Stresa Unbroken - a Tale of an Allied Mussolini
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
Belgium is still by far the more sensible option, and even Hitler would be aware that he wouldn't be able to punch thru mountainous terrain fast enough to actually exploit a gap before French and Italian troops make their way to stem the flow.
The ease with which Germany managed to annex Austria leaves me uneasy as well given Mussolini viewed Austria as one of his main client states, and many of the decisions that ultimately allowed for the Coup were made because Mussolini was pressuring Austria to move closer to Germany, which he wouldn't be doing in this case; major figures involved in the Coup would have likely remained imprisoned and the local Nazis, while gaining popular support, may have remained disorganized. That would have largely left pressure from the Wehrmacht which of course is still formidable.
Now I can see Mussolini informing the Austrians that Italy is not willing to fight Germany without the support of France or the United Kingdom, resulting in something resembling what occurred historically, but I can't see Mussolini sitting idly by as the situation devolved; he'd still be wary of Hitler, and he'd still want some sort of buffer between Germany and Italy proper. In light of that I believe he would have moved to occupy strategic locations in Austria just beyond the border, possibly slightly more, trying to legitimize this as the remaining territory of the Federal State of Austria which had been unlawfully occupied by Germany. Hitler predictably would be furious but I doubt he would be willing to try and dislodge the Italians from those mountains compared to the thirty thousand man Austrian Army.
The Munich Crisis would inevitably be connected to this as Hitler, whilst demanding the Sudetenland, would inevitably bring up the situation in remainder of the "Federal Republic of Austria" as being related, asking that both areas be ceded to Germany. I'm not sure how Mussolini would react in regards to Austria given he would likely face strong pressure to hold some manner of referenda in the Austrian regions he occupied, but he would probably have pushed from the British and French to go back to their initial proposal of pressuring the Czechs to cede those areas which were about fifty percent German or more to Germany. The British and French would probably decide to agree with Hitler's OTL demands, with Mussolini leaving the Conference in disgust and taking Austria off the table as a bargaining chip.
From there, things would likely proceed as you have already outlined, at least in regards to the second post.
The ease with which Germany managed to annex Austria leaves me uneasy as well given Mussolini viewed Austria as one of his main client states, and many of the decisions that ultimately allowed for the Coup were made because Mussolini was pressuring Austria to move closer to Germany, which he wouldn't be doing in this case; major figures involved in the Coup would have likely remained imprisoned and the local Nazis, while gaining popular support, may have remained disorganized. That would have largely left pressure from the Wehrmacht which of course is still formidable.
Now I can see Mussolini informing the Austrians that Italy is not willing to fight Germany without the support of France or the United Kingdom, resulting in something resembling what occurred historically, but I can't see Mussolini sitting idly by as the situation devolved; he'd still be wary of Hitler, and he'd still want some sort of buffer between Germany and Italy proper. In light of that I believe he would have moved to occupy strategic locations in Austria just beyond the border, possibly slightly more, trying to legitimize this as the remaining territory of the Federal State of Austria which had been unlawfully occupied by Germany. Hitler predictably would be furious but I doubt he would be willing to try and dislodge the Italians from those mountains compared to the thirty thousand man Austrian Army.
The Munich Crisis would inevitably be connected to this as Hitler, whilst demanding the Sudetenland, would inevitably bring up the situation in remainder of the "Federal Republic of Austria" as being related, asking that both areas be ceded to Germany. I'm not sure how Mussolini would react in regards to Austria given he would likely face strong pressure to hold some manner of referenda in the Austrian regions he occupied, but he would probably have pushed from the British and French to go back to their initial proposal of pressuring the Czechs to cede those areas which were about fifty percent German or more to Germany. The British and French would probably decide to agree with Hitler's OTL demands, with Mussolini leaving the Conference in disgust and taking Austria off the table as a bargaining chip.
From there, things would likely proceed as you have already outlined, at least in regards to the second post.
Of course. I meant that if (due to the diversion of an Alpine front) the drive into France is not totally successful the Germans might try an incredibly stupid attack into Switzerland. Or they might not.
The Germans are already going to be fighting in the West along a very long front, with Switzerland being their small part of breathing space, once they begin their invasion of the Benelux. I'm not sure if they would even have the men capable of adding to that frontage once you factor in the need to fight on the Alpine Front in Austria and additional French troops redeployed from the Italian border.
Alcsentre Calanice
Gone Fishin'
Can you pls outline the story of the book? And the things that could be "ASB"? I'm very interested
Can you pls outline the story of the book? And the things that could be "ASB"? I'm very interested
L'inattesa piega degli eventi it's the first book and it's in the 60's and la nostra guerra it's the prequel and tell the story of the war.
Basically Italy remain neutral till the 42 when Germany invade due to the deteriorating relationships with Italy and the work of House Savoy that want Mussolini out; btw the invasion it's helped by Vichy French.
