Fascist Italy in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Javier Rodrigo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In this highly important book, Javier Rodrigo examines the role of Fascist Italy in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.

Fascist Italy's intervention in the Spanish Civil War to provide material, strategic, and diplomatic assistance led to Italy becoming a belligerent in the conflict. Following the unsuccessful military coup of July 1936 and the insurgents' subsequent failure to take Madrid, the Corps of Voluntary Troops (CTV, Corpo Truppe Volontarie ) was created—in the words of an Italian fascist anthem—to 'liberate Spain', usher in a 'new History', 'make the peoples oppressed by the Reds smile again', and 'build a fascist Europe'. Far from being insignificant or trivial, the intervention of Fascist Italy and Italian fascists on Spanish soil must be seen as one of the key aspects which contribute to the Spanish conflict's status as an epitome of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources ranging from ministerial orders to soldiers' diaries, this book reconstructs the evangelisation of fascism in Spain.

This book is the first important study on Fascist Italy's role in the conflict to appear in English in over 45 years. It examines Italian intervention from angles unfamiliar to English-speaking readers and will be useful to students of history and scholars interested in twentieth-century Europe, fascism, and the international dimension of the Spanish Civil War.

1
Fascist intervention in the coup d’état of 1936

It was the seventh month of 1936, the fourteenth year of the Fascist Era, when the coup d’état in Spain erupted. In the days beforehand, Mussolini was travelling around Italy. And, if we follow his declarations on the dates when the first news arrived from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, it would seem that the coup was something totally alien to his concern.¹ However, although it remains within the realm of conjecture, there are signs that point to what he was doing. Curiously, for a man with so full and intense a schedule, based on the activity recorded by the compilers of his Opera Omnia (complete works), the Duce had no public engagements between 15 July, when he delivered his famous speech on the ‘bandera bianca’ (white flag) raised by ‘sanzionismo mondiale’ (global sanctioning), and his first trips in August, which began on the fourth. In all that time, he made no reference whatsoever to Spain, but he referred repeatedly to the Italian Empire in Africa. And, from that, an interpretative inference can be made. In Mussolini’s speech in Avellino on 30 August, Africa appears as the context for rejecting ‘perpetual peace’ as an absurdity; for describing the Geneva Disarmament Conference as a catastrophic failure; for emphasising that the Empire had not been born out of compromise or diplomacy but out of the glorious and victorious battles against an ‘almost universal’ coalition of states; and for reminding his audience that the Italian maxim of the Fascist Era was to be strong, always stronger, strong enough to face any circumstances and look the future in the eye.

He did not mention Spain, but Mussolini could not claim ignorance. Firstly, he was promptly informed of what was happening on the Iberian Peninsula and in Africa by his consular network, Ciano’s ministry, and the Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM, Military Information Service). Moreover, he had full access to the European media and its day-by-day reporting on the events in Spain and their repercussions for the political situations in other countries. Above all, however, Mussolini could not claim ignorance because he was aware that preparations for the July coup had been going on for some time. Indeed, he himself and his government’s services helped bring it to fruition. It may not have acquired its final shape until 1936, but it is increasingly evident that, in order to understand the complexity of what happened that summer, one must look back at least two years to the summer of 1934. Agreements and contracts existed from that time to help the anti-Republican political forces with their plans to overthrow the regime. We should bear in mind that much more was possibly known than was said about the conspiracies against the Second Republic. Without claiming an excessively teleological correlation of cause and effect, it seems clear that, at the very least, there was a connection of interests, preparation, and prior orientation—although, of course, this does not imply that the manner, timing, and results of the July coup were already decided. The Fascist intervention in Spain was the result of a complex—though not pre-determined—sequence and juxtaposition of contexts, processes, circumstances, and decisions.

