The Year of Aggression
Part 6: Operation Anicius Gallus II, July 23 – August 10, 1939
The first two and a half weeks of the invasion ran the gamut between easy battles on the frontiers to steadily stiffening resistance as the Yugoslav state and army recovered from the surprise and unreadiness with which it was caught and began striving to halt the Italian advance.
The frontier battles began immediately. Everywhere, Italian vanguards were met by weak resistance. The Yugoslav border guard was unprepared for war. Fortifications were neglected, troop levels were run down and weapons were obsolescent. Despite these deficiencies, the Yugoslavs fought as hard as they could. Their resistance broke first at Kostel, in the sector assigned to Gambara’s corps. Four Italian divisions devastated the Yugoslav guard units, inflicting nearly three hundred casualties for twenty-six of their own, in fifteen hours. Victory followed swiftly afterward in Roatta’s sector, at Cerknica, with just over two hundred and sixty casualties inflicted and thirty-three men lost. Pintor’s 7a Armata was moving forward. Bastico’s 2a, on the other hand, required longer to break through the defenses opposite them, for obvious reasons.
Yugoslav defenses in front of Solkan only fell late on the 24th with casualties approximating those of Roatta’s fight for Cerknica, and the Yugoslavs only gave Bovec up a whole day afterwards, having inflicted twice as many casualties on the Italians as any of the other frontier battles. But the 2a Armata was finally moving forward as well. The frontier had fallen.
Italian-Yugoslav frontier battles.
The only dark spot in those first two days occurred just before the Yugoslav defeat in front of Solkan, when Yugoslav forced marched on the Italian town of Zadar. As it was undefended, the town fell without a shot being fired. Mussolini ordered the suppression of this news, and any news service carrying the story was censored. In a war of aggression, it did not do to lose one’s own territory in the first thirty-six hours. In terms of prestige, it was a blow Mussolini was determined to suppress. Strategically, it was irrelevant. Possession or dispossession of Zadar gave Mussolini nothing either way, and would revert to Italian control in the anticipated roll up of Yugoslav forces anyway.
Zadar, lost to the Yugoslavs!
Almost as soon as war broke out, Campioni and Ghé were in the Adriatic, waiting just over the horizon in front of Split. Yugoslavia’s main naval base, and the only one with warships within it, was under blockade. The Yugoslav navy did not appear to find going out to sea in their best interests, an unsurprising development given the grave superiority of the Regia Marina’s guns. Mahan had no answer to such a development; he had never even come to grips with such a situation. Corbett, a British naval theorist writing soon after Mahan had, understood that the naval war in such cases was practically won. Mussolini, however, was something of a Mahanian and wished to destroy the Yugoslav navy. For this, he turned to a tool in his arsenal that Mahan never imagined. Mussolini called upon Campioni to strike at Split with his carrier-based aircraft. Within the confines of Split’s harbor, Campioni’s aviators found a flotilla of destroyers, a flotilla of submarines and three light cruisers. Over the course of the next three weeks, this naval force was to be entirely sunk, primarily by aircraft off of the RM Falco, Italy’s first true fleet aircraft carrier.
Campioni’s first port strike on the Yugoslav naval base at Split.
By the end of the 25th, most of the Yugoslav border region had fallen to the Italian advance. Though Bovec, in the very north, was not yet occupied, the three major towns directly to its south were: Solkan, Cerknica and Kostel. The Italian forces were already dispersing toward their next objectives. Pintor’s 7a Armata was beginning its wheel to the south. Though Roatta was at the outskirts of Ljubljana, he turned away from it and left it to Bastico’s 2a Armata. Pintor’s objectives were greater and their priority was higher. Roatta and Gambara would have to trek across Yugoslavia’s broken terrain faster than the Yugoslavs could throw together a new defensive line using reinforcements streaming toward the front from other frontiers and other military commands.
Italian forces pushing into Yugoslavia.
Half of Gambara’s corps—Nicolosi’s and Frattini’s divisions—broke a hurried Yugoslav resistance at Delnice on the 30th, taking half the casualties the Yugoslavs did. The battle of Ljubljana ended similarly on the next day, with casualties at the same ratio. The disproportionate casualty rates of the first battles were already vanishing. Messe and Caracciolo di Feroleto were, however, already meeting stiffer resistance around Otocac. This was destined to be the first great battle of the Yugoslav War, as the Italians were to come to know it as. By the 1st of August, Ljubljana was on the verge of falling and Bastico’s original mission was to be complete. However, informed observers already knew that the war was not going to be concluded as easily as previously anticipated. There was still fighting in the very north, at the German-Yugoslav border. Roatta’s corps was pushing through points of no resistance and was more than halfway to the Hungarian border. The Yugoslav front was disintegrating at an alarming pace, but the resistance had nowhere near begun to cease. Yugoslavia was not going to roll over and diea.
Italian forces pushing further into Yugoslavia.
By the middle of the first week of August, Otocac had become the largest battle the Regio Esercito had seen since the First World War. Two Italian divisions and two headquarter units strove against two weak Yugoslav divisions and a headquarters. To the north, the battle for Zagreb was in progress as three Italian divisions pushed against a single Yugoslav headquarters. Zagreb saw the most skewed casualty lists of the war: two Italians were killed, as opposed to 347 Yugoslav soldiers. Delnice, after a quick initial victory, was becoming another maelstrom of blood and steel, with neither side seeking nor giving quarter. To the south, Otocac finally fell to the Italians: nearly four hundred Italians gave their lives for that town, though 1,600 Yugoslav soldiers fell defending it. at Jesenice, in the very north, Yugoslav forces inflicted nearly as many casualties as they received. Nearly five hundred Italians died, five hundred and sixty Yugoslav graves also marked the field of battle. The Italian spearheads, comprising in one thrust Messe’s and Caracciolo di Feroleto’s two divisions and in the other most of Roatta’s corps, were pushing ahead of the main front, hung up as it was at Delnice. There was nothing in front of Messe and Caracciolo di Feroleto, though Roatta was beginning to run into heavier resistance.
The invasion’s progress by August 10th.
After easy battles, the Yugoslav resistance had stiffened to the extent that Italian casualties were rising above a full thousand a week, and were still increasing. Weak Yugoslav divisions were fighting from advantageous defensive positions and inflicted grave casualties upon the Italians. Yet the success of the invasion was not in doubt: the Yugoslav army was stronger in toto than Badaglio’s Army Group East, but this was balanced by superior Italian operational art on one hand and the fact that the Yugoslav army needed to create a coherent front on the other.