In the end the allies won (and the war more or less goes as OTL
) and Italy not only took the place of France in the overall strategic totem but even took over a lot (if not all) the French Empire as mandate...plus the territorial gain showed in the map.Italy become a republic (with Corsica, Malta
and Albania as associated republic) lead by Mussolini and create a loose alliance of fascist/non-aligned nation (among them Israel and Egypt).Ok while the overall historical and political world building it's totally ASB the description of the italian society, her provincialism, the little pettyness of the big names or even of the protagonist, the subtle decadence of the 'Empire' or the coming of age of the protagonist in La nostra guerra are top notch and are totally worth the price
I hope you all like the new update .
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 Halder 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, but they nonetheless inflicted serious casualties and the Germans didn't complete their conquest of France until early August, partially also because Italy sent some reinforcements. German armour outflanked the Maginot Line and pushed deep into France with German forces arriving in an undefended Paris on June 14th 1940.
Despite the fall of Paris, the French government decided not to surrender and the remnants of the French Army chaotically withdrew to the French Alps and the Massif Central. A rapid and successful German advance into southern France, as well as complete German air superiority, crushed any hope of maintaining a national redoubt in the southeast. Prime Minister Reynaud ordered the evacuation of the armed forces and the government to French North Africa. The French Navy, with the assistance of the Regia Marina and the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet, managed to evacuate roughly 200.000 French soldiers or twenty divisions through Marseille, Toulon and Nice. Unfortunately, they had to leave most of their equipment behind. Algiers was established as the provisional capital of France on August 7th 1940.
The question one could ask was what Italy had been doing all that time, 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 he 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. 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 Regia Aeronautica and the Regia Marina had made a contribution, and in the latter case a significant one in their assistance of the French evacuation, but the Regio Esercito had done little. 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. 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.
Nonetheless, Mussolini knew better than to attempt an invasion of Germany and instead played it safe by keeping his army behind his Alpine shield. That was a decision that has been heavily criticized by military historians because any major Italian offensive would have diverted forces away from the Battle of France, potentially allowing France to recover and regroup (Mussolini, however, didn’t have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight and neither could he have anticipated that France would perform so poorly). Due to the Italians’ defensive stance, the period from March to July 1940 had only seen a few skirmishes.
The Fall of France in July 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 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. 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). German infantry, with tanks being next to useless in Alpine terrain, broke through the first zone of the Alpine Wall. This fitted with Italian planning, since 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 while 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. 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 without justification dismissed the Italians as dead weight, 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, holding back the Germans for five weeks from mid July to early September as they attempted to break the Alpine Wall. 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 be fold quickly, and Hitler was frustrated when that didn’t happen. The Germans had trouble with the second zone and 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 Algiers Conference. As if they had other options, they agreed that Italy would form the cornerstone of the Allied war effort.
.Chapter III: The Battle of France and Fortress Italy, April-September 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 Halder 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, but they nonetheless inflicted serious casualties and the Germans didn't complete their conquest of France until early August, partially also because Italy sent some reinforcements. German armour outflanked the Maginot Line and pushed deep into France with German forces arriving in an undefended Paris on June 14th 1940.
Despite the fall of Paris, the French government decided not to surrender and the remnants of the French Army chaotically withdrew to the French Alps and the Massif Central. A rapid and successful German advance into southern France, as well as complete German air superiority, crushed any hope of maintaining a national redoubt in the southeast. Prime Minister Reynaud ordered the evacuation of the armed forces and the government to French North Africa. The French Navy, with the assistance of the Regia Marina and the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet, managed to evacuate roughly 200.000 French soldiers or twenty divisions through Marseille, Toulon and Nice. Unfortunately, they had to leave most of their equipment behind. Algiers was established as the provisional capital of France on August 7th 1940.
The question one could ask was what Italy had been doing all that time, 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 he 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. 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 Regia Aeronautica and the Regia Marina had made a contribution, and in the latter case a significant one in their assistance of the French evacuation, but the Regio Esercito had done little. 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. 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.
Nonetheless, Mussolini knew better than to attempt an invasion of Germany and instead played it safe by keeping his army behind his Alpine shield. That was a decision that has been heavily criticized by military historians because any major Italian offensive would have diverted forces away from the Battle of France, potentially allowing France to recover and regroup (Mussolini, however, didn’t have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight and neither could he have anticipated that France would perform so poorly). Due to the Italians’ defensive stance, the period from March to July 1940 had only seen a few skirmishes.