Some of these decisions, and the situations that preceded them, have been the subject of numerous publications. The literature was already abundant during the Civil War and the post-war years.² It has continued to fill shelves and bookshops to such an extent that there is a sort of bibliographic excess regarding the period that begins with those first weeks in the summer of 1936 and extends, arguably, until the Italian defeat at Guadalajara. This contrasts with the little attention that has been paid to the ensuing long months of Fascist military, political, and cultural intervention in Spain. In most works, coverage is as extensive for the first eight months as it is scarce for the following 24.³ In all this, perhaps the only advantage is that the chronology of the beginning of the intervention has become very familiar, despite the fact that, as Morten Heiberg has pointed out somewhat tartly, much of the historiography, especially the Italian, is limited to ‘recycling the viewpoints of Coverdale and De Felice’.⁴ Thanks to the punctilious reconstructions available to us, we can be more than sufficiently certain as to the line of reasoning that led to the final decision to send the initial aid and arms, followed by large numbers of troops. However, the overall interpretation of the events is far from a settled matter. Moreover, I lean towards a hypothesis opposed to that of the majority. What took place subsequently in 1937 is usually projected onto July 1936, as if everything was foreshadowed from the beginning, namely the massive intervention in Spain by Mussolini’s Italy. However, I argue—and attempt to demonstrate—that this massive intervention was not the continuation of the original plan of 1936 but the result of its failure, or, rather, the failure of the entire plan of rebellion that the fascist powers supported from July onwards. Though by no means exhaustive, this chapter seeks to examine the what, the how, the when, and, above all, the why of the Fascist intervention in the coup d’état, specifically from July to November of 1936, by examining its antecedents and objectives.

Blind faith

An imperial, wise, strong, and disciplined Rome; a Rome revived by fascism; a Roman Mediterranean. This was what the hierarchy of the Fascist Ventennio aspired to, beginning with Mussolini himself. He dreamed in 1928 of a Roman Italy, wise, strong, disciplined, and imperial, in which the history of tomorrow, which the fascists wanted to create, was neither in contrast to nor a parody of ‘the history of yesterday’.⁵ For all the hollow rhetoric that it incorporated—common in newly established and year-zero regimes—the Duce’s quote leads us to reflect not so much on the imagery that it contains as on how this imagery served as the framework for political strategies, set the coordinates for international action, and established his regime’s hierarchy of values.⁶ Fascism, the political movement which best took advantage of the governance of an Italy in crisis following its troubled path in the Great War,⁷ established a tremendously aggressive foreign policy and made political use of the myth of Ancient Rome and the Empire. This myth would serve to accommodate, in symbolic and metaphorical terms, fascism’s place in Italian history.⁸ In his first speech before the Chamber of Deputies on 16 November 1922, Mussolini reminded his audience that treaties—referring to Versailles—were neither eternal nor irreversible; they were chapters, not epilogues, in history.⁹ Consequently, for almost 20 years, Italian diplomacy and military action pursued the declared objective of carving a niche for Italy on the international stage as a great power, not subservient to the interests of other countries.

Even Renzo De Felice, so inclined to believe that fascism lacked its own foreign agenda, attributes the features of Mussolini’s international policy to an ensemble of states of mind, convictions, and cultural motivations specific to fascism and directed towards action. As Mussolini said in a speech during his famous rabble-rousing tour of Florence, Livorno, and Milan in May 1930, ‘words are beautiful things, but carbines, machine guns, ships, aeroplanes, and cannons are more beautiful still’.¹⁰ Italy’s repositioning on the international chessboard after the Great War, its Mediterranean vocation, and the palingenetic myth of Rome combined in the Duce’s words with social Darwinism to form an understanding of the development of societies—conceived in organic and vital terms—that explained fascism’s continental presence. If history was an aggressive struggle between peoples—young and old, dynamic and decadent, revolutionary and conservative, anti-democratic and liberal-democratic¹¹—then international politics had to grant Italy the new place it had won through the dynamism of its national revolution. Dino Grandi, renowned as one of the most violent leaders of early fascism and Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1926, formulated strategies of rapprochement with the western European powers using the hallmarks of anti-communism and disarmament.¹² Thereafter, in 1932, Mussolini himself took up the reins of foreign policy. From that moment onwards, Mussolini would set out the ancient claim to Empire.

The first area subject to claim was indeed East Africa, an objective of Italian expansionism since the end of the nineteenth century, under the governments of Agostino De Pretis and Francesco Crispi. The Italian Minister of Colonial Affairs, Emilio De Bono, had maintained liberal policies and signed a friendship treaty with Ethiopia in 1928, but, as early as 1932, he put together an aggressive campaign against Abyssinia. The international context was favourable at the time. As De Felice reminds us, the formation of an anti-German front in January 1935, prompted by the Nazi putsch attempt of July 1934 in Austria and crystallised in the conversations between Mussolini and the French minister Pierre Laval, brought with it the question of expanding Italy’s possessions and giving it a ‘free hand’ in Africa.¹³ At that moment, and in spite of British attempts at mediation, Mussolini began the tremendously one-sided campaign to occupy Ethiopia. A small skirmish in Wal-Wal in the Ogaden Desert, at the border between Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia and Italian Somalia, served as the excuse for the attack. Though Ethiopia belonged to the League of Nations, the first Italian troops set foot on Ethiopian territory on 3 October 1935, initiating a policy of faits accomplis.

