237: North Africa 1940 Pt. 1 - Italian Aspirations

Description

In the summer of 1940, with France defeated, the war in North Africa finally burst into the open. Rome pushed the Italian army in Libya - huge on paper but constrained by industry, vehicles, and logistics - toward the Egyptian frontier and the British positions shielding the Suez Canal. This episode explores the political objectives Mussolini chased, the command disputes that shaped Italian planning, and the realities of campaigning across the desert.

We also look at the British situation inside Egypt, the small, mobile Western Desert Force, and how both sides assessed their opponents as the first shots were exchanged. Was the Regio Esercito a paper tiger or a force to be reckoned with? We set the stage for the campaign that will define the next act of the war.

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Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 237 - North Africa 1940 Pt. 1 - Italian Aspirations. This week a big thank you goes out to Carter, Chat, Mark, Frank, and Blue for supporting the podcast by becoming members. Members get access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episode plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. Head on over to historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members to find out more. Within the sprawling story of the Second World War there are many contributions from many groups and individuals that are lost to us today. There are also many that are misunderstood, underestimated, or purposefully misrepresented within the histories. I am not here to do a tier list, or a ranking, or anything like that because by the very nature of the contributions such a list would be impossible. But on that list, somewhere, are the efforts made by Italian forces in North Africa. Because this is an asynchronous podcast I obviously cannot do a poll, but I am going to guess that if I could do a live poll and I asked you to name the most important person to the war in North Africa, if you are British you might say Montgomery but the vast majority of you will say Erwin Rommel. Rommel will certainly be an important character in our story, but he would not arrive in the theater until February 1941, and the majority of the Axis forces in North Africa would always be Italian. They would do most of the fighting, they would do most of the dying, and they would contribute to every Axis victory in North Africa in important ways. And that is just the 2 years that Rommel was on the scene, because during the second half of 1940 they were on their own in their battles against the British forces that were arrayed against them in North Africa. The Italian war effort as a whole is often looked at very negatively, and they certainly made many mistakes and were at a strategic level completely unprepared for the war that they found themselves fighting after 1940. But when you get closer to the action, there were many Italian units that fought extremely well, in some incredibly bad circumstances. Their logistics, medical, and air support was often lacking, their weapons were rarely first class, and their commanders often failed them in ways that would boggle the mind of any reader of history. But still they persisted, and for almost three years they stood up against the major efforts of the British, and then the Americans. All of their contributions are largely downplayed in English histories, with their focus on North Africa from late 1941 until the final victory in 1943. And the majority of those histories cycle and focus on Rommel and his actions in a way that is almost hero worship, ignoring the contributions of those around him, and downplays the roll that Italian forces played in all of his greatest victories. Instead the Italian forces are used far more often as an explanation for the eventual German defeat rather than for what they were, a crucial source of manpower and troops volume that made Rommel’s actions possible. In Understanding Defeat: Reappraising Italy’s Role in World War II James J. Sadkovich would say: “The tendency to attribute Axis successes to the Germans and failures to the Italians seems to have its roots in the conviction that Rommel was a genius who could do no wrong, and the belief that Italians were subject to excessive Latin nervousness and made pitiful soldiers. […] Far from being an Anglo-German affair, the North African campaign was Anglo-Italian, and to claim otherwise is to indulge in the sort of bad history that leads to simplistic conclusions regarding the fighting prowess of certain ‘races’ and the role of morale in warfare.”. There would even be multiple instances where Italian forces would be called upon to rescue the Germans from disaster, with one of those examples being at the most famous of North African battles El Alamein. This series is about the war before the Desert Fox, as we look at the actions of the British and Italians in North Africa during 1940 and very early 1941. And that starts this episode with a conversations Italy’s preparations for war during the 1930s and then its plans for when they entered the war in June 1940.