The Fall of France in July 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 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. 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). German infantry, with tanks being next to useless in Alpine terrain, broke through the first zone of the Alpine Wall. This fitted with Italian planning, since 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 while 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. 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 without justification dismissed the Italians as dead weight, 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, holding back the Germans for five weeks from mid July to early September as they attempted to break the Alpine Wall. 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 be fold quickly, and Hitler was frustrated when that didn’t happen. The Germans had trouble with the second zone and 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 Algiers Conference. As if they had other options, they agreed that Italy would form the cornerstone of the Allied war effort.
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Why would Free France not set up shop in Corsica? Provided most of their navy escapes they should be able to hold it.
I doubt it. France is the bigger threat, but it doesn't have to be one or the other. The Germans could attack both.
Algiers is safer. Corsica is within Luftwaffe range. In the meantime, the remainder of the French Army is regrouping in North Africa. Algiers therefore seemed like a safer choice to me, especially since France is on its arse.
Apart from the bit about the Italian passenger liner, I will write my timeline separately from yours. I can't preclude similarities though, given the subject.
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Well now this is neat...
Stalin might still be alarmed by how rapidly France fell but I imagine he would be suitably satisfied with a substitute meat-grinder in northern Italy. Looks like no Barbarossa... at least no in 1941. I imagine that the British would be initially reluctant to deploy an expeditionary force because of how they (justifiably) view the Italians, but an initial defensive success will likely change their minds on that count rather rapidly. This will also have some interesting knock-on effects in the Balkans and offer interesting political opportunities, and risks, to pretty much all the major players: the Italians, the Germans, the British, and the Soviets.
Stalin might still be alarmed by how rapidly France fell but I imagine he would be suitably satisfied with a substitute meat-grinder in northern Italy. Looks like no Barbarossa... at least no in 1941. I imagine that the British would be initially reluctant to deploy an expeditionary force because of how they (justifiably) view the Italians, but an initial defensive success will likely change their minds on that count rather rapidly. This will also have some interesting knock-on effects in the Balkans and offer interesting political opportunities, and risks, to pretty much all the major players: the Italians, the Germans, the British, and the Soviets.
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I share the same doubts. It looks to me that the ATL revival of the Stresa Pact had some (beneficial) effects for Italy but did not produce any change on the way Hitler approached the war much less on the reaction of France and UK to the more and more aggressive German moves. Even more surprising is that there are scant or no information on the period between the ATL Stresa pact and the war in the west.
Leaving aside my comment above, I cannot believe that France is going to fold exactly in the same way as they did in OTL. As a minimum, a chunk of the Luftwaffe would have to be left to protect Austria and southern Germany (and this would change the situation in France too, where there should be a presence of the Italian air force: It would be particularly stupid even for Musso to pull Hitler's moustache with the bombing of German cities but not to send a few wings of airplanes to France). Are we to believe that the German blitzkrieg works as well as it did IOTL (even better I would say, since France does not surrender and the Germans magically manage to occupy all of it)?
Subscribed but I have a nitpick. Why the French soldiers evacuate in North Africa? They could have relocate more easily towards Italy, which surely will have appreciated the additional divisions at disposal to defend the North.
Plus I guess Hitler will push for total occupation of France already to move German troops on the Western Alps, so no Vichy regime as well?
Plus I guess Hitler will push for total occupation of France already to move German troops on the Western Alps, so no Vichy regime as well?
Well, to nitpick, France didn't get defeated in exactly the same way. They lasted two weeks longer than IOTL. As far as Luftwaffe reinforcements to Austria are concerned, I didn't figure they'd make a significant difference to the outcome of the Battle of France. Neither did I believe that whatever token forces Musso might send to France would matter much. In fact, given the inadequacies of the Italian armed forces, I suspected that Mussolini would stay on the defence. That's what I'd do if I knew I had a piss poor army.
Well, I thought the French would have to regroup, re-equip and reorganize in Algeria before going to fight in Italy. As far as France goes, there indeed is no Vichy regime and Pétain's WW I reputation is never tainted by his record as a collaborator.
Sure the italian army was not very good (but between a shorter war on Ethiopia with no occupation and pacification, probably a lesser involvement in the Spanish Civil war and no saction...there are a lot more money for the upgrade of the army equipment than OTL), the problem it's not the Italian army but the Germans, the invasion of France was an enormous gambit for Hitler, he basically throw at the Wallies, everthing.
The need to guard her south flank even with token force (for the army) and to have to put Luftwaffe units (plus AA assets) to defend/retaliate against Italy mean throwing a big span on Hitler work and the Italian air force will be much more aggressive than the France one.
Frankly, due to the general situation, even in case of the Fall of France both BEF and French army will be in a position strong enough todo a more organizated retreat, keeping a great part of their equipment (France can simply send them in Italy)
In general i agree with LordKalvan, an Italy still on the Stresa Front mean that Adolf it's stopped earlier, Anshluss and Rhineland can happen as OTL (more or less) but the Sudeten crisis will be the hotpoint that will start the war.
