Stresa Revived - an Allied Mussolini TL

[Onkel Willie]

This is an improved version of a TL I did a while back. I hope everyone likes it.

Stresa Revived


Chapter I: The Italo-Ethiopian War and the Hoare-Laval Pact, 1934-1935.
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In 1934, Italian leader Mussolini had set his sights on Abyssinia because he wanted to avenge Italy’s humiliating defeat of 1896. Besides that, he wanted to give Italy its coveted place under the sun, which, he figured, would be achieved by creating an Italian colony that dominated the Horn of Africa. The Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928 stated that the border between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia was twenty-one leagues or roughly 118 kilometres parallel to the Benadir coast. In 1930, Italy built a fort at the Welwel oasis in the Ogaden and garrisoned it with Somali Ascaris, which were irregular frontier troops commanded by Italian officers. The fort at Welwel was well beyond the twenty-one league limit and the Italians were encroaching on Abyssinian territory. In November 1934, Ethiopian territorial troops, escorting the Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission, protested against Italy’s incursion. The British members of the commission soon withdrew to avoid embarrassing Italy. Italian and Ethiopian troops remained encamped in close proximity.

In December 1934 a border incident took place at Welwel that killed 150 Ethiopians and two Italians. The League of Nations exonerated both parties and neither France nor Britain took strong steps against Italy, keen to keep it as an ally against a resurgent Germany. Italy was able to launch its invasion without interference primarily due to the United Kingdom and France placing a high priority on retaining Italy as an ally in case hostilities broke out with Germany. To this end, on January 7th 1935, France signed an agreement with Italy, giving them essentially a free hand in Africa to secure Italian co-operation.

Next, in April, Italy was further emboldened by being a member of the Stresa Front. The Stresa Front was an agreement made in Stresa, a town on the banks of Lake Maggiore in Italy, between French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini on April 14th 1935. Formally called the “Final Declaration of the Stresa Conference”, its aim was to reaffirm the Locarno Treaties and to declare that the independence of Austria “would continue to inspire their common policy”. The signatories also agreed to resist any future attempt by the Germans to change the Treaty of Versailles. In June, non-interference was further assured by a political rift that had developed between the United Kingdom and France following the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.

In October 1935, the Italian invasion finally commenced under the over-all command of General Emilio de Bono, Commander-in-Chief of all Italian armed forces in East Africa. Italian troops were firstly confronted with tough logistics because their roads built up to the border, turned into vague paths on the other side of it. Nonetheless, by October 6th, the Italian II Corps took Adwa, the site of Italy’s ignominious 1896 defeat, without encountering serious opposition. On October 11th, Dejazmach Haile Selassie Gugsa and 1.200 of his followers surrendered to the commander of the Italian outpost at Adagamos. De Bono notified Rome and the Ministry of Information promptly exaggerated the importance of the surrender. Haile Selassie Gugsa was Emperor Haile Selassie’s son-in-law, but less than a tenth of the Dejazmach's army actually defected with him. A few days later, the Italians bloodlessly occupied the ancient holy capital of Axum, but Mussolini nonetheless replaced De Bono because his methodical advance was too slow for the tastes of “Il Duce”.

His replacement was Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Haile Selassie decided to test this new Italian commander with an offensive of his own. What became known as the Ethiopian “Christmas Offensive” had as its objectives the splitting of the Italian forces in the north with the Ethiopian centre, crushing the Italian left with the Ethiopian right and invading Eritrea with the Ethiopian left. The Italians were initially pushed back, but their superiority in modern weapons, such as machine guns, aircraft and artillery, stopped the Ethiopian offensive.

In early December 1935, the Hoare–Laval Pact was proposed by British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval. Under this pact, Italy would gain the best parts of Ogaden and Tigray. Italy would also gain economic influence over the entire southern part of Abyssinia. Abyssinia would have a guaranteed corridor to the sea at the port of Assab, which the exiled Haile Selassie would later call a “corridor for camels”. Mussolini took a few days to contemplate this proposal and then sent a telegram to his ambassador in London, Dino Grandi, that he accepted it.

The agreement was formalized a few days later, after which Italy communicated its provisions as its own peace terms. Sanctimoniously, the Italians expressed their regret that they wouldn’t be able to crush the institution of slavery in all of Ethiopia, which had never been a priority at all. Thereafter, an Italian-French-British bloc presented it to the League of Nations as a compromise to the conflict and the latter showed its weakness by accepting it. The League thereby legitimized the invasion of one sovereign nation by another and also de facto legalized unprovoked military aggression in general (a lesson Japan and Germany both remembered), discrediting the international body to the point of uselessness. Upon the leaking of the Hoare-Laval Pact in 1936, which had been negotiated without the involvement of the League of Nations, Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare was forced to resign because of the resulting scandal. Moreover, Anglo-French public opinion vis-à-vis Italy was very negative, forcing its democratically elected politicians to put relations with Rome on the backburner, much to Mussolini’s dismay.

Given the nigh complete absence of international support, a palace coup deposed Haile Selassie, who wanted to fight on until the end. His 19 year-old son Amha Selassie became the new (puppet) Emperor and was forced to sign over Tigray and Ogaden. The rest of the country became a de facto Italian protectorate as Amha Selassie was forced to sign commercial treaties that gave Italian companies access to Ethiopia’s mineral wealth, while a Consul-General took up residence in Addis Ababa as an “advisor to his Imperial majesty’s government” and as a “protector of Italian minority rights in Ethiopia”. The irony was that the Italian community in Ethiopia would never number more than 2% of the population, while at the same time dominating much of the economy of a nominally sovereign, independent country. Ethiopia’s protectorate status couldn’t be exemplified more by its acceptance of King Victor Emmanuel III’s new title of “Lord Protector of Abyssinia”, a mere few hours after the Italian government had granted it to him. If Mussolini thought that the Stresa Front was a solid anti-German power bloc, however, he was mistaken.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time. I hope you like it .

Chapter II: Italy’s Road to War, 1935-1940.
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The first issue that demonstrated how loose relations between the signatories of the so-called Stresa Front actually were, was the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. In reality only 3.000 German Wehrmacht soldiers entered the Rhineland, but French intelligence had come up with the number of 295.000 by counting SS, SA and Landespolizei (State Police) units as well. General Maurice Gamelin told the government a full scale mobilization would be needed, which would be unpopular while also costing 30 million francs a day. 1936 was an election year and the government didn’t want to alienate their constituents by means of a war against Germany, which seemed to be merely asserting its sovereignty. Moreover, it didn’t want to aggravate its economic woes: the country was gripped with financial crisis as there were insufficient reserves to maintain the value of the franc as pegged to the gold standard in regard to the US dollar and the British pound sterling. Huge loans would be needed to stabilize the situation, while a war needed to be avoided to destabilize it and cause a disastrous downfall.

Serious overestimation of German military prowess, electoral concerns and a weak economy ensured a tame French response. The British response was blasé, as exemplified by Lord Lothian’s famous statement that the Germans were merely walking into their own backyard. Mussolini was irritated that Germany wasn’t being kept to the Treaty of Versailles and he expressed his annoyance about the worthlessness of agreements with the Western democratic powers to British ambassador Eric Drummond. Drummond could only apologize sheepishly, feel ashamed for his country’s lacklustre attitude and subsequently watch Italy drift away from the Anglo-French Entente. As a result, Italy supported the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War with 50.000 troops, the so-called Corpo Truppe Volontarie (CTV) or Corps of Volunteer Troops (these veterans would prove effective in WW II). Britain and France assumed a slightly more favourable tone toward Franco, but it did little to fix their relations with Italy.

In the meantime, Hitler was emboldened. The notion of uniting all German-speaking peoples into one nation state had been around since the 19th century, but at the time the “Kleindeutsch” (small German) solution won out, excluding Austria from Germany. More than fifty years after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, after the end of World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Austrian elite and popular opinion favoured some kind of union with Germany. The 1919 Paris peace treaties, however, explicitly forbade that, ignoring the Wilsonian principle of self-determination due to fear of a German resurgence. Nonetheless, both the Weimar Republic and Austria included the political goal of unification into their respective constitutions, with massive support from democratic parties. In the early 1930s, popular support in Austria for a union with Germany remained overwhelming, and the Austrian government looked to a possible customs union with the German Republic in 1931.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler, an Austrian German by birth, became Chancellor of Germany and one of his goals and of his Nazis was to reunite all Germans either born or living outside of the Reich into an “all-German Reich.” There were economic interests as well: it supplied Germany with magnesium and the products of the iron, textile and machine industries; it also had gold and foreign currency reserves; lastly, it had many unemployed skilled workers, hundreds of idle factories and large potential hydroelectric resources. Austria, however, devolved into an authoritarian, clerico-fascist, corporatist regime that looked to Italy for support, which they got when in 1934 Austrian Nazis attempted a coup d’état that led to the death of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Italian sabre rattling was enough to make Hitler back down in 1934, which was no surprise since he didn’t have an army at the time. However, Nazi terrorist attacks continued until 1938 and killed roughly 450 people, despite the fact that Austrian Nazi leaders remained imprisoned and that the Nazis were harshly suppressed, leaving the movement disorganized and feeble.

Mussolini supported Dollfuss’s successor Kurt Schuschnigg. But by 1936 the damage to Austria’s economy caused by the German boycott was too great and Schuschnigg informed Mussolini that he had to come to an agreement with Germany. Schuschnigg first agreed to release Nazi prisoners and later met Hitler in February 1938, acquiescing to his demands for Nazi appointees to the Austrian government. In March 1938, in an attempt to preserve Austria’s independence, Schuschnigg announced a referendum, but the plan backfired when it became clear that Hitler wouldn’t simply stand by as Austria reaffirmed its independence by public vote. Schuschnigg pleaded his case with Mussolini in a series of telegrams between Vienna and Rome, but the latter informed the Austrians that he wouldn’t fight Germany without the support of France and/or the United Kingdom. As a result, the Austrian Chancellor caved before threats of violence and Hitler, triumphantly and without opposition, marched into his birth country with his triumphal tour climaxing in Vienna. By April 1938, Hitler’s 49th birthday, the Führer reached the zenith of his popularity.

However, the so-called Anschluss would also have serious international ramifications. Mussolini, who was wary of Nazi Germany, wanted some kind of buffer area. Therefore, within three hours of the Wehrmacht marching into Austria, the Regio Esercito moved to occupy strategic locations just across the border. They enacted the contingency plan that had been created on Mussolini’s specific orders the moment that Hitler started to make noise about Austria in February 1938. Rome legitimized these snippets of Austrian territory under Italian occupation as the remainder of the Federal State of Austria, which had been illegally occupied by Germany. Kurt Schuschnigg was allowed to set up a government-in-exile in Italy and an “Austrian Division” was created in the Italian army composed of Austrian soldiers that had withdrawn into northern Italy. Hitler was predictably infuriated, but fighting Italy was quite a bit different than invading a country which had an army of only 30.000 men, which was completely passive to boot. The German ambassador was summoned to meet a similarly furious Duce, who blatantly bluffed that any move to stop him would result in war.

A delusional Hitler still hoped to sweeten the deal and mend relations by officially denouncing any claims on South Tyrol. He stated that “the fate of the South Tyrol Volksdeutsche lies outside Italy” and proposed an emigration scheme. Mussolini shrugged, declined requests to have an audience with Hitler in Rome, and he refused to see German Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop when he was in Rome to also visit the Holy See.

More importantly, Mussolini was irate about the attitude of his supposed Anglo-French allies, who demonstrated their complacency by aggrandizing a German territorial demand that contravened the stipulations of Versailles, further emboldening Hitler. Furthermore, the attitude of London and Paris toward the Austrian government-in-exile was wishy-washy: they didn’t recognise the Anschluss, but neither did they recognise Schuschnigg as the legitimate leader of Austria. Mussolini had an idea of what the Wehrmacht was capable of and he wasn’t confident enough to wage war against Germany by his lonesome. Therefore he expressed his bitter disappointment to the ambassadors of Britain and France concerning their countries’ attitude in this crisis. Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was condemned in the press organs of the fascist regime, including an article written by Mussolini’s sharp pen in party newspaper “Il Popolo d’Italia” under a pseudonym that concluded that: “this Anglo-French policy of appeasement will only allow Nazi Germany to become stronger as well as bolder as its leaders see complacency, weakness, fear and dividedness among its bourgeois opponents. That will inevitably undermine the entire effort our countries have gone through to form a cordon around our common rival because distrust is irrevocably sewn if one ally ignores the interests of the other.” Though the article was signed by one Alessandro Maltoni (his father’s first name coupled with his mother’s maiden name), everybody knew who had actually written it and both Chamberlain and Daladier now knew how Mussolini thought of them. Relations between Britain and France on one hand and Italy on the other reached an all-time low and the Stresa Front very nearly was a dead letter. Future Prime Minister Winston Churchill later agreed with Mussolini that this had been the opportune moment to nip Nazi German expansionism in the bud.

Immediately after the Anschluss, Hitler made himself the advocate of ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia while Sudeten Nazis led by Konrad Henlein agitated for autonomy. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler at his chalet in the Bavarian Alps at Berchtesgaden, the Berghof, on September 15th and agreed to the cession of the Sudetenland; three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier did the same. No Czechoslovak representative was invited to these discussions. Chamberlain met Hitler again in Godesberg on September 22nd to confirm the agreements. Hitler, aiming to use the crisis as a pretext for war, now demanded not only the annexation of the Sudetenland but the immediate military occupation of the territories, giving the Czechoslovak army no time to adapt their defence measures to the new borders.

Now, France and Britain turned to Rome, but Mussolini wasn’t convinced of Anglo-French resolve and he merely proposed a four power conference. He wanted to conserve the fragile peace and give Italy more time to prepare for war. Mussolini’s arbitration staved off war because Hitler greatly admired the Duce, even though the two countries weren’t on a good footing due to the Anschluss (Hitler had been idolatrous of the Italian leader ever since his March on Rome in 1922, which the former had unsuccessfully tried to imitate with his failed coup of November 1923; the feeling wasn’t mutual, with Mussolini only feeling contempt toward Hitler and referring to Nazi Germany as a “racist nuthouse”). The Munich Conference peacefully transferred the Sudetenland to Germany in October 1938 and Hitler stated that it would be his last territorial claim, but in March 1939 he betrayed everyone’s trust by invading and annexing Bohemia-Moravia and setting up Slovakia as a puppet state.

Alarmed, and with Hitler making further demands on the Free City of Danzig, France and Britain guaranteed their support for Polish independence, a guarantee that wasn’t given by the Italian government because at this point the Duce was just as convinced as the Führer that the democratic leaders of Britain and France were too spineless to go to war. Hitler accused Britain and Poland of trying to “encircle” Germany and renounced the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement as well as the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934. In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty with a secret protocol in which they agreed to partition Poland. The agreement was crucial to Hitler because it assured that Germany would not have to face the prospect of a two-front war, as it had in World War I, after it defeated Poland. He did not believe Britain, France or Italy would intervene in the conflict, but in two out three cases he was wrong: Britain and France both declared war, while Italy stayed aloof. The British and the French, however, did nothing to save the Poles, which did little to encourage the Italians to come to their aid. It looked like Italy would sit this one out.

The morning after the so-called Gleiwitz incident, a meagre attempt to make Germany look like the victim of Polish aggression, German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west. As the Germans advanced, Polish forces withdrew from their forward bases of operation close to the Polish-German border to more established lines of defence to the east. After the mid-September Polish defeat in the Battle of the Bzura, the Germans gained an undisputed advantage. Polish forces then withdrew to the southeast where they prepared for a long defence of the Romanian Bridgehead and awaited expected support and relief from their Anglo-French allies. The Soviet invasion of September 17th rendered Polish plans obsolete and the government ordered an evacuation to neutral Romania (~ 100.000 Polish military personnel reached Romania and the Baltic States and most of these fought against the Germans in other theatres of the war). On October 6th, following the Polish defeat at the Battle of Kock, German and Soviet forces gained full control over Poland. The success of the invasion marked the end of the Second Polish Republic, though Poland never formally surrendered.

After September 1939, Paris and London tried to get Rome to join the war and the latter demanded guarantees for the fair treatment of the Italian minority in Tunisia, an Italian say in the affairs of the Suez Canal, recognition of the annexation of Albania, and the establishment of Djibouti as a jointly administered free port. The Italian community in French Tunisia would have the same legal status as the French there, and Britain and France were willing to give Italy a share in the Suez Canal (though not big enough to threaten their position). Albania was unimportant enough for Britain and France to recognize its annexation by Italy as well. France was unwilling to give up Djibouti, but they exempted Italy from import duties. Italian core goals had been met, but the opportunistic Mussolini wasn’t shy to get more if he could. Among other things, France and Britain agreed that Italian territorial claims vis-à-vis Yugoslavia and even Greece were open to negotiation (not a minute later Mussolini bullied the Greeks into giving the Regia Marina basing rights in the Aegean Sea, and without British support the Greeks had no choice but to give in). However, Mussolini knew his people would need a better reason to fight than mere territorial gains and Germany would provide one.

German U-boat U-26 was the first German submarine to slip into the Mediterranean Sea and in the night of Tuesday March 26th 1940 it spotted a roughly 22.000 tonne passenger liner and launched a torpedo, finishing her off with a second. U-26 reported the sinking of this supposedly French cruise ship 150 kilometres west of Sardinia to Admiral Karl Dönitz. The same night distress signals from Italian passenger liner Roma reached Sardinia and nearby auxiliary vessels of the Italian Navy as well as fishing ships responded. The Roma sank in 45 minutes and due to her severe list, which ultimately brought about her capsizing, she was unable to deploy all of her lifeboats. 389 people out of a complement of 1.121 passengers and crewmembers were rescued while the remaining 722, almost all of them Italians, died at sea of drowning or hypothermia. Initially, it was thought that a French or British submarine might have been the culprit, but Germany’s news outlets confirmed their responsibility for the catastrophe the next day. Apparently, with only moonlight to go on, the U-26 had misidentified the Italian tricolour as the French flag. Public opinion in Italy was outraged and Mussolini saw his hand forced, bringing the war to Italy sooner than he’d wanted, but he couldn’t afford to be seen as a coward.

He held a speech in Rome that was broadcast on radio across the country and the streets and squares filled with people who wanted to hear this message: “People of Italy, pay heed! Three days ago, a barbaric act was committed by this country north of the Alps. Slavishly following a pitiful doctrine, they have made this a racial war, and now we’ve seen that they have no respect for any race other than their own. They will never stop. It is clearly an illusion to believe that Italy can be an independent island in a German sea. The declaration of war has already been delivered to the ambassador of Germany. We go to battle against this insatiable imperialist and racist aggressor, which has more than once hindered the advance of or even threatened the very existence of the Italian people. We will avenge the victims of the Roma! We will fight, because it’s the iron necessity for national survival!” On March 29th 1940 Mussolini declared war on Germany, cheered on by an exhilarated crowd.

 

[Onkel Willie]

ETA of the next chapter?

How about now ?

Chapter III: The Battle of France and Fortress Italy, April-September 1940.
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In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to protect shipments of iron ore from Sweden, which the Allies were attempting to cut off by unilaterally mining neutral Norwegian waters. Denmark capitulated after a few hours, and despite Allied support, during which the important harbour of Narvik was temporarily recaptured by the British, Norway was conquered within two months. British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the replacement of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, with Winston Churchill on May 10th 1940.

May 10th 1940 was also the day that the Battle of France commenced, based on the so-called Manstein Plan, devised by General Erich von Manstein. General Franz Halder had devised a plan similar to the Schlieffen Plan with an advance through middle Belgium, but it didn’t intend to deliver a knockout blow. It had the limited goal of throwing the Allies back to the river Somme, which would cost an estimated half a million casualties; Germany’s force would then be spent and the main attack would only begin in 1942. Hitler was disappointed with Halder’s plan and initially reacted by deciding that the German army should attack early, ready or not, in the hope that Allied lack of preparedness might bring about an easy victory. This led to a series of postponements, as commanders repeatedly persuaded Hitler to delay the attack for a few days or weeks to remedy some critical defect in the preparations, or to wait for better weather. Hitler also tried to alter the plan which he found unsatisfactory, without clearly understanding how it could be improved.

Whilst von Manstein was formulating new plans in Koblenz, Heinz Guderian, commander of the XIX Army Corps, Germany’s elite armoured formation, happened to be lodged in a nearby hotel. At this moment, Von Manstein’s plan consisted of a move directly north from Sedan against the rear of the main Allied forces in Belgium. When Guderian was invited to contribute to the plan during informal discussions, he proposed a radical and novel idea. Not only his army corps, but most of the Panzerwaffe should be concentrated at Sedan. This concentration of armour should subsequently not move to the north but to the west, to execute a swift, deep, independent strategic penetration towards the English Channel without waiting for the main body of infantry divisions. This might lead to a strategic collapse of the enemy, avoiding the relatively high number of casualties normally caused by a Kesselschlacht (“cauldron battle”). Such a risky independent use of armour had been widely discussed in Germany before the war but had not been accepted as received doctrine. Halder removed Von Manstein from his position on January 27th, but the latter’s indignant staff brought the case to Hitler. He proved enthusiastic about the Manstein Plan. The objections of other generals were ignored because, as Hitler argued, the slightest chance of decisive victory outweighed the certainty of defeat implied by inaction, given Germany’s hopeless strategic situation.

The battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes and then along the Somme valley to cut off and surround the Allied units that had advanced into Belgium. When British and adjacent French forces were pushed back to the sea by the highly mobile and well-organized German operation, the British government decided to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) as well as several French divisions at Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. After the withdrawal of the BEF, Germany launched a second operation, Fall Rot (Case Red), which was commenced on June 5th. While the depleted French forces put up stiff initial resistance, German air superiority and armoured mobility overwhelmed the remaining French forces. German armour outflanked the Maginot Line and pushed deep into France with German forces arriving in an undefended Paris on June 14th 1940. In the meantime, the Regia Aeronautica deployed two fighter wings and one bomber wing for a total of 144 aircraft and they distinguished themselves through their aggressive fighting style, which was decidedly uncharacteristic for the Allies. Luftwaffe pilots came to respect Italian pilots more than other Allied pilots.

Despite the fall of Paris, the French government decided not to surrender and the remnants of the French Army, roughly half a million men, withdrew to the French Alps and the Massif Central while about 90.000 BEF troops out of the original 198.000 redeployed by way of Marseille. By early July much of south-eastern France, roughly a third of the country, was still under Allied control and the situation was stabilized by 80.000 Italian reinforcements. Nonetheless, the situation looked grim: most of France’s population centres, most of its industrial areas and most of its coal and iron ore reserves were under German control.

The question one could ask was what had been happening on the Italian front, which wasn’t much. The Regia Aeronautica had launched several small-scale bombing raids against Bregenz, Innsbruck, Salzburg and Klagenfurt, later followed by Graz, Linz, Munich and Vienna (primarily using the SM.79 medium bomber, which was a very popular aircraft in the Regia Aeronautica). The latter four cities meant a lot to Hitler because he had lived there and he was outraged because the Luftwaffe hadn’t managed to prevent them from being bombed. He treated Hermann Goering to several temper tantrums and the stress induced the Luftwaffe leader to give into his morphine addiction even more. Goering could only mumble in response that the Luftwaffe couldn’t defend southern Germany’s airspace with the bulk of its strength deployed to support the blitzkrieg in France. Strategically, the bombings were of limited value, but the propagandistic value, particularly of symbolic targets like Munich and Vienna, was great. Mussolini said “these attacks are small, but they’re pinpricks right into the heart of the German. This is vengeance for the sinking of the Roma.” The retaliatory raid on Milan was of limited success, but nonetheless angered Mussolini, who stepped up Italy’s efforts to aid France.

Italy did well, despite its many shortcomings. During the interwar years and 1939, the strength of the Italian military had dramatically fluctuated due to waves of mobilization and demobilization. In response to the Anschluss, Italy had increased its defence budget by 50% in 1938 and by another 50% in the 1939 fiscal year; additionally, France had allowed Italy to produce a few dozen Renault R35 tanks under license while the British had sold them fifty Vickers 6-ton tanks for a bargain price. But despite these substantial investments, the Italian army wasn’t expected to be ready for war before 1941-’42. By the time Italy entered the war, over 1.55 million men had been mobilized in what was a painfully slow mobilization. The Regio Esercito (Royal Italian Army) had formed 75 divisions out of this influx of men. However, only twenty of these divisions were complete and fully combat ready by the time France fell. A further 32 were in various stages of being formed and could be used for combat if needed, while the rest were not ready for battle at all. So in total, the Regio Esercito could muster 52 divisions, of which three fifths were of mediocre quality (and the rest not much better). On the upside, Italian soldiers were highly motivated as the government had painted the picture of being enslaved by Germany in the event of a defeat. Mussolini, however, knew better than to attempt an invasion of Germany across the inhospitable border and instead played it safe by safely keeping his army behind his Alpine shield and sending support to France.

German success in summer 1940 after only about eight weeks of combat profoundly changed the geopolitical landscape. The French Army had previously been thought of as the strongest army in the world and France as the dominant continental power, but in two months’ time it had been supplanted by Germany. What hope could there be for Italy, a country with a developing and still predominantly agrarian economy and with a largely non-mechanized, obsolete army?

Indeed, Italy’s situation looked hopeless: though considered a great power, Italian industry was lacking in critical military areas like automobile production, which didn’t equal more than 15% of that of France or Britain. Italy still had a predominantly agricultural-based economy, with demographics more akin to a developing country (high illiteracy, poverty, rapid population growth and a high proportion of adolescents) and a proportion of GDP derived from industry less than that of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Sweden, in addition to the other great powers. In 1940, Italy produced 374.000 cars compared to the roughly 2.5 million in Britain and France. Besides that Italy produced, 4.4 million tonnes of coal, 10.000 tonnes of crude oil, 1.2 million tonnes of iron ore and 2.1 million tonnes of steel that year. By comparison, Great Britain produced 224.3 million tonnes of coal, 11.9 million tonnes of crude oil, 17.7 million tonnes of iron ore, and 13 million tonnes of steel in 1940. Germany annually produced 364.8 million tonnes of coal, 8 million tonnes of crude oil, 29.5 million tonnes of iron ore and 21.5 million tonnes of steel. Most of Italy’s raw material needs could be fulfilled only through importation, and no effort was made to stockpile key materials before the entry into war (stockpiling commenced only in March 1940).

Italy, however, did have at least one factor working in its favour, namely geography: the Italian border was ridiculously easy to defend. In 1931, work had commenced on the “Alpine Wall”, and after the Anschluss the defences on the Italo-German border were emphasized (those on the Swiss, Yugoslav and French borders, on the other hand, were somewhat neglected. The Alpine Wall was composed of three zones: the first zone was only intended to slow down the enemy and inflict casualties; the second zone consisted of heavier fortifications capable of resistance in isolation; the third zone, the “zone of alignment”, was an assembly area for counterattack, into which the enemy was to be directed. Three types of fortifications were provided: “Type A”: the largest fortifications, generally built into mountainsides; “Type B”: smaller point-defence fortifications; and “Type C”: widely distributed shelters and rallying points.

These border defences were manned by the elite of the Italian army: all six Alpini divisions and all twelve Bersaglieri regiments. They were interspersed with regular divisions, the idea being that the presence of elite units would improve the performance of the rank and file ones. The Alpini were forces especially trained for Alpine warfare. The Bersaglieri were composed of recruits selected for their above-average size and stamina, their ability to endure intense physical training and their qualification as marksmen. Only very few men qualified for the Alpini divisions, and they gave equally sized elite SS units a run for their money whenever an equal confrontation took place. During the course of the war, no matter the reverses Italy experienced, the requirements to join the Bersaglieri weren’t relaxed and so their quality wasn’t diluted.

Though British officers, especially in the early war years, generally and not completely without justification, dismissed the Italians as mediocre, they often spoke respectfully of the Alpini and the Bersaglieri. These units fought valiantly with plenty of examples of courage and acumen when the Wehrmacht invaded. They inflicted higher casualties than German generals, who had a dismissive attitude of Italian strength due to their WW I experiences, had anticipated. They had expected Italy to fold quickly, and Hitler was frustrated when that didn’t happen. Churchill spoke of “Fortress Italy” as “a foothold against the forces of evil” when he met with French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud between July 23rd and 26th 1940 in the so-called Ajaccio Conference (Ajaccio being the capital of Corsica and the interim capital of France). They agreed that Italy would form the cornerstone of the Allied war effort.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time .

Chapter IV: The Battle of Italy, September 1940-January 1941.​

From late June to August 1940, using Lend-Lease aid from the United States, the British managed to re-equip a total of 125.000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force out of the more than 198.000 that had been evacuated from Dunkirk. With France occupied, French pride had taken a dent and therefore Reynaud agreed to a joint “Allied Expeditionary Force” to Italy under British command, even though the French contributed a far greater number of troops (still commanded by General Maxime Weygand). This force of circa 625.000 men would be commanded by Archibald Wavell, who replaced the defeated General Harold Alexander. This force in turn would be subordinate to the Italian Comando Supremo under Marshal Pietro Badoglio. At sea, however, the French Navy and the Regia Marina formed a joint command that also included the British Mediterranean Fleet. The British left them in charge of the Mediterranean Sea and transferred units to the Atlantic (as well as the Pacific due to the possibility of war with Japan).

