Mussolini was converted to imperialism in his thirties at a time when the idea of empire was losing ground in other parts of the world. The Atlantic empires of Spain and Portugal had long gone, and Britain and France were faced with increasing opposition in some of their colonies. The British may have been building a new imperial capital in Delhi, but by now much of the subcontinent’s administration was being conducted – except at the very top – by Indians. Yet when Mussolini embraced an idea, he invariably hugged it to excess. He talked about reviving the Roman Empire and incorporating within it Malta, the Balkans, parts of France, parts of the Middle East and most of north Africa. Although he had signed the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, which was intended to guarantee peace in western Europe, he later raved about defeating France and Britain by himself, of marching ‘to the ocean’ and acquiring an outlet on the Atlantic. Like Crispi, he wanted colonies for reasons of prestige rather than for their wealth – such as it was – or their potential as a place to settle land-hungry Italians.
Fascist Italy inherited certain colonial positions which it quickly resolved to strengthen. Somaliland thus had to be properly subdued and ruled more vigorously than before. The situation was more complicated in Libya because the liberal regime, aware that by the end of the Great War it controlled only a few areas along the coast, had made an agreement with the Senussi leader which gave the Arab tribes autonomy and economic assistance in exchange for accepting Italy’s sovereignty. This created a very unfascist state of affairs, and the policy was soon abandoned in favour of subjugating the tribes, first in Tripolitania and later in Cyrenaica. In 1930 two senior generals, Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani, herded the entire population of Cyrenaica into detention camps where conditions were so bad that thousands of people perished along with nearly all their goats and camels. The following year the ‘rebel’ leader in Cyrenaica, the septuagenarian Omar al-Mukhtar, was captured and executed in front of his followers. Half a century on, when a film called the The Lion of the Desert was made about this heroic figure, it was banned in Italy on the grounds that it was ‘damaging to the honour of the Italian army’.26
Mussolini believed that a nation could only remain healthy if it fought a war in every generation. The Italian army had been fighting for years in Libya, but its activities there did not count as a war: it was carrying out the ‘pacification’ of a territory that already belonged to Italy. The real thing would be to conquer and annex a foreign country. Mussolini was old enough to remember the defeat at Adowa and he had long-nurtured ideas of avenging it by conquering Ethiopia and overthrowing its emperor, Haile Selassie. It was unfortunate that the country was Christian, independent and a member of the League of Nations, but the Duce was not deterred by such things. He had generally disliked and affected to despise the League, a body formed in 1920 from which his new admirer, Adolf Hitler, had already withdrawn; he also had some support from the French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, who had allegedly offered him ‘a free hand’ in Ethiopia.
Mussolini had assembled a huge force of 400,000 men, consisting of regular troops and fascist militiamen, and in October 1935 he ordered them to invade Ethiopia from Eritrea and Somaliland. Although he knew the invasion was initially unpopular at home, he believed that a rapid victory and the consequent prestige of imperial ownership would change public opinion. After a triumphant entry into Addis Ababa, fascism would be unstoppable; it would next turn against Egypt, throw the British out and liberate Italy from the ‘servitude of the Suez Canal’. Seven months after the campaign’s inception, Badoglio’s troops entered the Ethiopian capital, an event which earned their commander the title of Duke of Addis Ababa. Victory justified the prediction of the Duce, who informed ecstatic crowds at home that, after a gap of fifteen centuries, empire had returned to the seven hills of Rome. Gentile seemed to embody the national mood when he claimed that Mussolini had not only founded an empire but ‘done something more. He ha[d] created a new Italy.’27 One ludicrous aspect of the enterprise was the military boastfulness that followed. The victory may have been Italy’s first ever without allied support but it was hardly, as its propagandists claimed, one of the most brilliant campaigns in world history: you did not have to be brilliant in the 1930s to defeat an enemy that possessed neither artillery nor an air force.
