The Second World War (54 page)

Arnim and Rommel (appointed commander of Army Group Africa on 23 February) now both mounted spoiling attacks against the First and Eighth Armies respectively, but with limited success. The Americans had learned battle wisdom at Kasserine and been brought, moreover, under the command of Patton, who did not tolerate amateurism; the two British armies were battle-hardened and commanded by experienced generals. On 20 March, while Patton was probing at Army Group Africa’s rear, Montgomery launched a breaching assault on the Mareth Line, found a way round it when his direct attack was held and drove the remnants of the old Panzer Army Africa back to the tail of the Eastern Dorsal by 31 March.

After this setback the Germans and Italians still fielded a considerable force in Tunisia, amounting to over eleven divisions when reinforcements were included with the survivors of the old Panzer Army Africa. However, their supply situation was critical: twenty-two out of fifty-one ships had been sunk during January, and the airlift mounted to supplement the sea convoys had delivered only 25,000 of the necessary 80,000 tons during February, despite the employment of the MC323 Gigant motorised gliders; on 22 April Allied fighters intercepted and shot down sixteen out of twenty-one Gigants flying petrol to Tunisian airfields. Not even secret weapons sufficed to offset the German disadvantage. Many of the first formidable Tiger tanks, rushed to Tunisia to oppose the Allied preponderance in armour, were lost in swampy ground and some were even penetrated by Allied anti-tank weapons. Moreover, Hitler did not have his heart in this battle, coming so soon after Stalingrad, a fortress position he had also vainly hoped to sustain by airlift. Tunisia seemed to him doomed as early as 4 March: ‘This is the end,’ he forecast then; ‘Army Group Africa might just as well be brought back.’ Characteristically, though he ordered Rommel home on 6 March, he could not bring himself to liquidate the front while something might yet be saved but charged Arnim with fighting it out to the last.

By the end of April Arnim had only seventy-six tanks still running and was trying to distil fuel for their engines from locally produced wines and spirits. On 8 May the Luftwaffe, confronted by an Allied air force of 4500 combat aircraft, abandoned its Tunisian bases altogether. Army Group Africa, which had been hustled from the Eastern Dorsal into the northern tail of the Dorsals by the Eighth Army between 7 and 13 April, was then confined to a small pocket covering Tunis and Bizerta. Its front had been broken in a set-piece assault by the First Army opposite Tunis on 6 May. Both Tunis and Bizerta fell next day. Rearguards kept up resistance during the next week as the remnants of Army Group Africa, short of ammunition and bereft of fuel, tried to withdraw into the final sanctuary of Cape Bon. However, on 13 May no territory remained for it to defend, and its last elements surrendered; 275,000 Axis soldiers including both the German and Italian commanders, Arnim and Messe, passed into Allied captivity. It was the largest capitulation yet imposed by an Allied force upon the Axis, a grave humiliation for Hitler and a disaster for Mussolini, who had committed his destiny to the creation and maintenance of a great Italian empire in Africa. Each of his three wars on the continent had now ended in catastrophe. Hitler, who had participated in two of them, could survive the aftermath; he had risked only enough force to demonstrate loyalty to his fellow dictator and profit by the strategic diversion which his intervention achieved. Mussolini could contemplate the aftermath in no such sanguine spirit. In Africa he had lost both the greater part of the Italian army and his reputation. Whether he and his regime could survive at all now depended upon Hitler.

‘Happy Austria,’ the seventeenth-century tag went. ‘Others wage war, you wage weddings.’ The Habsburgs did indeed have a habit of marrying into property, and this eventually brought them the greatest landholdings of any monarchy in Europe. Italy, parts of which remained in Habsburg possession until 1918, was Austria’s antithesis – unlucky in both love and war. Its north and south, unified only in 1866 under the House of Savoy, never achieved a proper marriage; its wars for independence from the Habsburgs in the mid-nineteenth century, and to win itself colonies in Africa later, turned out at best unvictorious, at most inglorious. The Italian expeditionary force which met the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896 was one of the few European armies to suffer defeat at the hands of indigenous forces throughout the course of the imperial conquest of the continent; while its avenging of Adowa in the successful campaign against the Emperor Haile Selassie in 1936 brought it international odium.