Coming into the war in 1940 there were several structural issues with Italian society that were always going to make a major war a challenge for the Mediterranean state. The first and most important challenge was around Italian industry which can be broken down into two parts. The part was the challenges that Italy had when it came to access to critical raw materials required to build and support a modern army in 1940. Oil was the largest problem for the Italian military, and it would be its greatest hinderance throughout the entire war, to the point where the operations of the Italian Navy were heavily curtailed during the crucial middle years of the war specifically because of a lack of oil. The second part was the problem of modern manufacturing techniques. Italian designers were not bad at what they were doing, and during the 1930s Italian designs for both aircraft and warships led the world in some respects. Nations like the Soviet Union would buy Italian ship designs, and Italian aircraft would constantly be at the top of the list for speed records at a time when those things really did matter. No, the problem was not their designs or their theory, but instead the inability of Italian industry to expand that production out in a way that other nations would once the war started. They could build things, but slowly, and this allowed the Italian military to be considered one of the most powerful in the world in the mid 1930s. But when faced with the attrition suffered during the Italo-Ethiopian War, and then the constant drain of Italian resources that were sent to assist Franco in Spain, Italian industry simply could not keep up with the demands placed upon them. The general problem was that the manufacturers were more artisanal in nature, able to built really nice machines, but they could only do things slowly, and they were often slow to innovate. This put them in a position where, of course, they could never build enough of anything, but also in a position where as the rate of innovation drastically increased in other nations after the start of the war, in Italy it remained the same. The end result was that as the war went on Italian technology fell further and further behind . It did not help anything that often the Fascist Government, led by Mussolini, was so weighed down and constricted by inefficient bureaucracy that even when good ideals and innovations did present themselves it would only be approved months after they were initially submitted. The perfect example of this is the fact that it took 6 months for the Army technical staff to approve the most straightforward of all anti-tank weapons in mid 1940, the Molotov Cocktail. This drastic inefficiency killed the movement of information and the rate of innovation in so many different areas, making it difficult for manufacturers to know the results of their designs and for the Army at the front to ensure that their experiences were properly impact the next design updates.

While the Italian industrial base would have many problems during the war, Mussolini never let such trivial concerns as “how do we build enough equipment” get in the way of this grand plans. But Mussolini was also not the only person making Italy’s plans, although he was driving the goals at the highest level which were predictably simple: expand. The details were handled by military leaders like Marshal Badoglio who would be the Chief of the General Staff from 1925 until December 1940. In his role Badoglio would would take Mussolini’s goals and turn them into something approaching actionable plans, with a series of planning meetings with all of the chiefs of staff of the Italian military services. During these meetings there were at times discussions of the strategic issues that could be caused by certain Italian actions, but they always floated around any action criticism of the decisions because those were made by Mussolini and he was always reading the minutes of the meetings. It should also be said that Badoglio was not great at his job as the Chief of the General Staff, partially due to his own mindset and abilities but also because he refused to have a real staff, which meant that there were serious limits to what his office could accomplish. This would change after he was replaced, and Marshal Ugo Cavallero would change how the position of Chief of the General Staff was structured, but this could not really change the overall course of the war by that point. The number one problem that the military side of Italian decision making could not make up for was the fact that there were simply no clear attainable goals for the Italian war effort. This was most apparent in North Africa where by attacking British interests in Egypt the only path to victory was to conquer all of Egypt up the Suez Canal. But the logistical challenges of such an action were immense, and should have forced major considerations from Italian planners before they went forward with the campaign. Such a change in course was not possible though, because the goals were set for the campaign before any of the logistical challenges of fighting across hundreds and thousands of kilometers of desert were reckoned with. Maybe things would have been different if they simply would have had more time to prepare, but with his ally in Germany putting together a stunning string of victories in 1939 and 1940, Mussolini was deeply impatient for his armies to also begin their great conquests. This urgency prevented the kind of force and material concentrations that were always going to be required for a successful conquest of Egypt. But in general this just continued the trend present in all of Italy’s war planning, which was built around jumping in way too soon and without any proper preparations.