Victory was achieved with the help of poison gas and bombing raids on civilian targets. One of Mussolini’s sons wrote a book about his experiences as an air force pilot in Ethiopia, describing fighting as ‘the most beautiful and complete of all sports’ and recalling how ‘diverting’ it was to watch groups of tribesmen ‘burst out like a rose after [he] had landed a bomb in the middle of them’. 28 The sport did not cease after the proclamation of victory. As in Libya in the decade before fascism, most of Ethiopia remained unoccupied by Italian troops, and native resistance continued after the fall of the capital. Mussolini reacted by ordering a systematic policy of terror, burning hundreds of villages, executing prisoners without trial and shooting all adult males in places where resistance was discovered. When weapons were found in the great monastery of Debra Libanos, at least 400 monks and deacons were murdered; the Coptic Archbishop Petros, who had come from Egypt to be head of the Ethiopian Church, was also executed. When in February 1937 two Eritreans threw grenades at the viceroy, Marshal Graziani, killing seven people and wounding others (including the viceroy), the local fascist boss gave his men three days to go on the rampage, ‘to destroy and kill and do what you want to the Ethiopians’. At least 3,000 Africans – and probably many more – were slaughtered in consequence. The victims had nothing to do with the bomb throwers; they did not even belong to the same part of the fascist empire.29
Italian soldiers used to enjoy the reputation of being brava gente, good fellows, ‘the good soldier Gino’ who remained good even in uniform. Italians claimed they were not like the nazis. Nor were their generals, whose decency is supposed to have been certified later by the fact that none of them faced a trial like the leading nazis at Nuremberg. Yet in recent decades an Italian historian, Angelo del Boca, has gone through the colonial records and painstakingly compiled, in volume after volume, evidence that the generals committed horrific atrocities in Africa and later the Balkans and that ‘the good soldier Gino’ is a myth: the brava gente were as adept at massacring as anyone else. The Italian army reacted by trying to have Del Boca prosecuted for ‘vilifying the Italian soldier’.30
In July 1936, two months after the capture of Addis Ababa, Mussolini decided to fight another war, this time in support of Franco’s insurrection against the republican government in Spain. He dispatched a squadron of bombers, which he soon added to, and a small army of blackshirts, which he increased with regular soldiers so that ultimately Italy sent 73,000 Voluntary Troops to the Iberian peninsula. Fascists and their apologists claimed they were sent to counter the ‘Bolshevik threat’, but at that moment no such threat existed.31 The Spanish Communist Party had sixteen deputies in a Cortes of 473, it was not part of the government, and communism was not even mentioned in the manifesto that Franco issued to justify his rebellion. Communism only became a force in Spain because the government, opposed by Italy and Germany and ignored by Britain and France, had to appeal to the Soviet Union for arms.
Mussolini decided to intervene in Spain because he believed intervention would add to the glory of Italy and its Duce. This time he was wrong. Fighting Spanish republicans backed by Russian tanks was very different from fighting African tribesmen, and it was demoralizing to be facing fellow Italians in the International Brigades who kept the volunteers awake at night with loudspeakers urging them to show solidarity with the workers by deserting to the Spanish government’s side. At the Battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, Mussolini’s troops were blocked by republican units that included the Italians of the Garibaldi Battalion, and they were forced to retreat, losing a lot of men, arms and prestige in the process. Although it was a clear defeat for the fascists, the Duce managed to proclaim it a victory.32
Yet it is easy to build up a case on the other side, and certainly there is space for a compromise. Even before the rise of the nazis, Mussolini had hoped for an alliance with a revived Germany and a joint war against France and Yugoslavia; he also believed that ‘the axis of European history passes through Berlin’.33 In 1932 he ordered Italian newspapers to support the nazis in elections that brought them to power, and in the same year he sacked his foreign minister for allegedly being too fond of the French and the British. Although Mussolini held ambivalent views about Hitler and liked to belittle him, he supported most of the Führer’s actions in the years before the Second World War. He accepted the German army’s occupation of the Rhineland, like Hitler he fought for Franco, and he eventually acquiesced in Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 and its occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year. Renzo De Felice, the author of a seven-volume biography of the Duce, used to argue that fascism was very different from nazism, that Mussolini desired to be a mediator in Europe, and it was only Britain’s championing of economic sanctions against Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia that drove Mussolini into the German camp. Yet this sounds too much like the plea of the apologist. Had he wished, Mussolini could have preserved peace and contained Hitler by aligning himself with Britain and France. He chose instead to join Germany, securing the support of a powerful ally to protect his position in Europe while he pursued his dream of empire in Africa.34
On a state visit to Germany in 1937 Mussolini was hugely impressed by the sight of armament factories and army parades staged in his honour. Soon afterwards he took Italy out of the League of Nations, made anti-Semitism a fascist policy and signed an anti-communist pact with Germany and Japan. In March 1938 he was perplexed (and privately furious) that Hitler grabbed Austria without warning him, and later in the year he made his sole appearance as a mediator, going to the Munich conference to persuade the Führer to opt for the peaceful cession of the Sudetenland rather than a military invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet Mussolini felt uncomfortable in the role of peacemaker, as he soon demonstrated when he told the fascist Grand Council that Italy must acquire Nice, Corsica, Albania and Tunisia.
