealings with the leaders of the armed forces, it was never sufficient to win their unreserved allegiance. This would prove a fatal weakness in the palace coup of July 1943.

  Although there were no overt signs during the uneasy period of non-belligerence in 1939–40 of the later rupture between Mussolini and his military leaders, the dictator could not simply ride roughshod over his senior generals and admirals.25 He would on more than one occasion bemoan the shortcomings he saw in the military and his inability to purge the officer corps, just as he expressed his intention to eliminate the monarchy as soon as he had the opportunity to do so.26 As it was, for the time being he had to put up with what he took to be the undue caution, pusillanimity, pessimistic outlook and lack of Fascist ‘fighting spirit’ of the King and of his military advisers.

  The officer corps remained, to Mussolini’s chagrin, irredeemably conservative in personnel and structure. Italy lacked the strong militaristic culture that had developed in Germany (especially in Prussia). There was, for the most part, no great enthusiasm for the military in Italian society. The army did not enjoy a high level of prestige, as it did not just in Germany but also in the western democracies, Great Britain and France. It was much the same with the navy, while the air force, as in other countries, was only just beginning to establish itself. What military tradition there was in Italy featured humiliating defeats, notably Adowa in 1896 and Caporetto in 1917, rather than glorious victories. A career in the armed services was, accordingly, not greatly sought after by most well-educated and technically skilled Italians, who in any case were not high in numbers in a poorly educated, industrially underdeveloped society. The outcome was the low calibre and shortage of talent in what amounted practically to a rigid military caste, especially in the army. Had Mussolini been powerful enough to purge the army leadership, he would have had difficulty in replacing those dismissed by men of much better qualities. In practice, he could make little dent in the closed ranks of the senior generals, who, despite their personal and inter-service rivalries, were backed by their close ties to the monarchy.

  From 1926 onwards Mussolini had been the minister at the head of each of the three branches of the armed services. But for years he remained diffident in his dealings with the top brass, keen to avoid provoking antagonism, and aware of his own technical deficiencies in military matters as well as the need to protect his own image by keeping out of issues he did not fully comprehend. Little was done to bring about a genuine coordination of the armed forces’ leadership. This was to remain the case, seriously damaging strategic planning, throughout the war.27 The powers of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, chief of General Staff since 1925, to intervene in the internal direction of each of the branches of the armed services, and even to coordinate strategic thinking, were more nominal than real. He served largely as no more than Mussolini’s liaison with the leaders of the army, navy and air force and as his chief adviser on military planning. Badoglio’s role in masterminding the victory in Abyssinia had bolstered his position and meant that Mussolini could not easily override his advice. But, in its defensive tone, this was seldom what the dictator wanted to hear.

  Nor did Mussolini like to face up to the obvious inadequacies of his armed forces and their lack of readiness for major combat.28 Victory in Abyssinia with the aid of heavy artillery, bombers and mustard gas against a hopelessly inferior enemy (which nonetheless provided surprisingly tenacious resistance for some months) offered little preparation for the engagement in the European war that Mussolini had in mind to gain Italy’s place in the sun–though it did give the dictator increased ambition to direct military affairs. Since he saw air and naval power as the key to future dominance in the Mediterranean following a struggle with Britain and France, the air force, above all, and the navy to some extent were given priority over the army in the allocation of resources. But despite substantial rearmament in the navy in the second half of the 1930s, the fleet at the end of the decade was still far from ready for full-scale combat, while its leadership was poor in its operational planning and strategic thinking, defensive-minded and largely rooted in the naval warfare of the past. The air force, too, had flattered to deceive in Abyssinia and then during the Spanish Civil War. Despite notable expansion in the later 1930s, it remained technically and organizationally weak in comparison with its British and German equivalents. The army was disadvantaged by the priority in resource-allocation accorded to the navy and air force, and suffered equally from Italy’s small industrial base. Beyond this, it had a leadership locked into the military thinking of yesteryear, unwilling, as well as unable, to break the chains of the past. By the end of the 1930s, as a result, the army was woefully far from the levels of modernization required by new, more mobile forms of warfare. One experienced officer, General Ettore Bastico, warned against idolizing the tank and wanted to ‘reserve our reverence for the infantryman and the mule’, while as late as 1940 the deputy chief of the army staff, General Mario Roatta, let it be known that he opposed the abolition of horse cavalry.29

