What if Mussolini had decided not to side with Germany or join in WWII in general?
The answer to that depends on
at what point Mussolini chose to take a different path; certainly there were numerous points where events could have diverged significantly.
Despite the superficial resemblance, Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism were
not natural allies, in fact, ideologically they were just the opposite; Hitler’s
Mein Kampf, in addition to being fervently anti-Semitic and anti-Communist, was also
anti-Italian. Hitler was, after all, an Austrian-German; when in
Mein Kampf Hitler wrote of recovering lost German territories, the only territory he actually specified
by name is the South Tyrol, lost by Austria to Italy at the end of the First World War. (The so-called Polish or Pomeranian Corridor, granted to Poland in the Treaty of Versailles to give them access to the sea, is
not mentioned, nor is the Sudetenland.) Because of this Mussolini, while harbouring irredentist ambitions in the Mediterranean and East Africa, was very firmly on the side of the status quo when it came to Europe.
Essential to that status quo was an independent and neutral Austria. The fascist Patriotic Front regime of Engelbert Dollfuss took its cue from Italian politics and saw Mussolini as its patron and guarantor of Austrian security. Opposed to the Patriotic Front were Austria’s National Socialists, financed by Hitler and dedicated to an Anschluss with Germany.
When Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time in June 1934, things didn’t go particularly well; Mussolini had been unimpressed by Hitler and, despite being fluent in German, he had struggled to understand Hitler’s course rural Austrian accent. And what he had understood had bored him. One thing that had come out of the meeting was a firm guarantee from Hitler that he would leave Austria alone. This was a lie.
In July 1934, after attempting for several months to destabilise the country with a terrorist campaign, Hitler attempted a coup. On the 25th of July, members of the
SS Standarte 89 stormed the Austrian Chancellery and assassinated Dollfuss, they also seized control of a radio station and announced that the government had resigned and they were now in control; Hitler’s Austrian Legion, an SS formation made up of Austrian Nazis, waited on the Bavarian border for the order to invade Austria. In Berlin, Goebbels triumphantly announced the fall of the Patriotic Front regime and the inevitable entry of Austria into the Reich.
While the British and French looked on passively, Mussolini reacted decisively, dispatching 4 divisions of the Italian Army to the Brenner Pass with orders to invade if the Germans entered Austria. Czechoslovakia also mobilised forces on their border with Austria and, in response to Italy’s troop movements, the Yugoslavian army did the same on their border with Austria, with orders to cross and secure the border regions if Italian forces moved through the Brenner Pass; war in Central Europe was in the offing, all it needed was a spark to set it off.
Coups succeed or fail in their first few hours, and the slightest hesitation is likely to doom them. It is therefore strange that the Austrian Legion wasn’t committed simultaneously with
Standarte 89’s seizing of the Chancellery; that would have given the putsch the manpower essential for it to succeed. Instead, the legion was left idol while Hitler waited for word of success in Vienna. That hesitation doomed the coup attempt; Austrian Vice-Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg mobilised the Austrian police and army and set about crushing the Nazi insurrection. In Berlin Goebbels hastily withdrew his earlier announcements celebrating the coup and released an announcement condemning it instead. Had the coup been better planned, Schuschnigg and other members of the government would have been rounded up at the same time as Dollfuss was being assassinated, with the Austrian legion providing the essential extra manpower required. While that
might have resulted in a successful coup, it
would certainly have resulted in a war with Italy.
If there had been a fight, Hitler would have lost. Mussolini could call on a large army that was equipped with artillery and light tanks; Hitler’s Austrian Legion, only a few thousand strong in any case, had neither; nor did the regular German army, which in 1934 was still restricted to the 100,000 men permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, with no heavy artillery and no tanks of any kind. Nor did Hitler have an air force, while the Italian Regia Aeronautica was well equipped with modern fighters and twin engine bombers. The Nazis in Austria would have been crushed, Mussolini’s position internationally would have been enormously strengthened, and relations between
Il Duce and
der Fuhrer permanently embittered.
