Introduction
Part 3: Mussolini’s Strategic Renaissance
As has been mentioned, it is impossible to truly understand what confluence of words, ideas and events came together in late 1935 to spark in his mind a renaissance of Italian strategic thought. He rarely committed his own thoughts to paper, thus making their reconstruction difficult. Before delving into speculation, however educated it may be, the basic facts will be laid bare. During the latter half of 1935, tensions rose between Italy and Abyssinia that led to war in October and the beginning of a grueling east African campaign that led to fallout between Mussolini on the one hand and a number of his senior generals on the other. This will be discussed in more detail later, when the fortunes of the Abyssinian War are recounted. At the same time as this ongoing campaign, Mussolini was known to have read the three books mentioned previously:
On War,
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1789 and
The Command of the Air, by Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Giulio Douhet, respectively. What is also evident is that in early 1936 Mussolini began ponderously shifting Italy’s grand strategy.
The following analysis of what Mussolini may have taken from these three works is a direct result of an exhaustive analysis of not only the actions he ordered during the following years of trial but also of the three works in question.
On War is widely acknowledged to be an incomplete work; the Prussian military thinker who authored its redoubtable theory died before his time, presumably of Cholera that spread westward into Germany from the Grand Duchy of Poland and Prussia’s own Polish lands. Nevertheless, it is difficult to over-acknowledge its importance. It argued many key concepts that have since been taken for granted by militaries around the world. What matters is not these concepts per se, but rather the ones that Mussolini may have grasped as being important. These I would argue number three. The first and most widely known is that war is a continuation of political intercourse by additional means. A simple statement, and an obvious one that most statesmen grasp intuitively. Yet it can be interpreted as validating the use of force toward political ends. For a revisionist power such as Italy, this would necessarily an important first step in using force.
Carl von Clausewitz.
The second concept is arguably a conglomerate of two separate ones. Firstly that strategy consists of the employment of engagements toward the achievement of a state’s war policy; and the second that those who avoid battle in an attempt to soften the face of war are fools, if kind-hearted fools, as battle, carnage and slaughter were the soul of war. Such proclamations would have suited Mussolini. He was eager to raise Italy back to the glory of the Roman Empire and was quite conscious that its conquests were made over the bloody battlefields and slaughtered corpses of those who resisted. There was no better way to emulate such heroes than by following suit.
The final concept is that of the culminating point of victory, that point at which attack becomes defense due to casualties and the diversion of troops from the push forward. Though it is impossible to measure until it has actually been passed, intellectually it would remain a constant reminder for Mussolini not to overstretch himself. He struggled to limit his ambitions, perhaps understanding that Italy’s culminating point of victory was drawing ever closer.
The value of Mahan’s work lay mainly in its sheer enthusiasm for and emphasis on the value of sea power. Though at times slightly too eager in its arguments, it did impress upon Mussolini the unlikelihood of ever defeating Britain by way of a
guerre de course, the favored French strategy of commerce raiding that Germany had followed during the Great War. Mussolini realized that the applicability of Mahan’s work was limited to the
superior navy and the quest for decisive naval battle and the command of the sea that was the natural result of such a battle; it found little to say for mundane tasks such as convoying or the like. Also, Mahan had no advice to give to inferior navies (and indeed Mahan’s work was in part a campaign to convince the American people of the need for such a superior navy), but Mussolini must have felt that he was able to rationalize it to Italy’s geostrategic position. Specifically, he felt that he could create artificial local superiorities to smash any enemy’s present battlefleet and take command of that stretch of sea, at least for a short while. Given sufficient opportunities for such engagements and the superior naval power would no longer find itself in such a dominant position.
Douhet’s work was similar to Mahan’s in that it dealt explicitly, and overenthusiastically, with a single branch of service: the air force. Its strengths were close to those of Mahan, mainly in that it created a very firm impression of how air power could grant victory on its own through a decisive blow. Its weaknesses were also not far off, it had little to recommend for the weaker air power save to become stronger, and it is more difficult to partition off portions of sky than sea. Mussolini was likely impressed by the potential of air power but likely did not buy in completely: he never authorized the vast fleets of heavy bombers that the Americans and British would and never intentionally aerially attacked civilians if he could attack a military target instead. Nevertheless, he believed air power would be useful, particularly in conjunction with sea power. It is plausible that the synthesis of Mahan’s and Douhet’s work led Mussolini away from the battleship and toward the aircraft carrier, even though he was patently unsure whether Italy could mobilize the resources for such a project.
To conclude this introduction, it will be put forward that Mussolini hit upon a maritime strategy that he believed could serve Italy well. The power projection capabilities of sea and air power could be to some extent synthesized into joint naval air power. Land-based air power would also serve when possible to aid in defining the stage of battle, as would incursions into the littoral by relatively elite units. These elite units, judging by what Mussolini always strove toward, were marine and armored divisions. In theory, Mussolini’s strategy seemed sound enough. Its crucible of success would be whether Italy could afford to pursue such a strategy.