No war cost Italy more than the First World War, its experience of which explains almost everything about its domestic and international conduct in the years that followed. Although their efforts were disparaged, the Italians fought with tenacity and courage against the Austrians on the most difficult of all fronts contested by the Allies between 1914 and 1918. Beginning in May 1915, when Italy threw in its lot with Britain, France and Russia, the Italians mounted eleven successive offensives into the Julian Alps, winning little ground but suffering heavy casualties. Surprised in a twelfth battle in November 1917 by a German intervention force, in which the young Rommel was one of the most enterprising junior officers, the Italian army was thrown back into the plain of Venice but recovered enough by late 1918 to go over to the attack and end the war with its self-esteem restored.

There was the rub. Italy had won its place among the victors; but, although 600,000 young Italians had given their lives to the Allied cause, neither Britain nor France would allow Italy the spoils it felt it had won. France and Britain divided between themselves Germany’s colonies and Turkey’s Arabian dominions, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. All Italy got was a small slice of former Austrian territory and a foothold in the Near East which proved untenable. Moreover, when the United States and Britain decided in 1921 to fix treaty limits on the size of fleet which the Allied powers were to be allowed to operate, Italy was obliged to accept constraints which effectively set its naval strength at the same level as the Royal Navy’s in the Mediterranean – a sea in which it reasonably felt it had claims to be predominant.

The disparity between Italy’s entitlement, as Italians perceived it, and her post-war inheritance lay at the root of the fascist revolution which overwhelmed established order in the kingdom in 1922. Mussolini’s appeal to the Italian working and lower-middle class was only partly economic; it was equally that of a veteran to veterans. At a time of recession, unemployment and financial turmoil, he not only offered work and security of savings but also promised honour to ex-servicemen and the territorial recompense to the nation that it had not received at the peace conference. The transformation of Libya, annexed from Turkey during the Balkan wars of 1912-13, into an overseas ‘empire’ was followed by the conquest of Abyssinia in 1936 and the annexation of Albania in 1939. Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War was part and parcel of Mussolini’s assurance to Italians that their country would cut a figure on the world stage; and that was ultimately the motivation also for his decision to enter the Second World War on the German side in June 1940. His efforts to build an alliance centred on Austria, as an alternative to the Italo-German Axis, had collapsed when Austria was incorporated into the Reich by the
Anschluss
of 1938, which automatically devalued his bilateral treaties with Hungary and Yugoslavia. The
Anschluss
determined that Mussolini should become Hitler’s partner in the Second World War.

Circumstances dictated, however, that Italy should never be an equal partner, hard though Mussolini strove to make himself one. It was not only that Italy’s economy could support only one-tenth of the military expenditure met by Germany (Italy $746 million, Germany $7415 million in 1938); it was also that Italy’s military strength had declined absolutely during the inter-war period, so that it was less a match for Britain and France in 1940 (as long as the war with France lasted) than it had been for Austria in 1915. Italian divisions were weaker in infantry and artillery than twenty-five years earlier, partly because numbers were diverted, entirely for Mussolini’s political conceit, into the Fascist Party’s dubiously valuable Blackshirt formations. Italian manpower had continued to decline through the surge of emigration to the United States. Italian equipment, though elegant and brilliantly engineered, was produced by artisan methods which could not match the output of British – and eventually American – factories working to volume demands. The Italian services also suffered from the disadvantage of having been driven by Mussolini’s urge to national aggrandisement into rearming too early. Italian tanks and aircraft were a whole generation outdated by their British equivalents; when confronted by American equipment, which reached the British in 1942, they appeared antediluvian.

