Explorations in Strategy - Italy at War

Juan_de_Marco: That's quite impressive, actually.

Valentinan: Some interesting thoughts there definitely!

stef737: No worries, we're all here to learn!

Jorath13: And it's not through yet!

So basically, on hiatus until next week.

womble: That reminds me of Callwell a fair bit.

Okay, so today I'm off to Glasgow, whoo! You guys probably won't hear from me until I'm back in London.

Baltasar: Hey to be fair I didn't fly this time, I took the train. I'm a bit sick of flying.

Jemisi: Thanks, I did!

Zanziabar: Thanks!

Remagen: I didn't have the Abyssinia problem because the AI control decided to be utterly incompetent and dragged war out for a long time. Otherwise, DanSez seems to have answered your questions, and I'm lazy.

DanSez: Yes, we should now be back soon.

So I'm back from the conference! For those interested, here is an outdated pdf of the conference program (but the only one I can find online in ten seconds). I won't tell you which one was me.

In other news, I'll try (operating word: try ) to have an update for tonight!

foriavik: To be fair, I don't do history either. But then, I do strategic studies.

Palmyrene: Hard to say what I enjoyed the most. Also am in the middle of cooking a curry so I don't have time. As for my future plans, those are for the future!

Update coming up!

The Year of the Masters of War
Part 11: The Strength of Italian Arms II, August 29 – September 24, 1944

For the practicing strategist, strategic effect is at the end of the day a finicky mistress. Much like her cousin Fortuna with whom she frequently associates herself, strategic effect can be highly unpredictable and comes in a variety of effective guises that always leave the practitioner of strategy wondering whether it is truly strategic effect he is cavorting with, or simply an illusion of circumstance and the hopes and biases of one’s own mind. One can, after all, win oneself to death in certain situations if not careful. The wily foe may appear to be effected by one’s own strategy, but may be laying an ambuscade of such enormous proportions that it is nigh un-discernable to those who know not of it. War is, of course, a dialectic of wills using force to settle their dispute, and this means that the element of reciprocality will never be absent. Such is the context in which the strategist must woo strategic effect. The Italians seemed to have achieved strategic effect this time around, however. Yet in many ways strategic effect cannot be separated from the strategist’s objectives.

Mussolini had conceived of this gamble of his as a way to reduce the Soviet presence in the Balkans, ideally to a point closer to ‘zero’ than even merely ‘negligible.’ Essentially, the goal was to eradicate the entire Soviet Balkan theater if possible. Though in the beginning the odds seemed long and fairly stacked against the Italians, by late August it had become not simply apparent but certain that the Italians would crush the very Soviet presence in the Balkans that they had set out to destroy, unless a miracle of some variety happened to occur in the Soviets’ favor that would save them. Such a miracle was not forthcoming, however. Indeed by September 4th, despite a number of more or less bloody clashes between advancing Italian formations and defending or withdrawing Soviet forces, a number of Soviet divisions were finally trapped in a pocket comprising most of central-western Thrace. While there were weak breakout attempts directed southward, these posed no problem to the Italians. Instead, they began pushing even harder toward the center of Soviet resistance, Sofia.


Soviet forces in Thrace, trapped once and for all.

Soviet forces did not give up, however, but instead fought on for as long as they could, determined to inflict as many casualties as possible and indeed try to wreck the ability of the Italian armies to achieve such blistering offensives in the future. However, the casualty exchanges were even more unbalanced than ever before and on many occasions the Soviets suffered hundreds of deaths merely to inflict a handful of Italian casualties. The Soviets’ own ability to wage battle, much less war, had been severely damaged in the offensive of recent months, resulting in a sort of half-helplessness that did not permit anywhere near peak combat performance, even though the defensive was, abstractly, the stronger form of warfare. Thus, the great pocket in Thrace was reduced in only four days to containing merely the city of Sofia itself. The Italians had also begun the final assault on the city, throwing two undamaged and high-spirited divisions into its streets, with another two in reserve. Their opposition consisted of two heavily battered infantry divisions, one of which was in reserve and a number of variably damaged headquarters units. The Soviets were scraping the bottom of their manpower barrel.


The final assault on Sofia and the surrounding area, note all the completely superfluous German divisions. There are still others not shown.

Sofia fell on the 11th of September, and with it the entire Soviet presence north of Greece. The next step in the operation was obvious, and the Italians took it. On that very same day, five Italian divisions that had moved southward into western Thessaly launched their advance toward Athens. Their goal would be to separate the last remaining major body of Soviet troops from the Athenian port of Piraeus and make way for the final destruction of the Soviet Balkan theater. Athens was defended by but a single division, and north of Athens the remaining Soviet forces were practically already sitting with their collective heads in a great noose, though they were perceptive enough to understand this and were trying to escape southward, albeit to little avail.


The final major stage of the operation at time of launch, the reconquest of Greece, ironically given how many times the Italians landed at Athens, from the north.

And so ended Mussolini’s great Balkan offensive. Originally a gamble, Italian operational skill turned it into a great victory. By the 24th of September only a single Soviet division remained in the area—a lone straggler holed up on Euboea destined to be crushed soon. During this last near month of operations the Italians had suffered three thousand three hundred and sixty casualties, the Soviets six thousand nine hundred. This is a testament to how swiftly the fighting abilities of the Soviet forces in the Balkans collapsed. In total, Italian and German casualties were perhaps as high as forty-five thousand from late June to late September. At the same time, however, the Soviets lost about seventy-six thousand two hundred men as killed in action. This was not, however, the full extent of the Soviet loss. The Soviets did not, as in the preceding year, lose simply whole divisions and corps. This year, the Soviets lost whole armies over the course of the operation, particularly in the past month and a half. Italian intelligence estimated that the Soviet Balkan theater comprised about half a million men before the offensive. By the end of September, this entire theater had been destroyed to a man. The Soviets had lost approximately three hundred brigades. The Soviet army was reduced to a point at which not strong enough, for a while at least, to be able to hold all fronts. Stalin and STAVKA would have to make sacrifices, would have to make hard decisions. Would they be able to do it?