In the meantime, while Italy’s geography certainly lent itself for a defensive war, it did little to diminish German air superiority. The Luftwaffe was able to field 4.201 airplanes in September 1939: 1.191 bombers, 361 dive bombers, 788 fighters, 431 heavy fighters and 488 transports. The Regia Aeronautica fielded 3.296 during the same timeframe, of which circa 2.000 were fit for operations and of which 166 were modern fighters (it was the smallest air force among the European great powers). Increased defence spending had increased numbers, but only to 3.480 by March 1940. Even after aircraft factories had been mobilized for wartime production, production never got far above one hundred aircraft a month (in part also because the Luftwaffe attacked Italian industry). In September, the Regia Aeronautica numbered 3.922 aircraft, of which ~ 3.200 were combat-ready and of which 820 were modern fighters, which meant that they were still outnumbered. 300 British aircraft and 150 French machines somewhat amended this major strategic disadvantage. These reinforcements were sorely needed because superior German aircraft production had only widened the numeric and qualitative gap between the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica.

The modern Macchi C.200 fighters with a top speed of 504 km/h were slow compared to the Messerschmitt Bf-109, which had a top speed of 640 km/h; they also had weak armament with only two 12.7 mm machine guns. Their sturdy design and their agility, however, allowed them to effectively fight against the Germans, and German pilots found their adversaries to be more than competent. A handful of the novel Macchi C.202 were rushed into service in time to fight and, especially when they were piloted by experienced airmen from the Spanish Civil War, they easily matched their German opponents blow for blow. For example, in less than three days, Vittorio Mussolini managed to shoot down eleven German fighters in a C.202, which he partially did in order to earn the recognition of his father, who seemed to prefer Vittorio’s younger brother Bruno (Vittorio was successful, with the Italian press glorifying him as the greatest Italian ace, which earned him his father’s recognition). Later versions of the C.202 would sport Rolls-Royce Merlin engines since a lot of Italy’s industry was under occupation.

The German general staff knew that the German-Austrian border didn’t lend itself to an invasion, more so because Italy still held some buffer zones dating back to 1938. Hitler hoped that a strategic bombing campaign would soften Italy to the point of a separate armistice, but he was quickly disillusioned. The other options were to invade through the French-Italian border (which was difficult as the French still defended the Rhone Valley) or the Yugoslav-Italian border. Hitler figured that France would withdraw from the continent with an Italian defeat and he was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen.

Because pretty much every invasion route on the Austro-Italian border had disastrous geography for the offensive force, the German OKW focused on invading via Yugoslavia through the Ljubljana Gap. Unfortunately, Yugoslavia’s geography wasn’t much friendlier than Italy's, but on the bright side Belgrade would face a multi-front war if it chose to defy Germany: Germany and Hungary would come in from the north and Bulgaria from the southeast (Romania, on the other hand, was fuming because it had been forced to cede northern Transylvania to Hungary in the Second Vienna Award, prompting Bucharest to improve its relations with Belgrade). Hitler chose to use Yugoslavia’s hopeless strategic situation as a stick, while also dangling a carrot in front of the face of Prince Paul (the regent for the 17 year-old King Peter II). The carrot was that Yugoslavia would get Albania on a silver platter if it joined the Axis, which not coincidentally removed a threat to the Ploiesti oilfields in Romania on which Germany depended. Additionally, the Allies harboured Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic and Italian fascist leaders had violently opposed the existence of the Yugoslav state in the past: this, as well as the fact that Germany seemed to have the upper hand, further strengthened the pro-Axis faction.

On August 13th 1940, Prince Paul responded to restiveness in Croatia – surreptitiously stirred up by Italian agents-provocateurs working for the Ustashe – by declaring martial law on the advice of the Germans. General Milan Nedic, Minister of Army and Navy, was thrust forward to the position of Prime Minister and also got the Ministry of Internal Affairs: he now was the head of the Yugoslav armed forces, the head of the country’s police forces and head of government. The country effectively became a military dictatorship and Nedic’s regime responded brutally to Croatian demands for more autonomy and violence against ethnic Serbs, engaging in ethnic cleansing. On August 23rd, just ten days after the 1940 August Coup, Nedic allowed the Germans to invade Italy via the Ljubljana Gap after, momentarily at least, crushing the Croats with help from the Waffen SS (the latter started to forcibly recruit “racially superior specimens” from the German minority in Yugoslavia, which was soon also subjected to conscription by the Wehrmacht). The WW I vintage Royal Yugoslav Army simultaneously attacked Albania, but it got stuck not far across the border and was actually repulsed, suffering for Belgrade’s arrogance. Much to his annoyance, Hitler was forced to deploy a fighter squadron and a Stuka dive bomber squadron to assist them. The Yugoslavs, to their own annoyance and surprise, encountered civilian resistance from the Albanians, who didn’t see Yugoslavian control as an improvement over Italy’s (Albania’s resistance movement was among the few not supported by the Allies because it opposed both sides). The resistance to Yugoslavia, however, wasn’t surprising: news of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Serbs predictably alienated supposed “allies.”

Yugoslavia annexed Albania, but at the cost of becoming a satellite state to Germany and of Allied support for the Croatian Ustashe movement. Italy promptly declared war on Yugoslavia on August 24th 1940, followed by France and Britain a few days later, but they did little to back it up. In the meantime, Nedic was pressured to sign a commercial treaty that allowed Germany to purchase metallic ores for its war industry for advantageous, below-market-price prices. And Yugoslavia was well endowed with metals (and other materials that the German war machine required). Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Macedonia had major iron ore deposits and the country was also rich in non-ferrous ores: Bosnia and Herzegovina had bauxite, Kosovo had reserves of lead, zinc and chrome, Serbia provided copper and antimony, and Macedonia held chrome, manganese, uranium and mercury.

Nedic kept his part of the deal, allowing the Germans to invade Italy through the Ljubljana Gap. What also helped the Germans was the fact that the Italians were distracted by the simultaneous Yugoslav offensives on Fiume, Trieste and Pola, which had been cut off from the rest of Italy by the German breakout into the country’s northeast. These cities themselves were ethnically Italian, but the countryside around them was decidedly Slavic, and ethnic violence took place against the Italian minority. On September 19th, members of the Slovene militantly anti-fascist and insurgent organization TIGR killed a few dozen Italians, but not before raping the women. The entire event was broadly meted out by the Italian press.

On September 20th, an angry Mussolini ordered the Regia Marina to bombard the Yugoslav naval base at Kotor and to evacuate as many of the besieged Italian civilians as possible. The Royal Yugoslav Navy was equipped with one elderly ex-German light cruiser (suitable only for training purposes), one large modern destroyer flotilla leader of British design, three modern destroyers of French design, one seaplane tender, four modern submarines (two older French-built and two British-built) and ten modern motor torpedo boats (MTBs); of the older vessels, there were six ex-Austrian Navy medium torpedo boats, six mine-layers, four large armoured river monitors and various auxiliary craft. That afternoon Italian light cruiser Luigi Cadorna and escorting destroyers Alpino and Artigliere, drew out the Royal Yugoslav Navy by shelling the coastal town of Zanjic for twenty minutes with their eight 152 mm (4x2) and eight 120 mm guns (2x2, twice).

The obsolete, WW I vintage ex-German light cruiser, three destroyers, four motor torpedo boats and five patrol boats steamed toward the inferior Italian force and drove it off. The Luigi Cadorna and its escorts fled southwest and, with the setting sun they provided good targets for Yugoslav gunners. They didn’t realize that a taskforce – composed of Italian battleship Andrea Doria, heavy cruiser Zara and a destroyer escort – was coming in from the south and that they were being led to them. The Italian force crossed the Yugoslav T and could therefore bring all its guns to bear; besides, Yugoslav 152 and 120 mm guns didn’t do much to Zara’s 100-159 mm (3.9-5.9 inch) armoured belt. In the meantime, Zara’s 203 mm (8 inch) and Andrea Doria’s ten 320 mm (12.6 inch) guns had no difficulties in obliterating the Yugoslav force, while a raid by SM.79 medium bombers bombed Kotor, damaging several ships, docks and supply facilities. The September 22nd Kotor Raid was an Italian tactical victory and a major morale boost, but it was of limited strategic value. Italian dominance in the Adriatic Sea had already been a given anyway.

Firstly, feints on the Brenner Pass, the Lienz-Belluno route and several other mountain passes took place. Then the Luftwaffe started to bomb the somewhat neglected segment of the Alpine Wall on the Yugoslav border while simultaneously 2.200 artillery pieces opened fire on September 1st. Even though Italian troops on the Yugoslav border were thinly spread – leaving the entire region lightly defended by only a screening force – the Wehrmacht took until September 10th to push through the Ljubljana Gap against determined defenders utilizing the natural features as much as possible. Any effort to attrite the Germans ended after the breakout and the crossing of the Isonzo a few days later, for the time being. Before the German Panzer Divisions lay the wide open Venetian-Friulian Plain followed by the Po Valley (the flatlands of Veneto and Friuli do not drain into the Po, but they effectively combine into an unbroken plain and are therefore often considered a part of the Po Valley). Among them was the 7th Panzer Division commanded by a Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel, which had been so wildly successful in France and was transferred to Italy precisely for that reason (as well as his experiences there in WW I).

The Luftwaffe started to attack Regia Aeronautica facilities all over northern Italy in the hopes of destroying as many Italian aircraft on the ground, but the Italians had the luxury of radar thanks to their British allies. The majority of Italian aircraft managed to take to the skies and fight the enemy, which they did surprisingly well. The modern Macchi C.200 fighters with a top speed of 504 km/h were slow compared to the Messerschmitt Bf-109, which had a top speed of 640 km/h; they also had weak armament with only two 12.7 mm machine guns. Their sturdy design and their agility, however, allowed them to effectively fight against the Germans, and German pilots found their adversaries to be more than competent. A handful of the novel Macchi C.202 were rushed into service in time to fight and, especially because they were piloted by experienced airmen, easily matched their German opponents blow for blow. For example, in less than three days, Vittorio Mussolini managed to shoot down eleven German fighters, which he partially did in order to earn the recognition of his father, who seemed to favour Vittorio’s younger brother Bruno (Vittorio was successful, with the Italian press glorifying him as the greatest Italian ace, which earned him his father’s recognition). Besides displaying a great deal of skill, the Regia Aeronautica in general fought much more aggressively than the French air force had done. As a result, Luftwaffe losses were significantly greater than in previous campaigns, but they still outnumbered the Italians and attacked columns of troops that retreated from the Austrian border to avoid being cut off.

On the ground, Von Rundstedt ordered his forces to advance carefully, but he didn’t count on Rommel, a general who seized an opportunity when he saw one. He advanced 35 km (22 mi) just on the first day, crossing the Tagliamento and Livenza rivers with little effort, successfully utilizing flanking attacks. He reached the left bank of the Piave River during the evening of September 11th, and he was again lauded as a war hero in German propaganda. Two days later his troops were in Venice and Hitler made him a full general while also awarding him the Iron Cross with the Oak Leaves for his successful leadership. Venice, Vicenza, Treviso and Udine among others were under German control while Trieste, Fiume and Pola befell Yugoslavia. Verona became a frontline city and was devastated by aerial and artillery attack. Rommel was later transferred to Army Group North as a corps commander for Operation Barbarossa for propaganda reasons: Hitler didn’t want him to be associated with the bloody stalemate in the Apennines.

In the meantime, Mussolini was royally pissed off that his army commander Marshal Pietro Badoglio had let himself be blindsided like this, failing to respond adequately the moment that Yugoslavia had entered the war by reinforcing that border. Mussolini fired him and sent him to London to become the military attaché there, although he spent his first two months on lessons in English from a tutor provided by ambassador Grandi (Churchill nicknamed him “Marshal yes, but” because Badoglio always said “yes, but” whenever Churchill complained about Italian performance or slow progress on the Italian front). His replacement was Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had been successful in the Italo-Ethiopian War, but who unfortunately was no miracle worker. He hastily organized a new defensive line on the Adige River. Sappers blew up most of the bridges across the river while Italian artillery and aerial attacks did so where they failed. The Regio Esercito dug trenches, placed machine gun posts, placed rolls of barbed wire, built Czech hedgehogs and other obstacles, and laid land mines while a concerted effort by Allied air forces challenged the Luftwaffe enough to distract them from preventing the consolidation of the Adige Line.

The Germans immediately noticed that Italian resistance noticeably stiffened after Graziani successfully managed to redeploy his forces to this new frontline while Anglo-French reinforcements arrived as well. German probing attacks were all easily repulsed while Luftwaffe attacks proved ineffective, both proving to be costly. Besides that, autumn rains that continued for much of October reduced many country roads to mud, hampering the German logistical situation. Hitler ordered the offensive to recommence once frost set in. After wearing down the defenders for weeks with an artillery and aerial offensive, the Germans broke through on December 6th, but still needed a week to reach the river Po, merely 24 km (15 mi) away. There was plentiful time for the Allies to destroy bridges across the Po, although their defences on the Po were more improvised than those on the Adige. The Wehrmacht crossed the Po in mid December but, with its resources depleted, they grinded to a halt the moment they got to the Apennines proper, where they encountered fierce opposition. The frontline stabilized on the Arno River over the course of December 1940/January 1941. The Battle of Italy ended in a stalemate, and it wasn't a total German victory since it had failed to achieve its goal of controlling the continent. The Italian Campaign, however, had only just begun.

 

[Onkel Willie]

How is this a strategic victory for the Allies? Germany has essentially destroyed Italy's warmaking potential by seizing the industrialised north. The Italian/French remnants combined with British troops may be able to pin down German troops by maintaining a presence in Italy, but that's about it right now.

Well, Germany has failed to win. They're in a superior position, but they haven't won. IOTL the Allies got kicked out of the continent but not ITTL, which counts as a strategic victory to me. Anyway, here's an update:

Chapter V: The Italian Campaign and the Capri Conference, January-December 1941.​

The Germans had suffered over 350.000 casualties, more than twice as many as in the Battle of France, and required fresh reinforcements. Besides that, Italy’s limited infrastructure, the hostile terrain and autumn rains that had reduced a lot of country roads to sludge (and there were many of those since Italy was a predominantly agrarian country) had caused the army to burn through supplies much quicker. Given the current manpower and supply situation, the campaign could only be resumed until next year according to Field Marshal Von Rundstedt. Hitler replaced him as commanding officer in Italy by Erich von Manstein, a proven excellent offensive general (though with little experience in mountain warfare).

In the meantime, the Regio Esercito had 300.000 troops stationed in the colonies and so far Mussolini had kept them there because he feared Italy’s colonial subjects would revolt in the motherland’s moment of weakness. Now, however, he decided to transfer half of them to Italy since “there has to be an Italy for there to be an Italian Empire” (the decision was made easier because South Africa offered some troops for policing duties in Italy’s colonies). Besides that, the British redeployed the 10th Indian Infantry Division, the 1st South African Infantry Division, the 1st African Division (part of the King’s African Rifles), the Canadian Corps and the Australian I Corps to Italy (shortly after its redeployment it was renamed ANZAC Corps since it also controlled the New Zealand 2nd Division, along with British formations). France, in the meantime, contributed three divisions and several brigades of colonial forces and started to bring in divisions that had been forced to leave France since the occupation of Northern Italy threatened their rear. All-in-all, the size of Allied forces in Italy (including Italy’s own) swelled by 30 divisions in early 1941 (among them were also the 1st and 2nd Libyan Divisions, which would fight for Italy with distinction). The German presence, by contrast, only grew by 21 divisions. Because of the bad situation, Mussolini sacked Graziani and appointed Ugo Cavallero to replace him.

Between February 17th and February 19th 1941 the leaders of the three Stresa Powers convened to establish common war aims and to engage in coordinated political and military planning. Mussolini met with Churchill and Reynaud during the Capri Conference in his villa on the island resort to formulate their war goals and strategy. All three agreed that none of them would open up separate peace negotiations without first consulting the others. Secondly, their stated war goal would be to return Germany to its 1937 borders and that they would do so via a “soft underbelly strategy”: i.e. liberating northern Italy and thrusting to Vienna via the Ljubljana Gap and from there into southern Germany. Mussolini emphasized the issue of restoring Austrian independence and in passing mentioned that territorial expansion at Germany’s expense wouldn’t be out of place. Churchill and Reynaud didn’t disagree, but wanted to put off that decision. So far, the conference was a resounding success for Churchill and Mussolini, who got what they wanted while Reynaud’s proposals for landings in northern and/or southern France were rejected. First and foremost, however, they could talk all they wanted about their goals and strategies, but knew that without the active participation of the United States it was all a pipedream.

Most of Italy’s small industrial base was located in the industrial triangle of Milan-Turin-Genua – an area of intense machinery, automotive, aeronautical and naval production – and all of it was under German occupation (including the incomplete hulks of battleships Roma and Impero, which the Germans used as storage space). Armaments and heavy industrial production in Italy’s colonies was practically non-existent, leaving the Italian armed forces no other choice but to loan money to buy weapons and later to apply for Lend-Lease aid. Italy became a recipient when Roosevelt expanded it to all three main Allied powers in late 1941 as tensions mounted between the US and Japan. He was reluctant to supply a regime he loathed because of its blatant imperialist war of aggression against Ethiopia, its use of mustard gas in that war in contravention of the Geneva Protocol, and its fascist dictatorial regime that at first glance seemed to be a lot like Hitler’s. However, he understood that many of the similarities were cosmetic. Mussolini, for example, had distinguished himself by accepting Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazis, which earned him the sympathy of the strong US Jewish lobby (the all-powerful Mafia, on the other hand, hated his guts because he had virtually wiped them out on Sicily with an iron fist campaign, including 11.000 arrests between 1925 and 1929).

Roosevelt ultimately thought of Hitler as the greater evil. Between 1942 and 1945, under the Lend-Lease Act, Italy received 7.000 motor cycles, 9.500 jeeps, 60.000 trucks, 360 locomotives, 2.500 aircraft, 1.000 tanks, 100.000 rifles, 25 million bullets, 750.000 tonnes of food supplies, a quarter of a million tonnes of fuel and 25 million dollars (roughly $375 million in today’s money) worth of construction materials. Britain also helped by marshalling the resources of the Empire, but Allied forces in Italy still weren’t powerful enough to defeat Germany. They could merely pin them down there. Both efforts were patch-ups rather than long term war winners. Nothing short of an American war effort would do.

Mussolini, being an ardent Italian nationalist pur sang, absolutely wanted his country to contribute to the war effort: he renegotiated Italy’s WW I debts to Britain in order to free up money to stimulate industry in southern Italy (and to a lesser extent in Italy’s colonies). The effort delivered a minor contribution to the war effort. The much larger agrarian component of Italy’s economy was far more important, supplying Allied forces with sugar, citrus, wine, olives, grains, meat (cattle, pig, sheep and goat) and seafood. Desperate for anything useful, Governor-General Italo Balbo ordered a geological survey in Libya. For a long time the suspicion had existed that Libya possessed oil reserves, but nothing had ever been undertaken to ascertain the truth. Oil would be discovered at Zaltan in Cyrenaica in 1943, but the war delayed exploitation, and it wasn’t really needed either because Britain got plenty of oil for the Allies from the Middle East where it controlled a substantial “informal empire”. The US would also supply fuel upon its entry into the war.

Holding out on continental Europe would not only stave off a German invasion attempt of Britain, but Winston Churchill also hoped to convince the US government that the war wasn’t a lost cause and tried to arouse sympathy by portraying it as a fight between the Allied David and the Axis Goliath. Churchill, out of wishful thinking, thought the United States would join the war sooner rather than later, and when that happened the Allies would use American might to push into Germany’s “soft underbelly.” The Atlantic Charter, signed on USS Augusta in August 1941, provided only a faint hope of that occurring: it detailed the goals of Anglo-American cooperation for the cause of international security, but didn’t mention anything about US entry into the war.

In the meantime, Hitler, who was unwilling to postpone his invasion of the Soviet Union for yet another year, de-intensified his effort in Italy. Hitler believed the Wehrmacht would easily be able to hold the Allies at bay with a defensive effort in the Apennines and turn Italy into the “largest Allied internment camp” (much like Greece in WW I). He did launch a final offensive in the spring of 1941, moving the frontline somewhat further south. The new frontline by May 1941 went from Leghorn to Pesaro via Siena, Arezzo and the Foglio River. From now on, German forces wouldn’t do more than fight small operations to take control of good starting positions for “the final offensives of the war” that would take place once the Soviets were defeated. After the USSR was defeated, which Hitler arrogantly assumed wouldn’t take very long, the Western Allies would surely fold.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time .

Chapter VI: Pearl Harbor, December 7th 1941. ​

During the Battle of Italy, the Regia Marina came out largely unscathed and, given that it was the world’s fourth largest navy, it would prove a major asset to the Allies. In early 1941 it consisted of six battleships (with two more incomplete and in German hands), nineteen cruisers, 59 destroyers, 67 torpedo boats and 116 submarines while the Kriegsmarine presence in the Mediterranean Sea consisted of the odd U-boat that managed to slip past Gibraltar. The Regia Marina had some issues: it had a number of newer, faster, lightly built cruisers with inadequate defensive armour; there were a large number of older vessels; there had been a lack of emphasis on the incorporation of technological advances like radar and sonar; and the service in general suffered from insufficient time at sea for crew training.

As far as the training and combat experience issues went, Italian and British ships conducted joint patrols. As far as radar and ASDIC (a precursor to sonar) went, Britain was generous enough to give some sets and translated manuals to its Allies, equipping all of Italy’s six battleships and several of its heavy cruisers with radar and equipping its destroyer leaders with ASDIC.

Knowing that the combined Italian and French navies could easily dominate the Mediterranean, barring the fluke U-boat related incident, the British admiralty decided to strip the Mediterranean Fleet of its capital units. They were redeployed to fight in the Battle of the Atlantic and to Southeast Asia to intimidate an increasingly ambitious Japan. Similarly, Great Britain reduced military forces in its African and Middle Eastern colonies, mandates, protectorates and informal possessions to the bare minimum required to police them. In late 1940 Singapore had been defended by little more than three divisions, but by spring 1941 that had increased to eight divisions and two armoured brigades, each equipped with 220 Valentine tanks. The RAF presence in Singapore, in the meantime, increased from 158 modern aircraft to 318 with the addition of two wings of Hawker Hurricanes and two wings of Supermarine Spitfires, totalling 160 modern fighter planes. Garrisons in Burma and Hong Kong were also reinforced.

War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation had been aware of (and developed contingency plans for) since the 1920s, though tensions did not begin to grow seriously until Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Over the next decade, Japan continued to expand into China, leading to all-out war between those countries in 1937. Japan spent considerable effort trying to isolate China and achieve sufficient resource independence to attain victory on the mainland; the “Southern Operation” was designed to assist these efforts. From December 1937, events such as the Japanese attack on the USS Panay, the Allison incident, and the Nanjing Massacre (the International Military Tribunal of the Far East concluded that more than 200.000 Chinese non-combatants were killed in indiscriminate massacres) swung public opinion in the West sharply against Japan. Fearing Japanese expansion, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France provided loan assistance for war supply contracts to the Republic of China. President Roosevelt didn’t manage to push economic sanctions through Congress, but the vote on this matter was narrow. What he did do was to move the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor and order a military build-up in the Philippines. Japan perceived these moves as hostile.

Because the Japanese high command was (mistakenly) certain that any attack on European Southeast Asian colonies would bring the US into the war, a devastating preventive strike appeared to be the only way to avoid US naval interference. Preliminary planning had begun in early 1941 under the auspices of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, with a key role being played by Captain Minoru Genda. In summer Genda was sent to Europe as a military attaché to observe German air offensives and assessed that the Mitsubishi A6M Zero was superior to the German Bf-109, the British Hurricanes and Spitfires, and the Italian Macchi C.202.

Upon returning to Japan in spring 1941, Genda met Yamamoto and the latter was inspired by Genda’s idea of launching a carrier attack on Hawaii because the element of surprise would be maintained until the last moment (unlike the “decisive battle” doctrine that had long dominated Japanese naval planning, which involved a campaign of attrition by cruisers, after which a strategic reserve of battleships would be released for a final battle). Genda also advocated the use of shallow-water torpedoes and they would be incorporated into this revolutionary attack plan. Despite the absence of American aircraft carriers, the attack wasn’t cancelled, and Japanese confidence in a quick victory also meant that facilities like the navy yard, oil tank farms, the submarine base and CINCPAC were ignored (by their thinking the war would be over before the influence of these facilities would be felt).

On November 26th 1941, a Japanese task force of six aircraft carriers (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku) departed northern Japan en route to a position northwest of Hawaii, intending to launch its 408 aircraft to attack Pearl Harbor: 360 for the two attack waves and 48 on defensive combat air patrol (CAP), including nine fighters from the first wave. The first wave was to be the primary attack, while the second wave was to attack carriers as its first objective and cruisers as its second, with battleships as the third target. The aircrews were ordered to select the highest value targets (battleships and aircraft carriers) or, if these were not present, any other high value ships (cruisers and destroyers). The first wave of dive bombers was to attack ground targets. Fighters were ordered to strafe and destroy as many parked aircraft as possible to ensure they did not get into the air to intercept the bombers, especially in the first wave. When the fighters’ fuel got low they were to refuel at the aircraft carriers and return to combat. Fighters were to serve CAP duties where needed, especially over US airfields.

In the meantime, Royal Navy battleship HMS Warspite had completed its repair and refit at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state in the United States (she had been transferred from the Mediterranean Fleet to the Home Fleet, and in May 1941 she departed for the US after suffering damage from an air raid on Portsmouth). Modifications consisted of the replacement of her deteriorated 15 inch (381 mm) main guns, a serious increase in her anti-aircraft weaponry, bridge improvements, and new surface and anti-aircraft radar. She left Puget Sound on December 2nd 1941 and maintained a brisk speed of 18 knots, steaming south-westward toward Hawaii for a scheduled goodwill visit before heading on to Singapore. On December 6th around 7:00 PM local time Warspite’s radar detected a large group of surface contacts on a course toward Hawaii. Her captain ordered her to increase speed to 22 knots, only two knots below her maximum speed, and to turn northwest and pass the surface contacts to their north. He then ordered her to steer south to shadow the unknown fleet, staying within radar range but outside visual range (in night time conditions Japanese navy lookouts could spot targets at 5.000 to 15.000 yards out, depending on conditions). During the night of December 6th to December 7th she set a course that would bring the unknown fleet within firing range (maximum range for Warspite’s 15 inch guns was 33.550 yards or 30.68 km).

The Japanese launched their first wave and it was detected by US radar at Opana Point and was also, unbeknownst to anyone, monitored by the Warspite’s radar. Although her captain understood what was going on and wanted to help, he couldn’t because Japan and Britain weren’t at war (and also because inadvertently causing an Anglo-Japanese conflict might cost him his job and rank). He merely sent an encrypted warning via radio, which took a while to decode. It only reached the attention of Lieutenant Kermit Tyler about twenty minutes before the Japanese attack struck home, and it took him up to five minutes to warn for “impending attack”. In a fifteen minute window only a minimal amount of preparations could be made. In the meantime, the radar operators at Opana Point had failed to make clear the size of the incoming formation. As a result, Lieutenant Tyler had initially assumed it was just a flight of B-17s coming in from the mainland and didn’t pass on an alarm of “attack imminent” until Warspite’s warning reached him, unfortunately too late to make a significant difference. The air portion of the attack commenced at 7:48 AM Hawaiian time (3:18 AM, December 8th, Japanese Standard Time). Slow, vulnerable torpedo bombers led the first wave, exploiting the first moments of surprise to attack the most important ships present (the battleships), while dive bombers attacked US air bases across Oahu, starting with Hickam Field, the largest, and Wheeler Field, the main US Army Air Force fighter base.

In the meantime, Warspite was still shadowing the Japanese fleet from the darkness of the west and by now her radio was receiving undeniable signs – i.e. SOS signals and pleas for help – that Pearl Harbor was under attack. But still her captain and crew were bound by orders as well as the fact that Great Britain and Japan were at peace, which changed shortly after the first wave had been launched. A few Japanese aircraft on CAP noticed Warspite and, mistaking her for an American battleship, attacked her (only to be shot down by her anti-aircraft guns while inflicting no damage). Almost simultaneously, she received word of Japanese landings in Malaya, and now there was more than enough reason to open fire.

A few minutes after being discovered and attacked by Japanese planes on CAP, after acquiring a firing solution, Warspite’s main guns unleashed a full broadside from a distance of 22.000 yards (roughly 20 kilometres or 12.5 miles) at 8:45 AM Hawaiian time and targeted the nearest enemy capital warship, by which time the second wave had already been launched. Warspite also radioed the HQ of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, that they were engaging the attacking Japanese fleet north of Hawaii. The nearest capital ship turned out to be aircraft carrier Kaga: it was a 38.800 tonne vessel, carrying 90 planes, that had originally been designed as a battleship, but which had been converted to a carrier after the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. Two of Warspite’s 15 inch shells hit on starboard side near the aft of the ship and cut through the thin 38 mm (1.5 inch) deck armour like a knife through butter. They exploded inside the ship and put her two starboard side propeller shafts out of commission, cutting her speed in half to a mere 14 knots. A third shell exploded right behind the ship and damaged the rudder, slowing Kaga down further to 11 knots. After several more broadsides Kaga had been reduced to a burning hulk, and at 9:05 AM she listed to the starboard side, began to capsize and started to sink, disappearing below the waves within another ten minutes (the second and last known instance of a battleship sinking an aircraft carrier, the only other example being HMS Glorious being sunk by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau).