There was a final and ultimately disabling impediment to Italy’s effective commitment to war on Germany’s side: the Italians harboured little or no hostility towards the enemies Hitler had chosen for them. Mild Francophobia may be an Italian sentiment; but the Italian upper class is notably Anglophile, while Italy’s peasants and artisans have high regard for the United States, whose known hostility to Nazism influenced the national outlook from the start – and decisively so after the American entry into the war. Consequently it was a half-hearted Italian army which crossed swords with the British in East Africa and the Western Desert in 1940-1. Its confidence had not been improved by its poor showing against the Greeks in October-November 1940. It was severely shaken by Wavell’s counter-offensive in December and, despite the arrival of the Afrikakorps to its assistance in February 1941, it never really recovered. Brilliant though Rommel was as a general, and notably
simpatico
though the ordinary Italian soldiers found him, their commanders could not but remember that the origins of his reputation lay in his exploits at Caporetto in November 1917, when he had captured several thousand Italians at the head of 200 Württemberg mountaineers.

By the end of the campaign in Africa in May 1943, the total number of Italians who had become prisoners of the Allies – in East Africa in 1941, in Libya in 1941-2 and in Tunisia in 1943 – exceeded 350,000, more than the number of those who had garrisoned Mussolini’s African empire at the start of the war. Even before the Tunisian débâcle, the Italian army, which Mussolini had been planning the year before to raise to a strength of ninety divisions, had equipment for only thirty-one. The loss of so many of the best divisions in Africa, so soon after the catastrophe suffered by the Italian Eighth Army (220,000 strong) at Stalingrad, reduced it to a shadow; and these twin crises drove the Italian high command to examine the wisdom of continuing to lend Mussolini and the fascist regime its support. Italy’s generals were disproportionately drawn from the northern society of Savoy-Piedmont, seat of the royal house where their loyalty ultimately lay. They had acquiesced in fascism as long as it favoured the monarchy’s and the army’s interests. Once it became clear that it was failing to do so, they began to reconsider their position. During the summer of 1943, and particularly as Italian cities began to feel the weight of Allied air attack, they were driven into plotting Mussolini’s removal. The trigger to action was the appearance of Allied landing forces on the southern coast of Sicily on 9-10 July 1943.

The decision to invade Sicily after the expulsion of the Axis from Tunisia had not been taken without disagreement between the British and Americans. To the Americans, Husky, as the operation was to be known, risked diverting forces from and even setting back the Second Front. To the British it seemed to promise highly desirable if intangible benefits: the domination of the central Mediterranean, from which threats could be levelled at the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis in southern France and the Balkans; the humiliation of Mussolini, perhaps leading to his downfall; the acquisition of a stepping-stone towards the location of the invasion of Italy itself, if that subsequently proved easy, desirable or necessary. The British eventually had their way, at the Trident conference in Washington in May 1943, but then only because the changing circumstances persuaded the Americans that a Second Front could not be opened that year. In the event, the invasion took Hitler even more by surprise than Mussolini – or his Italian enemies. Hitler harboured no illusions about the sympathies of the Italian ruling class. On 14 May he had told his generals:

In Italy we can rely only on the Duce. There are strong fears that he may be got rid of or neutralised in some way. The royal family, all leading members of the officer corps, the clergy, the Jews [still at liberty; for all Mussolini’s faults he was not anti-Semitic] and broad sectors of the civil service are hostile or negative towards us. . . . The broad masses are apathetic and lacking in leadership. The Duce is now marshalling his fascist guard about him. But the real power is in the hands of others. Moreover he is uncertain of himself in military affairs and has to rely on his hostile or incompetent generals as is evident from the incomprehensible reply – at least coming from the Duce – turning down or evading [my] offer of troops.

Hitler had just offered Mussolini five German divisions, to join the four reformed in Sicily and southern Italy from the rear parties of those lost in Tunisia, but his offer had been refused. As a precaution, plans had been prepared for the occupation of Italy (Operation Alarich, so named after the fifth-century Teutonic conqueror of Rome). However, although Mussolini warned that he expected the Allied army released by its victory in Tunisia to attack Sicily, Hitler insisted that the island was too heavily defended to be taken easily and that the Anglo-American descent would fall on Sardinia, Corsica or the Greek Peloponnese. The spectre of a landing in Greece aroused Hitler’s worst forebodings; it threatened not only the opening of a ‘third front’ in the rear of the
Ostheer
but also the interruption of supply of Germany’s most vital raw materials, bauxite, copper and chrome from the Balkans and, most precious of all, oil from Romania’s wells at Ploesti.