Reflections and Suggested Reading
Part 1: Strategic Assessment
Strategy has had many definitions over the decades. Baron Antoine de Jomini defined it as the art of waging war on a map, Carl von Clausewitz as the use of engagements for the purpose of policy. Basil Liddell Hart asserted that it was the distribution and employment of military force for the aims of policy. Andre Beaufre wrote that it was the art of the dialectic of force; J.C. Wylie deemed it primarily a product, an action or plan created to achieve some goal, together with the measures deemed necessary to accomplish this end. In more recent writing, Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley defined it as a process. Colin Gray has argued, in a Clausewitzian vein, that strategy is the use or threat of force for the purposes of policy. He also identified it as a bridge to constructively link military and political understandings of situations, as well as the military and the politicians as actors themselves. Everett Dolman argued that in its simplest form, strategy was a plan for attaining continuing advantage. It is by these basic standards and conceptions that Italian strategy from 1936 to 1945 should be judged.
It cannot be denied that the Italians became quite adept at the art of waging war on a map. After the near debacle of Abyssinia, when a section of generals were left to their own devices and so revealed their inherent operational conservatism, Mussolini determined to oversee all operational matters in the understanding that operations were the bread and butter of strategy. That is, operations were sequenced tactical actions geared at solving an immediate problem, and linked operations solved theater problems, which thus assuaged the demands of strategy. Although operations broke down to some extent in Spain, this was due primarily to factors outside Mussolini’s control. Spain’s declaration of war on Italy, while it did not catch the Italians off guard strategically, did so tactically and the Italians had no chance to cancel their military access through Spain. Thus, despite operational requirements, somehow the diplomatic obligations to a country with which Italy was at war were more important and limited the Italians to minor advances at a time. Despite the lack of sweeping operations that characterized operations in southeastern and eastern Europe, the Spanish were not up to the task of defending their country from the Italians, resulting in their defeat.
Italian strategy was not reliant upon engagements as such. In its strictest sense, in fact, Clausewitz’s definition of strategy was out of date. Wars were no longer punctuated by engagements but were comprised of operations. Solitary major battles were rare, although it is perhaps acceptable to redefine engagements simply as direct contact with the enemy. In such a case, the conclusion cannot be avoided that engagement was a significant part of Italian strategy. All three Italian offensives in Illyria—against the Yugoslavs first, and the two operations against the Soviets that came later—required a significant engagement phase to break the enemy’s frontlines, although particularly in the latter two cases this was done only after significant distractions were made, to divert Soviet attention. Such engagement was also necessary in all 1945 operations to push back and break apart the Soviet fronts around Italian controlled Ukraine. Mussolini not only used engagements to good effect, but the actual conduct of these engagements was skilful.
Liddell Hart’s definition, however, is of great significance in encompassing the totality of Italian strategy. By marking an explicit difference between the distribution of military force and its actual use in engagements, he identifies an important issue that Clausewitz only acknowledges in a scattered manner. The distribution of military force, and forces, is of paramount importance to their use. This is essential to understanding the difference between concentrating in space and in time. In the former, forces are concentrated at a particular spot rather than distributed in a pattern such that they can, as necessary, concentrate on attacking a particular spot from multiple angles. This distinction Italians displayed with considerable flair in breaking the Greek defenses during its conquest, as well as in both Illyrian offensives against the Soviets, particularly the second. Although Liddell Hart asserts that his is merely a definition of military strategy, it is applicable to grand strategy as well. After all, when one is dealing with various distinct theaters of operations, how one distributes one’s limited military forces between them can make a difference between success and failure. As such, limited forces were deployed to garrison Spain and hold the line in Africa—by 1945, but a single corps in the first case and two, including the marine corps, in the latter theater.
Beaufre defined strategy in a way to force a strategist to recall that his foe is not an inanimate entity to be overcome mechanically, such as the terrain, but rather an intelligent enemy which not only reacts to one’s own strategy and goals, but indeed has its own that one might have to react to in turn. With a bit of imagination, his definition could even be extended to incompetent and wayward allies. By these standards, Italian strategy had more to fear from its German allies than any of its enemies. Mussolini found it relatively easy to impose Italian control over the operational pattern of the war against any and all of its enemies, the inevitable culminating point of victory notwithstanding. However, he had much more difficulty in getting his allies to conform to his strategy. It was at this point that the Italians faced the most difficulty, one of the great ironies that war usually highlights. Nevertheless, at those times when the enemy had relative control over the operational pattern, the Italians took the proper measures to dilute the quality of this control, to the point of eventually retaking it. This was most apparent in the defensive campaigns against Spain in the early stages, as well as against superior Soviet pressure in southeastern Europe.