Well then, I hope you like how the next updates go. France will still fight, and Italy will give the Germans a better fight than they'd bargained for.
From late June to late July 1940, using Lend-Lease aid from the United States, the British managed to re-equip 75.000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force out of the more than 198.000 that had been evacuated from Dunkirk. An RAF air component of some 300 aircraft was also deployed to Italy. With Lend-Lease aid to France and Britain handing some of its share to France, the French managed to return one fifth of their evacuated combat units to frontline duty in time for the Battle of Italy (roughly 40.000 men or four divisions). With France occupied, French pride had taken a dent and therefore Reynaud agreed to an “Allied Expeditionary Force” to Italy under British command. This force of 115.000 men would be commanded by Archibald Wavell, who replaced the defeated General Harold Alexander.
In the meantime, while Italy’s geography certainly lent itself for a defensive war, it did nothing 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 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 sixty obsolete French machines didn’t do much to amend this major strategic disadvantage. In fact, superior German aircraft production had only widened the gap between the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica.
Starting in July 1940, the Luftwaffe attacked airfields, airstrips and aircraft factories across northern Italy to eliminate the infrastructure its opponent needed to fight back. They also hoped to catch the Italian air force off-guard, but with British help they had been able to set up some radar stations and only a small number of planes were destroyed on the ground. 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 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). Though Italian aces downed their fair share of planes, over-all the Luftwaffe’s superiority in equipment, numbers and combat experience forced the Regia Aeronautica to withdraw southward. Suffering severe losses, it nonetheless continued to contest German air superiority, which subsequently was never as great as that of the Battle of France. After that, the Luftwaffe concentrated on bombing roads, railroads, rail yards, factories and major ports (with limited success) while Stukas provided tactical support.
Before the main attack there were feints against the Brenner Pass, where Badoglio concentrated many forces and fought a successful defence, besides sabotaging railroads, mining roads and blowing up viaducts. On September 17th, the Alpine Wall was finally broken and General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, or “ghost division”, brazenly thundered across the border from Lienz, headed for Belluno right across the border, the objective being to break out into the Venetian Plain. From there, defying orders to consolidate his position, Rommel rapidly advanced further and his tanks rolled into the centre of Venice (German: Bozen) two days later. The Regio Esercito tried to counterattack against the rather exposed German flanks, but Stuka dive bombers stopped them dead in their tracks and inflicted heavy losses.
To avoid being outflanked, Italian troops had to abandon the Alpine Wall en masse and the Luftwaffe had a devastating effect on their fighting retreat, destroying defenceless columns with ease. Mussolini wanted to conduct a serious defence of the largely indefensible and flat Po Valley, which cost him a lot of troops. After Germany broke through the Alps in early September, there were no more serious natural defences before the Po River and by September 29th the Italian army had completely withdrawn behind it. Everything to the north of the river, including major cities like Milan, Venice and Turin, was now under German occupation, less than two weeks after they had broken through the Alpine Wall.
Italian army engineers were specifically ordered by Mussolini to destroy all bridges across the river Po, and they were largely successful. Nonetheless, the Germans managed to capture some intact bridges and, under air cover, they rebuilt many bridges as well as building many pontoon bridges with lightning speed. Italian sabotage efforts nonetheless slowed the Germans down and brought precious time. After tough fighting and constant air attack, seriously depleting Luftwaffe resources, the Germans had established firm beachheads on the right bank by October 9th, with Allied attempts to crush them being blunted by the Luftwaffe. In five days, the Wehrmacht added Piacenza, Parma, Genua, Modena and Bologna to the list of Italian cities under German occupation. To the west, the Italians initially fought a stubborn defence in the Ligurian Apennines, but to the east in Emilia and Romagna they crumbled much more easily, losing Rimini and the nearby Marecchia River Valley. Notably, however, Mussolini’s birth town of Predappio and nearby Forli, where Mussolini had lived during his younger years, were heavily defended and cost the Germans serious effort and casualties to break (despite the Germans’ good behaviour, they were treated to the cold shoulder in Forli and Predappio, even more so than in the rest of the country). The Ariete armoured division even undertook a brave but ultimately futile and costly counterattack to retake Predappio. With control of the Marecchia valley, Allied forces in Liguria and northern Tuscany were under threat of being attacked in their rear and had to retreat to the Arno River. By October 19th the Germans had established a line from La Spezia to Rimini.
The Battle of La Spezia (23-26 October) was the occasion that the Regia Marina fired its first shots in anger against the enemy (La Spezia being a naval base, which now had to be abandoned). Battleships Littorio, Vittorio Veneto, and Caio Duilio laid down suppressive fire with a combined eighteen 38 cm (15 inch) and ten 320 mm (12.6 inch) guns that held back the Germans for several hours until the ships had nearly depleted their ammunition supplies. After that they withdrew to Naples while the incomplete hulks of Roma and Impero, the sister ships of Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, were abandoned. The Germans briefly considered completing them, but ultimately decided against it. They then considered scrapping the ships and using the steel to build tanks and aircraft, but Admiral Raeder had already set his sights on them and prevented it. By way of a compromise, the Germans used them as storage space and made plans to complete them after the war and use them as the core of a future “Mediterranean Squadron” to be stationed at Fiume.