At this point Nagumo decided to break off the attack, recalling the planes of the second wave. In the meantime, Warspite managed to damage Zuikaku to the point that she’d need a few weeks in dry dock (at a time that the Imperial Japanese Navy needed its carriers the most). Warspite now came under attack from Japanese aircraft, but she conducted evasive manoeuvres, laid out a smoke screen and incurred no fatal damage. After the Japanese withdrew, she went to Pearl Harbor for patch-ups and repairs, proudly flying the Union Jack, and arrived later that day. Upon arrival US Navy crews cheered her on and very quickly she was popularized as “the ship that saved Pearl Harbor.” Lyrical US media glorified her as a David that had heroically and selflessly taken on the mighty Japanese Goliath and had triumphed against the odds, saving Hawaii from invasion and horrors like the Rape of Nanking (it only became known after the war that Japan had never intended to invade Hawaii). In the meantime her crew members were treated like heroes during their shore leave on Oahu, which lasted only two weeks. Though her original orders were to join Force Z at Singapore, as a symbol of Anglo-American friendship and cooperation, Warspite’s new orders were to operate with the US Pacific Fleet until further notice (conducting joint operations that later Allied operations would be modelled on).

In the meantime, Hitler foolishly declared war on the United States. He mistakenly believed the Japanese could keep the Americans distracted and that a German declaration of war on the US would get Tokyo to support his own effort in the USSR. He also arrogantly assumed his planned invasion of the USSR would have been finished by the time the American presence in Europe could be felt, allowing him to devote his full attention to the Western Allies, using Soviet resources to feed his war machine.

 

[Onkel Willie]

I presume the damages of OTL first attack wave and nothing more.

Pretty much.

Would Hitler actually DOW the US, though? I know it was stupid OTL, but from his point of view he had defeated France and Britain and had the Soviets on the ropes.
Here he hasn't defeated anyone, even if he's caused a lot of damage, and I don't think the USSR has been invaded yet.
I know everyone likes to call him a dumbass, but he was pretty insightful in the first years of the war and his DOW came from "victory disease" more than idiocy

IOTL Hitler assumed Japan would keep the US occupied until he finished the job in Europe. Besides that I thought Hitler's sense of racial supremacy would come into play: 'the pesky Slavic untermenschen will be defeated before American power can be felt and with Soviet resources we're invincible' .

Anyway, here's an update for you all.

Chapter VII: The Battle of Wake Island, December 8th-24th 1941.
​

In the meantime, simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Wake Island started when 36 Mitsubishi G3M medium bombers flown from bases on the Marshall Islands attacked. Four patrolling F4F Wildcat fighters didn’t detect them due to poor weather and another eight were destroyed on the ground, but two Japanese bombers were shot down the next day. Two more air raids followed in which the main camp was targeted on December 9th, resulting in destruction of the civilian hospital and the Pan Am facility, and on December 10th during which the bombers focused on Wilkes Island. Following the raid on December 9th, the guns had been relocated in case the Japanese had photographed the positions. Wooden replicas were erected in their place and the Japanese bombers attacked the decoy positions.

Early on the morning of December 11th, the garrison, with support of the four remaining Wildcats, repelled the first landing attempt by the South Seas Force, which included three light cruisers, six destroyers, two patrol boats and two troop transports containing 450 troops. The US Marines fired at the invasion fleet with their six 5-inch (127 mm) coastal artillery guns. Major Devereux, the Marine commander under Cunningham, ordered the gunners to hold their fire until the enemy moved within range of the coastal defences. “Battery L”, on Peale Islet, succeeded in sinking destroyer Hayate at a distance of 4.000 yards with at least two direct hits to her magazines, causing her to explode and sink within two minutes, in full view of the defenders on shore. Destroyer Yubari’s superstructure was hit eleven times. The four Wildcats also succeeded in sinking the destroyer Kisaragi by dropping a bomb on her stern where the depth charges were stored. Both were lost with all hands, with Hayate becoming the second Japanese surface warship to be sunk during World War II after Kaga. The Japanese force withdrew before landing (it was the last time that a naval invasion was defeated purely by coastal artillery).

The siege of Wake and frequent air attacks on the island’s garrison continued, without resupply for the Americans, though Commander Winfield Cunningham had sent a long list of critical equipment he needed (including fire-control radar, gun sights and spare parts). The US Navy planned a relief attempt centred on Taskforce 11, which was composed of aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, fleet oiler USS Neches, seaplane tender USS Tangier, heavy cruisers Astoria, Minneapolis and San Francisco, and ten destroyers. Taskforce 14 – with the fleet carrier USS Lexington, three heavy cruisers, eight destroyers, and an oiler – was to undertake a raid on the Marshall Islands to divert Japanese attention.

HMS Warspite’s commanding officer Douglas Blake Fisher, recently promoted to Commodore for his actions at Pearl Harbor, proposed a different and more daring approach, which the Americans adopted. He proposed that TF 11 and TF 14 would both steam for Wake, providing the island with air cover and providing it with the necessary equipment (including 18 US Marine Corps SB2U Vindicator dive bombers originally intended for Midway). Additionally, HMS Warspite would be added to this fleet and be escorted by destroyers USS Hull, USS Macdonough, USS Worden, USS Farragut and USS Dale. The relief force was therefore composed of two aircraft carriers, one battleship, six heavy cruisers, 23 destroyers, two oilers and one seaplane tender, in other words quite a sizeable fleet. It also carried the 4th Marine Defence Battalion and the VMF-221 fighter squadron equipped with Brewster F2A Buffalo fighters, along with 9.000 5-inch (127 mm) shells, 12.000 3-inch (76 mm) shells and 3 million .50 cal. (12.7 mm) rounds. Dummy messages were dropped that only USS Saratoga, three light cruisers and a meagre destroyer escort were headed for Wake (communications to the contrary were limited to written orders as much as possible, for fear of Japan breaking and reading coded messages to the contrary). It would be a target that Fisher believed would be too juicy for the Japanese to pass up, and if they took the bait then there’d be another opportunity to weaken Japan’s carrier force. Fisher’s plan was ambitious to say the least in a time that defeat piled upon defeat for the Allies in the Pacific, but it could count on enthusiastic support from Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt went along with it because he believed this gamble could be enough to hold Wake, which would be a major boost to morale as well as a boost to the spirit of Anglo-American cooperation. It was an improvised operation and gamble, but it might just work. The entire effort was coordinated by ABDAFCOM or “American-British-Dutch-Australian-French Command” which was under the over-all command of Sir Archibald Wavell, at least in theory.

The US relief force arrived at Wake on December 22nd and at 9:00 they received news indicating the presence of two enemy carriers and two fast battleships. The two fast battleships in fact turned out to be heavy cruisers and the carriers were Hiryu and Soryu, which had been diverted here because Wake was a key part of the to-be-established perimeter meant to ward off American counterattacks. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the First Air Fleet, seized this apparent opportunity to sink an American aircraft carrier: it would, after all, level the playing field (since the Japanese had already lost one carrier to the Allies) and give the Imperial Japanese Navy some breathing space. Hiryu and Soryu were ordered to look out for the American carrier Saratoga.

The new commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet Vice Admiral William S. Pye, a staff officer without significant combat experience, was tempted to abort the operation merely for fear of losses upon learning of Japanese reinforcements. A message from Commodore Fisher stated that he would assist Wake by himself if need be, which forced Pye’s hand because the heroes of Pearl Harbor couldn’t be allowed to be defeated ignominiously (Pye would soon be replaced by the less risk averse Admiral Chester W. Nimitz). The second Japanese invasion force came on December 23rd, composed mostly of the same ships from the first attempt with the major reinforcements of the carriers Hiryu and Soryu, plus 1.500 Japanese marines. Wake’s four remaining F4F Wildcat fighters were supplemented by 18 SB2U Vindicator dive bombers from USS Lexington and fourteen F2A Buffalo fighters (originally intended for Midway and Oahu respectively). Combined with Saratoga’s and Lexington’s own carrier wings, they were able to successfully counter Japanese attempts to gain air superiority, thwarting the planned amphibious assault.

At 8:10 AM on December 23rd, Japanese reconnaissance flights indeed discovered an aircraft carrier, namely the Saratoga. She was approaching Wake from the east and at eight o’clock in the morning she was about 80 kilometres away from the island; Hiryu and Soryu, in the meantime, were 30 km to the north of it, and about 85 km away from Saratoga. It was also reported that the enemy carrier was being escorted by a battleship that wasn’t supposed to be there, namely HMS Warspite. Nagumo dismissed the battleship as inconsequential against air power and figured its sinking would be another notch on his belt. He subsequently ordered an attack on the Saratoga, to be carried out by his Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers. After her reconstruction, however, Warspite had eight 4-inch Mk XVI anti-aircraft guns (4x2), thirty-two 40 mm two-pounder anti-aircraft guns (4x8) and four quadruple 0.50 calibre Vickers machine guns. Additionally, there was her armour: she had a 14 inch armoured belt, thicker than that of the preceding Iron Duke-class, and also had improved underwater protection compared to the Iron Dukes (the scale of deck armour was less generous, but sufficient for the time when she had been first commissioned, namely 1915). In effect Warspite was to act as a floating punching bag as well as anti-aircraft battery, drawing away attention from Saratoga whose aircraft complement would assist Warspite in keeping Japan’s carrier planes occupied.

Lexington and the accompanying Taskforce 14 steamed westward as well, but they were located about 70 kilometres to the north of Taskforce 11 and 90 kilometres away from the Japanese. Lexington remained undetected and – upon receiving word from Warspite and Saratoga that their radar had detected incoming enemy planes – launched her own attack, composed of 21 Buffalo fighters, 32 Douglas SBD dive bombers and 15 Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers who only had to worry about a small number of Zeroes on CAP. The TBD Devastators were the spearhead and were covered by eight Buffalos, and they were engaged by Zeroes on CAP with devastating effects: all but three planes were shot down because they, unfortunately, served as sacrificial lambs. While the TBD torpedo bombers and their fighter escort were being decimated, the SDB dive bombers descended from high altitude before Japanese fighters could climb to meet them. In fact, climbing Zeroes, otherwise superior to Allied fighters, were attacked and massacred from above by the thirteen Buffalos escorting the SDBs. Their 12.7 mm machine guns easily penetrated the wooden fuselage of the Zeroes (the Zero had superior speed and manoeuvrability, but its armour protection was weak compared to other aircraft of a similar role, configuration and era; its armament was also weak when compared to that of the Hawker Hurricane, the Spitfire and later the P-51 Mustang).

In the meantime, Nagumo had made the ill-fated decision to re-equip some of Soryu’s Aichi D3A dive bombers with armour piercing bombs designed for anti-ship purposes (basically, they were modified 16 inch shells). The reason was that Nagumo correctly assumed, based on the approach vector of the torpedo bombers that had just been shot down, that there was another American aircraft carrier out there. His timing, unfortunately, was poor because the American dive bombers struck right at the moment that Soryu’s aft deck was littered with aircraft, aviation fuel and bombs. Her aft deck was consumed by a huge fireball and was engulfed by an enormous conflagration that would burn for hours, forcing Soryu to withdraw while Hiryu took in her returning aircraft. Zeroes recalled from CAP drove off the American attackers, but they still managed to sink light cruiser Tenryu and a patrol boat. On December 24th, Christmas Eve, Nagumo made the decision to abort the invasion of Wake.

All-in-all, the failed invasion of Wake had cost the Japanese a light cruiser, two destroyers and a patrol boat while one of their carriers would be in dry dock for repairs for the next six months, after she had limped back to Japan. This was a handicap the Imperial Japanese Navy could ill afford at this time. Though Wake itself wasn’t extremely important, putting an enemy carrier out of commission for six months was a strategic victory. Besides that, the victory in the Battle of Wake Island was a major boost to American morale and – as an Allied rather than a purely American victory – further cemented Anglo-American relations.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And another update .

Chapter VIII: Malaya, Singapore and the Java Sea, December 1941-April 1942.​

Unfortunately, the Japanese were very successful elsewhere: Hong Kong had fallen by December 31st 1941, Guam fell in two days, Dutch forces in the Dutch East Indies were overwhelmed, and Rabaul, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines and French Indochina all fell rapidly in late 1941/early 1942. French Indochina, defended only by two brigades and some colonial militia, was conquered by the Imperial Japanese Army in a matter of days (France had stripped it of troops in order to support the Allied effort in Italy). Thailand caved to Japanese pressure without even putting up a fight. Now the Twenty-Fifth Army awaited orders to invade Malaya and take Singapore.

The 5th Division stood poised to invade Malaya from the north – after, on December 8th, the Japanese 18th division had conducted a successful amphibious invasion of the north-eastern town of Kota Bharu. Despite being on alert, the landings at Kota Bharu came as a surprise to the British, who of course immediately counterattacked in an attempt to drive the Japanese back into the sea, in which they failed. The 8th Brigade of the 9th Indian Infantry Division put up a stiff fight, while the 22nd Brigade formed a deeper defence to the rear, but both were compelled to withdraw. By December 9th, both units had fallen back to concentrate as a division, while other British forces had moved 50 kilometres into Thailand to the town of Kroh, encountering weak resistance from Thai gendarmerie and other Thai units. The Indian 11th Infantry Division prepared defensive positions at “The Ledge” near Kroh in Thailand and awaited the arrival of the Imperial Japanese Army’s 5th division.

In the meantime, Force Z steamed north – hugging the coast so they could be covered by land based airpower – and during the evening of December 9th it arrived at Kota Bharu. Force Z was commanded by Admiral Thomas Philips and was composed of battleship HMS Prince of Wales, battlecruiser HMS Repulse and four destroyers. The radar on the ships of Force Z detected Japanese light cruiser Sendai and its escort, consisting of four destroyers. Under the cover of darkness, Philips ordered his forces to close in and open fire at 10.000 yards (~ 9 km or 6 mi). His forces sunk Sendai as well as escorting destroyers Ayanami and Uranami due to superiority in firepower as well as the Royal Navy’s efficiency in night fighting. Though he hadn’t suffered any losses, Philips broke off action just before midnight and steamed south at high speed toward Singapore. He had been too late to stop the Japanese 18th Division from landing, but he had temporarily cut off their supplies. The events of December 9th 1941 have become known as the Naval Battle of Kota Bharu (so it won’t be confused with the fighting around Kota Bharu on land).

The Japanese responded by forming a taskforce of six cruisers around “fast battleship” Kongo tasked to hunt down and destroy Force Z; they also dedicated an entire air flotilla to the task. During the night/early morning of December 10th Force Z luckily remained undetected by Japanese aircraft and remained outside the range of Kongo and its taskforce. That was perhaps a blessing in disguise for the Japanese because Force Z – with ten 14 inch and six 15 inch guns – and its land based air cover could have seriously damaged its pursuers. Also, reinforcements were underway: heavy cruiser HMS Exeter and light cruiser HMAS Hobart were added to Force Z immediately after the Battle of Kota Bharu. Aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable was underway from the Caribbean, with a destroyer escort of three, and would reach Singapore in late January 1942. Battleship HMS Barham, aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, light cruisers Arethusa, Sheffield, Coventry and Calcutta and eight destroyers – all previously a part of the dissolved Mediterranean Force H – were also reassigned from the Home Fleet to Force Z on December 8th 1941. It would, however, take until mid January 1942 for them to arrive at best.

The success of Force Z encouraged General Arthur Percival, the commanding officer in Malaya, to launch a counterattack on the Japanese foothold around Kota Bharu. The Japanese were pushed back and suffered heavy casualties, but weren’t driven out of Malaya. Nonetheless it was a strategic victory for the British because they contained the 18th Division, which should have broken out to advance south together with Japanese forces coming in from Thailand. The Indian 11th Infantry Division, however, also repulsed the Japanese 5th Division at Kroh and therefore the British blunted that component of the invasion of Malaya too.

Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Twenty-Fifth Army, was aware that British naval reinforcements were underway and he absolutely wanted to take Singapore before they arrived. Any major British presence in Malaya and Singapore would be a threat to the Japanese position in the Dutch East Indies, a possession that was the cornerstone to Japan’s fuel situation. Yamashita’s 30.000 frontline soldiers had suffered heavy casualties and he unleashed the remainder of his forces, including the elite Imperial Guards Division, and added Thai units to cover his losses, increasing his strength to 70.000 men. His opponents, however, numbered over 200.000 men and had superiority in tanks as well (by the end of January, the invading Japanese had lost almost their entire tank force while the British had lost only 56 tanks out of 440). The Japanese did have an edge in airpower with ~ 500 aircraft opposed to 318, but with the presence of modern planes the British did manage to put up a fight and gain local air superiority from time to time. Even with the aforementioned reinforcements, the Imperial Japanese Army made little headway into Malaya, making negligible gains for serious losses against a numerically superior and motivated foe. By late January/early February 1942, British, Anzac and British Indian forces still held on to most of Malaya. After seven weeks the Japanese had only conquered a few jungle-clad mountains.

The failure of the conquest of Malaya and Singapore forced the Imperial General Headquarters to divert troops, whilst berating Yamashita for his failure. Japanese objectives in Burma had originally been limited to capturing Rangoon, the colony’s capital and principal seaport, which would close the overland supply line to China and bolster Japanese gains in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. The Fifteenth Army under Lieutenant-General Shojiro Iida, initially consisting of two infantry divisions, attacked the southern Burmese province of Tenasserim. Their attack across Kawkareik Pass was surprisingly successful and they captured the port of Moulmein at the mouth of the Salween River. To Iida’s frustration, most of his forces were transferred and he was ordered to take up a defensive position on the left bank of the river Salween. The Indian 17th Infantry Division commanded by Major General John George Smyth, reinforced by the 48th and 63rd Indian Infantry Brigades, held the Salween’s right bank through January and February. On February 17th 1942, the defending forces of Burma launched an improvised counteroffensive preceded by a short artillery barrage, after which they crossed the river in improvised canoes and almost effortlessly recaptured Moulmein.

In short, the successful defence of Malaya meant that the Japanese had to abandon their conquest of Burma, and Burma indeed remained under complete British control. By February 22nd, British and colonial forces had evicted the Japanese invaders from Burma. Also, by mid February, Malaya and Singapore were still in Allied hands and Force Z had been reinforced to become a formidable force: at this point it consisted of two aircraft carriers, two battleships, one battlecruiser, one heavy cruiser, five light cruisers and fifteen destroyers for a total of 26 ships.

In the meantime, the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies progressed at a rapid pace as they captured bases in Sarawak, Borneo and Celebes. Dutch colonial forces were plainly not ready for war and were easily overwhelmed by Imperial Japanese forces. Troop convoys, screened by destroyers and cruisers with air support provided by swarms of fighters operating from captured bases, steamed southward through the Makassar Strait and into the Molucca Sea. To oppose these invading forces was a small force, consisting of Dutch, American, British and Australian warships. In January a force of four American destroyers unsuccessfully attacked a Japanese convoy in the Makassar Strait and in February the Allies were defeated in the Battle of Palembang, allowing Japan to capture the major oil port in eastern Sumatra. The Allies were also defeated by an inferior invasion force in the Battle of Badung Strait, while air raids rendered Darwin useless as a supply and naval base.

The odds were not great for the Allied forces. They were disunited (ships came from five separate navies) and demoralized by constant air attacks. In addition, the coordination between Allied navies and air forces was mediocre. The Japanese amphibious forces gathered to strike at Java, and on February 27th 1942, the main ABDAFCOM naval force, under Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, sailed northeast from Surabaya to intercept a convoy of the Eastern Invasion Force approaching from the Makassar Strait. The ABDAF force consisted of one heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, and eight destroyers while the opposing force was composed of two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, fourteen destroyers and ten transports. Doorman’s forces launched pinprick probing attacks throughout the afternoon in what was the early phase of the Battle of the Java Sea, inflicting little damage (while also suffering limited damage). To the Japanese it seemed like Doorman’s Combined Striking Force was aiming for the invasion convoy, but in reality they only diverted attention from the real attack.

Battlecruiser HMS Repulse and her destroyer escort (detached from Force Z) steamed down Karimata Strait and arrived on February 27th around 19:00 hours. Repulse seriously damaged Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro in intermittent night-fighting between 8:15 PM and 00:30 AM, using Allied radar technology to her advantage. She suffered damage herself too as Haguro’s sister ship Nachi and light cruisers Naka and Jintsu engaged at 13.000 yards out, proving that Japanese naval crews too were proficient night fighters. Repulse was hit by several 203 mm (8 inch) and 140 mm (5.5 inch) shells, but one of her own 381 mm (15 inch) shells, cut through Naka’s 29 mm (1.1 inch) deck armour like a knife through butter, exploding in her ammunition magazine. Naka sank in a few minutes, taking all but eight of her crew with her. In the very early morning hours of February 28th, HMS Repulse withdrew back to Singapore under the cover of darkness to avoid air attacks by the Japanese out on patrol looking for her, rejoining Force Z after some repairs.

The Battle of the Java Sea was a tactical victory for the Allies: they had damaged a heavy cruiser, which would likely need a few weeks in dry dock, and had sunk an enemy light cruiser. Strategically, however, it was inconclusive. The Japanese invasion of Java continued with only a few days delay and they sank heavy cruiser USS Houston, light cruiser HMAS Perth and four destroyers, leaving no serious Allied forces capable of stopping the Japanese in the Sunda Strait. Dutch light cruisers HNLMS De Ruyter and HNLMS Java with five remaining destroyers had to withdraw all the way to Perth, Australia. They survived the war and saw some action in the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia between 1945 and 1950. Java was sold to become the Costa Rican navy’s flagship in 1951, in which capacity she served until they sold her for scrap in 1972. De Ruyter was upgraded after the war and was stationed at Netherlands New Guinea, serving in the shooting war against Indonesia in 1961-’62 which resulted in the Dutch keeping this colony as an autonomous country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (being much better of than Indonesia, having an $18.000 GDP per capita compared to $3.500). De Ruyter was eventually decommissioned in 1966 after a thirty year career and became a museum ship at the Dutch naval base of Den Helder, remaining open to the public until the present day. Rear Admiral Karel Doorman was promoted to full Admiral and survived the war. In 1950 he had a part in organizing a NATO naval exercise, he retired from active duty in 1951 and he died in 1964 aged 75. He was given a state funeral.

In the meantime, British resistance in Malaya was starting to buckle as well under the weight of Japanese reinforcements, although they continued to inflict serious losses. The beleaguered Japanese 18th Division managed to break out of Kota Bharu on March 1st 1942. That forced the Indian 11th Infantry Division to withdraw from their long held position at Kroh, Thailand, to avoid being captured in a pincer between the reinforced Japanese 5th Division and the Imperial Guards coming in from the north and the 18th Division threatening their rear. Before Malaya fell, an RAF squadron of De Havilland Mosquito bombers conducted an air raid on Borneo on March 15th, targeting the island’s oil wells and refineries. Their success was moderate: they knocked out oil production for two weeks, but lost a number of bombers that would take more than two weeks to replace.

By March 23rd, the Japanese had overrun Malaya and laid siege to Singapore while Japanese advances in the Dutch East Indies threatened to make this position untenable. 150.000 men were under threat of becoming prisoners of war of the Imperial Japanese Army, a fate one wouldn’t wish for their worst enemy. Force Z kept the fortress city supplied and, but the situation became hopeless as the Dutch defences on Sumatra collapsed. Force Z started to evacuate Singapore’s defenders despite Japanese air attacks aimed at preventing that. While the evacuation was ongoing, Japanese soldiers found out the hard way that British and Imperial forces were more than a match in urban combat. During fierce urban fighting in Singapore, Japanese forces incurred heavy losses. The last defenders of Singapore surrendered on April 5th and Force Z left for Ceylon to fight another day, joining aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, heavy cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire and destroyer HMAS Vampire at Trincomalee.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Has the sabotage of dutch oil fields been as through as IOTL?

About the same.

Chapter IX: Barbarossa vs. Nevsky, May-December 1942.
​

While the Pacific theatre saw a lot of action from late 1941 to spring 1942, the European theatre was inactive in the same timeframe, except for some minor battles in Italy. During this period, the United States Army Expeditionary Corps – composed of the US 2nd Armoured Division and the US 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions, totalling 35.000 troops – was deployed to Italy in April 1942. It was commanded by Major General George S. Patton and was nominally subordinate to the Allied Expeditionary Force commanded by Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (replacement of Wavell, who had been sent to command ABDAFCOM). In reality, Patton ignored Auchinleck routinely when he saw an opportunity for a victory. The original plan was to rotate large American units in and out of Italy to gain combat experience, but Patton objected and kept most of the forces he had started out with. Subsequently, his core USAEC became an elite force in the US Army that scored small but valuable victories. Brigade sized forces rotated between training areas in North Africa, guard duties at POW camps there, and the battlefields of Italy, slowly forming a veteran force. US troop strength also grew to 150.000 in four months.

In the meantime, the British stepped up their bombing campaign: they had conducted bombing raids against targets in Germany before, but even the largest of those had been two and a half times smaller than the attack on Cologne on the night of May 30th/May 31st 1942 (daytime bombings had proven much too costly). The Royal Navy refused to let Coastal Command aircraft to participate because they felt propaganda justifications were too weak against the real and pressing U-boat threat. “Bomber” Harris managed to get enough pupil pilots and flying instructors to crew the remaining aircraft. 1.047 bombers eventually took part in Operation Millennium, the first thousand bomber attack on Cologne.

A total of nearly 1.500 tonnes of bombs was dropped, two thirds of those being incendiaries, starting 2.500 fires across the city, of which 1.700 were classified as “large” by German fire brigades. 3.330 non-residential buildings were destroyed, 2.090 seriously damaged and 7.420 lightly damaged, making for a total of 12.840 buildings of which 2.560 were industrial or commercial buildings. The damage to civilian homes, most of them apartments in larger buildings, was also considerable: 13.010 destroyed, 6.360 seriously damaged and 22.270 lightly damaged. Additionally, 428 civilians died, 58 military personnel were killed, 5.027 people were listed as injured and 135.000-150.000 out of Cologne’s population of 700.000 fled. The cost to the RAF was only 43 planes and it would be the first of many thousand bomber raids. These were designed to hit German war production and break civilian morale, but they failed in both respects: the output of German industry in fact increased under the leadership of Minister of Armaments Albert Speer and the German people continued to support the war effort. There, however, was an effect: over one million soldiers would be assigned to air defence duties, more than 500.000 Germans would die because of the strategic bombing campaign, and the Luftwaffe would have to divide its attention over at least three fronts for the remainder of the war (the Eastern Front, Italy and Germany).

The increase in the production of weapons and ammunition had a reason: within days of the bombing of Cologne, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union that had been in the making for almost two years, kicked off (despite the urging of several of Hitler’s generals to postpone it indefinitely). It had been scheduled to start on Sunday May 17th 1942, but intelligence reports emphasized that most roads had been reduced to impassable sludge due to the rasputitza rains. Because the ground part of the German invasion would get irrecoverably stuck in the ocean of mud within five minutes, it was postponed by a week to May 24th. Weather reports indicated that heavy rains would continue to plague the western Soviet Union and Barbarossa was again postponed until May 31st. In the following days, however, the weather cleared up: a weather front came in from the southeast that brought clear skies and minimum daytime temperatures of 22 °C (72 °F), reaching a maximum of 31 °C (88 °F). It lasted for the entire month of June and the Russian steppes transformed from a giant tank trap to a highway for the Panzers. Red dust got everywhere and was a major annoyance, but not a serious hindrance to Barbarossa, which commenced on June 7th 1942. 3 million German and another 800.000 Axis troops (Finnish, Slovakian, Hungarian, Romanian and Yugoslavian, and a Spanish volunteer division) crossed the border in the largest military campaign the world had ever seen.

In the meantime, in November 1941, Stalin had summoned his defence minister Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, his best tank general Georgy Zhukov, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Marshal Semyon Budyonny, head of the air force Pavel Zhigarev, and People’s Commissar for the Navy Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov to his Kremlin office, known as “Stalin’s corner”. He informed them that by his top secret decree they formed the new General Staff, or Stavka, and that Zhukov was the new Chief of the General Staff, succeeding Kirill Meretskov. He reiterated a statement he’d made in a speech to graduates of military academies in Moscow on May 5th 1941: “War with Germany is inevitable.” Over the course of 1941, the Red Army had implemented reforms based on their embarrassing performance in the Winter War against Finland and after witnessing the success of German blitzkrieg tactics. They had also modernized their equipment and built thousands of T-34 medium and KV-1 heavy tanks. As Stalin witnessed how Germany failed to defeat and completely dislodge the Western Allies from the European continent, he believed this was the perfect time to strike. In the November meeting in his office, he ordered newly appointed Chief of Staff Zhukov and Stavka to plan a pre-emptive strike on Germany. The attack, codenamed Operation Nevsky, was to take place in June, after the autumn rains had subsided. Stalin also formed a the new People’s Commissariat for Armaments Production and appointed Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, to lead it. Fear and intimidation would be used to increase arms production, along with further exploiting the hundreds of thousands of Gulag inmates to their maximum potential (the Gulag was in fact the country’s largest employer).