Following this chain of events, Mussolini’s credibility with the British and French would have been greatly strengthened, and the Stresa Conference of 1935, held to formulate a united response to Hitler’s announced repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles, introduction of universal conscription and the forming of a German air force, might actually have produced some actual course of action intended to prevent Hitler from carrying through with his plans. I say
might, because at the conference Britain’s foreign secretary, John Simon, undermined any actual action when he said that Britain would not support the introduction of sanctions against Germany, and that would be unlikely to change following a short war in Austria. Significantly though, if Britain, as concert with the other members of the Stresa Pact, had been willing to impose sanctions on Germany for violating the Treaty of Versailles, it might have worked as a cautionary note to Mussolini and restrained him from launching his full-blown invasion of Ethiopia later that year; the result of which was sanctions on Italy by Britain and France and the collapse of the Stresa Pact.
If events in Austria proceed unchanged, the next time that Mussolini and Hitler would find themselves on opposite sides would be in Ethiopia in 1935. When the Italians invaded the African Empire of Halle Selassie the League of Nations imposed sanctions on them, but is a bizarre form of fair play, they treated the victims the same as the attacker and imposed an arms embargo on Ethiopia as well. This meant that the only people that the Ethiopians could obtain arms were rogue states willing to ignore the League of Nations: the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan.
That the Japanese were willing to supply arms to Ethiopia is understandable; by 1934 80% of Ethiopia’s imports came from Japan, so Japan was defending a valuable market for its products and, as an independent Empire trying to fight of the encroachment of the Europeans, the Japanese were easily able to identify with Ethiopia’s struggle. Hitler’s motivation however, in providing arms to what he referred to as a
‘Nigger kingdom’ in its struggle against a white race, is less obvious. The Italians believed that it was an attempt by the Germans to establish influence in the region as a precursor to rebuilding Germany’s lost African empire. It is equally possible that it was simply payback for Mussolini’s frustration of Hitler’s Austrian plans the year before and, at the same time, a cheap way of weakening a serious rival. Whatever the reason, it sowed further distrust between the two dictators. The war dragged on, with Ethiopian resistance stiffened by German and Japanese material support which was only overcome by the Italians by resorting to chemical warfare: mustard and phosgene gas.
The Hoare–Laval Pact was an attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, actually out of half a sow’s ear; the British and French would recognise Italian sovereignty over the territory in the north and south of Ethiopia that they’d already conquered, and in return unoccupied central Ethiopia (reduced to about half of the country by this time) would remain independent, albeit with the Italians granted exclusive economic privileges. Mussolini would also would undertake to guarantee the continued independence of Austria from Germany, by force if necessary. Other than saving half of Halle Selassie’s throne, the pact had little going for it; Mussolini had already publicly guaranteed Austrian independence and in ’34 had demonstrated that he would use force if necessary to preserve it, a new written undertaking of the same would guarantee nothing new and would only have value for as long as Mussolini saw a benefit in honouring it – which is to say for only as long as it was in Italy’s best interests anyway. The pact
might have prevented Mussolini from being alienated from the British and French camp, and ultimately moving closer to Germany, but it’s unlikely; although the pact committed Italy to defending Austria, it did not commit France and Britain to helping Italy in that defence (Likewise, in the earlier Locarno Treaty, although Italy guaranteed to defend France’s borders with Germany, the French made no such guarantee to Italy.) Ultimately, the pact drowned in a wave of British public righteous indignation after news of it leaked in December 1935. British righteous indignation, so much easier roused by news of Italian planes bombing defenceless villages in Ethiopia than news of RAF planes bombing defenceless villages in Iraq or the North West Frontier, was only roused sufficient to kill a deal that would have saved half of Ethiopia, not enough to do anything to actually save it.