For his failure to stop the inexorable German advance Chief of the Italian Supreme Command (Comando Supremo) Pietro Badoglio was sacked and Mussolini replaced him with Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had been successful during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Graziani, unfortunately, wasn’t a miracle worker and he would therefore prove unable to turn the tide for the battered Italian army, which by late October had already suffered a third of a million dead, wounded and missing. The Regio Esercito was largely a spent force.
The Germans resumed their offensive on October 7th as Hitler wanted to end the Italian Campaign before winter. At the Po, Badoglio had opted for a defensive line further away from the river to keep his forces from being picked off by the Luftwaffe. Given the failure of this stratagem, Graziani opted to build defences that “hugged” the left bank of the river Arno. The Luftwaffe bombed Italian trenches, but Italian troops withdrew into the underground chambers that they had built with remarkable speed. After the aerial offensive, German troops started to cross the river and they encountered withering fire from Italian, British and French machine guns and light artillery. The Germans suffered serious losses, but superiority in equipment and air supremacy turned an Italian tactical success into a German strategic victory in the end.
Though the defenders inflicted serious losses, they ultimately couldn’t prevent the Germans from establishing a foothold on the river’s southern bank. By October 28th, the Germans had crossed the river and were fanning out into Tuscany, with the region’s somewhat hilly farmlands turning out to be suitable enough for blitzkrieg, increasing the fame of the highly successful General Erwin Rommel. A few days later Hitler and his confidants, including Goebbels, Goering, Speer and Himmler, visited Florence to pick the paintings and other works of art they wanted for their personal collections. In the meantime, while most of Florence was given up without a fight, the Ponte Vecchio was heavily contested and took over 36 hours to take.
In the meantime, Italian Jews that hadn’t fled ahead of the German advance became second-rate citizens after Hitler had made them the scapegoat for his own inability to make an ally out of Mussolini: Hitled stated “Jewish capital has infected the Italian state like a fungus and has taken the Duce hostage. I wish he had listened to my warnings concerning the Jew, who is no more a friend of the Italians than he is of the Germans. There’s no such thing as Jewish fascists.” Italian Jewish art owners were effectively robbed of their art collections, with the Gestapo confiscating them and offering the token compensation of ten German pfennig for every piece, i.e. one German Mark for ten pieces. Almost immediately discriminatory regulations went into effect that forced Jews to wear the Star of David, fired Italian Jewish civil servants, forced Italian Jewish children to attend separate Jewish schools, and which banned Jews from a range of public venues (such as city parks, cinemas, swimming pools, theatres, football stadiums and upper class restaurants and hotels).
The Germans had also captured Achille Starace, who had been fired from his position as Secretary of the “Partito Nazionale Fascista” during the Anschluss: at the time, Mussolini had hoped that by firing his openly anti-Semitic and anti-French party secretary he would gain French support to oppose the German annexation of Austria. Achille Starace had been sidetracked by Mussolini to the position of mayor of Milan, and Starace’s embitterment about this treatment by a leader he had fanatically followed drove him into the hands of the Germans. Starace formed the “Repubblica d’Italia” and the “Partito Nazionalsocialista d’Italia” or PNSI, a puppet state and a puppet party respectively (this government would only be officially recognized by Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Japan). To his annoyance, however, the Germans forced him to accept the position of “interim Prime Minister.” Hitler was still under the illusion that he could get Mussolini to see things his ways once he got his hands on him.
With the war reaching Italy proper, his own mother country, and with examples of Nazi violence and racism almost on his doorstep, Pope Pius XII (born Eugenio Pacelli) and the Vatican explicitly condemned Nazi German treatment of the Jews. Pius XII did so in an encyclical that he had previously dissuaded his predecessor Pius XI from issuing in the wake of the November 1938 Kristallnacht, which he combined with elements of the unpublished Humani generis unitas encyclical. The draft encyclical Humani generis unitas (“On the Unity of the Human Race”) had been ready in September 1938 but hadn’t been forwarded to the Holy See. The draft had contained an open and clear condemnation of colonialism, racial persecution and anti-Semitism. The condemnation of colonialism was almost completely omitted since all three major Allied powers (Great Britain, Italy and France) were major colonial powers, but the disapproval of racial persecution and anti-Semitism was included into Pius XII’s modified version of the 1938 encyclical. The German ambassador to the Holy See protested, but Germany took no further action: even after Rome had been taken, Hitler didn’t make a move on Vatican City because he feared the response of the tens of million of Catholics under German occupation in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Italy, and especially of German Catholics. Plans to invade the Vatican and kidnap the Pope were shelved indefinitely. Vatican City subsequently provided refuge for almost 3.000 Italian Jews while its extraterritorial properties provided shelter for another 2.000 (most notably the Papal palace of San Gandolfo, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the Basilica of Saint John Outside the Walls, and the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore). Pius XII used the Vatican’s considerable financial resources to keep them fed for the duration of the German occupation of Italy. Additionally, the Catholic clergy in Italy saved another 10.000 Jews by hiding them away in monasteries and the cellars of churches and cathedrals across the country.