Based on meteorological reports, the Red Army was to attack on June 12th 1942, as scheduled, and 3.500.000 troops started to deploy to vulnerable forward attack positions from late May. In the meantime, Stalin was warned that the Wehrmacht was doing the same thing, but he dismissed these reports. He didn’t believe Hitler would be stupid enough to start a war against him while also at war with Great Britain and now also the United States and not even in control of continental Europe yet, ignoring the history lesson that Germany should avoid a two-front war at all costs. Stalin’s gigantic misjudgement of Hitler’s character and motives meant that the massing vanguard of the Red Army – composed of three quarters of a million men and thousands of tanks – was caught in a colossal encirclement. Also, over 887 aircraft deployed to forward positions were destroyed in the first 24 hours by the Luftwaffe.

In total, 42 divisions were caught by Wehrmacht spearheads that cut through them and then threatened their rear while the Luftwaffe and German artillery attacked them relentlessly. German soldiers and commanders were quickly disillusioned, however, when it turned out during their initial encounters that their adversaries were anything but weak. Soviet soldiers provided fierce and competent resistance due to a mix of ideological conviction, being terrified of their own superiors (the political commissars in particular) and the immediate threat of an invasion of their motherland. Moreover, T-34 tanks proved superior to the Panzer IV, the most ubiquitous German tank by 1942, never mind the heavy KV-1: the Panzer IV could only penetrate the T-34’s armour at point blank range while 88 mm flak guns were needed for the KV-1. The newest version of the Panzer IV would have an elongated version of the 75 mm gun with greater muzzle velocity and therefore greater armour piercing capacity.

The German attack commenced at 3:30 AM June 7th and two days later, for lack of orders from a shocked and confused Stalin, Zhukov ordered the entrapped forces to fight their way out to lines further east. The Red Air Force and troops intended as follow-up for the initial invasion in Operation Nevsky launched an improvised counteroffensive to relieve their encircled comrades, suffering very heavy losses. Veteran Wehrmacht pilots ran circles around inexperienced Soviet pilots and they also had the most advanced machines. Even in this early phase of the invasion they noticed the sheer number of aviators and aircraft their opponent could bring to bear (Stalin said “great quantity is a quality in its own right”). Soviet ground forces also came with major numerical strength but incurred heavy losses due to their disadvantageous positions, but were able to survive (and they had inflicted more serious losses than the Germans had anticipated). Major Soviet formations were destroyed in cauldrons in the early frontier battles, particularly at Kaunas, Bialystok, Brest and Lvov. Out of 750.000 men, 300.000 were irrevocably lost in the frontier battles of the first ten days, destroying two fifths of the vanguard of Operation Nevsky, which had been snuffed out before it even began. A 40% loss was massive and a couple of divisions even suffered losses up to 80% in their escape attempt. Besides 300.000 men killed or taken prisoner, 200.000 men were wounded to various degrees, for a total of 500.000 casualties. Almost 15% of the entire Red Army invasion force had been put out of action in less than a month. Only a country the size of the Soviet Union could survive such catastrophic losses and continue to fight on to victory.

Zhukov ordered the Red Army to fall back to a line that followed the Dvina River, the Berezina River, then diverged south to the impassable Pripyat Marshes, then followed the western part of the Teteriv River and then followed the Southern Bug River. Lithuania, a large part of Byelorussia, and western Ukraine were abandoned between June and September in a phased, fighting retreat. Army Group North broke out and overran Latvia and Estonia, threatening Leningrad and being by far the most successful of the three German army groups. Army Group Centre advanced east and crossed the Berezina and also the Dnieper, but resistance from a numerically superior, well-equipped and motivated foe reduced the German advance to a snail’s pace. Army Group South didn’t do much better in its attempt to conquer eastern Ukraine after crossing the river Dnieper, taking the Ukrainian SSR’s capital of Kiev.

In the meantime, the Crimean Peninsula turned out to be a haemorrhage for the Germans: the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and the Red Air Force continued to supply the besieged troops at Sevastopol regardless of the cost. They also supplied the troops operating in the eastern Crimea through the harbour of Kerch, which was only 3.1 km away from the Taman Peninsula on the opposite side. Forces in the Crimea were reduced to two pockets where fighting was ferocious and Stalin, ignoring disproportionate losses, hung on to them to stir up patriotic sentiment: through propaganda Sevastopol and Kerch became symbols of defiance. In December 1942, the two pockets even launched simultaneous breakout attempts which very nearly succeeded in linking up, but they got stuck 30 kilometres from each other. They could actually hear each other’s gunfire, but by Christmas were exhausted and no reinforcements arrived to counter fresh German troops.

Behind the front, in the meantime, Nazi atrocities unfolded: as per the “Commissar Order” political commissars of the Red Army were executed upon capture to destroy the country’s ideological backbone. Not long thereafter, the SS Einsatzgruppen encouraged pogroms against Jews, which were particularly violent in the Baltic States. These were followed by indiscriminate mass executions of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen: this was known as the “Holocaust of Bullets” and killed one million people, culminating in the massacre of nearly 34.000 Jews in two days time in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev. The high dropout rate due to psychological problems motivated SS leader Heinrich Himmler to seek alternative methods. By October 1942 the SS deployed trucks that pumped poison gas or exhaust fumes into the back and that proved to be a much more effective way to conduct the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as it was called. Two months later the first gas chambers went into operation at a location personally selected by Himmler 80 km northeast of Warsaw, the city that had the largest Jewish ghetto in the entire Reich (with over half a million inhabitants crammed into a 3.4 square kilometre space). Upon becoming operational in December 1942, Treblinka killed more than a quarter of a million people and those select few who were left alive to work were subjected to humiliation, random cruelty, imprisonment, forced labour, starvation and a complete absence of medical care. The Polish Home Army, or Armia Krajowa, haphazardly smuggled in some supplies, proving unable to consistently aid the Jews in the ghetto.

After their invasion force had been caught with its pants down and got mauled, the Red Army had withdrawn in chaos, but by autumn 1942 they had reorganized. Despite furious offensives on Hitler’s orders, the frontline stabilized on a line running from Leningrad through Novgorod, Smolensk, Dnepropetrovsk to Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov. Given the numerical advantage it wasn’t surprising that the German advance grinded to a halt: they suffered half a million casualties up to September and could replace only 200.000 of them. Opposite 136 Axis divisions stood 280 Soviet divisions, with another 40 kept in reserve for possible action against Imperial Japan. After the damage that had been wrought by the enemy, however, Zhukov allowed Hitler to grind down his strength in futile offensives that produced negligible gains, with Stalin’s permission of course. In the meantime, factories in places like Leningrad, Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Orel, Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod, Kharkov, Stalingrad and Rostov churned out massive quantities of tanks, artillery guns, rifles, machine guns, mortars and airplanes. The Red Army prepared for a major winter offensive.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Here's the next chapter. Hope you like it .

Chapter X: Tipping the Balance, December 1941-April 1943.
​

By summer 1942, the Italian Campaign didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. During the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) meetings, constituted from the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, British and American officers had bitter arguments. The Americans wanted a landing in northern France in 1942 to complement the Red Army coming in from the east. They wanted to capture the ports of Cherbourg or Brest and hold the beachhead on the Cotentin Peninsula through the winter of 1942 and into 1943. It was a stratagem which British, Italian and French politicians and military commanders viewed as impractical and foolish for a number of reasons. In 1942, the Luftwaffe’s air superiority hadn’t been broken yet, amphibious warfare equipment wasn’t available in the necessary quantities, there weren’t enough troops, and adequate supplies were also absent. The British could have landed only six divisions at most, whereas the Germans had 25 divisions in Western Europe. Assuming it could be established in the first place, a beachhead on the Cotentin peninsula would be blocked off and attacked by land, sea and air. Cherbourg, the only suitable port would undoubtedly be mined, while aircraft and artillery would be expected to attack the town in strength, while German armoured forces were brought to bear.

During the First Washington Conference in December 1941/January 1942 – attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and the ambassadors of the USSR, Italy, and France – the US agreed to a “Europe first” policy to the relief of London, Moscow, Rome and Paris. They, however, disagreed about the approach. Western Allied commanders, other than the Americans, still espoused Churchill’s vision, which consisted of breaking out into the Po Valley and the Venetian-Friulian Plain. This would be followed by an assault on the Lubljana Gap and a breakout into the Slovenian Plateau, after which the Allies could move on to Vienna and Prague, cutting the Reich in half (as well as keeping the Soviets out of Central Europe). During the Second Washington Conference in June 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt made the Italian front the main priority. In August 1942, Churchill and US special envoy William Averell Harriman arrived in Moscow to motivate the choice of the Western Allies for a campaign via Italy to a frustrated Stalin. The paranoid Soviet tyrant wanted a front in northern France to relieve his beleaguered forces sooner rather than later. At this point, however, that just wasn’t an option.

To compensate for the absence of a new front in France, the British and Americans stepped up their strategic bombing campaign, using Corsica and Sardinia as large, unsinkable aircraft carriers. They allowed for bombing raids on southern Germany while raids on western Germany could continue from British airfields, forcing the Luftwaffe to disperse its defensive forces further. For example, the first raid launched from Sardinia took off on August 8th 1942 and targeted Ulm, devastating the city centre as well as some barracks, supply depots and the lorry factories of Magirus-Deutz and Kässbohrer (hampering the production of both trucks and the necessary spare parts that were desperately needed in the east). Secondly, some PBY Catalina maritime patrol seaplanes and B-24 Liberator medium bombers were allocated to Corsica and Sardinia and further diminished the already modest U-boat presence in the western Mediterranean (when compared to the Atlantic Ocean). The most important strategic aspect, however, was that southern France, the Italian Tyrrhenian, the Italian Adriatic and the Yugoslav coasts were completely open to invasion. German commanders had little clues as to where the anticipated Allied invasion would come, more so with Allied disinformation, and they had to spread out their forces.

German lines were heavily defended, including 75, 88 and a handful of 105 mm anti-tank guns dug in as casemates (which were very effective against Allied tanks). The Allies launched several offensives to capture the Futa and Il Giogo passes in early 1942 to break out into the Po Valley, but German defences proved to be too strong to breach with a simple frontal assault. They were designed with plenty of tank traps, obstacles, overlapping fields of fire etc. and were hard to hit by air attack, quickly reducing this to a war of attrition like the one the Italians had fought before in WW I. The Comando Supremo had no interest in a repeat of that demoralizing, exhausting slugging match and neither did other Western military leaders. Mussolini proposed the use of chemical weapons to force a breakthrough, but the other Western leaders didn’t want to open up that particular can of worms. Besides their fear of retaliation, they remembered how ineffective chemical weapons had been at breaking the stalemate in WW I. So the solution was to go around German defences in Italy rather than through them by landing an amphibious force behind them, which would also give the Allies a practice run for a future landing in France. It was as Kesselring feared, but Hitler chose to believe a trickle of false Allied intelligence – sizeable enough to be noticed, but not big enough to appear obviously false – concerning a landing at the Pas-de-Calais and waved away any evidence to the contrary.

The Allied offensive was codenamed Operation Sword Bearer and encompassed a landing at Rimini, on the extreme southern edge of the Po Valley, Rimini being the most suitable port in the province of Romagna, Mussolini’s home province (which, in turn, had been identified as a much more optimal landing area than the largely mountainous province of Liguria). It commenced at 5:00 AM on November 15th 1942 with the first major Allied airborne operation, conducted by the US 82nd Airborne Division. The 82nd had only been recalled to active service in March 1942 and was rushed to the Italian front in October 1942: it was therefore mostly composed of soldiers with no combat experience whatsoever, and commanding officer Major General Ridgway complained that he had been given insufficient time to prepare his men for this assignment (only seven months). The parachutists were dispersed by the wind and grossly overshot their landing zones, but they performed beyond expectations and maximized their opportunities, attacking patrols and creating confusion wherever possible.

At 6:00 AM, 110.000 men landed which were spearheaded by 35.000 US troops commanded by General Patton, interspersed with three elite, veteran Italian assault brigades. A true baptism of fire it was not because the 15 kilometre long and 200 metre wide beach was only lightly defended by a handful of machine gun posts and 37 mm anti-tank guns protected by little more than sand bags. There were some 50 mm PaK 38 and some 75 mm PaK anti-tank guns, a few minefields and some bunkers around strategic locations, but there were huge undefended gaps in between. German defences were in fact planned to be completed in 1944, and even that was doubtful, which meant that in many cases Allied soldiers could just walk off the beach. The only trouble came at the port of Rimini because the Germans had built a number of pillboxes and casemates to protect it. But there was little that the mighty 381 mm (15 inch) guns of battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto couldn’t take care of. Indeed, the Regia Marina provided plentiful artillery support while aircraft carriers HMS Eagle and USS Ranger provided air cover.

When Hitler got out of his bedroom past noon at the Berghof after a serious migraine attack, the Allies had already established a beachhead that was 15 kilometres wide and two kilometres deep. Hitler ordered an immediate counterattack and the Allies got to deal with Tiger tanks for the first time. The Tigers scored some spectacular tactical victories against M4 Shermans, but they didn’t push the Allies back into the sea, not surprising since the Allies were backed up by devastating naval gunfire and major air support. German resistance was nonetheless much more fierce than expected and it took the Allies an entire week to take Cesena (a city about 30 kilometres from Rimini that was planned to have been captured within 36 hours). The Allies renewed their offensive against the Futa and Il Giogo passes and seized them from the Germans. The Germans had to withdraw to avoid being outflanked by the troops that had landed at Rimini and were advancing north-westward to Bologna. The decisive breakthrough had finally been achieved, but poor winter weather from December onward made armoured manoeuvres and the exploitation of air superiority impossible. Kesselring, who had replaced Von Manstein, withdrew in good order to a line that followed the Reno River and then the foothills of the Apennines before swinging south and ending just east of Genoa. Rimini, Ravenna, Faenza, Forli, Bologna and La Spezia had been liberated by late 1942.

In the meantime, in December 1942, the Soviets had recovered from the massive losses sustained in the summer in a way that only such a giant country could. They launched the massive Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation in Ukraine against a Wehrmacht weakened by a successful Soviet defensive campaign that had swamped the Germans with superior numbers. Over 1.5 million troops, 20.000 artillery guns, 2.000 armoured fighting vehicles and 2.750 aircraft of the Red Army stood opposite 1 million men, 12.000 guns, 1.500 AFVs and 1.800 aircraft. The German frontline was overwhelmed by parallel as well as successive attacks – in line with the Deep Battle doctrine – and the Germans were driven across the Dnieper in days with the Soviets hot behind them. After that Red Army troops skated across the river, which had frozen solid due to temperatures as low as -25 °C, and established beachheads north and south of Kiev. The counterattack ordered by Hitler failed to dislodge these beachheads, which continued to grow, and in February 1943 the Red Army finally liberated Kiev, the third largest city of the USSR. The Germans commanded by Von Manstein conducted a brilliant riposte at Zhytomir in late February, in part due to overextended Soviet supply lines. The reprieve was short and in another two months time, the Red Army advanced to the Dniester River, liberating an area bigger than France and reaching the doorstep of Romania. The balance had decisively been tipped in favour of the Allies, for a large part due to the massive efforts of the USSR, which almost put those of the Western Allies to shame.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update!

Chapter XI: D-Day, April-August 1943.
​

By spring 1943, the Allies were pushing Germany and its allies into a corner and, unlike the Axis powers, the Allies actually coordinated their efforts. The Soviet winter offensive of 1942, for example, came within a month of the landings in Rimini. Hitler responded by diverting forces from Italy to the Eastern Front and later weakened garrison forces in France and Yugoslavia to cover his losses in the east.

The Western Allied bombing campaign also intensified and underwent specialization, diminishing the bombings of apartment blocks and the killings of civilians (though they never stopped, instead continuing until the end of the war since people like Bomber Harris defended them as a way to break civilian morale). They targeted chokepoints instead. The British started to target bridges, railway stations, shunting yards, supply depots and began to mine internal waterways during night time raids, heavily relying on De Havilland Mosquitos as tactical bombers. These attacks weren’t too accurate by modern standards, but they nevertheless hurt the German war effort. After the success of Operation Chastise – more commonly known as the British “Dam Busters raid” – the US Air Force chose to emulate it. They carried out daytime “precision” bombings against these dams which delayed their reconstruction by three months and caused electricity blackouts that lasted well into 1944. Beyond that, the USAAF started to bomb Germany’s electrical grid in general and also targeted coal mines, power plants, oil wells, oil refineries, factories producing synthetic oil, storage depots, pipelines and other POL infrastructure resources (POL meaning petroleum, oil and lubricants).

In January 1943 in the Tripoli Conference in Italian Libya, Churchill, Roosevelt, Reynaud, Mussolini and Chiang Kai-shek convened and announced their demand for the Axis powers’ unconditional surrender to convince the paranoid Stalin of their intentions and their commitment to the “Grand Alliance” as Churchill had dubbed the Allied powers (Stalin refused to show up out of anger about the absence of a new front in northern France and because he wouldn’t meet with Chiang Kai-shek since he supported Mao Zedong). It was also the first occasion US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and fascist leader Benito Mussolini met, with Mussolini making an impression by using battleship Littorio as his flagship for the occasion. Mussolini thought Roosevelt was intelligent as well as charming, sometimes to the point of being slick, a bourgeois trait that Il Duce didn’t appreciate. He also detected a faked politeness from the US President, which was caused by the fact that Roosevelt didn’t know what to make of Mussolini. His analysis of Il Duce was summed up by his statement that “the Duce is a man of many faces: intelligent, sometimes charming, other times loud, impetuous and bombastic, and later pensive and brooding.” In February 1943, the four Western leaders met with Stalin in the Damascus Conference in the office of the French High Commissioner there, unsurprising since Syria was a French mandate. The Soviet leader proved to be able to puzzle them all with his sometimes charming, other times aggressive behaviour and his macabre sense of humour. Mussolini and Stalin instantly disliked each other, and not only for ideological reasons, but they nonetheless respected each other as superb politicians and ideologues. It was the first time these five leaders met. The United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, Italy and France – collectively known as the “Big Five”, or “Old Alliance” because they had been allies in WW I too – planned their final strategy to defeat Germany. More specifically, under American and Soviet pressure, the Big Five agreed to landings in northern France that were to take place in August 1943. Mussolini and Churchill had consistently advocated Balkan landings, but came out as the losers because Reynaud sided with Roosevelt and Stalin.

In June 1943, the Red Army launched a spring offensive, known as Operation Chichagov in propaganda. It was named after an early nineteenth century Russian general from the Napoleonic Wars and Governor-General of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1812. The name choice was a part of the propaganda campaign to drum up nationalistic rather than class based sentiments, with Stalin believing the former to be more effective. Knowing that the Allies were far removed from Berlin, the Soviets could leisurely allow themselves to let an advance on the German heartland wait and instead pursue traditional Russian Balkan interests. For a country that officially adhered to an internationalist, anti-imperialist ideology, it was being very nationalist and imperialist. It would also be much more brutal than anyone in the British Empire, the French Empire and even the Italian Empire could imagine. These were the same colonial empires that Roosevelt ironically distrusted while falling for the charms of a tyrant that would easily make Mussolini look like a pacifist, the same Italian leader that had crushed Libyan revolts in the 1920s and had used chemical weapons on the Ethiopians. After retaking Bessarabia, the NKVD would summarily execute tens of thousands and deport many more to Siberia to do slave labour in the gulag.

Operation Chichagov, known to Stavka as the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive during its planning stages, involved 1.7 million men, 4.500 tanks, 1.100 assault guns, 30.000 artillery guns and 3.500 aircraft. After the Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation, Army Group South had been further reduced from 1 million to 800.000 men; its armour and air forces were easily outnumbered 3:1. When it seemed ever more likely that Romania would be invaded, King Michael attempted a palace coup against the country’s leader, Ion Antonescu. This coup d’état failed and the Romanian King was placed under house arrest, while Antonescu and commander of Army Group South Friessner conducted Romania’s defence. Antonescu summoned all available reserves and greatly relaxed physical requirements that would get conscripts rejected: everyone who could point and shoot would do, and thusly Romania managed to rally an additional 300.000 men. Anticipating the Soviet offensive on Romania, Friessner also got reinforcements diverted from Army Groups North and Centre. In the meantime, the Germans and Romanians had managed to blow up pretty much every bridge across the Dniester. They fought a strong defence in the hills of Bessarabia and held the Red Army back at the river Prut and turned the Focșani Gap into a deadly bottleneck. To everyone’s surprise, the Germans and Romanians not only held but proved themselves superior on a tactical level and by July 1943 the Soviet offensive had petered out, sooner than expected by Stavka.

Despite bad weather, the Red Army renewed its offensive in September and finally subdued the tenacious Germans and Romanians in October. After that they proceeded to overwhelm the defenders, who were forced to withdraw to the northwest of Romania, behind the Carpathian Mountains. Ironically, by stopping King Michael’s coup, Antonescu was actually delaying the inevitable for the Hungarians that he hated so much. Knowing his army couldn’t operate without oil, Hitler ordered an ill-fated counteroffensive to retake Bucharest and the Ploiesti oilfields in December. It produced a long salient that the Germans had to withdraw from due to the inevitable Soviet counterattack, ultimately bringing about only negligible gains. Hitler now had to rely on small scale oil production at the Balaton Lake, some small sources in Austria, Poland, Moravia and Yugoslavia and synthetic oil. Only half of the Wehrmacht’s needs could be met.

Anticipating Stalin’s move to overrun the Balkans as early as the Damascus Conference – using their own intelligence as well as decrypted German Enigma messages – Mussolini and Churchill knew they had to act if they wanted any kind of influence on the Balkans after the war. Churchill practically begged Roosevelt to conduct an amphibious landing in Dalmatia, but Mussolini went a step further by boldly stating he would do it with or without American help. He forced Roosevelt’s hand: Roosevelt couldn’t allow inter-Allied rivalries to become public, never mind letting his British and Italian allies fail and get driven back into the sea ignominiously. The attack started on May 9th 1943, with the Regia Marina providing the bulk of the naval support.

Fully utilizing America’s phenomenal logistical capabilities, the US managed to support simultaneous airborne landings on the Croatian islands of Brac, Hvar, Vis and Solta, which controlled the waters around the Croatian port and shipbuilding centre of Split. The Yugoslav garrisons were small and many ethnically Croatian soldiers, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Slovene soldiers surrendered without putting up a fight. As a result of wartime policies, Yugoslavia’s Serb elites had further strengthened their power. That essentially turned the country into a “Greater Serbia” even more than before, alienating the country’s minorities. Just before the invasion, supply drops to the Croatian Ustashe increased dramatically and the Croats stepped up their partisan war against the Serbs and Germans. They attacked economic and military targets – such as power plants, factories, mines, bridges, communications facilities and command and control installations – all over Croatia and parts of Bosnia. The response by Serbian SS units was brutal, consisting of ethnic cleansing, to which the Ustashe responded with their own bloody massacres of ethnic Serbs, a fact to which the Allies turned a blind eye (Yugoslavia was the only place in the European theatre comparable to the Eastern Front in terms of atrocities). The climax was an attack by 3.000 Croat resistance fighters on an ammunitions and fuel depot right outside Split, to which the local German commander responded by sending in a German SS brigade that was defending the port.

Not an hour later, one Italian assault division and one US infantry division overwhelmed the weakened garrison and seized control of several docks so reinforcements could be brought in. But the Allies weren’t out of the woods yet because enemy forces in the city resisted fiercely, turning a task that should have been completed in a few hours into one that would take almost two days. It was among the worst urban fighting the Western Allies had seen thus far. While the Allies were fighting from the inside to the edge of the city, the edge of the city was under attack from the outside by constant pinprick raids from the Ustashe. The Allies took Dalmatia in about one month, but didn’t progress further. Crucial was that the Luftwaffe could resupply German forces from the air despite Allied interdiction and later also Red Air Force attacks from Romania. Also, the railway network was so limited that most supplies had to get to the front by truck, which wasn’t easy because many roads weren’t solid and turned to mud whenever it rained. It took two divisions dedicated to logistics to support one frontline division. Eighteen divisions had been deployed to Dalmatia within one month, but only six of those were true combat divisions. The Americans would come to see the Dalmatian campaign as a useless sideshow, but despite its small size it was still a thorn in Germany’s side thanks to strong cooperation with the Ustashe.

August 1st 1943 then finally saw the opening of the second front that Stalin so desired. It was preceded by a short but intense phase of low altitude aerial bombing against German coastal defences, destroying German radar installations. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, numbering 13.000 men, landed to the west and southwest of Cherbourg at Octeville and Equeurdreville-Hainneville. The British 6th Airborne Division, numbering 11.000 men, landed east of Cherbourg near Tourlaville. Many of the paratroopers grossly overshot their landing zones due to the prevailing strong winds, but that had the positive effect of confusing the Germans and fragmenting their response. Additionally, the German Panzer reserves couldn’t be released without Hitler’s consent, but the insomniac Führer had been put to sleep by a teaspoon of barbiturates administered to him by his quack of a physician Theo Morell. To slow the enemy ability to launch counterattacks against the to-be-established beachhead, the airborne forces seized control of bridges, road crossings and terrain features, blocking many approaches to the landing area. Others, who were too far away from their objectives, maximized their opportunities, doing everything they could to create as much confusion as possible among the Germans.

The amphibious landings commenced at 7:00 AM on August 1st 1943, D-Day, under cover fire from a huge Allied fleet and with massive air cover, though the air wasn’t uncontested. The Luftwaffe posed a serious challenge and when Hitler unleashed the Panzer reserves the Allied beachhead around Cherbourg came under siege. The Allied position remained tenuous, but a continued Allied naval presence and vigorous aerial campaign allowed it to survive.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And the war ends.

Chapter XII: Endgame, August 1943-February 1945.​

Allied troop strength quadrupled from 150.000 to 600.000 by mid September 1943, but continued German pressure brought the Anglo-American allies to appeal to Mussolini and Stalin for help. Stalin was about to launch an offensive anyway to retake Belarus and the Baltic States to reach the pre-1942 border, and it was wildly successful. Mussolini, on the other hand, was unpleasantly surprised because he’d been counting on the landings in northern France to take pressure off his burdened forces and allow them to sit back and recover for a while. Instead, however, the weary Regio Esercito, bolstered by British, American and French forces, was asked to attack and Mussolini reluctantly agreed. 350.000 Allied troops, two thirds of them Italian, went unto the breach once more and attacked the new German line along the Reno River on September 14th. The German defence under Kesselring proved tenacious and Allied progress was negligible, and there were a number of cases of mutiny among the Italians similar to the 1917 French mutinies: it wasn’t that they no longer wanted to fight, but they were tired of useless offensives. Disciplinary courts came down hard on the worst mutineers and handed out a few death sentences, but let most off with a slap on the wrist to avoid making things worse. The offensive was paused after two weeks with only a few snippets of territorial gains and heavy casualties to show for it.

To deal with the situation of a war weary army Mussolini knew he needed a serious victory to sell the idea of continuing the fight. He definitely wanted that, for the last thing he wanted was to sign a separate peace and be seen as a cowardly traitor. The fascist dictator, against the wishes of his fellow Allied leaders, chose for decisive action and took off the gloves by authorizing the use of chemical weapons. Based purely on written orders, to avoid Germany finding out, gas masks were distributed among the troops and mustard gas shells arrived at the front by mid October. On October 18th the Italian offensive was resumed just west of Lake Comacchio during an Indian summer style spell of good weather (average daytime temperatures were 17 °C). It started out with an artillery bombardment with mustard gas, completely catching the Germans by surprise. Chemical weapons had so far not been used during the war in Europe and German forces in Italy had stored their gas masks outside immediate reach. Besides that, the cautious fascist resistance operating in northern Italy was ordered to engage in a full-blown partisan war against the occupying forces regardless of German reprisals. Those indeed occurred but they only further increased the numbers and the resolve of the partisan movement.

In the meantime, thousands and thousands of German soldiers were incapacitated by the effects of mustard gas: blistered skin; sore, sticky, stuck together and blind eyes; vomiting; and internal bleeding and external bleeding. While trying to run from the gas and get gas masks, German troops were cut up by shrapnel shells and strafing by C.205 fighters (equipped with two 12.7 mm machine guns in the nose and two 20 mm wing cannons). Italian Bersaglieri spearheaded the attack and liberated Ferrara on October 21st 1943, after which Modena, Parma and Piacenza soon fell. After enduring three years of German occupation, Mussolini was received by wildly enthusiastic crowds in Ferrara, where his speech was interrupted several times by cheering. The Italians broke out into the Po Valley and pushed the Germans to a new, much longer frontline following the river Po. Mussolini hoped to break out northeast and reach the Ljubljana Gap, but that was too ambitious a goal. German lines held, but Milan was only 40 kilometres away and Venice about 60 kilometres. Italian morale was restored, but German retaliation followed: Hitler authorized the use of tabun nerve gas. The existence of Germany’s nerve gas stockpile was unknown and it caused heavy casualties, even after the Allies figured out what was going on and used gas masks (tabun can also be absorbed through the skin, though many who ingested it that way eventually recovered).

After the horrors wrought by these gas attacks, both Axis and Allied leaders agreed to return to the tacit agreement between them not to use chemical weapons. As far as the Allies were concerned they didn’t really need any further use of such trump cards because the desired effect had been achieved. Hitler had diverted troops to the Italian front, where the Germans now had to defend a much longer defensive line along the river Po. This allowed the beleaguered Anglo-Americans in the Cherbourg beachhead to consolidate and break out into northern France, and rather spectacularly at that. The breakout began on September 3rd and within one week Eisenhower’s forces had liberated the Cotentin Peninsula as well as Brittany and had pushed to within 50 kilometres west of Paris. Hitler, in the meantime, agreed to de-escalate because he feared the prospect that Churchill would make true on threats to bomb German cities with mustard gas or, God forbid, anthrax. Chemical warfare was the only thing that the Führer was reluctant to engage in.

