[Britain] is convinced that the life of the British citizen is too precious to be risked in the petty fights among continental countries.1
F
or Mussolini, war was the greatest test of nations and ideologies, and it was the pursuit of war and imperial expansion that led Fascist Italy down the path of hostility with Britain.2 However, war itself proved the doom of the Fascist experiment, mainly at the hands of the British Empire. The Italian Fascist representation of Great Britain from a military point of view is therefore both interesting for understanding the dynamics of Fascist ideology and its centrality to the development of Fascist foreign policy. In order to assess it, it is particularly interesting to analyse the reports of Italian military attachés in London, mid-ranking officers who enjoyed a direct contact with British mil-itary culture. As we will see, they also had a remarkable influence on the higher ranks of Italian military and political elite.Before the Great War, British martial aptitude was widely admired. The Ital-ian attaché in London before and during the Great War, Lieutenant Colonel Edoardo Greppi, showed an ‘evident Anglophilia’ and appreciation for Britain, with ‘its gigantic empire, the sobriety of its costumes and the good demeanour of the people, the admired military virtues and the patriotic dedication of its ruling class.’ Furthermore, he was fundamentally in agreement with the political and military policies chosen by the British authorities.3 Likewise, during and after the Great War, Mussolini had shown respect and admiration for the British Army and the British people’s military qualities. In December 1917, he praised the power and efficiency of the British Army, and shortly afterwards resolutely denied that Britain waged what the Germans called ‘the War of the Usurers,’
that is, having the Italians and the French die for it.4 He also mentioned the
‘impressive’ cohesion of the British people behind the war effort.5 Comment-ing on the beginnComment-ing of the German offensive in March 1918, he stated that his
Appraisals of Britain’s Military Strength and War Propaganda 69 confidence in a British victory was also rooted in the human factor, contrasting
by implication the British with what happened in Italy, where, according to him, Socialists, unpatriotic pro-Germans and deserters boycotted the national war effort. According to Mussolini, ‘the English soldier does not desert. He does not surrender. England has no deserters. The English soldier knows why he fights.
He has the sense, the individual consciousness of his responsibility.’6 A few days later, he added that ‘the admirable English divisions [. . .] fight for us as well.
[On] them depends our destiny.’7 In December 1918, after the end of the war, he commented on the British elections stating that ‘the English nation is rallied around the government and the men who fought the war and snatched the vic-tory.’8 Such a perception radically changed in the following years, in particular after the end of the 1920s. From an analysis of the Italian attachés in London during the 1930s emerges a growing belief in British military weakness and con-tempt for the British people’s military virtues and will to fight.
The Italian perception of Britain as a military power evolved dramatically in the years between the First World War and the Second World War. The reports from the attachés during the early 1920s mostly focused on technical issues;
during the second half of the 1920s, however, an interest in British military in-novations can be found in the reports. In 1927, the attaché Lieutenant Colonel Amerigo Coppi had already shown an enthusiastic interest in the mechanisation of the British Army. Coppi believed that mechanisation was the right direction for the British Army and, to a lesser degree, for continental armies as well.9 His successor was to devote even more attention to the subject, without, however, ne-glecting a broader assessment of Britain’s domestic and international situation.
Lieutenant Colonel Adolfo Infante described a nation that had been critically hit by the economic crisis, was politically unstable and increasingly weakened in its international position by US competition and the desire for independence of the Dominions and Colonies.10 The root of the economic troubles was, in In-fante’s view, a lack of competitiveness in the British economy, weakened by high salaries and the weight of generous unemployment benefits, which were neces-sary to preserve social peace.11 For the first time, Britain’s place as the greatest world power seemed uncertain and it is not difficult to discern that, in Infante’s view, the reason was that Britain lacked a form of corporatist discipline like the one that existed in Italy. In October 1930, Infante noted a general sense of de-pression and pessimism, a remarkable contrast with the usual British optimism.12 Nevertheless, he was convinced that Britain could still regain its strength, even if it was clear that it would require time and that maintaining its position vis-a-vis the United States was an impossibility: ‘The strength of the great qualities
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of British character will certainly allow the country to overcome the current economic crisis (which is global).’13 If this political assessment adhered closely to ideas common in Italy at the time, Infante looked at military matters in a very different way. Despite a lack of funding, the army had managed to improve its organisation and,
since the beginning of 1929, [had been] going through a crisis of deep trans-formation, mostly due to the mechanization of many units and to the many experiments to define the new organic constitution of the infantry Brigade and of the Division. The problem of mechanization of the army is today the fundamental problem [that] is most studied, experimented and debated.14 Mechanisation had progressed a great deal, particularly with the first ma-noeuvres involving tanks, the creation of the Tank Corps and the introduction of a new model of tank. These improvements were combined with a vast and innovative operative experimentation, so that ‘it could be said that [Britain] is ahead of all nations not just in terms of materiel but also for its employment.’15 Infante was a careful observer of mechanisation; he made two very detailed re-ports on the so-called Purple Primer and recorded the troubled constitution of the Armored Brigade and its employment in the manoeuvres of 1929, the intro-duction of Charles Broad’s Tank Brigade in 1931 and its brilliant success in that year’s manoeuvres.16 Observing the manoeuvres, he wrote of the mechanised units’ possibilities for achieving surprise and of their extreme mobility, the ef-ficient cooperation between light and medium tanks and between tanks and infantry, the progress in radio communication, and of how tanks had changed war, bringing it back to the ‘classic art of Napoleonic manoeuvres.’ He did not hide his admiration when describing ‘a great deal of really great issues and new problems, which, while they might appear still far in the future, are in Britain already studied, analysed and practically faced.’ 17