  At the height of his power, then, Mussolini still faced a military caste–particularly strong in the officer corps of the army–that was far from his Fascist ideal, and in some respects obstructionist with regard to his far-reaching plans for war and expansion. And he presided over armed forces that were badly led, ill-coordinated, insufficiently modernized (especially, again, in the army) and inadequately prepared for seriously testing combat.

  The leadership of the armed forces amounted to only one–though arguably the most important–of a number of partially autonomous bases of power in the Fascist regime that were far from simply vehicles of Mussolini’s supposed ‘total’ control and domination. It could be claimed with some justice that Fascism in Italy, more than was the case with Hitler’s regime in Germany, rested upon a ‘power cartel’.30

  Mussolini’s ‘seizure of power’ in the ‘March on Rome’ in 1922 was a Fascist myth. In reality, he had been handed power in a deal with the national-conservative power-elites. What transpired ‘was not a revolution but an authoritarian compromise’ establishing ‘a primarily political dictatorship that presided over a semipluralist institutional system’.31 Big business, the Church and the state bureaucracy retained some independence from Fascist control. In the economic sphere, Mussolini had to work with, rather than dominate over, the leaders of industry, business and finance. In a country where Catholicism was so influential–and there was no plainer reminder of this than the residence of the papacy within Italy’s capital city–Mussolini had little choice but
to reach a modus vivendi with the Church, as he did in the significant concessions granted through the Lateran Pacts of 1929 in return for the ending of papal hostility to the Italian state. And despite the rhetoric of Fascism’s totalitarian ambitions, the party made few inroads into the domination of the apparatus of state government. On the contrary, it found itself shorn of much real power and turned largely into an agency of mass mobilization, propaganda, attempted political indoctrination and acclamation of the leader. Unlike in the Soviet Union, the state, not the party, remained pre-eminent. Mussolini recognized this by taking charge for a time in the latter half of the 1920s of no fewer than eight ministries of state. Although this, of course, significantly helped establish his unassailable leadership position, in reality, since he could not possibly oversee and direct everything in person, it also boosted the role of the state bureaucracy.32 Even within the Fascist Party itself, Mussolini’s position had initially been effectively first among equals, the acknowledged party leader, certainly, but compelled to recognize the independent power-bases of the local chieftains, the ras (an Ethiopian term) upon whose control of the local party organization his own power ultimately drew.33 Nevertheless, by the later 1920s this initial mutual dependency had been transformed into the Duce’s outright supremacy over the party.

  Mussolini’s initial struggle, once in power, had been to subordinate the Fascist Party itself to his complete control. One vehicle for attaining this was the institution of the Fascist Grand Council, which he initially set up in 1922, then, six years later, supposedly turned into ‘the supreme organ that coordinates all activities of the regime’. In practice, it rarely met, had no legislative powers and indeed became little more than an agency of Mussolini’s personal rule.34 When Mussolini made his big decisions in 1940, to enter the war, then to attack Greece, he did not even consult the Fascist Grand Council. Nevertheless, as the events of 1943 were to show, even this apparently tame animal could still kick, for it was the Fascist Grand Council which led the revolt against Mussolini that ended with his deposition. Institutionally, then, even the Fascist Grand Council, however emasculated in practice, posed a potential check on Mussolini’s power. In Germany, by contrast, Hitler consistently rejected overtures to establish a senate of the Nazi Party, alert as ever to the existence of any collective body that might in certain circumstances be in a position to challenge his personal authority.35