As Stalin’s hordes surged forward across the pre-war border and into Nazi occupied Poland during autumn and winter 1943, Hitler started to increasingly denude his defences in the west and on the Italian front. By the end of September Western Allied forces were on the Belgian border and Hitler had been forced to abandon southern France in order to prevent his forces from being cut off. One of the most deplorable episodes of this entire phase of the war was when Hitler ordered the SS to put down the popular uprising of the Parisians and destroy their city. SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his subordinates ruthlessly carried out this task, killing several thousand French civilians, before the Allied advance forced them to stop. The winter of 1943-’44 saw the situation stabilize with the Soviets on the Vistula and the Western Allies in Brussels, while the Italian front remained stable. Mussolini bided his time and waited as German forces weakened. An assassination attempt on Hitler in December 1943 failed and the SS rounded up several thousand people and sent them to concentration camps, if they weren’t executed outright.

March 1944 saw spring weather set in and the Allied push to crush Nazi Germany recommenced in full force. A tremendous Anglo-American offensive pushed north into the Netherlands toward the river Rhine, and toward bridges at Eindhoven and Arnhem in particular. Simultaneously, the Red Army thrust across the Vistula toward the river Oder and delivered a crushing defeat to German Army Group Centre, reducing it to half its original strength. With German troop strength in northern Italy at an all time low, Allied forces in Italy launched an offensive too and finally broke enemy lines on the Po, reaching the Austrian and Slovenian borders. In the meantime, they encountered emaciated inmates at the “Bolzano Transit Camp” which mostly housed political opponents, but also Jews and Gypsies. Allied forces in Dalmatia, in the meantime, broke out and liberated large parts of Croatia, reaching the ethnically Italian city of Fiume that had chafed under four years of German-Yugoslav occupation. The Regio Esercito was greeted by jubilant crowds.

By May 1944 Western Allied forces had crossed the Rhine, Soviet troops were on the river Oder and a mere 65 kilometres from Berlin, Italian forces had pushed to the Ljubljana Gap and Allied forces in Dalmatia had finally broken out into Croatia and were advancing north. June 1944 saw the final collapse of Nazi Germany with the Soviets taking Berlin and meeting the Western Allies on the river Elbe. In the meantime, Allied forces spearheaded by Italy liberated Vienna and Prague and met with the American Third Army under Patton that had advanced through Bavaria into Bohemia. During this final advance, Allied forces spearheaded by the Italians discovered the horrors of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp where the inmates had been forced to perform slave labour under horrific circumstances and cruel, sadistic treatment (more than 100.000 people died at Mauthausen-Gusen, one of the largest forced labour camps in German occupied Europe).

After Hitler committed suicide in his bunker underneath the ruins of Berlin on June 6th 1944, his designated successor Hermann Goering agreed to sign an unconditional surrender. Heinrich Himmler – leader of the SS, the Gestapo and all of Germany’s other police services, commander of the Reserve Army as well as Minister of the Interior – disagreed with this move. Himmler used his power, which was not to be trifled with in the areas still under German control, to try and stage a coup d’état and continue the war. His idea was to continue the war as an SS led guerrilla insurgency against an Allied occupation, but the Wehrmacht put down the SS and Himmler was sentenced to death by guillotine for high treason by a kangaroo court (as non-military personnel, though ex-military, he wasn’t given the courtesy of a court martial and an execution by firing squad despite requesting it). He still got an easy death compared to what many concentration camp inmates had gone through.

That left one remaining Axis power to deal with: the Empire of Japan. Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia and its war on the US had proven more costly than anticipated and hadn’t led to an early decisive victory. Southeast Asia had largely fallen, but at serious casualties, and the British held their ground on the Thai-Burmese border. In the meantime, the Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered some sensitive losses in the early stages of the war that limited their ability to maintain the initiative: at Pearl Harbor aircraft carrier Kaga had been sunk while Zuikaku had been damaged, requiring weeks in dry dock; the Naval Battle of Kota Bharu had seen the loss of one light cruiser and two destroyers; the Battle of the Java Sea had seen the loss of a light cruiser and damage to a heavy cruiser; and at Wake the Japanese lost one patrol boat, two destroyers, one light cruiser and saw aircraft carrier Soryu out of commission for six months at a time when Japan needed her for its offensives.

In early 1942, the Japanese admiralty prioritized the Pacific over the Indian Ocean, which probably contributed to the failure of Japan’s Indian Ocean Raid (Zuikaku was reassigned from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific after her repairs were completed in January). Force Z alone numbered two aircraft carriers, two battleships, one battlecruiser, one heavy cruiser, five light cruisers and fifteen destroyers for a total of 26 ships. At Ceylon it was merged with the Eastern Fleet, which contributed aircraft carriers HMS Formidable and HMS Hermes as well as battleships HMS Revenge, Resolution, Ramillies and Royal Sovereign. By March 1943 the Eastern Fleet was composed of four aircraft carriers, six battleships, one battlecruiser, three heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers, 29 destroyers, thirty smaller war ships and fifty merchants for a total of 133 ships.

The attacking Japanese strike force consisted of forty ships: five carriers, four battleships, seven heavy cruisers, nineteen destroyers and five submarines. On March 26th 1942 Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville learnt about a Japanese sortie from Borneo from signal decrypts and decided to ambush it. Aircraft carrier Indomitable, battlecruiser Repulse, heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, four light cruisers and eight destroyers were set up as a lure. They briefly engaged the superior Japanese force in the evening of April 2nd, losing destroyers HMS Fortune and HMS Griffin, and fled westward under the cover of darkness. At dawn, April 3rd 1942, the pursuing Japanese fleet commanded by Nagumo ran into the main body of the Eastern Fleet 300 km east of Ceylon, which was also supported by land based aircraft of the RAF. The British lost HMS Hermes, HMS Dorsetshire and destroyers HMS Panther and HMAS Vampire, but the Japanese lost carriers Akagi and Shokaku, fast battleship Kirishima and heavy cruiser Chikuma. The latter two were sunk in a fight in which they were pitted against HMS Barham and heavy cruiser Cornwall. That fight was among the last confrontations between battleships, although Kirishima’s classification of “fast battleship” rather than battlecruiser proved unjustified: against actual battleships she proved insufficient, with 15 inch (381 mm) shells inflicting major damage while her opponent could survive hits by the enemy’s 14 (356 mm) inch shells.

With the loss of four carriers at Midway in June 1942, Japan’s last attempt to regain the initiative in this war, its carrier force was down by seven since the start of the war, while the Americans commissioned USS Essex in July 1942, replacing USS Yorktown (she was lost at Midway). This allowed the Americans to take the initiative in the Pacific and start an island hopping campaign toward Japan, with HMS Warspite being involved all the while, mostly performing coastal bombardment duties with her mighty 15 inch guns. By the end of 1943 Saipan, Tinian and Guam had fallen due to Japan’s inability to match the Allied navies after the losses sustained in 1942. Iwo Jima fell in summer 1944.

By autumn 1944 the US was in a position to invade Japan and on September 21st 1944 the greatest armada in history – American, British, Australian, Dutch and French ships – assembled off the coast of Kyushu for Operation Olympic. With fuel supplies low, the Japanese couldn’t do much to resist except for kamikaze attacks that scored a few spectacular but not war winning successes. The invaders encountered fanatical resistance from eighteen Imperial Japanese Army divisions, not to mention fanatical civilians that were equipped with cooking knives, awls, bamboo spears, eighteenth century muskets and bomb vests to commit suicide attacks with. Losses were appalling and even the US Army was brought to commit a few atrocities in order to maintain order, this in the context of mutual distrust and hatred between GIs and the locals. The US Army conquered the southern third of the island and used it to fire bomb Japanese cities even more and as a staging area for the invasion of Honshu. January 1945 saw the second part of the operation that was to bring the Empire of Japan to its knees: Operation Coronet, in other words the invasion of Honshu. This prompted Japanese generals to use chemical and biological weapons, causing massive enemy losses, but not enough to drive them back into the sea.

In the meantime, in December 1944, the Soviet Union and Italy, which had officially been at peace with Japan until now, declared war (Ethiopia, which was a de facto Italian protectorate at the time, also symbolically declared war). The Soviet contribution was by far the largest and they massed 800.000 men on the borders of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state controlling Manchuria. The Red Army invaded Manchuria (as well as Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) on December 20th 1944 in what was a classical double pincer movement and confounded the Japanese analysis of Soviet logistics by moving through the Gobi Desert. The Kwantung Army resisted fanatically, but the Red Army was superior in logistics as well as firepower: the Soviet T-34 medium tank was nearly ten tonnes heavier, more heavily armed and with better armour than Japan’s “medium” Type 97 Chi-Ha tank. The 57 mm gun on the Chi-Ha could only harm the T-34 at point blank range while the 85 mm gun on the newer variants of the T-34 easily cut through the 8-28 mm armour on the enemy tank at any distance. The Japanese A6M Zero also wasn’t the trump card it used to be, finding the Yakovlev Yak-3 to be a serious adversary. While the T-34 bloodied enemy tank forces and the Red Air Force proved more of a challenge than expected, colossal quantities of Soviet artillery compensated for whatever deficiencies the Red Army still had. Despite being outnumbered nearly 2:1, the Red Army overran all of Manchukuo in two months time (and they would have done even better if Stalin hadn’t kept so many forces in Eastern Europe out of the paranoid fear that the Western Allies would stab the USSR in the back). The Imperial Japanese Navy was having increasing difficulty in meeting its fuel demands and Stalin ordered plans to be drawn up for an invasion of Hokkaido.

The British transferred much of their forces from Europe to Burma and got support from Italian and French contingents, although those were of limited use initially due to their inexperience in jungle warfare. The Italian navy also based submarines at British bases to help in the fight against the Japanese navy and heavy cruisers Pola and Gorizia deployed their 203 mm (8 inch) guns in coastal bombardment duties (Italian battleships were considered for deployment to the Indian Ocean, but they had never been designed to operate outside the Mediterranean Sea and the Regia Marina ultimately decided against it for fear of losing them against Japanese “super battleships” Yamato and Musashi or enemy carriers). The French navy sent battleship Richelieu to operate in the Indian Ocean with the Royal Navy. The British of course also sent naval reinforcements of her own: among others they sent battleships HMS King George V and Howe to serve with the Americans in the Pacific while HMS Duke of York and Anson would serve in the Indian Ocean.

British and British Indian forces waited until September 1944, the end of the monsoon season, to launch an offensive into Thailand. Bolstered by 300 additional aircraft, the Royal Air Force gained air superiority over Thailand, bombing Bangkok and other Thai cities on several occasions. They focused on enemy defences, command and communication installations, training areas and airfields, both Thai and Japanese, as well as bridges, railways, rail yards, power plants, oil refineries and other petroleum infrastructure. The result was that the ability of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Royal Thai Army to effectively operate was seriously impaired due to bad logistics. In October engineers constructed pontoon bridges across the Salween River, which was the border between Burma and Thailand. Japanese attempts to stop them were met with devastating aerial and artillery bombardment and the British were able to establish and consolidate beachheads on the Thai side of the river. By the end of the year the British had occupied much of the west and north of the country and were only 75 kilometres from Bangkok.

On December 16th 1944, the 19 year-old King Rama VIII took control with support from the army and sacked his regent, Pridi Banomyong, placing him under house arrest. Thailand promptly switched sides and declared war on Japan. All of a sudden the Imperial Japanese Army found itself under attack from its former ally and its forces in Malaya were now cut off. Allied forces, in the meantime, crossed the Mekong River and liberated Vientiane and between December 1944 and February 1945 liberated French Indochina. With the Burma Road secure and other roads also opening up on China’s southern flank, aid to the Kuomintang was stepped up (to Stalin’s annoyance since he supported the Communist Party of China, which was excluded from Lend-Lease Aid). Chiang Kai-shek had already gotten more than a billion dollar’s worth of aid since 1941, but in 1945 alone it would receive another 1.2 billion dollars worth (China received 2.2 billion in Lend Lease in the war in total, or about 29 billion dollars in today’s money). China received tanks, rifles, machine guns, modern aircraft, jeeps, trucks, locomotives, food, petroleum products and construction materials. The National Revolutionary Army went on the offensive in March 1945 and attacked toward Nanjing and Shanghai, hoping to cut off Japanese forces operating in Anhui and parts of Zhejiang, Hubei and Jiangxi (in response Stalin radically stepped up support for Mao, supplying copious amounts of modern weapons). Though not reaching Shanghai, which was admittedly an ambitious goal, the Chinese did remarkably well and liberated Nanjing.

By late 1944 the Japanese were withdrawing all their forces to defend the Home Islands. On January 16th 1945, the Soviets managed to surprise the world by launching an invasion of Hokkaido, using the ships it had managed to scrounge together: some modern destroyers supplied by the British, some Soviet built heavy cruisers and a few old Tsarist era battleships. At this point, the Japanese tried to use the prospect of Japan falling to communism in order to negotiate a separate peace with the west, but it fell on deaf ears with the Allies. An even more outlandish idea to negotiate “an anti-imperialist Soviet-Japanese pact” was simply met by a Soviet demand for an unconditional surrender to all the Allied powers. Attempts to negotiate a conditional surrender via Fascist Italy – which was probably the least unsympathetic Allied power since its interests hadn’t been threatened by Japan – produced no results either.

With Allied forces converging on Tokyo, the Emperor intervened. In February 1945 Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the “Japanese Instrument of Surrender” in Tokyo Bay on the deck of USS Missouri with HMS Warspite nearby. While pointing at Warspite he said “so that’s the old monster that gave us so much trouble” and became one of the early adepts of the idea that, had it not been for British intervention, Pearl Harbor would have been Japan’s decisive victory. Despite economic, demographic and military realities there are still some fringe archconservative nationalist elements that believe Japan lost due to bad luck in the war’s initial stages, nowadays congregating on a few small internet forums. The truth is that in attacking the USA Japan had doomed itself, although it was perhaps lucky chance that they didn’t last longer than they did. The USA never did get to use the wonder weapon they’d been building: the atomic bomb.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Here's the first post-war chapter for you, mainly focusing on post-war reconstruction . Foreign developments will be in the next chapter.

Chapter XIII: Ricostruzione Nazionale, 1945-1952.​

In 1945 the Second World War had finally ended with the defeat of Japan, which had been preceded by the defeat of Germany in 1944. Approximately 55 million people had died, including more than 5 million Jews murdered by the Third Reich, and many survivors were left homeless. In many cases, surviving Holocaust victims returned only to find that other people had moved into their homes and had taken many of their possessions. In some cases, such as in Poland, returning Jews even experienced anti-Semitic violence. Non-Jewish refugees were also to be found everywhere, looking for protection, shelter, food and also medical care: the complete collapse of basic medical services in many places, due to war devastation, caused outbreaks of disease. In the meantime, the European economy had collapsed with 70% of industrial infrastructure destroyed, and a lot of other infrastructure being in ruin as well: entire cities had been destroyed, especially in Germany, which was the economic engine of Europe.

And there was the elephant in the room of what to do with Germany. Germany was divided into five occupation zones controlled by the US, Britain, France, Italy and the Soviet Union – France in the southwest, Britain in the northwest, the United States in the south, the USSR in the east, and the Italians in Austria. German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line were hived off to Poland while East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. Additionally, millions of Germans living in these territories or in the Czech Sudetenland were expelled and experienced hardship: thousands froze to death while being transported by slow and ill-equipped trains and many ethnic Germans, primarily women and children, were seriously mistreated by Czech and Polish authorities. In total some ten million German refugees arrived in Germany from countries across Central and Eastern Europe while many German POWs became forced labourers to provide restitution to the countries occupied by Germany. Additionally some factories were removed as war reparations, but in 1947 the Truman administration decided that Europe couldn’t be rebuilt without the German industrial base on which it had previously been dependent. The Anglo-French-American zones became the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

The Soviet zone had less luck: due to their own economic devastation the Soviets decided that reparations, even though they would alienate the German workforce from communism, were more important than alliance building. Eventually even they saw relaxation of punitive measures (Soviet soldiers, for example, were restricted to their bases and so rape of German women finally became a thing of the past). In 1949, the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. The Allied Control Council essentially became a symbolic organization: it couldn’t do anything because Cold War tensions paralyzed it.

Europe became divided. The Eastern Bloc was composed of those states “liberated” by the Red Army: East Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria all became communist regimes based on the Stalinist model. Croatia became a pseudo-fascist Italian puppet state headed by Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic. Slovenia became a separate country and, surprisingly, was allowed its democracy (albeit on the condition that it accepted Italy dominating its foreign affairs). Members of Italy’s Slovenian minority, which had been subjected to compulsory Italianization, were given the choice of staying in Italy or giving up their Italian citizenship and migrating to Slovenia. Croatia included Bosnia-Herzegovina and the period 1944-1946 saw deportations of ethnic Serbs, with Serbs being severely mistreated by Croatian authorities. Croatia agreed to cede Dalmatia to Italy, further strengthening Italian control of the Adriatic Sea, and oriented its iron ore exports to Italy. Kosovo was annexed to Italian Albania, giving Italy control of deposits of lead, zinc and chrome. The communist “Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” in the meantime was only composed of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Outside communist regimes and some dictatorial regimes on the Mediterranean Sea most of Europe was a part of the free world. Italy, Spain and other regimes in southern Europe fared a separate but generally pro-Western course.

Austria, which was the Italian occupation zone of Germany, was a different case. Mussolini immediately reinstated the Federal State of Austria as it had existed until 1938 and hoisted Kurt Schuschnigg right back into the saddle. The new regime conducted a denazification campaign that was very rigorous in its initial phases with 1946 seeing the search of over 100.000 homes and 10.000 arrests in Vienna alone. Several tens of thousands of arrests took place across the country, but in most cases it was determined that the suspects had merely joined the Nazi party for career reasons. The vast majority of the country’s civil servants were reinstated once the Italians decided that maintaining a military administration down to the local level was much too expensive. True Nazis and Nazi leaders, on the other hand, were thrown in jail and the now illegal NSDAP was virtually decapitated. Austrofascism was reinstated and the country became a conservative Catholic autocracy once more, but not independent. Austria was now under Italian influence, economically, militarily and politically. Its factories and hydroelectric capabilities would be an asset to Italian reconstruction.

By far the greatest contributor to Italian post-war reconstruction was the black gold that came from Libya. Major oil deposits had been discovered in 1943 in a geological survey ordered by Italo Balbo, the Governor-General of Libya, but no development had been done due to the war. To that end Mussolini created the Ministry of Oil in 1945 and took the portfolio himself (in addition to his cabinet posts as Prime Minister, Minister of War and Minister of the Interior). In that year, Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli – General Italian Oil Company) was given the exclusive rights to exploit it and it purchased the necessary drilling equipment in Texas, using Marshall Aid to do so. In 1947 the first crude oil started to flow at 65.000 barrels a day, which was about equivalent to 10.000 tonnes: a day’s worth of production in 1947 equalled the entire annual production of 1940. It was exported at a price of little over one dollar a barrel and Agip’s Libyan operation therefore made a turnover of about 23.7 million dollars (356 million in 2011 dollars) from Libyan oil. By 1948 daily oil production had doubled to 130.000 barrels, some 20.000 tonnes, while the price of oil reached 2 dollars a barrel. That meant Libyan oil production in 1948 was worth about 95 million dollars, or 1.8 billion 2011 dollars, and 50% of Agip’s profits went into the state’s coffers through taxes. The petroleum industry became the largest sector of the colonial economy by far, perhaps to the neglect of others. Mussolini said that the black gold was the cornerstone of “ricostruzione nazionale” or national reconstruction. That year also saw Mussolini’s 65th birthday and, as part of his cult of personality, it was declared a national holiday.

While the discovery and exploitation of oil was a national triumph that was celebrated during the 25th anniversary of the March on Rome in October, the death of King Victor Emmanuel III in December 1947 at age 78 cast a shadow over that. Two ceremonies were held: one was a state ceremony filled with fascist and royal symbolism while the second was a church ceremony in the Pantheon in Rome, where the King was interred alongside his father Umberto I and his grandfather Victor Emmanuel II. Mussolini, despite being a vitriolic atheist and considering religion a mental illness, attended the service and gave a eulogy. Victor Emmanuel’s son succeeded him as King Umberto II and his wife Marie José, sister to Leopold III of Belgium and aunt to the future King Baudouin, became Queen Consort. Opinions on Victor Emmanuel are mixed: fascists, if they had an opinion on him at all, were moderately positive, while anti-fascists considered him a puppet of Mussolini.

In the meantime, Mussolini decided to launch a major propaganda campaign to promote emigration to Italian Libya, in particular the Libyan provinces of Tripoli, Misurata, Benghazi and Derna, which had become part of metropolitan Italy in 1939. The campaign had the greatest effect in southern Italy, which was still the poorer part of Italy despite serious investments. Between 1947 and 1955 the size of the Italian community swelled from 120.000 to 250.000 while the Arab population reached 1 million. The Italian population was 20% of the entire colonial population, but in Tripoli and Benghazi it was 51% and 46% respectively. A few thousand Jews that had found refuge in Italy from the Nazis had become Fascist Jews also answered Mussolini’s call to settle Libya. Its Jewish population reached 37.000 compared to 30.000 before the war, almost 3% of the population (along with foreign Jews, Italy’s Jewish community reached 50.000, with some going to Libya and others to Israel though most remained in Italy).

Libyans were actively involved in the development of their country as they had been allowed to join the National Fascist Party, and in particular the “Muslim Association of the Lictor” created especially for them, since 1939 (the “Arab Lictor Youth” was its youth organization). Since the late 1930s Libyans, also known as “Italian Moslem Arabs”, had equal rights with Italians in the existing legal system (these Italian laws were in full contrast with the colonial policies done by the French and British authorities in their African empires, where the colonial populations were separated and segregated from the white colonists). They were allowed to pursue careers in the administration or the Regio Esercito, which decided to form the 3rd and 4th Libyan Division as well as the 1st Libyan Armoured Brigade (only equipped with WW II vintage armoured cars and obsolete tankettes, but still one of the few colonial armoured units in Africa). The Regia Marina now also manned a destroyer squadron with Libyans.

As a result, support from the Libyan population not only continued but increased as their prosperity grew. In the late 1940s and the 1950s Libya saw massive infrastructural works: oil money allowed for the completion of the 1040 kilometre Tripoli-Benghazi railroad along the coast. Construction also began on an 1100 kilometre railroad toward the border fortress town of Ghat in the southwest on the border with French Algeria through Sabha, Germa and Awbari. A 550 kilometre railway from Sirte via Waddan joined up with the Tripoli-Ghat railroad at Sabha. An 800 kilometre railway into Cyrenaica, the strategic oil producing region of Libya, ran from Benghazi to Al-Jawf. That lay in the Kufra basin, one of the most heavily irrigated oases of the Sahara desert, which is dominated by depressions on three sides that make it dominate east-west traffic across the desert. Besides Cyrenaican oil, its function as a traffic hub in North Africa and a well-watered oasis made it a strategic asset. The railroad strengthened Italian control of its colony. The last major railroad built was the 500 kilometre stretch of track that extended the Tripoli-Benghazi line toward the border town of Bardia, location of a fortress, via Derna and Tobruk. All-in-all, in combination with existing track, Libya’s railroad network would reach ~ 4.400 kilometres by 1955.

The educational system was also radically expanded: in 1939-’40 the Italian population (10% of the population at the time) had 81 elementary schools while the Libyans (over 85% of the local population at the time) had 97. There were also three secondary schools for Libyans in 1940 – two in Tripoli and one in Benghazi. Between 1947 and 1955, the number of elementary schools for Italians was increased to 207 and the number of schools for Libyan children expanded spectacularly to 785 for a total of 992 schools. Education became virtually free apart from token tuition fees, and it became mandatory in Libya for all children aged 6-12 in 1949 and that was extended to the age of 14 in 1956. By the mid 1960s the Libyan populace would be 90% literate as a result, as well as being educated in the Italian language, arithmetic, history, geography, topography, music, and handicrafts. The number of secondary schools, in the meantime, increased from a mere three to 19 while a military academy and a large number of vocational schools were also opened. Italy also built two dozen new villages as a reward for Libyan military performance in WW II, each of which had its own mosque, elementary school, library, small hospital and “social centre” containing sport grounds, a theatre and a cinema. Libya started to change: it moved away from the largely illiterate society of farmers, fishermen, artisans and nomads. During the 1950s it became a sedentary, urbanized society with a middle class of office clerks, civil servants, shop owners, teachers and military officers.

Of course Italy itself also underwent tremendous development in the post-war era. The Milan-Turin-Genoa industrial triangle – which was a centre of automotive, machinery, aerospace and naval production – recovered and grew. It wasn’t for nothing that the cheap and practical Fiat 500 became incredibly popular upon its introduction in 1957 and even turned into a symbol of the post-war Italian economic miracle. More exclusive car brands like Maserati, Lancia and Alfa Romeo also resumed production and Mussolini was often seen driving such sports cars. With hobbies like fast cars, fencing, playing the violin, writing political essays, and keeping pet lions, he seemed much more like a celebrity and a dynamic, multi-talented figure rather than a dull politician (propaganda practically made him out to be superhuman and exceptionally virile). In the meantime, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Lancia started to participate in car racing almost as soon as the war was over to promote their cars, such as the Lancia Aurelia which sported the world’s first full-production V6 engine. With car ownership radically increasing in the 1950s, it’s no coincidence that the “autostrada” (highway) was propagandized as a symbol of the economic miracle (besides the fact that in the 1920s Italy had been the first country to build a highway). In a few years time between 1948 and 1951 the highway network increased from 400 km to 2000 km in a period of frenzied construction. And of course oil money was used to fund a literacy campaign, such as in Libya but on a much grander scale. By 1960, the Italian population would be 97% literate. Besides that, Italy also got free universal healthcare and university education was made accessible to all classes, albeit only for men given the emphasis on traditional gender roles (women were to be housewives and mothers to large families; sexual behaviour deemed deviant, such as homosexuality and prostitution, was combated aggressively and the former was labelled a social disease). The country’s television audience also exploded: in 1955 television had reached only 100.000 households, mostly the homes of party big wigs able to afford them, but in a decade that number increased tenfold.

With the discovery of sizeable natural gas deposits in the Po Valley, industrialization spread into Emilia and Mussolini’s birth region of Romagna. Natural gas could be used to produce fabrics, glass, steel, plastics and paint. Besides that, via the Haber process, natural gas could be used to produce ammonia for fertilizers and it’s no coincidence that the Po Valley indeed became a centre of fertilizer production. Besides that, natural gas has applications in chemical industry, petrochemical industry, electricity production, metallurgy, pharmaceuticals and electronics and these sectors indeed emerged. The Milan-Turin-Genoa triangle expanded into an industrial region covering much of Emilia, Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria. Mussolini also used Libyan oil money to modernize underdeveloped southern Italy, using dirigist economic policies to set up Palermo, Catania, Messina, Naples, Bari, Brindisi and Taranto as centres of petrochemical industry. That increased employment, and there was also a land reform that organized a large number of small holdings into a smaller number of larger holdings by encouraging poor peasants to immigrate to Italy’s colonies, Libya in particular.

While Italy’s economy experienced growth rates up to 10% from the late 1940s well into the 1950s, its political influence also expanded. Austria, Croatia and Slovenia were a part of the Italian sphere of influence from the get-go and Greece had been Finlandized since 1940, when it had been bullied by Italy into granting the Regia Marina basing rights. Mussolini briefly considered joining the European Coal and Steel Community, but ultimately decided to focus on the Mediterranean Sea and form his own “fascist bloc.”

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update .

Chapter XIV: Birth of the Fascist Bloc, 1952-1956.​

After Italian oil started flowing from Libyan wells the goal of a “fascist bloc” came within reach since Italy became the Mediterranean’s dominant economy by far, besides being the dominant naval power. In fact, Italy decided to finish the incomplete Littorio-class battleships Roma and Impero, which were commissioned in 1947 as the last battleships to ever be commissioned worldwide. In 1946, as a stopgap solution, the Regia Marina acquired British aircraft carrier HMS Colossus, a cheaply built carrier without armour, with few anti-aircraft guns and with a 25 knot (46 km/h) top speed. She was renamed Sparviero and in 1950 the Aquila, Italy’s first purpose designed aircraft carrier, was laid down: she was a 32 knot 31.000 tonne carrier that could carry 90 turboprop planes (which would be replaced by A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft) and had 120 mm, 37 mm and 20 mm anti-aircraft guns. She was commissioned in 1953 and her sister ship Falco entered service in 1955.

Francoist Spain’s policy of economic autarky, adopted on the urging of domestic economic pressure groups, hadn’t produced any serious growth. Rather, with war devastation and trade isolation, Spain was much more economically backward in the 1940s than it had been a decade earlier. Inflation soared, economic reconstruction faltered, food was scarce, and, in some years, Spain registered negative growth rates. In 1950, Italy and Spain signed the Pact of Madrid, which was in fact three agreements: 1) firstly, Spain and Italy formed a defensive military alliance by which they pledged support if the other was attacked. 2) Italy agreed to supply Spain with military equipment, which initially boiled down to Italy selling a lot of its surplus equipment from WW II at bottom prices. 3) In 1951, Italy gave Spain a $300 million dollar low interest loan (the equivalent of $2.8 billion in 2015 dollars) to invest in economic development. Spain, though more of a conservative authoritarian regime, adopted fascist economic views as explained in “The Doctrine of Fascism” essay attributed to Mussolini but largely written by Giovanni Gentile: in short the means of production were nominally left in the hands of the civil sector, but directed and controlled by the state. Spain experienced its own economic miracle from the early 1950s, in part because of large numbers of tourists.