In the meantime, the Wehrmacht’s Panzers blitzed through Tuscany and advanced from Pisa to Grosseto, some 120 km away, in six days between October 27th and November 1st. Once again the Regia Marina intervened and denied the Germans the use of the coastal roads through suppressive fire, until the Luftwaffe heavily damaged heavy cruiser Bolzano and drove the Italian navy off (Bolzano herself was put out of commission for weeks). Rome was now less than 150 km away and the Germans prepared for the final thrust on the capital of Italy. In the meantime, the Allies noticed that the German advance on Rome had exposed their left flank, but their offensive to take advantage of that failed due to German air superiority. The German advance on Rome started on November 6th.
The fall of Rome seemed less than a week away and therefore King Victor Emmanuel III, the royal family, the cabinet and the Grand Council of Fascism were evacuated to Naples. Mussolini and his most important military officers chose to stay and continue to coordinate military operations, partially due to ego reasons: the Duce didn’t want to be seen as a coward. Il Duce eventually left Rome on November 8th, only one day before the Germans entered it, and declared it an open city to prevent its cultural treasures from being destroyed. Nevertheless, several MVSN or “Black Shirt” militia units and some fanatical members of the Opera Nazionale Balilla youth organization held several government buildings in Rome. Notably, despite being vastly outnumbered, a company of militia units held out in the Palazzo Venezia against an entire regiment of German infantry for almost three days. Mussolini’s office in the “Sala del Mappamondo” was defended for six hours against hopeless odds, leaving the building heavily damaged. A few police and gendarmerie units also fought back. All-in-all, it took until November 10th to secure the entire city. Hitler and his brass visited the city and, like in Florence, selected the pieces of art they wanted for their private collections. The Wehrmacht paraded through Rome as it has paraded through Paris and the capture of Rome was a major propaganda victory, but not a strategic one. Moreover, the two months of heavy fighting in Italy had seriously sapped the strength of the Wehrmacht, giving the Allies a breather that would allow them to prepare a serious defence. The Battle of Italy wasn’t over yet.
Chapter IV: March on Rome, September-November 1940.
In the meantime, while Italy’s geography certainly lent itself for a defensive war, it did nothing 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 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 sixty obsolete French machines didn’t do much to amend this major strategic disadvantage. In fact, superior German aircraft production had only widened the gap between the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica.
Starting in July 1940, the Luftwaffe attacked airfields, airstrips and aircraft factories across northern Italy to eliminate the infrastructure its opponent needed to fight back. They also hoped to catch the Italian air force off-guard, but with British help they had been able to set up some radar stations and only a small number of planes were destroyed on the ground. 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 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). Though Italian aces downed their fair share of planes, over-all the Luftwaffe’s superiority in equipment, numbers and combat experience forced the Regia Aeronautica to withdraw southward. Suffering severe losses, it nonetheless continued to contest German air superiority, which subsequently was never as great as that of the Battle of France. After that, the Luftwaffe concentrated on bombing roads, railroads, rail yards, factories and major ports (with limited success) while Stukas provided tactical support.
Before the main attack there were feints against the Brenner Pass, where Badoglio concentrated many forces and fought a successful defence, besides sabotaging railroads, mining roads and blowing up viaducts. On September 17th, the Alpine Wall was finally broken and General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, or “ghost division”, brazenly thundered across the border from Lienz, headed for Belluno right across the border, the objective being to break out into the Venetian Plain. From there, defying orders to consolidate his position, Rommel rapidly advanced further and his tanks rolled into the centre of Venice (German: Bozen) two days later. The Regio Esercito tried to counterattack against the rather exposed German flanks, but Stuka dive bombers stopped them dead in their tracks and inflicted heavy losses.
To avoid being outflanked, Italian troops had to abandon the Alpine Wall en masse and the Luftwaffe had a devastating effect on their fighting retreat, destroying defenceless columns with ease. Mussolini wanted to conduct a serious defence of the largely indefensible and flat Po Valley, which cost him a lot of troops. After Germany broke through the Alps in early September, there were no more serious natural defences before the Po River and by September 29th the Italian army had completely withdrawn behind it. Everything to the north of the river, including major cities like Milan, Venice and Turin, was now under German occupation, less than two weeks after they had broken through the Alpine Wall.