Thus, the Empire was born and, with it, the institutional order of Fascist supremacy, which was to determine Italy’s entry into the Spanish Civil War. Four days later, Italy was condemned as an aggressor nation by the League of Nations. In May 1936, after the conquest of Addis Ababa, and in the face of the British and French governments’ incapacity to broker an agreement between Mussolini and Emperor Selassie, Vittorio Emanuele III was declared Emperor. The Italian armed forces, which totalled some 600,000, had enormous superiority in weapons and few scruples in using mustard gas against African troops, despite Mussolini’s vigorous denials. As has been investigated in recent decades, this rebirth of Imperial Rome, incarnated by the Duce and Fascist Italy, had more than a few negative aspects, particularly in relation to the violence used in the conquered territories.¹⁴ Italian colonial power inflicted many forms of violence on indigenous people, from expropriation to deportation, from racial segregation to summary justice.¹⁵ Both the territorial conquest itself and the repression of guerrilla fighting against the Italian Army were characterised by the use of poisonous gases, a real and deadly practice that has been denied until very recently.¹⁶ Between December 1935 and March 1936, Italian aircraft deployed on the northern Ethiopian front dropped almost 1,000 bombs, with a total of 272 tonnes of mustard gas. Moreover, on the southern front, they dropped 44 tonnes of phosgene gas, the same type of gas that was used in the trenches during the Great War due to its effect of paralysing the respiratory system. Angelo Del Boca recounts that, during the battle of Amba Aradam in February, more than 1,300 missiles were fired containing arsine, which is extremely lethal if inhaled.¹⁷

This was the immediate, ‘marvellous’ background to participation in the coup d’état against the Spanish Second Republic. Until 1996, the Italian Parliament refused to acknowledge the violence and use of gases in the war to occupy Ethiopia. Until then, despite the sources and evidence found by Giorgio Rochat and Del Boca, it had been a taboo subject surrounded by denial and wishful thinking.¹⁸ The catalogue of judgements and valuations stemming from the trivialisation of Italian colonialism extends to the analysis of Fascist foreign policy and, therefore, to the intervention in Spain and is difficult to reconcile with the complexity of historical contingency. It created the metaphorically perfect narrative. Spain was the war which, due to the alliance with Germany, served as the turning point between the pleasant dream of empire and the nightmare of the world war. This narrative contrasts ‘good’ colonialism in Libya and Ethiopia with a misguided policy of expansion in Europe marked by the alignment with the Third Reich, onto which Italian Fascism’s most sinister inclinations are projected.¹⁹ It was the classic account—Africa was an adventure, Spain a war which would diminish Mussolini’s popularity, and Hitler the epitome of all evils. One man’s testimony speaks explicitly of how:

The war in Africa was a marvellous adventure. The Spanish one was a war. The widespread enthusiasm in Italy then began to wane. Then came the contacts with Hitler, who did not appeal to many Italians. And so that Fascist spirit began to decline, until we reached the outbreak of the war, which was the biggest mistake made by Mussolini. The first was the war in Spain: people began to change their mind … with the war in Spain, people began not to think about fascism and the Duce in a uniform way.²⁰

In fact, against this whole background, intervention in the Spanish Civil War was what served as the link between foreign colonial aggressiveness and military interventionism in Europe. Thus, just a few months after the African triumph, the same month the League of Nations lifted the boycott against Italy, Spain represented an opportunity for Mussolini to introduce a new fascist politics in foreign diplomacy, not dependent on the great powers but founded on Italian power, which would gain, at a low cost, an ally of prime importance in the Mediterranean that would replace a potential enemy, the openly anti-fascist Popular Front of the Republic.²¹ Spain represented the link between colonialism and fascistisation.

The chain of command was short and consisted essentially of the Duce and Ciano, with barely any input from the monarch, Victor Emmanuel III, who was kept out of the major decisions of 1935 and 1936. Although it had been born of a collective spirit, as the jurist and journalist Giuseppe Bottai (a heavyweight in the regime, director of Critica Fascista, Minister of Education, Mayor of Rome, and member of the Fascist Grand Council) would say, Fascism’s personalist drift in the 1930s brought with it decisions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Fascist Italy and the Spanish Civil War
• 1 Fascist intervention in the coup d’état of 1936
• 2 Fascist Italy at war, 1937
• 3 Italy, the CTV, and politics on the National side
• 4 Identity, combat, rearguard
• 5 A European war in Spain, 1938–1939
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index