After Spain, others were drawn to Italian success as well. The Portuguese Estado Novo regime headed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was corporatist and nationalist, like Fascist Italy, but also conservative and Catholic like Spain. Portugal and Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship in 1948 in which they agreed to economic cooperation. Turkey had become a democracy but it was dominated by the military and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) created by Ataturk became increasingly attracted to fascism. The CHP’s Kemalist core principles of republicanism, nationalism, statism, populism, laïcité and revolutionism proved remarkably adaptable to fascist ideas. Rejecting communism as well as reactionary conservatism, the CHP from the late 1940s strived to follow a “third path”: even though it was once opposed to Islamism it now incorporated a few elements of it into its politics; they also adopted the Italian corporatist economic model, linking together employer and employee syndicates in associations that would work alongside the state to set national economic policy. The CHP assimilated both moderate Islamists as well as moderate socialists. In 1950, the short-lived multiparty period that had begun in 1946 ended when the military staged a coup d’état and reinstalled the CHP as the only legal political party. Turkish general and statesman Ismet Inönü was reinstated as “National Chief.”

In October-November 1952, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the March on Rome, representatives of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Greece and Turkey met in the Italian Riviera town of San Remo. At this conference hosted by Mussolini these seven powers, who shared such ideological similarities, tried to merge their myriad of existing bilateral treaties with Italy into one multilateral treaty concerning defence and economic cooperation. During breaks in talks these representatives were invited as guests to the bombastic choreographed events, the enthusiastic celebrations and the endless military parades in Rome in honour of three decades of fascist rule. They were impressed, even intimidated, by demonstrations of Italian organization and military strength and it was all topped off by an awe inspiring fleet review in the Gulf of Naples. None of the attending delegations could claim to have a navy as powerful as the Regia Marina, which was the prime navy of the Mediterranean and had distinguished itself in WW II. Besides that it was the world’s fourth navy behind the US Navy, the Royal Navy and the French Navy. The seven powers formed the San Remo Pact, which in fact was two agreements: 1) a defensive military alliance and 2) a common market shielded from the world by protectionist measures. The Rome Manifesto was signed which explained that the San Remo Pact strived to be an alternative to democratic bourgeois capitalism as well as totalitarian communism, both of which were considered equally exploitative and materialistic in different ways. A joint decision making body was established in the shape of summits held once every two years, which alternated between the capitals of its members. Of course room was left for emergency meetings.

A third bloc in the Cold War was a fact and it had major influence on non-member states as well: Fulgencio Batista’s regime in Cuba, the military dictatorship in Venezuela, the Peronist regime in Argentina and later Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguayan regime took notes from Fascist Italy to varying degrees, with especially the latter being extremely successful in creating a long-lasting cult of personality. All of them adopted nationalist rhetoric and a mixed, corporatist economic model. Buenos Aires and Asuncion maintained cordial relations with Rome while Havana remained more oriented to the US due to its geographic proximity. Paraguay and Argentina became observer countries of the San Remo Pact, and were later joined by Bolivia after Italy had mediated a border dispute dating back to the Chaco War in the 1930s. This observant status meant they engaged in military and economic cooperation with the Pact, but didn’t have a say in its summits. The reeling Argentine economy of the mid 1950s was revitalized due to economic cooperation with Italy and Peron decided to become a full member in 1956, followed by Paraguay in 1959. In the meantime budding (pseudo)-fascist movements spread across the South American continent in the 1950s: the military juntas in Columbia and Bolivia established in 1958 and 1964 respectively were inspired by fascism. The popularity of fascism wasn’t limited to South America: several Asian regimes, such as Chiang Kai-shek’s in South China and Syngman Rhee’s in South Korea, modelled themselves along fascist lines, as did Apartheid South Africa. The regime of the Shah Mohammad Pahlavi of Iran also drew inspiration from fascism. In 1953 the Shah joined the San Remo Pact after he had alienated the British by siding with leftist Prime Minister Mossadegh after the latter had nationalized Iran’s oil.

In the meantime, countries across Western Europe saw the establishment of fascist parties and they enjoyed electoral success during the 1950s. In 1951, the British Union of Fascists headed by Oswald Mosley won 13% of the vote, becoming the second largest opposition party after Labour. Winston Churchill’s Tories had to form a coalition with the Liberals to have a majority. It was the greatest success of the BUF, with coalition governments being rare in British political history, but the Liberals rose against them. The Liberals would remain an influential force in British politics, but the BUF was destined to wane from the late 1960s throughout the 70s and 80s and finally lost its one remaining seat in parliament in the 1992 UK general election. Other “democratic fascist” parties followed similar paths.

A major fascist subculture also existed in Western countries during the 1950s and 60s as an alternative to the rather pessimistic beatniks and the leftwing hippie subculture. During the Vietnam War fascist groups attracted many who were proponents of the war against communism in Vietnam, in contrast to the anti-war hippies. The hippies were accused of being communist by the fascists, while hippies began using the word “fascist” as a slur against all their opponents. Fascists responded by wearing the term as a badge of honour even more than they already did. Fascist movements in the Western world declined from the mid 1970s. The exception was the US: until the 1990s the “National Fascist Party of the United States of America” (NFPUSA) founded in 1953 persisted as an alternative to the Mob for Italian Americans as well as a non-racist radical right alternative to the Ku Klux Klan, growing to 500.000 members nationwide during its peak in the early 1960s. While the Communist Party of the United States and its sympathizers suffered under the Red Scare and McCarthyism, there was no corresponding “Black Scare” toward fascism. These days the fascist party is a shadow of its former self, with 70.000 members and some city council seats (mostly in areas with sizeable Italian American communities, such as New York and Chicago). Besides the Greens the NFPUSA is the only party to run for the Presidency and gain some votes on a national level.

Due to being anti-communist Mussolini maintained a pro-Western stance. Despite taking a separate course he therefore enjoyed the support of the United States, which needed the Italian vote in the United Nations Security Council. Italy was one of its six permanent members alongside the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and the Republic of China (South China). Italy was one of the proponents of intervention in Korea when North Korea invaded the south in 1950, contributing a sizeable force: an infantry brigade, a tank battalion and a fighter squadron. Mussolini portrayed himself as a champion of anti-communism and that necessitated a sizeable Italian contribution.

In return for its support the Italians purchased American equipment cheaply: A-4 Skyhawks for its aircraft carrier Aquila and her sister Falco, F-86 Sabres and F-100 Super Sabres for the Regia Aeronautica’s early jet squadrons, loads of surplus WW II M4 Shermans and M24 Chaffee light tanks, and the new M48 Patton. Of course Italy began to produce its own equivalents once its armaments industry was back on its feet. It developed the Agusta Bell line of helicopters and continued production on the Macchi C.205, considered nearly equal to the P-51 Mustang, after which Fiat developed the G.91 jetfighter that entered production in 1957. Fiat also developed a 47 tonne tank with 50-150 mm armour and a 105 mm rifled gun, the Fiat M47/54. Piaggio, in the meantime, developed a swept wing version of the P.108 heavy bomber known as the P.109, which had upgraded turboprop engines, an upgraded fuselage, radar, sonar buoys, and was mostly built from duralumin like its ancestor. They had a top speed of 800 km/h, a maximum range of 3.700 kilometres and a 3.5 tonne payload.

Another foreign policy move was a failure, namely the initiative to form a cartel of oil exporting states in 1955. Many oil exporting states were Arab or Asian and therefore former colonies or protectorates of the West. With Nasser’s Egypt taking the lead, many of the representatives invited to Rome (some of which also attended the Bandung Conference the same year) heckled continued Italian colonial rule over fellow Arab and Muslim nations – i.e. Libya, Eritrea and Somalia – and the initiative became a near fiasco. Venezuela, Iran, Ecuador and Portugal remained (Ecuador had recently become an oil exporter after Agip prospectors had struck oil in 1952 while the Portuguese had discovered the Benfica oilfield in Angola near Luanda in 1954, which was just becoming operational in 1955). Italy, Ecuador, Iran, Portugal and Venezuela formed the Petroleum Exporting States Association or PESA in 1956. In 1958 Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia formed the competing OPEC, which was soon joined by other Arab states.

The aging Mussolini was left with vindictive feelings toward Nasser, who he saw as the culprit for the failure of PESA to become an all-encompassing cartel of oil exporting countries. He wanted to take revenge and above all prove who was boss of the Mediterranean or “Mare Nostrum,” i.e. Italy and not Nasserist Egypt as far as Mussolini was concerned. Nasser provided him with the necessary casus belli in October 1956 when he nationalized the Suez Canal, which until then had been jointly owned by Britain, France and to a lesser extent Italy.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And I give you the Suez Crisis. Enjoy .

Chapter XV: The Suez Crisis and the Birth of Neo-colonialism, 1956-1958. ​

British economic and military interests in the region were seriously threatened and Prime Minister Anthony Eden was under pressure to do something from Conservative MPs, who directly compared the events of 1956 to the Munich Agreement in 1938. Popular opinion was to hit the Egyptians hard and fast, although Eden was worried about being denounced as an aggressor in the UN Security Council or getting the majority of the UN General Assembly against him. Additionally, at this point Canada wasn’t affected by the events while to New Zealand and Australia the Panama Canal was much more important: all three weren’t very interested in supporting a war against Egypt. Britain’s non-white dominions supported Egypt’s actions as admirably anti-imperialistic, and compared Arab Nationalism as similar to Asian nationalism. French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, in the meantime, was outraged about Nasser’s move and was determined to not let him get away with it. Mollet even held up a copy of Nasser’s book “The Philosophy of the Revolution” during an interview and called it “Nasser’s Mein Kampf.” The French parliament decided on military action and condemned the lackadaisical attitude of the Eisenhower administration, which merely proposed diplomacy.

A 23 nation conference attended by the canal’s main users led to two proposals: the American-British-French supported international operation of the Suez Canal while Ceylon, India, Indonesia and the USSR would go no further than international supervision of the canal. Italy was the only country that flat-out refused a compromise from the outset, condemned Egyptian actions as illegal and abandoned the negotiations, while engaging in secret talks with Britain, France and Israel. A secret summit with Mussolini, French Prime Minister Mollet and the British and Israeli ambassadors to France in Paris led to the formation of an anti-Egyptian four power coalition.

Especially Mussolini was keen on revenge and had, in fact, been massing forces at Tobruk for days while being pushy toward France and Britain concerning the need for military aggression (he got them to abandon the idea to deploy ships with gun calibres no larger than 5 inches to limit civilian casualties). The 1st through 3rd Libyan Infantry Divisions, the 1st Libyan Armoured Battalion, the 1st Bersaglieri Regiment and the Ariete Armoured Division stood poised to strike. All-in-all this boiled down to 65.000 men, 500 tanks and 400 aircraft. The Regia Marina deployed in force with all four Littorio-class battleships, aircraft carrier Falco equipped with its first A-4 Skyhawks, heavy cruisers Zara, Pola, Trento and Bolzano, eight light cruisers and a destroyer screen. France deployed battleships Richelieu and Jean Bart with an escort.

The Royal Navy deployed its last commissioned battleship HMS Vanguard and the extremely aging but prestigious HMS Warspite, an indication of how serious they took this and an attempt to gain American support. After the official surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay in September 1945, by which time she’d seen thirty years of service, Warspite had leisurely steamed back to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for maintenance and necessary repairs. From there she had conducted a good will tour and visited several American cities on both the western and eastern seaboards of the United States before finally returning home to Portsmouth in January 1946. Upon arrival she was put in reserve as a training vessel and the admiralty decided not to restore her again since the effort wouldn’t be worth it: time had taken its unavoidable toll, the ship had endured shellfire, bombing, ramming and mines, and aircraft carriers had displaced battleships as the most important capital ships. In May 1947 the admiralty finally made the decision to scrap her after much deliberation, which provoked an outrage among Pearl Harbor veterans and the American public since Warspite was still viewed as “the ship that saved Pearl Harbor.” The wave of negative publicity and outright demands from the “Pearl Harbor Veterans for Warspite” lobbyists to retain her in some form startled the admiralty, who hadn’t expected this reaction. The decision to scrap her was quickly reversed and instead Warspite travelled to Belfast for a complete renovation. During the trip she encountered her sister ship Barham, which was ignominiously headed to Faslane for scrapping, and they greeted each other one last time. By the mid 1950s Warspite was among the oldest capital warships in active service, along with the Andrea Doria and Conte di Cavour class-battleships, which were also World War I veterans.

Warspite was restored to fighting shape, but apart from that mostly just sat in port since the Royal Navy had little use for her, at least until 1956. Apart from the usefulness of her big guns, she was mostly sent into action to gain American sympathy, which had a modicum of success. At least some viewed Nasser as a closet communist who was in bed with Khrushchev, including the vocal American fascist movement which vilified Eisenhower for failing to support his European allies. Overall, the attitude of the Eisenhower administration toward Nasser didn’t change and Warspite therefore didn’t prove a trump card in mobilizing anti-Nasserism in the US. She was finally retired in 1957 after an illustrious 42 year career and was turned into a museum ship at Portsmouth, where she remains until today and has recently seen her centenary.

65.000 Italians were joined by 175.000 Israeli, 45.000 British and 34.000 French troops who were opposed by 300.000 Egyptians. Otherwise highly motivated British forces suffered from the economic and technological limitations imposed by post-war austerity: due to the Cyprus Emergency parachutist training had been neglected in favour of counterinsurgency tactics and the Royal Navy suffered from a shortage of landing vehicles. The RAF had just introduced two long-range bombers, the Vickers Valiant and the English Electric Canberra, but owing to their recent entry into service proper bombing techniques hadn’t been established yet. Despite this, General Sir Charles Keightley, the commander of the invasion force, believed that air power alone was sufficient to defeat Egypt. By contrast, General Hugh Stockwell, the Task Force’s ground commander believed that methodical and systematic armoured operations centred on the Centurion battle tank would be the key to victory. French soldiers were well motivated but they too suffered from post-war austerity and in 1956 the French were heavily involved in the Algerian War. The “Regiment de Parachutistes Coloniaux” was extremely experienced and battle hardened and had distinguished itself in Indochina and Algeria, but other French troops were described as “competent, but not outstanding.” The French Navy also suffered from a shortage of landing craft. Israeli forces were outstanding with ingenious and aggressive commanders while superior pilot training gave them an unbeatable edge in the air. The IDF, however, suffered from deficiencies like doctrinal immaturity, faulty logistics and technical inadequacies. Ironically, the Italians were now much better prepared for war than France and Britain, since its oil money had saved its armed forces from austerity measures; instead, Italy’s defence budget had increased annually in the 1948-1956 period. By the mid 1950s, in fact, the Regia Marina wasn’t that much smaller than the Royal Navy.

The commanders of the four power anti-Egyptian coalition, however, needn’t worry too much. In the Egyptian Armed Forces, politics rather than military competence was the main criterion for promotion. The Egyptian commander, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, was a purely political appointee who owed his position to his close friendship with Nasser. A heavy drinker, he would prove himself grossly incompetent as a general during the Crisis. In 1956, the Egyptian military was well equipped with weapons from the Soviet Union such as T-34 and IS-3 tanks, MiG-15 fighters, Ilyushin Il-28 bombers, SU-100 self-propelled guns and AK-47 assault rifles. Rigid lines between officers and men in the Egyptian Army led to a mutual “mistrust and contempt” between officers and the men who served under them. Egyptian troops were excellent in defensive operations, but had little capacity for offensive operations, owing to the lack of “rapport and effective small-unit leadership.”

War finally erupted on October 29th when Israel started Operation Kadesh, its invasion of the Sinai Desert, and the same day the Regia Aeronautica started to bomb targets selected because they’d cripple the Egyptians. Israeli armour, preceded by parachute drops on two key passes, thrust south into the Sinai and routed local Egyptian forces in five days. Feigning to be alarmed by the threat of fighting along the Suez Canal, the UK and France issued a twelve-hour ultimatum on October 30th to the Israelis, Italians and the Egyptians to cease fighting. When, as expected, no response was given, Operation Musketeer was launched. Vanguard, Warspite, Richelieu and Jean Bart used their guns for coastal bombardment at Port Said and pulverized coastal defences, after which Egyptian units stayed away from the coast. By then the Regia Aeronautica and the Israeli Air Force had suppressed most Egyptian airfields, winning the battle for air superiority in two days. A strategic Italian bombing campaign with P.109 heavy bombers severely hindered the Egyptian military by destroying most of its fuel stocks.

On November 5th, The British 45th Commando and 16th Parachute Brigade landed by sea and air near Port Said while the French seized Port Fuad, opposite Port Said. Anglo-French air attacks neutralized what little remained of the Egyptian Air Force and their ground forces quickly seized major canal facilities. Egyptian attempts to sink obstacles in the canal and render it unusable were stopped dead in their tracks by air attack. The 3rd Battalion Parachute Group captured El Cap airport by airborne assault, the Commando Brigade captured all its objectives, and elements of the 16th Parachute Brigade and the Royal Tank Regiment set off south along the canal bank on November 6th to capture Ismailia.

By far the most effective operation was the Italian ground offensive that started on October 31st, preceded by two days of strategic bombings and accompanied by tactical air support. Italian battleships followed the army along the coast, using their 15 inch guns to pulverize Egyptian forces that were too much trouble, while Aquila and Falco functioned as mobile airbases. In four days from October 31st to November 3rd, the Regio Esercito spectacularly advanced about 170 kilometres from the Libyan border to Mersa Matruh, bringing the Egyptian Army to the brink of collapse. As the Italians advanced further eastward and started to bomb El Alamein on November 5th 1956, pressure mounted on the Egyptians. Then on November 6th Italian amphibious and parachutist landings took place at key locations in and around El Alamein to the rear of Egyptian frontline units, which were counterattacking at Mersa Matruh and failing miserably. A military coup placed Nasser under house arrest. His more moderate former comrade Muhammad Naguib saw the end of two years under house arrest and was reinstated as President. A ceasefire was signed and the frontlines froze as of November 7th 1956. Nasser, in the meantime, was placed under house arrest himself until cardiovascular disease and diabetes made him so sick, despite getting the best medical care, that he was released on health grounds in 1976, twenty years later. He died in 1980, aged 62.

The intervention against Egypt was a total military victory for the Anglo-French-Italian-Israeli alliance, crushing the Egyptian armed forces and affecting a leadership change. The international response, however, was mixed. Along with the Suez Crisis, the US was also dealing with the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Vice President Nixon later explained: “We couldn't on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.” Besides that, President Eisenhower believed that the US couldn’t be seen acquiescing to this attack on Egypt without causing a backlash in the Arab world.

The attack on Egypt greatly offended many in the Muslim world. In Pakistan, 300.000 people turned up for a rally in Lahore to show solidarity with Egypt while in Karachi a mob chanting anti-British slogans burned down the British High Commission. In Syria, the military government blew up the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline that allowed Iraqi oil to reach tankers in the Mediterranean to punish Iraq for supporting the invasion, and to cut Britain off from one of its main routes for taking delivery of Iraqi oil. King Saud of Saudi Arabia imposed a total oil embargo on Britain and France, but it was rendered ineffectual because Italy and its PESA partners picked up the slack. The Soviet Union also solidly backed Egypt, but Khrushchev shied away from military intervention.

Khrushchev preferred to make his point symbolically rather than jeopardize the ongoing thaw in US-Soviet relations, never mind risking nuclear war with a country that had ten times as many nuclear weapons as well as superior delivery systems. He demanded sanctions against the four invading powers, but as permanent members of the UNSC Britain, France, Italy and South China vetoed his motion (Chiang Kai-shek remembered Italian support for him in the Chinese Civil War and now returned the favour, even though he was sympathetic to the Egyptian position; Sino-Soviet support for Egypt, however, greatly uncomplicated his position toward Nasser). Commonwealth members Australia and New Zealand, Iraq, Italy’s San Remo Pact allies of Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Greece, Turkey and Iran, PESA members Ecuador and Venezuela, and the pro-fascist regimes in Argentina and Paraguay expressed their support for the intervention. Apartheid South Africa, ruled by the Afrikaner minority, was opposed to Nasser but believed it would benefit economically from a closed canal and politically from not opposing a country’s right to govern its internal affairs.

The prospect of becoming an observer country to the San Remo Pact with all the benefits that entailed, such as investment opportunities in South America, changed Prime Minister Strijdom’s mind. It would prove to signal fascist support for neo-colonialism and white minority regimes in Africa, such as military support for Spain so it could keep Spanish Morocco, Ifni and the Western Sahara. In 1956, Italy deployed 10.000 men to Spanish Morocco in order to discourage the recently independent Kingdom of Morocco from taking military measures.

France was reaffirmed as a great power and Britain retained its superpower status due to their military success against Egypt. They engaged in neo-colonialism, decolonizing more slowly and methodically while creating a middle class to administrate the country and (hopefully) have friendly post-independence rulers in charge. At times they played ethnic and religious groups against each other, with Sudan being a good example: the British heavily favoured the Christians in the south and promised them a separate country. Rather than be ruled by the Muslim Arabs, South Sudan chose to remain a British protectorate under the name Juba when Sudan became independent in 1956. Juba remained under British rule for another decade and in 1966 became independent together with Uganda and Kenya. Britain also tried to keep some of its holdings by offering them devolved government within the context of the United Kingdom. Over the course of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s a number of possessions were given devolved government. They became British Overseas Territories which meant that they were under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United Kingdom but weren’t part of it. The Maltese people liked the security of British rule and voted for this option in 1964 and Cyprus, fearing Turkish irredentism, did the same and both remain British Overseas Territories until today. In 1958, Britain merged Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, Montserrat, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago into the West Indies Federation, a customs union with freedom of movement. The early years were rocky since the larger islands were worried about mass immigration from the smaller islands while the smaller ones feared their economies would be overwhelmed. The British had, however, implemented a strong federal government, federal taxation and freedom of movement. This initially went against the wishes of many locals, but it helped the federation survive its fragile earlier years. The West Indies Federation today has a population of 5.1 million people and economically it’s a major player in the Caribbean. It remains a British Overseas Territory under a Governor-General (the background was the desire of the smaller islands to have a check on the larger ones). Many Pacific Islands also chose such a course and Singapore preferred major autonomy inside a reformed British Empire over being subsumed by Malaysia or getting picked off by Indonesia.

Lastly, the Royal Navy chose to maintain a presence in the Trucial States. Britain maintained its dominance in the Middle East for another decade through CENTO, mainly because of Britain’s prestige as a “superpower.” This superpower status faded as Britain decolonized. The Central Treaty Organization, which included Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, the Trucial States and Britain was de facto dissolved in 1968 when Iraq and Jordan abandoned it. Even after that, Britain maintained its presence on the Persian Gulf via its continued naval presence in the Trucial States.

The USSR, in the meantime, was affected too. Khrushchev’s position was gravely weakened due to his lack of a more serious response to the Suez Crisis. Khrushchev sought to find a lasting solution to the problem of a divided Germany and of the enclave of West Berlin deep within East German territory. In November 1958, calling West Berlin a “malignant tumour”, he gave the United States, United Kingdom and France six months to conclude a peace treaty with both German states and the Soviet Union. If one was not signed, Khrushchev stated, the Soviet Union would conclude a peace treaty with East Germany. This would leave East Germany, which was not a party to treaties giving the Western Powers access to Berlin, in control of the routes to the city. This ultimatum caused dissent among the Western Allies, who were reluctant to go to war over the issue. Khrushchev, however, repeatedly extended the deadline and his failed political gambles resulted in a coup by a triumvirate of Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich who replaced him with Bulganin as Secretary General in 1959. Though the Soviet Union did not return to terror and purges, under these Stalinist hardliners it became much more repressive. Khrushchev was made ambassador to Albania, far away from the Kremlin, and served in that capacity for another decade during which he became an embittered recluse. He was allowed to retire and return to Moscow in 1969, where he died in 1971.

In the meantime, the US had threatened to financially cut off Britain which would have provoked a further devaluation of the pound sterling and jeopardized Britain’s post-war economic recovery. In the end they couldn’t afford to alienate their most important ally and did nothing. American actions against Britain and France remained solely limited to words since any serious measures would cause a split in the Western World, something that the Soviets were hoping for. Eisenhower’s language singled out Italy since its contribution to the invasion was greater and because the Italians had conducted human rights violations by strafing columns of fleeing civilians a few times. Rome strengthened its relations with Israel, even though Mussolini had serious reservations toward Zionism, and compensated for lack of relations in the Arab world through intensifying its cooperation with Imperial Iran. Mussolini responded to Eisenhower’s denunciatory talk with political brinkmanship, threatening to totally break off relations. Furthermore, he summoned the American ambassador to his office in the Palazzo Venezia and angrily lectured him, stating: “American interference in the Mediterranean Sea – the Mare Nostrum we have fought and bled for and require for our security and prosperity – would be the equivalent of us colonizing or intervening in Latin America. This would violate the Monroe Doctrine. Mr. Ambassador, tell me, would your government tolerate that?” The Duce concluded by stating, in subtle terms, that the US government could shove any further criticisms where the sun doesn’t shine. Mussolini’s response confounded Eisenhower. Italy, for all of its power and influence, was still too weak to stand alone in the Cold War without US backing against the Soviet bloc so its behaviour was irrational.

The rationale behind Mussolini’s behaviour became clear soon enough. Like Stalin, Mussolini had noticed how, from 1942, Western scientific journals had suspiciously stopped publishing papers on the topic of uranium fission despite their progress in that area until then. In July 1942, Enrico Fermi – who was one of Italy’s and one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists – wrote a letter to Mussolini explaining the potential power of an atomic bomb. In early 1943, Il Duce decided to launch his own atomic bomb program known as Project Jupiter, even though he lacked the resources for it, and appointed Fermi as its chief researcher. A lot of theoretical work was done, but there were little practical results due to lack of money and a strong industrial base, besides the fact that in 1943 most of Italy’s resources were devoted to fighting in the north of the country. After the war in Europe ended, support for Project Jupiter increased only marginally because the country was rebuilding and because the war in Asia was still ongoing. Funding saw a major increase in 1945 after the American announced they had the bomb and showed the footage of the Trinity test, but in the end the project saw its greatest progress when oil money became available. From then on Project Jupiter became the main expense of the defence budget.

By the early 1950s its existence had correctly been deduced by the CIA and Soviet intelligence due to large Italian uranium imports, although both incorrectly assumed Italy would need at least another two decades to get the bomb. Fermi told Mussolini he’d have a bomb in 1960, but Il Duce wanted it sooner and applied pressure to speed things up. Fermi did what he could and settled for a smaller amount of fissile material to bring forward the test date. Besides that, he decided to emphasize the gun-type design, which was easier to make but also more inefficient than the spherical implosion-type bomb that used plutonium rather than uranium-235. In early July 1958, three weeks before Mussolini’s 75th birthday, Fermi reported that a bomb was ready for testing to which the latter reportedly said “this is the best birthday gift you could have given me.” The bomb was shipped to a test site in the centre of the Libyan Desert in secrecy for the “Jupiter-1” test and on July 12th 1958 seismographs in neighbouring countries detected a tremor. The Soviets and later the US detected radioactive fission products, traced them back to their origins and, based on the strength of the tremors, correctly deduced that a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion had taken place in Italian Libya. On July 28th, the start of a week of celebrations in honour of Mussolini’s 75th birthday, the Duce bombastically announced that Italy had become the world’s fourth nuclear power (after the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain).

The following year, Italy conducted a test with an implosion-type weapon that produced a yield of 23 kilotons. A tritium boosted bomb was detonated in 1960 with an explosive force of 45 kilotons, after which a few more boosted fission devices with yields up to 150 kilotons were tested. In 1967 Italy tested its first hydrogen bomb, known as Jupiter-11, which exploded with a force of 2.2 megatons. In 1959, Italy had only one atomic bomb available in the event of war and by 1960 that had increased to only four. By 1970 Italy would have 175 nuclear weapons and its stockpile peaked in 1975 at 300. Mussolini had joined the nuclear weapons club and now the fascist bloc could go toe to toe with NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was the crown to his life’s work.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And like all good things, the reign of the Duce too must end. Enjoy .

Chapter XVI: The Death of the Duce, 1958-1962.
​

Throughout his life Benito Mussolini had been exceptionally healthy except for a recurring constipation problem that particularly plagued him during moments of stress, causing him great pain. Apart from that, the Duce had never suffered from any serious ailments and had always had a healthy, even Spartan, lifestyle: he rarely drank alcohol, he didn’t eat in excess and he was very sporty (fencing, horse riding and tennis were among his hobbies and in propaganda movies he was seen doing physical labour like harvesting grain). He remained very sexually active despite advanced age, regularly engaging in intercourse with his mistress Clara Petacci who was 28 years his junior, while also continuing his long string of brief liaisons with female admirers (producing at least five illegitimate children). All of that nicely coincided with his personality cult, which depicted him as a super virile, extremely healthy Herculean demigod and which never entertained the thought that Mussolini would also die one day.