Italian army engineers were specifically ordered by Mussolini to destroy all bridges across the river Po, and they were largely successful. Nonetheless, the Germans managed to capture some intact bridges and, under air cover, they rebuilt many bridges as well as building many pontoon bridges with lightning speed. Italian sabotage efforts nonetheless slowed the Germans down and brought precious time. After tough fighting and constant air attack, seriously depleting Luftwaffe resources, the Germans had established firm beachheads on the right bank by October 9th, with Allied attempts to crush them being blunted by the Luftwaffe. In five days, the Wehrmacht added Piacenza, Parma, Genua, Modena and Bologna to the list of Italian cities under German occupation. To the west, the Italians initially fought a stubborn defence in the Ligurian Apennines, but to the east in Emilia and Romagna they crumbled much more easily, losing Rimini and the nearby Marecchia River Valley. Notably, however, Mussolini’s birth town of Predappio and nearby Forli, where Mussolini had lived during his younger years, were heavily defended and cost the Germans serious effort and casualties to break (despite the Germans’ good behaviour, they were treated to the cold shoulder in Forli and Predappio, even more so than in the rest of the country). The Ariete armoured division even undertook a brave but ultimately futile and costly counterattack to retake Predappio. With control of the Marecchia valley, Allied forces in Liguria and northern Tuscany were under threat of being attacked in their rear and had to retreat to the Arno River. By October 19th the Germans had established a line from La Spezia to Rimini.
The Battle of La Spezia (23-26 October) was the occasion that the Regia Marina fired its first shots in anger against the enemy (La Spezia being a naval base, which now had to be abandoned). Battleships Littorio, Vittorio Veneto, and Caio Duilio laid down suppressive fire with a combined eighteen 38 cm (15 inch) and ten 320 mm (12.6 inch) guns that held back the Germans for several hours until the ships had nearly depleted their ammunition supplies. After that they withdrew to Naples while the incomplete hulks of Roma and Impero, the sister ships of Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, were abandoned. The Germans briefly considered completing them, but ultimately decided against it. They then considered scrapping the ships and using the steel to build tanks and aircraft, but Admiral Raeder had already set his sights on them and prevented it. By way of a compromise, the Germans used them as storage space and made plans to complete them after the war and use them as the core of a future “Mediterranean Squadron” to be stationed at Fiume.
For his failure to stop the inexorable German advance Chief of the Italian Supreme Command (Comando Supremo) Pietro Badoglio was sacked and Mussolini replaced him with Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had been successful during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Graziani, unfortunately, wasn’t a miracle worker and he would therefore prove unable to turn the tide for the battered Italian army, which by late October had already suffered a third of a million dead, wounded and missing. The Regio Esercito was largely a spent force.
The Germans resumed their offensive on October 7th as Hitler wanted to end the Italian Campaign before winter. At the Po, Badoglio had opted for a defensive line further away from the river to keep his forces from being picked off by the Luftwaffe. Given the failure of this stratagem, Graziani opted to build defences that “hugged” the left bank of the river Arno. The Luftwaffe bombed Italian trenches, but Italian troops withdrew into the underground chambers that they had built with remarkable speed. After the aerial offensive, German troops started to cross the river and they encountered withering fire from Italian, British and French machine guns and light artillery. The Germans suffered serious losses, but superiority in equipment and air supremacy turned an Italian tactical success into a German strategic victory in the end.
Though the defenders inflicted serious losses, they ultimately couldn’t prevent the Germans from establishing a foothold on the river’s southern bank. By October 28th, the Germans had crossed the river and were fanning out into Tuscany, with the region’s somewhat hilly farmlands turning out to be suitable enough for blitzkrieg, increasing the fame of the highly successful General Erwin Rommel. A few days later Hitler and his confidants, including Goebbels, Goering, Speer and Himmler, visited Florence to pick the paintings and other works of art they wanted for their personal collections. In the meantime, while most of Florence was given up without a fight, the Ponte Vecchio was heavily contested and took over 36 hours to take.
In the meantime, Italian Jews that hadn’t fled ahead of the German advance became second-rate citizens after Hitler had made them the scapegoat for his own inability to make an ally out of Mussolini: Hitled stated “Jewish capital has infected the Italian state like a fungus and has taken the Duce hostage. I wish he had listened to my warnings concerning the Jew, who is no more a friend of the Italians than he is of the Germans. There’s no such thing as Jewish fascists.” Italian Jewish art owners were effectively robbed of their art collections, with the Gestapo confiscating them and offering the token compensation of ten German pfennig for every piece, i.e. one German Mark for ten pieces. Almost immediately discriminatory regulations went into effect that forced Jews to wear the Star of David, fired Italian Jewish civil servants, forced Italian Jewish children to attend separate Jewish schools, and which banned Jews from a range of public venues (such as city parks, cinemas, swimming pools, theatres, football stadiums and upper class restaurants and hotels).