The next year saw the beginning of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini and Hitler both provided support to the Nationalists, but there was nothing fraternal about their actions; while both were concerned at the possible spread of Communism to Spain, they were both far more motivated by the possibility of having Spain as a friendly client state; Franco found himself benefitting from the competition between Germany and Italy for his favour. Ultimately Hitler was the winner; in addition to Franco signing over valuable future mineral concessions to pay for arms, he also guaranteed the Germans access to Spanish facilities; during World War Two, Luftwaffe long range reconnaissance flights over the Atlantic were able to refuel in Corunna, while U-boats were able to re-victual in Spanish ports, most often Cádiz and the Azores and Spanish iron, mercury, tungsten and antimony fed the German war machine. For his part, Mussolini obtained a treaty with Franco guaranteeing him use of bases in the Balearic Islands in the event of war with France – a guarantee Franco reneged on.
On the ground in Spain, German and Italian personnel developed a working relationship out of necessity; this was the beginning of a thaw in relations between the two rivals. If the Spanish Civil War had proceeded differently, which it very easily could have, then such a thaw may have been delayed, or simply never have happened at all. If the attempted coup by the generals on the 18th and 19th of July 1936 had been crushed, as it could quite easily have been – it was both badly planned and badly executed, with poor timing and an almost ludicrous lack of secrecy – then no working relationship would ever have occurred. The same result would have occurred in the much more unlikely event of the coup being carried successfully. Also, if the counter-coup had had more success, and had confined the Nationalists to the south, they might have been able to build on initial success and crush the rebellion, which probably would have resulted in further acrimony between Berlin and Rome, with mutual accusations of betrayal of ‘
the cause’.
Either way, without an ongoing ‘
Spanish Ulcer’, Italy would be militarily stronger; Spain swallowed 700 Italian aircraft and nine million rounds of ammunition. The cost of the war forced Italy to spend as much of armaments as (much wealthier) Germany was, and twice as much as Britain, despite a GDP less than one quarter of Britain’s. Between 1934 and 1939, over half of all Italian government expenditure, was expended on fighting in Ethiopia, Spain and Albania. Due to the cost of the war, replacing the aging biplanes with new fighters, mechanising the army and construction of new ships for the navy all had to be postponed. Remove the enormous cost of the war, and Mussolini’s army, navy and air force would be stronger. Although still lacking the strength needed for a major war, this increased military power
might have made Mussolini feel that he had greater freedom to manoeuvre, and been less inclined to move into either the Anglo-French or German camps.
Returning to ‘
The Cause’. Opposition to the spread of communism - the only truly common interest the Germany and Italy had - lead to Mussolini joining the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937, the Anti-Communist pact founded by Germany and Japan in 1936. (Ironically, despite the anti-communist rhetoric of the Fascist regime, Italy had enjoyed extensive trade and effective diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. This really isn’t too surprising; Stalin never let ideology get in the way of practicality; in China he supported Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists in preference to Mao’s Communists, because the former were tying down more Japanese troops than the latter. And when Stalin needed advice on industrialising the Soviet economy, he went to Henry Ford, the arch-Capitalist, Anti-Communist strike-breaker, because Ford’s factories had a reputation as the world’s most efficient. Italian-Soviet relations were only soured by the torpedoing of Soviet ships supplying arms to Republican Spain.) Although the treaty itself bound the members to the sharing of intelligence on the activities of the Comintern (the Communist International organisation controlled from Moscow), it was a stepping stone to closer military ties. The Anti-Comintern Pact was abrogated by Germany in 1939 with the sighing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and by the Japanese in 1941 by their signing of a similar non-aggression pact with Moscow.
In March 1938, Hitler focused his attention once again on Austria. This time, with the British and French clearly unwilling to oppose Hitler, and the Germans now clearly militarily superior to Italy, Mussolini had little choice but to acquiesce to the Anschluss. In return for his compliancy, Hitler told Mussolini that he would
‘never forget this… no matter what happens.’ (As usual, Hitler’s gratitude was temporary; following his removal from power by a coup in 1943, Italy was occupied by German forces and Mussolini was established as the puppet head of the
Salò Republic, it did not include the South Tyrol, which Hitler annexed into the Reich – it was the Third Reich’s final territorial expansion.