At Munich the Duce was deeply unimpressed by the British prime minister (Neville Chamberlain) and the French premier (Édouard Daladier), whose feeble performances in the face of Hitler’s pugnacity reinforced his view that Britain and France were decadent and geriatric states that could easily be defeated by the young and virile nations of Germany and Italy. Much influenced by a meeting of the Oxford Union in 1933, when idealistic undergraduates had voted against fighting ‘for king and country’, Mussolini had decided that the British were effete and unhealthy (and too fond of umbrellas), that their empire was in terminal decline, and that their country should be destroyed like Carthage. He also convinced himself that Italy could capture Egypt without difficulty because the British were unable to fight in the heat; perhaps he was unaware that they had won a few summer battles over the years in India. Such views were strengthened by reports from his ambassador to London, Dino Grandi, who watched British soldiers on parade and dismissed them as ‘marionettes of wood’ who would be too cowardly to defend their country.35
In March 1939 Germany enacted another aggression without warning Italy, this time overturning Mussolini’s ‘success’ at Munich by seizing Prague and setting up a German ‘protectorate’ in Bohemia and Moravia. Although the Duce felt humiliated by this episode, he decided to stand by ‘the Axis’ and to demonstrate parity with Germany by conquering something for himself. After briefly considering Croatia as a target, he opted for Albania, a strange decision considering that the little country was already largely under Italian control. In May Germany and Italy formalized the Axis with the ‘Pact of Steel’, a name that, while professing equivalence between the two signatories, drew attention to the disparity in industrial might: Germany produced ten times as much steel as Italy. Once again the Germans were dishonest with their ally. They told Mussolini that no European war would take place for over three years, which would give him time to strengthen his armed forces and to hold his big exhibition, the EUR in Rome. They also pretended they had no intention of attacking Poland, although Hitler had already selected September 1939 as the month for his invasion and on the day after the pact’s signature he informed his generals of his plans. When Mussolini finally learned that the Germans were about to strike, he panicked and sent Ciano, his foreign minister, to entreat them to desist. Although keen to fight and make territorial gains – what he called ‘our share of the plunder’ – he was beginning to have doubts about Italy’s armed forces and how they might perform in battle.
Among his other posts, the Duce was minister for the army, the navy and the air force, and he talked so much about the invincibility of each service that Italians were led to believe they were as good as any in Europe. He boasted that he could raise an army of 8 million men – a figure he later raised to 12 million – yet he was unable to produce rifles for more than a sixth of that number; he vaunted Italy’s technological skills, though some of his best artillery had been captured from the Austrians in the Great War; and he claimed to possess enormous tanks, though the Italian model was little more than an armoured car, and its vision was so limited that it had to be guided by infantry walking ahead, often with fatal results for the guides. No wonder Farinacci told Mussolini he was the commander of ‘a toy army’ or that, after inspecting it, the German war minister in 1937 had concluded that his country would stand a better chance in the coming war if Italy was on the other side.36
A great deal of money was spent on speedy new battleships, but these were ineffective in action, and their guns apparently failed to hit a single enemy ship at any time during the war; far more dangerous were the courageous Italian frogmen and the manned ‘slow speed torpedoes’ (known as maiali – pigs) entering the harbours of Gibraltar and Alexandria and inflicting considerable damage on British ships. More sensible than building battleships would have been the construction of aircraft carriers, which would have been useful for attacking Malta, a strategic goal that Mussolini ignored until it was too late; they might also have protected the rest of the fleet from devastating raids by the RAF. The greatest deficiencies, however, were in the air force, which the Duce had taken charge of in 1933, when he sensed that Balbo was doing too well in the job – a replacement that proved disastrous for Italy. Mussolini claimed to have over 8,500 aeroplanes, so many that they could ‘blot out the sun’ and so effective they could reach London or destroy Britain’s Mediterranean fleet in a single day. Yet in fact he had fewer than a tenth of that number, and he failed during the war to build a great many more. At the height of the conflict Italy was manufacturing as many aeroplanes a year as the United States was producing in a week. One of the most revealing statistics about the inefficiency of fascism is that Italy mana
ged to produce more aeroplanes in the First World War than it did in the Second.37
While Mussolini vacillated during the August of 1939, news of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact made some fascist leaders question the wisdom of an alliance with Germany; communism was after all meant to be their chief enemy. At a meeting of the Grand Council earlier in the year, Balbo had criticized the policy of ‘licking Hitler’s boots’ and later he suggested that Italy should fight on the side of Britain and France. This suggestion had no appeal to Mussolini. Although in September he declared Italy’s neutrality or ‘non-belligerence’, his sympathies had been long with the nazis, and he wanted to fight with them when he was ready. Meanwhile he played for time by demanding from the Germans more millions of tons of oil, steel and coal than they could possibly supply and transport. All the same, he knew that a position of neutrality was rather ridiculous for a man who had been threatening wars for seventeen years and who was still telling Italians that warfare was ‘the normal condition of peoples and the logical aim of any dictatorship’.38 At the beginning of 1940 he warned his government that Italy could not remain permanently neutral and ordered the armed forces to be prepared for war against anyone, even Germany. Soon afterwards he issued bizarre instructions to the navy, which in the coming war was to go on the offensive everywhere, to the air force, which was to remain passive, and to the army, which was to stay on the defensive in all places except east Africa, where it would attack the British colonies. Even more bizarrely, he continued to erect costly fortifications along the Alpine frontier with Austria, a policy he did not abandon during the war and which understandably annoyed the Germans, who had already demonstrated in the case of the Maginot Line that such defensive schemes were outmoded and useless.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 40