The Germans had also captured Achille Starace, who had been fired from his position as Secretary of the “Partito Nazionale Fascista” during the Anschluss: at the time, Mussolini had hoped that by firing his openly anti-Semitic and anti-French party secretary he would gain French support to oppose the German annexation of Austria. Achille Starace had been sidetracked by Mussolini to the position of mayor of Milan, and Starace’s embitterment about this treatment by a leader he had fanatically followed drove him into the hands of the Germans. Starace formed the “Repubblica d’Italia” and the “Partito Nazionalsocialista d’Italia” or PNSI, a puppet state and a puppet party respectively (this government would only be officially recognized by Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Japan). To his annoyance, however, the Germans forced him to accept the position of “interim Prime Minister.” Hitler was still under the illusion that he could get Mussolini to see things his ways once he got his hands on him.
With the war reaching Italy proper, his own mother country, and with examples of Nazi violence and racism almost on his doorstep, Pope Pius XII (born Eugenio Pacelli) and the Vatican explicitly condemned Nazi German treatment of the Jews. Pius XII did so in an encyclical that he had previously dissuaded his predecessor Pius XI from issuing in the wake of the November 1938 Kristallnacht, which he combined with elements of the unpublished Humani generis unitas encyclical. The draft encyclical Humani generis unitas (“On the Unity of the Human Race”) had been ready in September 1938 but hadn’t been forwarded to the Holy See. The draft had contained an open and clear condemnation of colonialism, racial persecution and anti-Semitism. The condemnation of colonialism was almost completely omitted since all three major Allied powers (Great Britain, Italy and France) were major colonial powers, but the disapproval of racial persecution and anti-Semitism was included into Pius XII’s modified version of the 1938 encyclical. The German ambassador to the Holy See protested, but Germany took no further action: even after Rome had been taken, Hitler didn’t make a move on Vatican City because he feared the response of the tens of million of Catholics under German occupation in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Italy, and especially of German Catholics. Plans to invade the Vatican and kidnap the Pope were shelved indefinitely. Vatican City subsequently provided refuge for almost 3.000 Italian Jews while its extraterritorial properties provided shelter for another 2.000 (most notably the Papal palace of San Gandolfo, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the Basilica of Saint John Outside the Walls, and the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore). Pius XII used the Vatican’s considerable financial resources to keep them fed for the duration of the German occupation of Italy. Additionally, the Catholic clergy in Italy saved another 10.000 Jews by hiding them away in monasteries and the cellars of churches and cathedrals across the country.
In the meantime, the Wehrmacht’s Panzers blitzed through Tuscany and advanced from Pisa to Grosseto, some 120 km away, in six days between October 27th and November 1st. Once again the Regia Marina intervened and denied the Germans the use of the coastal roads through suppressive fire, until the Luftwaffe heavily damaged heavy cruiser Bolzano and drove the Italian navy off (Bolzano herself was put out of commission for weeks). Rome was now less than 150 km away and the Germans prepared for the final thrust on the capital of Italy. In the meantime, the Allies noticed that the German advance on Rome had exposed their left flank, but their offensive to take advantage of that failed due to German air superiority. The German advance on Rome started on November 6th.
The fall of Rome seemed less than a week away and therefore King Victor Emmanuel III, the royal family, the cabinet and the Grand Council of Fascism were evacuated to Naples. Mussolini and his most important military officers chose to stay and continue to coordinate military operations, partially due to ego reasons: the Duce didn’t want to be seen as a coward. Il Duce eventually left Rome on November 8th, only one day before the Germans entered it, and declared it an open city to prevent its cultural treasures from being destroyed. Nevertheless, several MVSN or “Black Shirt” militia units and some fanatical members of the Opera Nazionale Balilla youth organization held several government buildings in Rome. Notably, despite being vastly outnumbered, a company of militia units held out in the Palazzo Venezia against an entire regiment of German infantry for almost three days. Mussolini’s office in the “Sala del Mappamondo” was defended for six hours against hopeless odds, leaving the building heavily damaged. A few police and gendarmerie units also fought back. All-in-all, it took until November 10th to secure the entire city. Hitler and his brass visited the city and, like in Florence, selected the pieces of art they wanted for their private collections. The Wehrmacht paraded through Rome as it has paraded through Paris and the capture of Rome was a major propaganda victory, but not a strategic one. Moreover, the two months of heavy fighting in Italy had seriously sapped the strength of the Wehrmacht, giving the Allies a breather that would allow them to prepare a serious defence. The Battle of Italy wasn’t over yet.
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