Joseph - Mussolinis War: Fascist Italy?s Military Struggles from Africa and Western Europe to the Mediterranean and Soviet Union 1935-45

Words are indeed splendid things. But rifles, machine-guns, ships, airplanes and cannons are even more splendid. Right remains an empty word, if it is not backed by power, and your great countryman, Niccolo Machiavelli, has predicted that unarmed prophets will perish.

Benito Mussolini, Florence, May 1935

A ccording to Ernle Bradford in his Siege: Malta, 1940-1943 , The stories of (Italian) cowardice carried in the British press, like all things else in wartime, were designed for home consumption by civilians.

Mussolinis War belongs to these multiplying reassessments, but differs from them in that it does not focus on a single campaign or theater, but for the first time attempts to encompass the entire conflict from the perspective of Italys true role in the fighting. In so doing, its fresh examination of the Italian military in North Africa, on the Eastern Front, in the air and at sea, reveals a story radically at odds from standard assumptions about the Duce and his men, unknown to most readers, particularly outside Italy. Forgotten, too, are Italian achievements in aircraft production, such as her Veltro , or Greyhound, equal to the best Allied fighters, and so admired by Luftwaffe top brass they equipped an entire Gruppe with the swift airplane.

However, Mussolinis War does not attempt to sanitize the memory of a man capable of waging modern warfare on pre-literate East Africans. Since 1945, countless published biographies and film documentaries have enumerated this and many other morally reprehensible acts associated with 20th Centurys Italys most infamous son. The present investigation will not re-hash his all-too-familiar reputation as a murderous bully, but endeavor to separate it from his abilities as a dux bellorum, or Roman war chief, which gave birth to his popular title, Il Duce . In so doing, the real performance of his troops stands forth.

Unfortunately, their remarkable military record is still obscured by historical exaggeration. Even dispassionate researchers interested only in the truth continue to view Italys role during World War Two through the distorted lens of Mussolinis despised ideology. Instead, this history strives to illuminate him, not from a 21st Century perspective, but within the context of the crucial times he lived in and impacted. Today is not yesterday. A world died in 1945, followed by a new epoch, ours, with which it had little morally in common. The wholesale gassing of African tribesmen by European imperialists, now an unthinkable atrocity, was hypocritically criticized at the time as a kind of embarrassment to the League of Nations, whose own member-nations had gassed many more thousands of British, French and Germans on the Western Front, just seventeen years earlier. There are two sides to every story, even Mussolinis story.