Like with everyone else, time caught up to Mussolini. In January 1957, the then 73 year-old Duce again started to suffer from abdominal pain but this time it was worse than usual. During surgery doctors discovered a small adhesion linking part of the small intestine with the neck of the gallbladder, indicating a minor gallbladder problem, and they removed the adhesion. Six months later in early 1958 Mussolini’s stomach problems returned with a vengeance in the shape of an ulcer of the duodenum, which was resolved through surgery and antibiotics. During his 75th birthday celebrations, which included daily public appearances across Italy for over a week, he was in fact kept going by prescribed medicinal opium that took away his severe pain and made him euphoric. Opioids, however, had the tendency to cause constipation and his doctors weaned him off them again over the course of 1958, which was made easier by the fact that Il Duce wasn’t prone to addiction.

Il Duce’s amazing health seemingly returned as he was free of any ailments over the course of 1959, being seen showing off his still athletic body on the beach at Riccione. 1960 saw a visit to Italian Eritrea which was home to an Italian community of 110.000 people, about 10% of the population, and about 56.000 of them lived in Asmara, constituting 55% of the capital’s population. The city was very well developed due to urban planning, having more traffic lights than Rome did, and looked very much like an Italian city with its architecture, wide streets, piazzas, coffee bars, pizzerias and ice cream parlours. It was perhaps the most industrialized region on the Horn of Africa: factories produced buttons, cooking oil, pasta, construction materials, packing meat, tobacco, hide and other household commodities; in the area of Asmara, there were in 1940 more than 2.000 small and medium sized industrial companies, which were concentrated in the areas of construction, mechanics, textiles, food processing and electricity. Due to its blossoming industry and highly developed infrastructure its standard of living was considered among the best in Africa, both for Italian settlers and local Eritreans. The Eritrean Ascaris were the best colonial troops in the Italian Empire and the Eritreans in general were very loyal (in part because they, as Muslims, feared an Italian departure would mean a return of Christian Ethiopian rule). At a speech in Asmara, attended by a mixed crowd of Italians and Eritreans, Mussolini stated that the locals were “Italian Moslem Africans” equal to the Italians and he lauded their loyalty. The crowd was enthusiastic.

In spring 1960 Mussolini again fell ill with symptoms like fever, chills, sweating, malaise, weakness, weight loss and flu like feelings. He was diagnosed with infective endocarditis and was treated with penicillin, which cured him but not before he was left with a chronic heart condition. He was told by his doctors to take lots of rest and to avoid physical stress, advice that he routinely ignored until he suffered his first minor heart attack in August 1960. He stayed almost completely aloof from state affairs for six weeks, retreating to his villa on Capri, and he appointed his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano to act as his deputy. Ciano started to act as an intermediary between the Duce and the rest of his ministers and used that to strengthen his position to take over in case his father-in-law died.

His public appearances decreased in number and duration, although he did meet with the recently elected President Richard Nixon in his birth town of Predappio in 1961 (where he had decided to celebrate his birthday with family only, since he now lacked the energy for lengthy public appearances). The White House under Nixon desired to smooth over the past and improve its relations with Fascist Italy, which had been chilly ever since the Suez Crisis in 1956-’57. The prime reason for mending relations was the coup of 1959 that deposed Khrushchev and replaced him with a neo-Stalinist oligarchy. The new regime – consisting of a tetrarchy of Bulganin, Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich – carried out Khrushchev’s threat, which been a mere bluff at the time. In 1960, the Soviet Union signed a peace treaty with East Germany and left it in control of the routes to the city. East Berlin was signed over to the GDR and officially became its capital. That caused a stir, and besides that the USA was now mired in the Cuban Revolution, which saw the number of American 'advisors' triple in 1961 and triple again in 1962. Due to these setbacks the West needed Fascist Italy firmly on their side once more. Mussolini agreed to sell weapons, ammunitions and fuel to Cuba at favourable rates and to provide two battalions of trainers for military and police purposes. He even agreed to a 50 million dollar loan (equivalent to ~ 400 million dollars in today’s money) to the government in Havana. He would not commit to military intervention, but did agree to send a volunteer division to fight the ongoing communist insurgency faced by Batista's regime.

Over the course of 1961 Mussolini’s health stayed about the same and, while his public appearances became less common, he continued to prolifically write articles. In the early morning of Monday November 5th 1962 he got up fairly early as usual for a light breakfast. But before he could get around to that he had the umpteenth heated argument with his wife concerning Mussolini’s longstanding mistress Clara Petacci, 28 years his junior, and in particular the now 14 year-old bastard son Benito Petacci he had fathered with her in 1948. Not only had he decided to award her a state allowance to maintain her standard of living and raise their son, but he permitted his son to visit him at the Villa Torlonia. Mussolini’s wife Rachele couldn’t tolerate the presence of Petacci’s son and locked herself in her room whenever he visited, cursing Clara who she saw as “the whore who seduced my husband.” After leaving for his office in the Palazzo Venezia later that morning he complained to his aides about chest pains. However, when a fairly new aide asked if he should get a doctor Mussolini responded he’d fine and that was all she wrote because the 19 year-old boy dared not question a living god. Shortly after noon the guards outside the Sala Del Mappamondo, Mussolini’s office in the Palazzo Venezia, heard a thud and groans of pain. Il Duce had gotten up to leave his office in order to meet with Lisbon’s ambassador at the Portuguese embassy to discuss the increasing violence in Angola, but had fallen to the ground before he had even gotten halfway to the door. Doctors were summoned immediately, but they could do nothing to remedy this massive heart attack and at 04:13 PM Mussolini was officially proclaimed dead.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, the Duce of Italy who had just witnessed the 40th anniversary of his own March on Rome, had died at age 79. When his family was informed they were all devastated, especially his wife Rachele who blamed herself for inducing her husband’s heart attack because she’d argued with him that morning. The rest of the country was informed by a special broadcast on all TV channels and all radio stations at eight o’clock that evening, which announced three days of national mourning. An entire nation was plunged into shock upon learning that the fixture of Italian society for four decades, the Duce, was gone. His body lay in state in Rome for three days and was visited by hundreds of thousands of people during that short time. After that, his body was moved to his birth town of Predappio for his funeral, which was attended by dozens of foreign dignitaries such as President Nixon, French President Charles de Gaulle, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Spanish caudillo Franco and many others. His embalmed body was laid to rest in a fairly modest mausoleum in fascist architecture where it can be seen until today, much like Lenin in Russia. The Villa Torlonia was bought by the Italian state and was turned into a museum about the life and work of Benito Mussolini.

With Il Duce laid to rest after ruling Italy for four decades the question was who was going to fill the gigantic shoes he had left behind. Italo Balbo was a big name, but he had no clout in Rome since he’d been in Libya as its Governor-General for about thirty years, which also applied to Dino Grandi who had served as ambassador in London for very long. That left Alessandro Pavolini and Galeazzo Ciano, bitter opponents, but the latter and not the former was the son-in-law of the deceased political giant. Besides that, Ciano had a lot of experience as Foreign Minister and knew how to act diplomatically and court the right people. Pavolini, who had a reputation of being cruel to opponents of fascism, wasn’t well liked by King Umberto II, and Ciano was therefore appointed Prime Minister. Additionally, Ciano won over Dino Grandi and Italo Balbo by appointing them as Foreign Minister and Minister of Oil respectively, heralding their return to Rome after many years. Pavolini, on the other hand was promoted away to the position of Governor of the Italian Islands of the Aegean (the Dodecanese Islands) where he could do little harm. The now 59 year-old Ciano became the new Duce of Italy and continued the policies of his predecessor. The early and mid 1960s remained uneventful for Ciano and he was fairly popular, though not on the same level as Mussolini, the giant on whose shoulders he stood.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update .

Chapter XVII: The Portuguese Colonial War, Italian Colonial Reform and Neo-colonial Conflict, 1962-1973.​

In 1961, in the meantime, an uprising had started in Angola against Portuguese rule, which was the natural product of a wave of civil disobedience that had begun in 1948. In January 1961 there’d been a peasant revolt at Baixa de Cassanje with the peasants demanding better pay and improvement to their working conditions. The Portuguese military responded to the rebellion by bombing villages in the area with napalm, killing anywhere between 400 and 7.000 indigenous Africans. In February, about fifty militants stormed a police station and Sao Paolo prison, killing seven policemen while forty militants died and no prisoners were freed. The UPA (later known as the FNLA) and the MPLA fought the Portuguese as well as each other, with all sides committing atrocities, and in the first year of the war up to 30.000 Angolans were killed by Portuguese forces. The UPA kicked off the war by massacring 1.000 white and 6.000 black civilians, but they were soon driven out of the country into Zaire. From there the UPA continued its attacks, creating more refugees and more terror among local communities. The violence became so terrible that the UN Security Council drew up Resolution 163, calling on Portugal to desist from repressive measures against the Angolan people. Italy vetoed this resolution, arguing that Portuguese colonial rule was the only thing preventing communist revolution, and drew the ire of the Soviets in doing so.

The MPLA received support from the USSR, East Germany and Cuba while Italy supplied Portugal with all the modern weapons, ammunition, fuel and “military advisors” it needed. The white minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa also supported Portugal, fearing the effects of an independent Angola on their own black majority population. The other San Remo Pact powers provided some weapons and financial support as well, but didn’t provide military support of their own. In the meantime, the supposed military advisors Italy sent were in fact two elite regiments of Bersaglieri and two squadrons of fighter-bombers. They did little advising and a lot of fighting. In terms of firepower the Portuguese military was superior, but of course there’s more to a guerrilla war than just that. A new group called UNITA broke off from the FNLA in 1966 and twice derailed a train transporting Zambian copper through Angola, prompting Zambia to kick them out. UNITA leader Savimbi secretly entered Angola through Zambia and worked with the Portuguese military against the MPLA.

At the annual summit Ciano flat-out told Portuguese Prime Minister Caetano that Italy wouldn’t support the Portuguese effort forever, most certainly not if Portugal would continue to refuse to improve the living standards of its colonial subjects. Ciano heavily pressured him to do so, threatening to withdraw his troops. In 1965, therefore, Caetano therefore passed a revolutionary colonial act that initiated a ten-year plan to uplift the indigenous Africans and integrate Angola as a true overseas province of the Lusotropical Empire. He largely imitated Italian assimilatory policies, moving away from separation and segregation. To enlist local support, the Portuguese army started to promote indigenous soldiers to positions of command, initially only to junior ranks up to sergeant-major but by 1970 also middle ranks up to major and (more rarely) lieutenant-colonel. In other words, Angolans had the opportunity to rise up in the ranks to the point of commanding a battalion.

Besides that, after 500 years of colonial rule, Portugal had failed to produce any native black governors, mayors, headmasters, police inspectors, or professors due to racist policies that had denied Angolans equal and adequate education. In the decade after 1965, hundreds of elementary schools, thirty vocational schools, two dozen secondary schools, one military academy and one university were founded. From the late 1960s, blacks could not only have a military career but could also rise in the colonial administration. By the early 1970s there were several thousand black civil servants, varying from office clerks to teachers and policemen. 1974 would see the first black mayor. Inspired by the Italians, the Portuguese also built villages for loyal soldiers and black civil servants and each had its own church, elementary school, library, small hospital, sport grounds and a small cinema or theatre. The intensity of the guerrilla weakened, especially after 1970 when Africans were officially granted legal equality with whites. In keeping with Portugal’s supposed tradition of miscegenation laws were passed that forbade discrimination of interracial couples.

Italy’s own colonies remained quiet for most of the 1960s because Italian rule remained fairly popular due to its assimilatory policies. In 1962, there was a brief border war with Chad, which had gained its independence from France two years prior: though the Aouzou Strip had been signed over to Italy in the 1935 Franco-Italian Agreement, both parties had failed to ratify the agreement; despite this the newer border was conventionally assumed to be the southern frontier of Italian Libya. Chad’s first President François Tombalbaye had established an autocratic one-party dictatorship marked with insensitive mismanagement that exacerbated interethnic tensions. He tried to rally support, particularly Muslim support, by portraying Italy as a foreign bogeyman because it illegally occupied the north of the country, inhabited predominantly by Muslims. A few incursions into the Aouzou Strip took place, and the Chadians already noticed that the local populace had little interested in being “liberated” by them. The Regia Aeronautica and Italian armour responded to these incursions by obliterating the intruding Chadian armed forces. Tombalbaye was deposed and sentenced to house arrest by a moderately pro-French regime which recognized the Aouzou Strip as part of Italian Libya. That way France and Italy both got what they wanted: Italy kept the disputed territory while Chad would keep looking to its former colonizer for protection for the foreseeable future.

By the early 1970s, however, some dissent started to develop in Libya. Italian policies to integrate and assimilate its colonial subjects, to give them legal equality and to provide a high standard of living had ensured the popularity of their rule from the 1930s onward. The Libyans, however, still weren’t very involved in the administration of their country. Sure, the colonial state and the army provided career opportunities and socioeconomic advancement, but the higher up positions were still de facto reserved for Italians. There weren’t many native mayors, provincial governors were all Italian and no Libyans were to be found in the senior staff of the Governor-General’s office in Tripoli. Educated Libyans felt that if they, as Italian Muslim Arabs, were legally equal to citizens from Italian origins then they should also have an equal say in how Libya was governed.

One of these educated Libyans was Muammar Gaddafi, born in 1942 in a tent near the coastal city of Sirte, and he was illustrative of Libya’s transition from a society of nomads and farmers to an urban, sedentary middle class society. He was born into an un-influential tribal group known as the Qadhadhfa, who were Arabized Berber in heritage, to parents who earned a meagre subsistence as goat and camel herders. Determined to raise his standard of living and encouraged by the token tuition fees of Italian vocational schools Muammar’s father Abu Meniar Gaddafi learned the trade of bench mechanic. Initially this supplemented his income, but when he got a fulltime job in Sirte in his trade it supplanted his herder existence and he sold most of his goats and camels. Muammar, in the meantime, went to one of the government elementary schools and proved remarkably intelligent, passing through six grades in four years and learning to speak Italian fluently. Simultaneously he was enrolled in the Arab Lictor Youth, the youth branch of the Muslim Association of the Lictor (in turn the Muslim branch of the National Fascist Party). Gaddafi then enrolled in Sirte’s secondary school and was noticed by his teachers for his high grades and his popularity with his fellow students. Exceptionally, his principal wrote a letter of commendation to the education department of the Governor-General’s office.

This ensured that the now 17 year-old Gaddafi, part of a small select group of young Libyans, was allowed to enrol in the Sapienza University of Rome in 1959. His chosen area of study was philosophy and he was educated in the thought of many Western philosophers, scientists, political theorists, economists and sociologists: Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto. He took notes from all of them. In October 1962 he witnessed Mussolini’s speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the March on Rome and was inspired to acquire oratory skills of his own, taking acting lessons. In the meantime, in 1963, the now 21 year-old Gaddafi completed a 77 page master paper titled “Sorel’s Social Myth and Violence coupled with Pareto’s Elite Concept.” In his paper he elaborated on how the elites defined by Pareto could use a combination of force and social myth to break the cycle of taking risks, running into catastrophe, becoming weak and humanitarian, and ultimately being replaced by new elites. In his paper he also elaborated on Marxism and called it an ideology that was “admirably idealistic, but realistically impractical” and said that historical materialism “ignores the intervention of exceptional individuals from Hannibal to Napoleon Bonaparte.” His professors considered it good enough to help him publish it as an article.

In 1963 Gaddafi returned home, but despite his education couldn’t get a better job than manager of the mailroom of Sirte’s social office and substitute teacher. From the mid 60s he started to feel disgruntled and disenfranchised and jotted down his thoughts in a diary that he started to keep. He noted that an Italian with similar academic achievements would have had a well-paid, prestigious job by age 25. In 1970, the 28 year-old Gaddafi still was a glorified office clerk and also worked as a substitute teacher in philosophy at a secondary school. Frustrated as he was, he started to give speeches wherever educated Libyans congregated. All of them boiled down to this: the Italian rulers said one thing but did another when they said that Libyans were citizens with equal rights; if Italians could get high government positions, then why couldn’t Libyans? In 1971 he formed the “Philosophy Discussion Group of Sirte” which was a front Gaddafi used to give “lectures” across the country in which he encouraged Libyans to protest against unfair treatment. Everywhere he went he got signatures for a petition, which he mailed to Governor-General Giorgio Almirante in 1972, by which time he had gathered tens of thousands of signatures. When no response was given Gaddafi encouraged a campaign of non-violent resistance, upon which Almirante ordered the OVRA to arrest him and charge him with disturbing the peace. Rioting erupted, particularly in Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte, even though the sentence was likely to be a gag order and a few months in jail or, very possibly, internal exile somewhere in the Italian Empire.

With ongoing and growing civil unrest Ciano started to fear the possibility of a full-blown colonial war like the one Portugal was fighting (although serious reforms had weakened the support for the anti-Portuguese resistance, soaking off moderates to the colonial regime). A colonial war would endanger many Italian lives since by the early 70s about 35% of Libya’s population was ethnically Italian. Also, by now, there was a sizeable Libyan community in parts of Italy that could be cultivated by anti-Italian opposition. Ciano didn’t have any interest in a colonial war nor did he have an interest in terrorist attacks in Italy itself, both of which France had seen in its conflict in Algeria. Under pressure from Rome, the court in Tripoli declared Gaddafi not guilty and ordered his immediate release. Since he was officially still a member of the Muslim Association of the Lictor, the Muslim branch of the National Fascist Party, a party and state career was still possible (in fact, party membership was a de facto requirement for a serious career). In a radical move, Gaddafi was appointed governor of Misurata Province, in which Sirte was located, becoming the first provincial governor of Libyan origins. Libya was pacified and slowly but surely similar reforms were undertaken in Albania, Eritrea and Somalia to keep them in the Italian Empire. In Gaddafi’s wake, slowly but surely more Libyans were allowed into the upper echelons of their country’s administration until in 1983 the then 41 year-old Gaddafi was elected the first Governor-General with native origins. It must be said that this occurred in the post-fascist era. Gaddafi later became Minister of Oil in 1991, after serving two terms as Governor-General at the head of the Muslim Association of the Lictor (keeping the Muslim branch of the PNF in charge after the PNF had already lost power in Italy).

In the meantime, the only serious threat to Italy’s position was a popular uprising in Ethiopia against the puppet regime headed by Emperor Amha Selassie. His regime was corrupt, amassing tonnes of wealth for the Italian community and the Ethiopian court and the elites collaborating with them. Protests against proceeds from gold mining disappearing into Italian pockets took off in 1965 when about a hundred miners were laid off because they had partaken in strikes for better pay and working conditions. Other industries, such as natural gas exploitation, were no different: apart from infrastructure the Italians primarily built for their own purposes, the Ethiopian people didn’t benefit. A guerrilla erupted led by the People’s Democratic Party of Ethiopia, a communist movement headed by a certain Mengistu Haile Mariam and supported by the Soviets and the Cubans. The Italians initially only supplied Ethiopian government forces with weapons, trainers and advisors, but by 1970 half the country was lost to the rebels. Ciano decided to intervene militarily, delivering heavy blows to the communists and retaking much of the country. In 1970, Italy provided 20.000 men and copious air and artillery support to Addis Ababa, and by 1972 that had tripled.

As a favour for Italian support to Cuba, President John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to provide the Italians with intelligence. The massive intervention in Cuba had caused neo-conservatism to weaken and by the time Nixon left the White House in 1969 it was dying. Kennedy issued a policy of Cubanization of the conflict, gradually decreasing troop strengths and leaving the country altogether by 1972, just in time for the Presidential elections that year. Since he had kept his 1968 election promise of extracting the US from the Cuban conflict, JFK was re-elected in 1972, but the Democrats lost the White House to Reagan in the close run 1976 elections, which was the last hiccup of neo-conservatism. In the meantime, John F. Kennedy suffered from stomach, colon and prostrate issues, abscesses, high cholesterol and adrenal problems and in 1983 he died of a heart-attack, aged 66. His brother Robert F. Kennedy defeated Reagan in 1980 and was re-elected in 1984, after which he stayed in Congress until his retirement in 2000. The 90 year-old RFK occasionally still acts as a spokesperson for the Democrats.

Cuba, in the meantime, saw generous weapons sales by the US and the anti-communist San Remo Pact powers. Fulgencio Batista started a strong anti-corruption campaign and even became an observant member of the San Remo Pact to demonstrate that he was not an American puppet, like his opponents said he was. Batista used Italian money for popular policies to uplift the poor, thus taking away the communist support base. Drug lords (in part Colombians and Peruvians trafficking through Cuba) proved a tougher nut to crack, violently resisting attempts to shut down their operations. The government responded with 1.000 arrests in six months, using tactics like kidnapping criminals’ families to force them to come out of hiding and turn themselves in. In 1975 the Cuban Revolution finally ended with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in custody.

Besides Italy, the white minority regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia also helped Ethiopia. They returned the favour of generous Italian weapons deliveries and trainers to the State of Katanga, the mineral rich province that had seceded from Congo in 1963. They supported the Ethiopian Empire and, by extension, Italy. Rome taking sides in this post-colonial conflict allowed Katanga to repulse efforts by Congo, now led by the kleptocratic military dictatorship of Mobutu, to subjugate it. After his defeat in Katanga the unpopular and discredited Mobutu banana republic faced a Maoist insurgency led by Pierre Mulele, who in 1972 chased him out of the country and established the halfway competent People’s Republic of Congo. After Mulele’s death in 1989 the country imitated Chinese economic reforms and, with a GDP per capita of $1.100 and 7% economic growth is doing alright by African standards. Katanga, however, has been doing great with a GDP per capita of $16.000, making it one of the most affluent countries of sub-Saharan Africa. For a long time Katanga, outside the white minority regimes in Pretoria and Salisbury, was the only sub-Saharan African country that Rome had friendly relations with. All African countries spurned Italy because it held on to its empire and it had relations with only five countries: obviously the neo-colonial powers of Portugal and Spain, secondly Apartheid South Africa as well as white ruled Rhodesia, and lastly one black majority country namely the State of Katanga. Other African countries couldn’t ignore Italy since it was one of the six permanent members of the UN Security Council as well as a nuclear power, but they definitely tried. Italian embassies and consulates in African states were generally located in locations off the beaten track, and during the late 1960s and the 1970s they were the location of protests against the “Ethiopian War.”

 

[Onkel Willie]

The reworked and, I assume, ASB free version of the last chapter.

Chapter XVIII: The Decline and Fall of Fascism, 1973-1979.​

After a tense peace in the Middle East after the Suez Crisis and the Six Day War in 1967, conflict erupted again in 1973. Iraq had become a republic and a dictatorship under the Arab Socialist Baath party, ending British influence in the region by the late 1960s. Egypt, Iraq and Syria banded together and in 1973 launched a surprise attack against Israel to destroy it once and for all, the so-called Yom Kippur War. Israel was under the threat of being defeated, so it invoked a military pact with Italy signed in 1957, which guaranteed that one would support the other if it was the victim of Egyptian aggression.

Ciano was a bit reluctant to uphold his end of the deal, since he couldn’t use an enflamed Arab public opinion against him now that he also was fighting in Africa and had that entire continent riled up. He nonetheless supported Israel since backstabbing the Israelis would undoubtedly backfire on Italy in terms of Western sympathy. The Egyptian offensive into the Sinai stopped within range of its own anti-aircraft defences; the IDF couldn’t push them back, but the Egyptians didn’t advance any further. The reason for that was that Egypt came under air attack from the Regia Aeronautica while an armoured division moved to Sidi Barrani, a fairly tame military intervention on Italy’s part considering what it was capable of. It was enough for Israel to grind the Syrians and the Iraqis to a standstill at Karmiel, preventing a breakout toward Haifa just 25 kilometres away. Arab forces were driven back into the Golan Heights, but there they managed to hold a defensive line under the cover of SAMs provided by the Soviet Union, which prevented Israel from gaining air superiority.

The war ended through American as well as Soviet mediation, allowing Syria and Iraq to get away with a status quo ante bellum peace, apart from small war reparations, while Egypt and Israel agreed to a referendum on the Sinai’s future to be held in 1974 under UN supervision. The Arabs walked away fairly unscathed and they had been fairly successful militarily, unlike in 1948, 1956 and 1967, but the outcome was still widely perceived as a failure because nothing was achieved for the Palestinian cause (many of them remained stuck in surrounding countries, particularly in Jordan). The OPEC initiated an oil embargo against Israel and its Western backers, but the effects were mitigated by the effect that the competing PESA continued to sell oil to the affected countries. With greatly diminished oil supply, oil prices did rise and Italy made a lot of money, while other Western states suffered from stagflation in the 1970s. The Arab League cut off diplomatic ties with Israel and Italy.

The fascist bloc, however, was showing cracks. Portuguese Prime Minister Caetano was fundamentally an authoritarian, but he did make some efforts to open up the regime. Soon after taking power, he renamed the regime as the “Social State,” and slightly increased freedom of speech and the press and conducted an emancipation program in the colonies (the latter had been effective, and by 1975 the colonial war had become rather low-key). These measures did not go nearly far enough for a significant element of the population who had no memory of the instability which preceded Salazar. The people were also disappointed that Caetano was unwilling to open up the electoral system; the 1969 and 1973 elections saw the National Union – renamed People's National Action – sweep every seat, as before. However, even these small reforms had to be wrung out of the hardliners in the regime – most notably Thomaz, who was not nearly as content to give Caetano the free rein he had given Salazar. By 1973, the hardliners were pressuring Caetano to end his reform experiment, causing discontent to simmer among the people.

In Spain, King Juan Carlos I functioned as active head of state during periods of Franco’s temporary incapacity in 1974-’75 and in October 1975 Franco gave him full control, dying three weeks later on November 20th. His accession met with relatively little parliamentary resistance from the ruling “Movimiento Nacional” party. He, however, quickly initiated reforms that displeased conservative and Falangist elements, especially in the military, who had expected him to maintain the authoritarian state. In July 1976 he dismissed Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro who had been trying to continue Francoist policies in the face of the King’s reformist stance. Although recycled as a moderate during the final years of Franco’s rule, Navarro was in fact a hardliner who had been involved with the “White Terror,” signing thousands of death warrants in the 1936-1939 timeframe.

Navarro was replaced with Adolfo Suarez, a former leader of the Movimiento Nacional. Navarro being replaced by the King rather than becoming a new caudillo displeased Ciano, who disliked the precedent that a head of government could be replaced by his monarch. The Estado Novo regime was also displeased since it feared the effects of its Spanish neighbour’s democratization on the growing demand for reform in its own country. Their arguments against “bourgeois capitalist democracy,” however, fell on def ears with King Juan Carlos. In September 1976 Spain was confronted by 350.000 unarmed Moroccans brandishing Moroccan flags, portraits of King Hassan II and Korans. They’d been given permission by King Hassan II to march into the Spanish Sahara and they went unopposed by the Spanish Armed Forces on the King’s orders. That was the final straw to the domestic opponents of Juan Carlos’s reforms as well his foreign opponents, particularly Italy and Portugal. Rome and Lisbon were alarmed by Spanish negotiations with Morocco concerning the surrender of the Spanish Sahara. They viewed possible Spanish concessions to an Arab state as a dangerous example to their own colonial peoples, who had just been pacified through combinations of force and moves toward emancipation.

On September 7th 1976 members of the “Guardia Civil” led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero seized control of parliament and placed Juan Carlos under house arrest as an “illegitimate usurper,” the rightful heir being his father. This was ironic since Franco had passed over Juan Carlos’s father as his successor because he was thought to be too liberal. Infante Juan was blackmailed into ascending the throne – with the threat that his son Juan Carlos would be tried for treason and face lifelong imprisonment, being spared execution only because he was a royal. He became a puppet ruler as King Juan III. The Spanish military reinstated Navarro as Prime Minister while Juan Carlos was sent into internal exile to a villa on the island of Formentera, just off the coast of Ibiza. The first thing Navarro and his military junta did was to break off negotiations with Morocco concerning the Spanish Sahara, and order riot police and soldiers to chase the Moroccan protestors back across the border with truncheons, rubber bullets and tear gas. The Spanish Army clashed with Moroccan troops sent by Hassan II in response, and Spanish forces proved superior by far. Morocco and Spain found themselves in a shooting war. In the meantime, there was a major protest in Spain, but security forces broke it up and further protests were limited due to the rally to the flag effect. Besides that the separatist Basque ETA stepped up its terrorist activities, thereby legitimizing continued dictatorship.

In Italy itself the fascist regime remained fairly popular due to the wealth and the opportunities it provided, though there were some objections to it. Firstly, fascism appealed the most to the generation that had come of age between 1914 and the early 1950s: it appealed much less to the post-war generation, which had not experienced the Great War, the “mutilated victory,” post-war instability, the great depression, WW II and the reconstruction era. The generation that came of age post-1955 didn’t see the need for authoritarianism and uniformity as much as earlier generations. In the meantime, like his father, Galeazzo Ciano was not above extracting private profit from his public office, using his influence to depress a company’s stocks, after which he’d buy a controlling interest, then increase his wealth after the value rebounded. He introduced an element of mild corruption into the system, and power abuse by state and party officials was a serious annoyance to many Italians by the early 1970s. This was starkly contrasted against Mussolini’s incorruptibility, more so since the latter’s lifestyle had been fairly Spartan compared to Ciano’s taste for the finer things in life such as a bourgeois game of golf. He also never did have the clout of his illustrious predecessor since King Umberto II asserted himself after Mussolini’s death. Besides that, he had rivals like Pavolini waiting in the shadows for a moment of weakness to usurp his position. Ciano, however, still had the prestige of being Mussolini’s son-in-law going for him as well his status as a first generation fascist.