Wylie’s definition may be a bit problematic in the context of a continent-wide war, particularly as a mid-sized country facing a much greater one. While the possibility of a single coherent plan was easily possible against weaker foes, and Italy had no issues with plans when it came to crushing any state within southeast Europe, it was much more difficult against the Soviet Union. The best that the Italians could manage was theater-wide plans, which admittedly was still difficult to achieve in wartime. Yet the Italians had a coherent plan for the Balkans, developed over the course of two years, which they finally successfully implemented in the third year. The actual invasion of the Soviet Union followed a particular plan as well, but broke down right upon the verge of success. The final operation, saving the Germans from a Soviet steamroller, was also framed by a plan of sorts, and was successful. Yet there was never any overarching plan to deal with the Soviet Union as a whole, nor with the British Empire. Italian planning could quite possibly have been at a loss if the United States had deigned enter the war against the Axis.
As a counterpoint to Wylie’s definition, there is Murray’s and Grimsley’s: that of strategy as a process. The above analysis perhaps hewed to a too straight-jacketed concept of a plan, while in reality strategy must constantly account for new factors, new actions and possibly even new actors. Thus, it cannot be denied that Italian strategy-making was very much a process in which such inputs were analyzed as soon as, or soon after, their introduction and frequently the proper, or at least a good enough, response was crafted and deployed. This was particularly the case in the war in the east, against the Soviet Union. Mussolini and the Italian General Staff required two years to create a plan sufficiently bold, dispersed and forceful to throw the Soviet forces in the Balkans in chaos, trap them and destroy them while simultaneously conserving the new frontline in Dacia and Anatolia. As was already noted, the greater the foe is, the greater the process aspect of strategy is in relation to its product, plan aspect.
Gray’s dual definition attributes two purposes to strategy. The first is to serve policy through force, a fairly consistent theme in definitions of strategy. This definition is of use because, although relatively more abstract than a number of other strategies, it combines the strengths of Clausewitz’s definition with the strengths of Liddell Hart’s. By emphasizing both the use of force, and the threat of its use, the gap is spanned between the two aforementioned definitions. Italian strategy most certainly successfully harnessed the use of force for the aims of policy. Less appreciated perhaps is the argument that it also similarly successfully harnessed the threat of force. The most significant case of the successful use of mere threats would be the blockade of Tel Aviv. Here, the British fleet was caught in port and dared not sally out in an attempt to escape. Partially, this was because, with both the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal closed, it would be difficult—although probably not impossible—for them to escape the Mediterranean. However, the British fleet did not fear sallying out on a temporary basis to engage in battle and disruptive patrols when the Italian blockading force was merely a squadron of heavy cruisers or a watchful array of submarines. It took the entire surface force of the Regia Marina, minus the three carrier groups and their escorts, to successfully hem the British in. Thus it can be said that it was the threat of this blockading force which was the decisive factor in holding the British fleet at bay and in port. As for Gray’s bridge definition of strategy, it had little applicability during this part of Mussolini’s reign. With his intense interest in strategic affairs, his total dominance over Italian strategy and significant input into Italian operations, there was no need for a bridge as such to connect the military and political understandings of the situation as there was already a unified strategic understanding.
Dolman’s definition of strategy is an interesting one. He wrote about what he called “pure” strategy; that was indeed the title of his book. Although he was primarily investigating the operational level of war by his own admission, his definition of strategy matches very well the demands and tasks not of operational tactics (which he erroneously calls operational strategy) but grand strategy. In terms of grand strategy, thus, Italy cannot be judged other than fairly successful. Although Mussolini was not present to witness it, Ciano’s peace left Italy in exactly the position Dolman would have approved of, with two client states—Abyssinia and Spain—an empire in southeastern Europe and Anatolia and Italian-leaning states in Germany, Poland and Portugal. Italy had become the political center of Europe, but without directly dominating it and thus incurring resentment. Although the quest for continuing advantage naturally never ends, Mussolini, together with Ciano, settled Italy into a position from which it was greatly advantaged.
By any of the above definitions of strategy, Italian strategic performance was excellent. It was not perfect, for strategy never is, never can be and indeed never should be. A perfect strategy is not a strategy at all, for perfection, while in and of itself an entirely hollow concept, becomes even more worthless in the context of strategy as it implies that the enemy was powerless. That is, that it was as good as inanimate, thus violating Beaufre’s important insight and a basic truth of war. In addition, Italian strategic performance cannot but be measured in terms of its enemies, and Italy’s foes were of varying strength, but rarely of varying competence. They were primarily less rather than more competent, although competence, or lack thereof, is always enhanced or exacerbated by geography and the amount of military forces available. Thus, Italian strategy was good enough to overcome the challenges that faced it and which it directly strived to solve. This is all that can be asked of any strategy, and any strategist.