Infante’s replacement from 1933, Lieutenant Colonel Umberto Mondadori, even while acknowledging the progress of army mechanisation in Britain, was already clearly giving in to an ideological worldview. Possibly influenced by Brit-ish economic difficulties, he claimed that Britain had ‘growing enthusiasm for the Fascist ‘totalitarian’ conquest [. . .] of Italian society.’18 Mondadori described the British Army in increasingly grim terms, contrasting its old-fashioned oper-ational doctrine with the most modern Italian ‘mobile’ warfare. He wrote that, in terms of mobility, Italy was ahead of Britain. In Ethiopia, in fact, Italy was not going to employ those ‘old infantry formations’ still used by the British, instead using its ‘Mobile Divisions,’ which represented its most modern and perfect
Appraisals of Britain’s Military Strength and War Propaganda 71 instrument of war. The fact that he was referring to the new, slim ‘hay and oil’
Italian Celeri Divisions hints how far he was already detached from reality.19 In his summary report for 1935, he wrote that ‘what is remarkable in these ma-noeuvres is the feeling that the army is in a state of disarmament; the organics are extremely reduced, armament and equipment are seriously lacking’ and at the beginning of 1936, he highlighted the anxiety of public opinion on this topic.20
It is hardly surprising then that during the Ethiopian War Mondadori claimed that British forces in Egypt were still in a peacetime condition, and that an Italian advance towards the Suez Canal would pose a significant threat to British imperial communications.21
He also concluded that Britain was unable to provide anything other than air support to its allies in case of war.22 His opinion was shared by the naval at-taché in London, Ferrante Capponi. Reporting on the French-British meetings following the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, he underlined French scepticism caused by the lack of ‘. . . British military preparation [. . .].
Regarding the army, it is abundantly clear for the French that the British forces could cross the channel, if necessary, only with huge delay.’23 The issue of the role the British Army would play in a continental war was widely discussed by Lieutenant Colonel Cesare Ruggeri Laderchi, attaché in London from 1937 to 1939. British reluctance to expose themselves to any risk is a recurring theme in his reports, perfectly matching the new Fascist image of the declining, cowardly and satisfied Western democracies. In March 1938, Laderchi wrote a report on British rearmament in which he claimed it had a merely defensive purpose, in accordance with the people’s opinion that British lives were too precious to be risked in petty fights among continental countries. Laderchi was convinced that rearmament was in no way a prelude to a more ‘active,’ if not quite ‘offensive,’
British foreign policy:
Great Britain does not want to be dragged into a new European war. Who fought it emerged from it with a feeling of disgust, has taught his children in the belief that war in Europe ‘is not for the British,’ and is convinced that the life of the British citizen is too precious to be risked in the petty fights among continental countries.24
The issue of material was a different matter. British rearmament was meant to assure Britain’s European allies it had the necessary means to defend its interests in Europe.25 Eventually, Laderchi convinced himself of the possibility of a Brit-ish intervention in Europe but, in September 1938, he characteristically wrote that the mechanisation of the British Army had encouraged aversion for the
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arduous, routine part of the conflict, which was to be left to the Allies, reserving for themselves only the most decisive and glorious actions.26 His contempt for the British character was as strong as the high esteem in which he held its Fascist counterparts: he repeatedly attacked British newspapers, which, according to him, underrated Italy’s military might. In January 1938, reporting on some Daily Telegraph articles in which the Italian strategic situation was described as ‘weak’
and it was claimed that Britain was in a stronger position, the attaché dismissed them as ‘War Office propaganda.’ Such propaganda was, the officer believed, aimed at convincing British public opinion that, in the case of conflict against Italy, Britain would not be ‘in that bad condition,’ as well as at introducing the audience to the much-debated and feared idea of a conflict with its Mediter-ranean adversary. In another article, it was stated that Italy had no history of military successes, that Italian soldiers in Spain had not behaved brilliantly and had suffered a defeat at Guadalajara, and that the Abyssinian campaign, while an organisational and mechanic triumph, had been a military walk in the park that did not particularly add much to Italy’s military reputation. Laderchi, who seems to have been offended, dismissed the author as insolent and ignorant of Italian military glories. He was equally annoyed by the reaction of the British press to the Italian annexation of Albania in April 1939. The occupation had not been depicted as a success by the Italian armed forces, and British newspapers had not analysed the reasons behind such a quick and masterful action. The silence that had followed the first attempts to discredit the Italian action was, in the attache’s eyes, the best recognition from the British (who had lost their traditional sense of fair play) that they had recognised Italy’s success.27