According 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.” 2 Writing of the Italian pilots who flew against Britain in 1940, aviation historian, Peter Haining, concluded that “many of them fought with skill and bravery against daunting odds.” Haining recounts that an RAF commander, angry and embarrassed by newspaper distortions of his unit history, said “there was no truth in the claims of the press that the Italians had run away at the first sight of a Hurricane.” His men, he added, “admired the Italians for their bravery and courage in inferior aircraft.”4
Mussolini’s 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 Italy’s 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, Mussolini’s 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 Century’s Italy’s 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 Italy’s role during World War Two through the distorted lens of Mussolini’s 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 Mussolini’s story.