Mussolini signed the
Pact of Steel with Hitler in May 1939, binding Italy to supporting Germany in the event of war with Britain and France. But the commitment was conditional; due to Italian economic and military weakness, war was to be avoided before 1943, at which point, with the economy stronger and their military preparations completed, Italy would be ready for war. It was pure opportunism; Mussolini now wanted Germany to ‘
cover Italy’s shoulders’ while he turned the Mediterranean into
Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’)and then ‘marched to the ocean’, just as previously he’d wanted the British and French to back him in Europe against Germany. The alliance was not truly binding, however, because the two ‘
allies’ simply did not trust each other – in large part because of the personal relationship between the two dictators.
Things hadn’t started well with their first meeting in 1934; Hitler found Mussolini ‘
pompous’, while Mussolini though Hitler was an ‘
insignificant degenerate’. The prospects for building a trusting relationship were dealt a further blow by Hitler’s assurances at the meeting that he would leave Austria alone, only to launch a campaign to undermine the Austrian state lasting several months and culminating in the attempted coup and assassination of Mussolini’s good personal friend Engelbert Dollfuss. Later meetings did nothing to overcome the negative first impressions; when Mussolini visited Berlin in September 1937, Hitler impressed the Duce with an enormous military parade; Mussolini was certainly impressed, but he was also bitterly envious of the power now at Hitler’s disposal. Their relationship, based on distrust, and having to contend with rival ambitions, developed, in the opinion of one German diplomat, ‘
ad hoc, on rational grounds as the result of necessities confronting both of them… they were have-nots in contrast with the powers which were satiated by the peace treaties’.
So having just signed a defence alliance on the understanding that war was to be avoided for the next four years, the Italians were duly alarmed when,
only a few weeks later, they received news from their Berlin embassy of secret German preparations for the invasion of Poland. Mussolini dispatched his foreign minister, Count Ciano, to meet with Hitler and Ribbentrop at Berchtesgaden on the 11th of August and restate Italy’s need for time to rearm. Ciano was unable to dissuade the Germans of their plans for war. Hitler believed that the war with Poland would be short and the western allies would not become involved, therefore it did not violate the agreed terms of their pact. Ciano thought otherwise, telling Hitler that the allies were bound to support Poland and it would result in the beginning of a major war; he returned to Rome and told Mussolini that the Germans had ‘
betrayed us and lied to us’, and that therefore Italy should not consider itself bound by the alliance, he urged Mussolini to stay out of the war.
Nor was Ciano the sole voice of caution; King Victor Emmanuelle III said firmly that ‘
we are absolutely in no condition to wage war’; the commanders of the armed forces were likewise warning that they were unready for war, while the finance ministry warned that the country was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Mussolini was obliged to face facts, sending the Fuhrer a message that
‘it will opportune for me not to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations.’ Instead Mussolini announced that Italy was now a Non-belligerent member of the Axis; in terms of international law, the statement was meaningless, but it felt better to Mussolini than remaining entirely neutral.
With the fighting going Germany’s way in Poland, Mussolini discussed with his advisors the possibility of Italy entering the way sometime in May 1940. Their responses were again negative; the army and navy would not be ready before 1943-44, and the air force before mid-1941, and these were the most optimistic (and unrealistic) estimates. Mussolini was forced to reschedule Italian participation until late 1941.