When charting Italy’s course into the Second World War, the one common feature was that the Italians were late to just about everything. They believed that the war was going to start later than it actually did, even until relatively late in August 1939 the Italians still did not understand how imminent the German invasion of Poland was. Mussolini has instead been pushing a message of caution and delay, out of concern that the Italian military was simply not ready to enter into a war. Then when the war did start, Italy elected to stay out of it, at least for 1939. The quick and decisive victory over Poland was expected, and then the long Phoney War between Germany and the Western Powers allowed Italy to remain neutral for an additional 8 months. The Italian leaders believed that there was a real case to be made that their stated nonbelligerency during this stage of the conflict was actually a benefit to Germany, making it more difficult for the British to properly blockade German commerce. It was also kind of a pleasant situation to be in, particularly for Mussolini who had been trying to increase Italian prestige by being the peacemaker of Europe since before the Munich Crisis. The British government would approach with various proposals to provide economic goods in exchange for Italy’s continued neutrality, and even the export of Italian armaments. The British policy would eventually be to blockade Italy as well, particularly the transport of coal which was relatively easy to blockade and absolutely critical not just to the Italian war preparations but just to Italian society as a whole. The American president Roosevelt would also get involved with Italy, attempting to convince Mussolini into prolonged neutrality so that the economic sanctions could be lifted. But at the core of Mussolini’s plans was that the war could be used to benefit Italy’s position on the world stage, if it entered at the right time and for the right price. The challenge was that above all else, Italian forces needed time to come onto a war footing if they were going to be useful and seen as a legitimate force in the conflict. The German successes against France caused problems. The Italians thought they had time, that the war would be long, and they would have time either to convince the sides to negotiate using Italy as an intermediator or to prepare the Italian military to join the conflict. Then those pesky Germans had their great successes in France and it appeared that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. This forced the Italian hand, because the worst possible outcome would be for the war to begin and end without Italian participation and therefore without an Italian presence in the peace negotiations. And so on June 10, Italy entered the war against Britain and France.

Given its position and its general lack of access to critical resources the most important thing for Italy in June 1940 was that it not get embroiled in a long war . Two of those critical resources were coal and oil, both of which were essentially required to prosecute a war in the mid 20th century. For the armaments industry coal was required to run the factories, and the shortage of coal would cause Italian industry to be essentially paralyzed by mid 1941. Oil was in a similar place, with the Italian Navy being a critical consumer of oil, and the shortage of oil having important ramifications on the ability of the Italian navy to participate in the war in the mediterranean. More important to our story for these episodes is another major shortage faced by the Italians, merchant ships. For any nation attempting to support campaigns overseas merchant shipping was critical, particularly in the Mediterranean where the dangers were everywhere and some amount of attrition would always be felt among the merchant fleets of the participants. Almost all of the areas in which the Italians planned to fight would be supplied via maritime naval traffic, and oh by the way they were up against the Royal Navy, the largest and strongest navy in the world in 1940. To complicated things further, specifically in North Africa, there were also not a large number of ports that could support the throughput required by the Italian army in North Africa. Benghazi and Tripoli were the two under Italian control and while they could more than handle the tonnage required in peacetime, when trying to support a military campaign simply space and unloading speed would be a problem. This lack of transport capacity, both aboard ship and then when it came time to unload those ships, would put the Italian army in a position where they were constantly just a little bit short of supplies. This would cause strain on the forces involved, sometimes heavy strain, but always strain as not enough equipment was available, or rations were cut short, or replacements did not arrive, or leave back home was unavailable. All the kinds of things that impact the fighting capacity of military units in both big and small ways.

With all of these issues, the smart move would have been for the Italian leaders to put all of their focus on one goal where they could concentrate their limited resources. If they could do so then maybe they could bring enough of everything together to achieve a victory over the British in North Africa, or wherever else they chose to concentrate. They did not choose this path, and instead of a concentration almost immediately in 1940 Italy began to spread its resources far and wide in a bunch of efforts that did not really support one another. Most of this dissipation of resources would only come into play after the time period of these episodes, but it is important to discuss them as a way of illustrating the lack of focus that was being placed on events in North Africa throughout the war. The first area where Italian efforts would expand to would be Greece, where 400,000 troops would be committed to an invasion that would go horribly. This was just one area of the Balkans which would be a major drain on Italian resources throughout the war as places like Greece, Yugoslavia, and other smaller territories were garrisoned by Italian forces until 1943. While Italian and German efforts did eventually cause a major diversion of British resources from North Africa to Greece, it was not an advantageous trade for the Italians and it would have almost certainly resulted in better outcomes if they never would have attempted to invade Greece in the first place. There were also many Italian troops in East Africa as well, almost 300,000 in total, many being part of the occupation forces of Ethiopia. Here the Italian forces probably did a good job of diverting British resources, with the British bringing in almost 200,000 additional troops to counteract the Italian forces in the region. This included forces like the 1st South African division and the 4th and 5th Indian divisions which would have been very very useful in North Africa in 1941 when the Italians and Germans launched their first attacks after the arrival of German forces. Throughout the war the Italians would end up sending forces to all different kinds of theaters: divisions to the Eastern Front, submarines to the Atlantic, and other areas where the direct link between those actions and the main Italian effort in North Africa was tenuous at best. They were simply trying to do much with not enough.