Nonetheless, Ciano felt the need to increase funding to Italy’s secret police to bolster his position: the OVRA (Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Antifascism – Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo). The OVRA’s powers were increased and along with it the definitions of what constituted anti-fascism, turning Italy into a more repressive society than before. Among the OVRA’s victims were feminists: in the late 1960s groups of women who rejected the gender roles imposed by the fascist state banded together, mostly inspired by liberal democratic, socialist or outright Marxist-Leninist ideas. Feminists were arrested by the OVRA and forced to follow re-education, which consisted of the following: memorizing and parroting quotes of Mussolini concerning the “natural roles” of men and women; psychological torture like sleep deprivation, humiliation, solitary confinement and fear; and physical torture when all else failed. All-in-all, corruption issues and increased repression made the populace rather apathetic, mildly supportive at best, while state propaganda seemed a bit hollow. Added to this was the fact that, for lack of reform, state officials continued to rely on existing procedures, producing the annoyance of bureaucratic red tape (the truth was that this already existed under Mussolini to an extent, but that his personality cult and popularity deflected blame to his underlings). The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Rome in October 1972, though it was grand, just didn’t have the Mussolinian patina to it of the fortieth, thirtieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries (even though his picture was everywhere one looked).

In the end antifascists could level accusations of conservatism, corruption, repression and red tape against the Italian state all they wanted, but combined those factors didn’t accumulate nearly enough resentment for a full-blown revolution. As late as 1973, the OVRA declared in a report that antifascist activities and sentiments were negligible and not a threat to national security. Many critics agreed that there should be reforms and relaxations of some kind, which had to do with zeitgeist as well: fascism was an ideology born in the interbellum and it appealed the most to the generation that had witnessed WW I, the post-war chaos, the mutilated victory, the golden years in the 1930s when Italy was mostly spared the consequences of the Depression, WW II and post-war reconstruction (i.e. the generation that had consciously experienced any significant part of the 1914-1952 timeframe). The generation that had come of age after 1958 had never experienced such crises and didn’t see why their country couldn’t become freer. However, as late as the mid 1970s only a select few argued that fascism was finished. Many of those were aging exiled Italian communists and socialists who repeated ad nauseam that fascism was doomed due to “the inexorable march forward to socialism dictated by iron Marxist laws, which would relegate fascism to the ash heap of history.” By the 1970s these surviving exiles, mostly members of Mussolini’s generation, were going extinct (besides that, their impact had always been negligible since they had always been ignored). Only in combination with external factors would internal issues precipitate the fall of fascism, but the “Second Duce” Ciano didn’t get to see that because he died of a major stroke in November 1977, aged 74. It was the culmination of a cardiovascular condition he’d been diagnosed with in 1971.

In 1977, there were only two first generation fascists left who were big enough to possibly succeed Ciano: there was Pavolini, but he’d been exiled to the Dodecanese years ago, and there was the 82 year-old Dino Grandi who reluctantly accepted the position of Duce out of a sense of duty, though he styled himself Prime Minister since he believed “Mussolini was and is the Duce of Fascism.” He was old and lacked the energy as well as ambition for the office bestowed upon him, allowing corruption to become ubiquitous. He soon faced a foreign policy crisis that dragged the country into another war.

Portugal still owned the exclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu which together constituted Portuguese India. On February 27th 1950, the Indian government asked the Portuguese government to open negotiations about the future of Portuguese colonies in India. Portugal asserted that its territory on the Indian subcontinent was not a colony but part of metropolitan Portugal and hence its transfer was non-negotiable; and that India had no rights to this territory because the Republic of India did not exist at the time when Goa came under Portuguese rule. When the Portuguese Government refused to respond to subsequent aide-mémoires in this regard, the Indian government, on June 11th 1953, withdrew its diplomatic mission from Lisbon. By 1954, the Republic of India instituted visa restrictions on travel from Goa to India which paralysed transport between Goa and other exclaves like Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Meanwhile, the Indian Union of Dockers had, in 1954, instituted a boycott on shipping to Portuguese India. Between July 22nd and August 2nd 1954, armed activists attacked and forced the surrender of Portuguese forces stationed in Dadra and Nagar Haveli (the latter two were ceded in 1954). On August 15th 1955, 3.000-5.000 unarmed Indian activists attempted to enter Goa at six locations and were violently repulsed by Portuguese police officers, resulting in the deaths of between 21 and 30 people. The news of the massacre built public opinion in India against the presence of the Portuguese in Goa and on September 1st 1955, India closed its consulate in Goa. Foreign mediation failed to produce any tangible results and Lisbon felt confident by the firm support of Rome.

In 1956, Mussolini attacked Egypt and the Indian ambassador was told by Ciano, then still Foreign Minister, that India could expect the same treatment as Egypt if it invaded Portuguese possessions, possibly with the support of Italy’s allies if need be. Nehru was intimidated, certainly because these words were backed up by precedent. He couldn’t think of any reason why Italy would back off rather than giving India the Egyptian treatment. Leaving an Indian annexation of Goa unopposed would be a major loss of face for the entire fascist bloc. The entire matter was shelved indefinitely when Italy tested its first atomic bomb in 1958 since Nehru was unsure as to whether Mussolini would go that far (his use of mustard gas on the Ethiopians in 1935, however, spoke volumes and there was no indication that Mussolini viewed atomic bombs as anything more than big explosives). India limited itself to peaceful means, such as a total economic embargo against Portuguese possessions, but for the sake of national pride Portugal wouldn’t give up even though holding on to these exclaves meant haemorrhaging money. Much of it was spent on heavily fortifying these exclaves with defence in depth consisting of pillboxes, casemates, trenches, barbed wire, anti-tank ditches, Czech hedgehogs, barbed wire, mine fields, artillery batteries and machine gun nests with overlapping fields of fire. By the 1970s Goa, Daman and Diu were among the most fortified places in the world.

India strengthened its relations with the USSR in response and got Soviet aid for its nuclear weapons program, conducting an 8 kiloton test codenamed “Smiling Buddha” in May 1972. By late 1977 India had seven weapons available to it and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, feeling strengthened, tried to reopen negotiations with Portugal concerning the status of Portuguese India. The technocratic Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano reiterated that Portugal’s territories on the Indian subcontinent were 1) an integral part of metropolitan Portugal and 2) that India had no rights to this territory since it had come under Portuguese rule long before India even existed as a country. Its status wasn’t negotiable. Indira Gandhi responded by ordering a naval blockade of Goa, Daman and Diu, escalating the crisis to the point where backing down would mean major loss of face. Frantic arbitration by the United States and the Soviet Union tried to steer the world away from a conflict between two nuclear powers; the US suggested a referendum and the Soviets were generous enough to suggest a five-year transition period. Even the Vatican’s mediation had no effect, even though Pope Paul VI had been directly involved. Heightened tensions, stubbornness, pride, conviction, miscommunication, lack of empathy, fear of losing face and underestimation of their adversary on both sides ensured that diplomatic efforts came to naught. In the end Prime Minister Gandhi ordered Operation Vijay to commence on December 10th 1977, upon which 40.000 Indian troops assaulted Portuguese defences. She hoped to vindicate her rule by decree with a military victory against a reviled colonial power. Despite their numerical superiority, the tenacious Portuguese defence initially held them back.

Caetano immediately invoked an emergency teleconference of the San Remo Pact powers and got Italian support, with Grandi issuing an ultimatum to India to cease and desist within 24 hours or face war. Frantic negotiations by the US and the USSR had no results since both parties rejected compromise, and the spectre of nuclear war loomed. Under the mistaken assumption that the Soviets would actively support them, the Indian government allowed the ultimatum to expire and incurred the wrath of Mussolini’s ghost. US Forces went to DEFCON 3 while Soviet forces were put on a similar state of alert. In the meantime, a naval taskforce centred on guided missile battleships Impero and Roma, aircraft carrier Falco and guided missile cruisers Gorizia and Fiume appeared off the Indian west coast to provide fire and air support to ground troops, also firing cruise missiles at targets deep inside India. Unbeknownst to the Indians they carried a small number of nuclear shells. Italian elite forces were deployed to assist their allies, the Portuguese defenders. By the end of January Portuguese defences buckled under sheer weight of numbers and their positions were overrun. Under heavy cover fire from Italian 15 inch naval guns, Portuguese and Italian defenders were evacuated. Dino Grandi threatened nuclear war, but lacked the stomach for it and as a face saving measures ultimately accepted an American proposal to have India “buy” these exclaves from Portugal. Lisbon agreed to “sell” for a sum of 1.5 billion dollars.

Anti-war sentiments aroused by this pointless and costly war combined with frustration about the administration’s rigidity, sluggishness, repression, political corruption and economic nepotism. Massive student protests erupted in Rome in March 1978 demanding reforms from the fascist regime: such as the abolition of obsolete bureaucratic procedures; more anti-corruption efforts; an end to the nepotistic favouritism in the career ladder for the sons of big party officials; change to the repressive gender roles still imposed by the state to a certain extent, even though universities had opened their doors for women; an end to extra-legal arrests and the use of torture by the OVRA to extract confessions. Above all, however, they demanded an end to the Italian involvement in postcolonial and neo-colonial conflicts in the Third World, especially in Ethiopia. The prospect of being drafted and sent to Ethiopia and other places was particularly resented by college students in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.

Grandi simply ordered the riot police to break up the students camping on the Piazza Venezia, using truncheons and teargas. A battle erupted between the students and the police and rioting erupted all across Rome, upon which Grandi ordered soldiers, including armoured vehicles, to occupy the city. Martial law was declared and a curfew was put in place, after which things seemed to quiet down, but only for a few days. Soon protests erupted across Italy, which quickly devolved into riots and looting since the response of the authorities was the same everywhere: truncheons and teargas. The protests gained a new dimension in May 1978 with the dramatic death of a 32 year-old communist named Mario Moretti, who was beaten to death by the riot police with their batons. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, but now they demanded not reform but free elections, with the moral support of the Holy See. Pope Paul VI, who was lingering on death’s door at this point, asked both sides to end the violence and to enter a dialogue.

Grandi didn’t want to open the can of worms of ordering soldiers to open fire on crowds of protestors. He saw which way the wind was blowing and instead put forward a motion in the Grand Council of Fascism to restore to the King his full constitutional prerogatives, which was accepted by a slight majority. King Umberto II issued elections which would take place in July 1979, and up until then Minister of the Interior Giorgio Almirante would serve as interim Prime Minister. He also announced the withdrawal of Italian ground troops from Ethiopia. After those announcements things quieted down and everybody went back to school and to work. Fascism ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

 

[Onkel Willie]

I present to you the final chapter of fascism.

Chapter XIX: Il Secolo Fascista, 1979-2015.​

The Grand Council of Fascism and the cabinet formed an interim government which abolished many of the restrictions and limitations imposed by the fascist state. In the meantime, these events had their effects on the other authoritarian regimes on the Mediterranean, who underwent what became known as the Revolutions of 1978-’79. Iran notably escaped that fate since the Shah’s cancer diagnosis in 1972 forced him to take a more hands-off approach, allowing the country to grow into constitutional monarchy. Soviet propaganda cackled triumphantly about the fall of fascism as it had been “predicted” by Marxist-Leninist teachings, not realizing that they’d been given a preview of what would happen to them. In the meantime, parliamentary elections were held in Italy where the “Partito Nazionale Fascista,” which was allowed to run, got competition from the “Partito Socialista Italiano,” the “Democrazia Cristiania” which was a centrist Catholic catch-all party, and the “Partito Comunista Italiano”.

The PNF still held a large sway, particular over the generation of people that had experienced the heyday of fascism in the 1950s and early 60s. A major boost to the PNF was that Romano Mussolini, son of the Duce, was among the candidates running for a seat in parliament. He was not the party leader, though he played a big role in the propaganda campaign preceding the elections (during which the PNF, as the ruling party, had the advantage that they could still use state-owned media). He used his status as the son of Benito Mussolini, who was still held in high regard, as well as his popularity as a jazz musician to get votes (he had in fact only entered politics in the 1970s when he witnessed his father’s legacy of revolutionism wither away). The leader of the PNF was the 65 year-old and second generation fascist (meaning he had not participated on the March on Rome, but had partaken in WW II) Giorgio Almirante, former Governor-General of Libya. After a promising start in the fascist party’s ranks in the mid/late 1930s, WW II rolled around and he enlisted voluntarily, after which the now 32 year-old Almirante retired from the military in 1946 with the rank of Major. In 1951 he became mayor of his hometown, the spa town of Salsomaggiore Terme, and later chose for a career in the booming “Fourth Shore,” i.e. Libya.

Anyway, the Fascist Party got 22% of the popular vote, but the DC got 30%, the PSI got 25% and the PCI got 11% (the rest of the vote was taken by liberals and single issue parties; colonial parties did not participate in Italy, but competed for their own colonial councils in Tripoli, Asmara and Mogadishu respectively). After months of difficult negotiations, the Christian Democrats and the PSI formed a governing coalition in January 1980, and the governing fascist party overnight became an opposition party for the first time in almost sixty years, ending the one-party state.

Regime change didn’t mean that Italy’s foreign policy saw dramatic change. The San Remo Pact was held together by three things: 1) friendly ties between its members weren’t fundamentally affected by democratization since Italian dominance was never experienced as an occupation, quite unlike Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact. 2) Anti-communism remained a core element of the foreign policies of these countries, and Italy provided a convenient nuclear umbrella (though Spain continued the nuclear programme initiated by the Francoist regime and finally tested a device in the Spanish Sahara in 1982). 3) These countries had a vested interest in maintaining their shielded, protectionist Mediterranean economic zone rather than joining the European Community and embracing its free trade philosophy.

One major conflict of the 1980s was the Soviet-Afghan War. From the early 1970s Fascist Italy had begun supporting the regime of Mohammed Daoud Khan, which had applied for membership of the San Remo Pact in 1975 and became an observer state. His pseudo-fascist regime saw major improvements to living standards, particularly during the Helmand Valley Project in southern Afghanistan, and tentative steps were taken to the emancipation of women. In April 1978, however, the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan supported by the army staged a coup for fear of being eliminated by Daoud Khan’s regime. Khan, his wife Princess Zamina Begum and some of their children fled the country, but many members of Khan’s family were killed in the revolution. With a thirst for vengeance Khan returned in 1979 and organized armed resistance in southern, Pashtun dominated, Afghanistan. Though he didn’t really want to, he reconciled with his cousin King Zahir Shah under Italian and Iranian pressure. Zahir Shah formed a government-in-exile in Rome and Khan was put in charge of its military component, comprised of elements of the Afghan Army loyal to Khan combined with moderate Islamist groups who engaged the communist regime in a guerrilla (Pakistan, following the logic that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” supported the same groups that Italy and Iran did).

Support from the San Remo Pact, and in particular from Italy and Iran, remained unaffected by the Revolutions of 1978-’79. Italy (together with the USA) helped supply the resistance with weapons and ammunition such the brand-new Beretta M9 pistol and Italian license produced versions of the Stinger missile. The result was that the Soviet Army was getting drained more and more and eventually withdrew in 1991, although the communist regime continued to fight another three years (besides that, there was the distraction posed by Solidarity in Poland, which had provoked a Soviet invasion in 1981 and precipitated a persistent guerrilla against the Soviet occupation). By 1994 Daoud Khan had died of natural causes, but King Zahir Shah was still alive and with overwhelming popular support regained his throne.

Campaigns like this aimed at the rollback of communism had major effects. In 1991 the last of the neo-Stalinist leaders, Lazar Kaganovich, died aged 97. By then the USSR was a poor, underdeveloped country with a bloated military-industrial complex and it was thoroughly disliked by its own people, who were desperate for change. When a conservative pawn Grigoriy Romanov was put forward as Kaganovich’s successor, massive peaceful protests erupted in Moscow and spread across the country. The events were eerily similar to what had happened in 1978 in Italy and then a mutiny erupted in garrisons in Poland, which still under de facto Soviet occupation and ruled by puppets. Romanov withdrew troops from the Warsaw Pact states to suppress dissent at home, but that was a mistake. Neither the soldiers nor the politburo had the stomach for it, so in 1992 he was deposed by the same politburo that had put him in charge. In the meantime, the Revolutions of 1992 ended the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union was reformed by its new leader Gorbachev into a much looser federation and semi-free elections were held in 1993 on local and regional levels. The New Union Treaty reformed the country into the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics (which coincidentally also abbreviated to USSR). The impoverished Eastern European countries became new democracies overnight, thereby vindicating among other things the fascist legacy of virulent anti-communism.

In the meantime, the democracy that emerged in Italy from 1980 struggled to renew Italian society, and in hindsight their difficulties were unsurprising. Fascism had had nearly six decades time to pervade all layers of society and during that time it had influenced the way of thinking of entire generations. There were still plenty of people around who had consciously experienced the golden years of fascism in the 1930s, which were renewed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Mussolini was still viewed positively and not even the new government dared to touch him, unlike his successors who were blamed for all the failings of Fascist Italy. One historian said that “Mussolini was fascism and fascism was Mussolini. It was what he wanted it to be, which is why it began to falter after his death. He merely left his successors guidelines rather than the ‘how to’ of fascism they would have liked.”

In the meantime, Italian democracy provided greater freedom than had ever been known under fascism, leaving room for experimentation. Later than in other Western countries women became serious participants in the economy and in politics, gaining both the passive and the active vote from 1978. Liberalizations went further. Behaviour deemed sexually deviant under fascism, such as homosexuality, prostitution and pornography was decriminalized overnight, though not outright legalized due to objections from the Christian Democrats. Milan received the doubtful honour of being named the “capital of Europorn” because the government was apprehensive when it came to enforcing already lax censorship laws. By 1984 they had already lost two lawsuits in which the judiciary called government bans on two pornographic films a violation of the freedom of expression, and leftwing media slandered them as “fascist” to boot. Veronica Lario, born Miriam Raffealla Bartolini, harassed by the fascist authorities in the 1970s for being a sex-positive feminist, became a major name in the porn industry in the 1980s, beginning her career in 1982 aged 26. She put active starring on the backburner and turned more to directing and producing in the early 1990s; the final productions in which she starred as a pornographic actress were produced in 1999.

Liberty and equality were valued greatly, but the democratic government struggled with the economic recession of the 1980s, unable to rely on oil money to mitigate it since oil prices were low. Economic liberalization increased in Italy as much as it did in the rest of the developed world and manufacturing industry relocated to Thailand, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and China. The economies of Japan and West Germany were the most notable in the West that continued to enjoy strong economic growth. The Italian economy didn’t shrink in the 1980s, but average annual growth was less than 0.7%, which was even less than the average normal growth of the Western world, which was about 1.5-2%. Growth in the 1980s paled in comparison to “Il Glorioso Venti,” the roughly twenty year period starting in 1947 that saw exceptional economic growth (on average 7% a year, and growth up to 10% in the early and mid 1950s), which largely coincided with Mussolini’s tenure. Even the somewhat slower 1970s saw the Italian people maintain their standard of living, subsidized by the high oil prices of those years.

In the 1980s the government decided to sharply cut interest rates to stimulate growth, deciding that inflation was a secondary concern. It was the standard macroeconomic prescription, but it instead caused stagflation and unemployment instead. The first democratic government of Italy fell in 1982 because the Christian Democrats wanted to privatize many state-owned companies as part of austerity measures meant to curb inflation. Ever since the 1930s the IRI, the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, had controlled ~ 17% of the economy through government-linked companies. Their socialist coalition partners disagreed because it would undoubtedly produce unemployment and instead wanted to use the IRI to rescue, restructure and finance banks and companies that threatened to go bankrupt to prevent a credit crunch (it was ironic that they looked to the IRI since it was a remnant of fascism). Halfway through its four year term the coalition imploded and new elections were issued, something that became a recurring theme. The PSI replaced the DC as the largest party and formed a coalition with the PCI and pushed through its programme, which curbed unemployment and momentarily spared purchasing power but it increased inflation. This precipitated a wage-price spiral, which was not improved by austerity measures from a DC led government after that party regained power in 1983.

In March 1983 Umberto II died at age 78, coincidentally the same age his father had reached. His successor, the then 46 year-old King Victor Emmanuel IV, was faced by an unprecedented economic crisis, but he lacked the moral authority and air of incorruptibility of his parents, who had been devout Catholics (and had markedly improved relations between the otherwise anticlerical house of Savoy and the Vatican). The Queen Mother, Marie José of Belgium, remained celibate and never married again and died of lung cancer in 2001 at age 94. Her son, however, continued a longstanding affair. In 1963, then Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel had become engaged to Infanta Margarita of Spain (who was two years his junior) and they married in 1964. They had a crown prince named Victor Emmanuel born in 1965, two other sons named Umberto and Giovanni born in 1967 and 1974 respectively, as well as two daughters named Yolanda and Elena born in 1970 and 1976. But it was an arranged marriage and Victor Emmanuel stuck with it for appearances only, quite like the loveless marriage of his parents, albeit for public relations and not out of religious piety.

He continued his relationship, dating back to 1960, with water ski champion Marina Ricolfi Doria, who became a regular visitor of the Quirinal Palace. By the early 1980s, without heavy fascist censorship clamping down on the press, his adultery became a public secret. That didn’t kill his mediocre popularity, but in 1988 the press discovered a carefully guarded secret: in 1965 he had fathered an illegitimate son named Gianni. The issue tore his family apart since in public he denied that Gianni was his son, upon which the indignant young man demanded recognition and a paternity test. Unlike in other countries, members of the royal family were not immune thanks to a series of Duces eroding the position of the royals. Gianni Ricolfi Doria refused financial compensation and after four years of litigation the court demanded a DNA test, but the King gave notice of appeal, which would have led to more trials. His cousin Uberto, who had racked up serious debts with bad investments, agreed to a DNA test for money and got rich from interviews. The result proved Gianni had been telling the truth all along and it completely discredited his father who abdicated in 1990 (which enabled him to divorce Margarita and finally marry his long-time mistress). His son was left with the burden of being King at age 25, becoming King Victor Emmanuel V. He improved the image of the House of Savoy and remains King of Italy until the present day, while his father has withdrawn from public life.

The ineffectuality of the democratic governments of the 1980s as well as the issues of the royal house opened the door for third generation fascists, which is to say fascists who had made their careers post-war. Among them was a certain Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi had been born in September 1936 in Milan, where he was raised by a middle class family and experienced the German occupation. After the war he went to a state run secondary school and in October 1954 the 18 year-old Berlusconi was drafted into the army for the compulsory two year stint, and he became a cello player and singer in a military band. Apart from basic training, life in the Regio Esercito proved fairly easy on the young Silvio and he decided to stay and see Italy’s overseas provinces while attending the military academy in Tripoli. In 1956, Berlusconi, now a sergeant major in command of his own platoon, saw action in the Suez Conflict and got shot in the left shoulder leading an assault on an entrenched Egyptian position, for which he received a medal. Afterwards he used his time mostly to get involved in the petroleum industry, gambling by spending his savings on Agip stocks, a gamble that paid off. By the time the 24 year-old Berlusconi retired from the army in 1960 with the rank of captain, commanding an infantry battalion, he had amassed a large amount of capital for someone his age.

After buying his way into the public service broadcaster RAI, owned by the Ministry of Communications, he became a propaganda-broadcasting TV/radio personality and moderately successful singer in the mid and late 1960s (recording three albums with a few top 40 hits on them). Using a combination of personal charm, competence and bribes he continued his meteoric rise and became Minister of Communications in 1972, a post he held until the end of the regime in 1980. In 1977 he also became Minister of Foreign Affairs since the aging Grandi was too tired to combine this function with the office of Prime Minister. Once considered promising, his political career was abruptly ended when the fascist regime was voted out of power in 1979 and finally handed over power in 1980 to the newly formed coalition. He used his personal wealth, his connections, his fame and his charm to climb up the ranks of the fascist party. He used his wealth to finance the PNF during its years in opposition and became its new face, replacing the gerontocracy of 60, 70 and 80 year-olds leading it until then.

In 1989, the now 53 year-old Berlusconi officially became the new party leader and his party continued the trend that had begun in the mid 1980s: increasing popularity. The latent popularity of fascism was demonstrated perfectly when broadcaster RAI organized a poll titled “the greatest Italian who has ever lived.” Benito Mussolini was voted the third greatest Italian who ever lived, behind Camillo Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi who held first and second place respectively. Capitalizing on this result, using propaganda Berlusconi kept reminding people of the golden years of fascism under Mussolini. In 1991 the PNF became the largest party in parliament and the young, inexperienced King appointed Berlusconi to the position of Prime Minister, ending 12 years in the opposition. He initiated wage and price controls to curb inflation; these policies weren’t very popular but they worked. Secondly, he used the IRI to help save and restructure ailing businesses and issued a stimulus package to the economy worth 120 billion dollars. Under his rule Italy entered a new period of economic growth in the 1990s, although it must be said that oil prices rose again in this period. Economists pointed this out, but it was ignored by the fascist propaganda machine and, with communism discredited, democratized Italian Fascism became the strongest alternative to neo-liberalism, which fascists considered “a socioeconomic and political disease.” Its dirigist economic policies gained traction in second and third world countries once again, while Western social-democratic parties adopted them too (though vehemently denied being inspired by fascism).

The 1990s saw 2-3% annual economic growth, which was high compared to the Western world (though nowhere near the heights of “Il Glorioso Venti”). Otherwise the decade remained uneventful. Then, on July 29th 2000, Mussolini’s birthday, Italy saw a terrorist attack on the subway in Rome with sarin nerve gas during the morning commute, killing hundreds of people. Berlusconi declared martial law and ruled by decree, reforming the OVRA to find the culprits by any means necessary. He also announced that Italy would retaliate to any use of weapons of mass destruction against it in kind. It legitimized fascist rule even further and it caused the people to accept stricter censorship laws and diminished privacy rights. Italy entered strong cooperation with the United States led by Clinton in his third term. America had also seen an attack for its continued support to Italy. The OVRA rapidly tracked down the suspects and took them to secret prisons on the islands of Ponza and Ventotene, which had been used as prisons for political opponents by Mussolini for decades. The OVRA interpreted “by any means necessary” as the right to use torture, which they did, and they learnt the radical Islamic Al-Qaeda group led by billionaire Osama Bin-Laden was behind it. He hated Italy for its continued rule over large numbers of Muslim Arabs and he despised American support for Israel.

An ultimatum was delivered to the government of Sudan that demanded: 1) the extradition of Osama Bin-Laden and known associates, 2) American and Italian inspections of military bases, training facilities and command facilities, 3) the closure of property owned by Al-Qaeda or Bin-Laden and 4) the arrest of all known members of this organization. The Sudanese government rejected these demands and instead proposed to bring Bin-Laden before a Sudanese court, a proposal rejected because in an Islamic country such a court would undoubtedly be biased in favour of the defendant.

US Navy ships appeared in the Red Sea and started pelting Sudan, the country which hosted Osama Bin-Laden, with cruise missiles while Italian guided missile battleships Littorio, Vittorio Veneto, Impero and Roma did the same, also using their 15 inch guns to pummel coastal defences and naval facilities. Italian tanks stationed in Eritrea spearheaded a land based offensive toward the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Another spearhead advanced along the coast to ensure Bin-Laden didn’t escape by sea to his home country of Saudi Arabia. The Regia Aeronautica and the US Air Force made sure that an escape by air was impossible by taking air superiority. Berlusconi helped in that regard by making true on his words that a WMD attack on Italy would see a response in kind. Controversially, he deployed a 5 kiloton tactical nuclear warhead against Wadi Seidna Air Base, 22 kilometres away from Khartoum and Sudan’s most important air force base. The Italo-American military victory and the arrest of President Omar al-Bashir, who was shipped to The Hague and sentenced to life in prison, boosted Berlusconi’s popularity. Osama Bin-Laden, who was caught on the run, let himself get killed in a gun fight rather than surrender, and afterwards his organization in Sudan crumbled as the OVRA started to operate there.

Other Muslim countries were subsequently terrified of getting into Italy’s hair, more so since Italy had proven willing to use tactical nuclear weapons. Among them was Tunisia which crushed groups sympathizing with the cause of Islamic extremism. Tunisia, which continued to harbour an Italian community of 125.000, had always been wary of its neighbour. They tiptoed around Italian interests in their country and in terms of foreign policy had Finlandized themselves because the last thing they wanted was to provoke an Italian invasion. Saudi Arabia responded similarly, fearing the Shah’s Iran, which had the fifth strongest army in the world, would team up with Italy to expand its influence in the Persian Gulf and Middle East at the Saudis’ expense.

The new “Duce’s” popularity reached its zenith in the early 2000s. After four consecutive terms in office, between 1991 and 2007, however, Berlusconi was caught in a major corruption and infidelity scandal that severely damaged the PNF and saw fascism return to the opposition. Subsequently, the question is to what degree fascism, momentarily in power again as a junior coalition party, will define the 21st century. Fascist imagery, sometimes as simple as streets and piazzas named after Mussolini, remain ubiquitous and hundreds of thousands of tourists and supporters flock to his mausoleum in Predappio every year. Though the fascist dictatorship ended in 1980, its influence stretched much further and the twentieth century was indeed the fascist century. Mussolini had changed an entire nation and his legacy continues to affect Italy and the world. Whether the 21st will also be a fascist century remains to be seen.