Mussolini’s distrust of Hitler also manifested itself again. Fearing that, enraged by Italy’s non-compliance with the Pact of Steel, Hitler would strike south ‘
in order to square accounts with Italy’, Mussolini ordered a massive expansion of the military defences along Italy’s borders; while 600 million Lire were to be spent on the border with France, a full billion Lire (out of a total national budget of 60 billion Lire) were spent on the border with Germany. Mussolini’s orders were that the defences should be complete by May 1940 and impregnable, ‘
in the most absolute sense of the term’. Changes to the cabinet at the end of 1939 further strengthened opposition to Italy joining the war. On the eve of the German offensive in the west Mussolini expressed the view that the campaign would be prolonged, ‘
bloody and indecisive’, saying he would not be upset to see Hitler ‘
slowed down’. Ironically, Mussolini’s hopes and expectations matched those of Stalin.
So, for Italy to
not enter the war in June 1940, very little actually needs to change. Even with the breathtaking success of the Wehrmacht in France, opposition was still strong; Ciano still believed war would
‘mean ruin of the country, the ruin of Fascism, and the ruin of the Duce himself’; the king still believed that the war should only be entered into under the most favourable of circumstances (which clearly wasn’t the case) and Mussolini’s military commanders still expressed doubts as to the success of any military offensive, no matter how minor, while the treasury warned that fighting lasting anything more than a few weeks would be ruinous. All that was required was slightly more caution; while Mussolini declared war on 10 June, he did not act militarily until the 21st (1 day before the French armistice was signed). Ciano, as foreign minister, was still warning that the English would not seek peace, and force the war to be long and bitter; waited, the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on 3rd of July would have made it plain that they would fight to the bitter end.
Was continued Non-belligerence really a viable option for Mussolini to achieve his objectives? Hitler had already conceded Italian Imperium in the Mediterranean region, and Italian primacy in the Balkans, in exchange for German domination of Central and Eastern Europe; surely Mussolini had as much reason to believe that those spheres of influence remained unaltered? And if Hitler was going to betray the agreement, wouldn't he do so even after the deaths of a few thousand Italian soldiers in a limited attack on France? By not fighting he had still tied down French and British forces in the Mediterranean, far away from the German front; in fact Italy was probably more valuable to Germany as a
potential combatant than she could be by involvement in the actual fighting before the fall of France.
So with French capitulation and Britain still fighting, how could Mussolini have still achieved Fascist irredentist aims in the Mediterranean? Obviously, avoiding direct conflict with Britain, at least before late-1941 (based on previous expectations of military preparations), would be essential. There was certainly room to manoeuvre, with both Spain and Japan providing examples.
On 14 June, the same day the Germans marched into Paris, Spanish forces occupied Tangier. Tangier had, like Danzig, been a League of Nations administered Free City, guaranteed jointly by the major powers. Franco considered annexing the city, but under pressure from the British satisfied him with occupying it as a ‘
defensive measure’; Franco maintained control of the city until 1945, doubtless if the war had gone the Axis way he would have annexed the city. In September 1940, the Japanese pressured the Vichy French regime into signing an agreement allowing them to station troops in the north of French Indochina, another ‘
defensive measure’. (This did
not lead to US sanctions; they were brought about by the Japanese move into Southern Indochina in obvious preparation for attacking S.E. Asia.) So potentially Italy could achieve some of its objectives by taking similar ‘
defensive measures’ while remaining a Non-belligerent.
Italy’s primary irredentist objectives in the Mediterranean were Malta, Tunisia and Corsica. Any move against Malta would mean war with Britain, so that would have to be postponed (permanently), leaving Tunisia and Corsica. While any move into French territory would undoubtedly be condemned by de Gaulle and the Free French based in London, British hopes of avoiding Italy entering the war outright would have probably limited their condemnation, as it did with the Japanese occupation of French Indochina. Vichy France’s response however, is unlikely to have been as restrained; regardless of how Mussolini phrased it,
Maréchal Pétain and
Amiral Darlan would view it as an attempt to plunder France of her empire, which, of course, it would have been. And while they lacked the forces in Indochina to oppose the Japanese, the French had strong forces in the Mediterranean with which to defend their territory. Ultimately it probably would have come down to what Hitler decided.