Speaking of trying to do too much with not enough, the war in Africa would generally be a war of movement, and part of that war of movement would of course be tanks. Tanks, at times, take on an outsized role in the histories of the Second World War, and it can be easy to assume that they were the most numerous vehicle on the battlefield given how often they are mentioned and focused on. This was rarely the case, and in fact when tanks performed well they were almost always part of a combined operations team of armor, infantry, artillery, and other support units. And the armored fighting in North Africa was no different, and in some ways was the purest expression of pre-war armored doctrine for the Italians and the British, largely untainted by the earlier events of the war . For the Italians this was a problem because while every army had their own teething issues with armored doctrine, the Italians started from a difficult place of believing that tanks should be a widely dispersed asset and one that was parceled out in small groups . This prevented the Italians from achieving the kind of mass armor movement that many armies would utilize to great effect throughout the war, and which would be a major component of German successes after their arrival. There were also other issues for the Italian armored units, many of their tanks were more correctly classified as tankettes, which were small and lightly armed and armored, which made them mostly useless against a determined enemy and they were only really good for reconnaissance work. Another issue was, as you might guess, logistical problems which were not limited to the areas of strategic movement like with the merchant ships. Italian tank units did not have enough engineers to repair, or dedicated retrieval capabilities if a tank broke down, and tanks broke down a whole lot. Tanks breaking down was a plague upon every armored unit in every army during the war, and the best armored forces prepared for this and made real efforts to repair tanks and return them to duty as quickly and efficiently as possible. Also, and this is something that is a real head scratcher when looking back at it, Italian tanks did not all use the same fuel, with the medium tanks using diesel fuel while the tankettes used normal petrol, adding an additional layer of confusion and difficulty to supply operations.

Even with all of these problems the forces available to Italy in North Africa in 1940 were a major risk for the British. At the time that they declared war around 225,000 Italian troops were in Libya, although many of these were either in garrison duty or were facing the French to the West, not the British to the East. These forces were largely equipped and prepared not for a conflict with Britain and France but instead the type of colonial peacekeeping and operations that the Italians had been doing for many years. This also meant that their ability to launch major offensive actions was limited by their ability to stage logistical support which would be hampered by the lack of motor vehicles. They could still mount these type of operations, even if they were not as fast moving as Italian doctrine was really going for, but that also would require time. Time was a major factor in the early years of the desert war because moving anything over the hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of mostly desert also took time. To launch an attack supply dumps had to be created so that they could be drawn upon for the advance, including not just fuel and munitions but food, water, and other goods that might be found in other theaters but were completely absent in the arid landscapes of the North African desert. These issues could be solved with time though, and it was clear that the Italians probably had that time in the summer of 1940, with the British and French defeat in France and then the battle of Britain raging seeming to indicate that it was unlikely that the British forces in Egypt would mount any kind of major offensive. Reinforcements also arrived from Italy with the arrival of part of the Ariete division, equipped with the new M11/39 medium tanks, the best tank available to the Italians in 1940. This would be delivered in July, along with a large amount of fuel and other supplies designed to support a major Italian operation later in 1940. When exactly “later” would be was a hot topic of debate among the Italian leaders, with Mussolini wanting it to be soon while the Italian military commanders in North Africa attempting to do everything they could to delay and long as possible to allow for greater preparations.