Following the Vichy French defeat of the Anglo-Gaullist attack on Dakar in September 1940 (Operation
Menace), Hitler held a series of summit meetings with his fellow dictators, Mussolini, Franco, and. His objective was to convince both Spain and Vichy France to join the Axis and enter the war against Britain, but to do this he had to resolve the conflicting colonial claims of Spain, France
and Italy. Franco’s appetite was enormous; in return of taking Gibraltar from the British (and to even do that he would have required assistance), Franco wanted all of French Morocco and the western half of Algeria. Mussolini, as noted earlier, wanted Tunisia (and a part of eastern Algeria), and Corsica. While Pétain and Darlan of course wanted to keep their empire intact. The French had, since the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, been fighting an undeclared war against their former allies and the rebel French under de Gaulle; this active fighting, and the potential that the French might come over fully to the Axis, was worth far more to Hitler than a potential belligerent Franco was. Which was more valuable to him, maintaining the French or strengthening the Italian position in the Mediterranean is harder to answer. While he might have been prepared to let them slug it out, allowing him to arbitrate a solution when they had exhausted themselves, it would be unlikely; doing so would weaken both of his potential allies, something only the British would have welcomed.
The other sphere of interest for the Italians was the Balkans, where they’d been granted primacy by the Pact of Steel and where Mussolini had ambitions of making Croatia into a protectorate. To this was later added ambitions on Greece, at Count Ciano’s urging, despite the Foreign Minister’s earlier pacifist beliefs. The outcome of any fighting would depend on how much planning and preparation was put into the campaign and
when Mussolini chose to act; without having become involved in the wider European war, Italy would be significantly stronger, both economically and militarily, but would still not be ready to fight a significant war before the latter half of 1941 at the very earliest, and probably more likely late 1942 or 1943 (as pre-war forecasts had predicted).
In the meantime Italy would have benefitted from being wooed by both the Germans, to join the war, and the British, to keep out of it. It would have been a battle fought at the hip pocket, and the British simply had deeper pockets than the Germans. Just as Spanish and Turkish generals found themselves the beneficiaries of British generosity, to the tune of millions of Pounds Stirling, so Italian power-brokers would have done. The Italian economy would also have benefitted; the British had offered to supply Italy with millions of tons of desperately needed coal in return for arms supplies if Italy had remained neutral (or ‘
Non-belligerent’ as it were).
If Italy went to war with Greece or Yugoslavia in late 1941 or 1942, the conflict would most probably have been viewed much as the Finnish-Soviet Winter War was; a separate war that coincided with, but was not connected to, the wider European war. Both Greece and Yugoslavia were armed principally with Czech manufactured armaments, which, following the occupation of Prague by the Germans, meant resupply would be problematic. Historically, the British enthusiastically offered arms, and then troops, to defend Greece because they were already at war with Italy and because access to air bases in Greece put Rumania’s oil fields, critical to Germany, within range. Greek dictator Metaxas, for his part, had been reluctant to accept aid from the British, because despite being at war with Italy was on good terms with Germany, and feared the Germans would attack Greece because of the presence of the British; after Metaxas’s sudden death, his successor invited the British in, and Metaxas’s fears were borne out. If Italy wasn’t already at war with them, the British would probably sell arms to Greece, but they would not send troops and while the Greeks would enjoy sympathy as the underdogs, both regimes were essentially fascist, so sympathy from the democracies might by limited, particularly while they are still trying to keep Italy out of the larger war.
Herein lies the problem for Italy in the Mediterranean; Italy’s reach always exceeded its grasp and the achievement of the fascist irredentist wish list would always be dependent on the broader war fought by Germany against Britain and the Soviet Union, and later the United States, because even if Rome acquired Tunisia and Corsica, they would only be held temporarily, for a few years at most, before having to be relinquished peacefully to de Gaulle, backed by the allies, or come into conflict with the, by then, overwhelming strength of the Anglo-Americans.