How Italy cost Germany the Second World War
Without Italy as an ally, Nazi Germany might have won the Second World War.
Common wisdom suggests that two or more countries entering into an alliance will benefit from pooling their assets. This logic has underpinned most alliances throughout history. Yet, in its partnership with Fascist Italy, the Nazi war effort gained negligible benefits while suffering extensive harm. This sorry saga stands as a warning bell against states rushing unthinkingly into alliances of questionable benefit and possible harm.
The detrimental impact of the Nazi-Fascist alliance first showed itself during the German invasion on France in the summer of 1940. Despite Italy being unready for war, Mussolini decided to attack France from the south to avoid missing out on sharing the spoils of victory. This contribution rapidly became a disaster: advancing through freezing conditions over the Alps, the Italian assault was quickly repulsed. The death toll was humiliatingly lopsided: 631 Italians versus just 37 French.
Italian participation in the invasion afforded no advantage for the Germans, who had already effectively secured victory through their Blitzkrieg to the north. The attack did, however, provide the Allies with significant psychological and political benefits. For the French, their successful resistance against Italy helped foster the belief that they were not entirely helpless against the Axis, which eventually contributed to the resistance movement in France. For the British, it created a sense of hope as they desperately ferried their troops back from Dunkirk across the English Channel. Most importantly, it contributed to the growing solidarity between the Americans and the Allies, which would soon lead to the lend-lease program. Indeed, on the day of the Italian invasion, President Roosevelt caustically declared that “the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor” and proclaimed that the American people “send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valor their battle for freedom.” With his speech, as Time Magazine noted, “the U.S. had taken sides. Ended was the myth of U.S. neutrality.”
Next, in September and October 1940, Mussolini began campaigns against the British in North Africa and the Greeks in their homeland respectively. Despite being massively numerically superior, the Italians were pushed back and routed in both theaters. Moreover, the British crippled the Italian fleet, disabling three battleships, two cruisers, and three auxiliary vessels, at the cost of just two planes. Following this bruising, the Italian Navy was left in ruin and would never again command sufficient presence or courage to challenge British naval power in the Mediterranean. The British also succeeded in seizing Crete and several Aegean islands.
Italy’s debacles in North Africa and Greece had numerous deleterious consequences for Germany. First, it provided a badly needed morale boost for the beleaguered British, at a time when Hitler was hoping that the magnitude of his victories in France, along with a campaign of strategic bombing, would induce the British population to give up hope and sue for peace. Second, it secured the Suez Canal for mostly unfettered shipping for the Allies for the remainder of the war. Had Italy remained neutral but sympathetic to the Germans, the weakness of their fleet would have gone unexposed and its presence in the Mediterranean would have restricted the ability of the Allies to operate freely through these waters. Third, it alarmed General Franco in Spain and increased his reluctance towards entering the war on the Axis side. This hamstrung Hitler’s plan of invading Gibraltar in order to shut off British access to the Mediterranean through the straits. Finally, it helped to change the narrative in America from being that Britain’s defeat was all but inevitable to Britain being a valiant underdog who was holding on against seemingly insurmountable odds. This particularly appealed to the American people, whose founding revolutionary war had also involved an underdog fighting courageously against a seemingly stronger foe.
In order to bail Italy out, Hitler made the fateful decision in regards to both Greece and North Africa to send German forces to assist his ally (with subjugation of the Balkans being considered necessary prior to assisting the Italians in Greece). These decisions were motivated by Hitler’s personal affection for Mussolini; his desire to overturn the blow to Axis morale inflicted by Italy’s abortive campaigns; and a fear that if the debacles were not reversed then the Allies could eventually use the Mediterranean as the soft underbelly from which to attack Germany. Hitler’s interventions in both theatres proved extremely costly for his war efforts in other theatres.
In North Africa, the conflict tied up an ever-growing number of Germans – rising to 130,000 men by 1943 – including some of the Wehrmacht’s most elite panzer forces. It also ate up substantial amounts of food, fuel, senior officers (particularly the strategic geniuses of Rommel and Kesselring, who were deployed in the southern Mediterranean for much of the war), air power, and naval forces. These were all desperately needed elsewhere. Nor were any strategic gains yielded from these efforts, as the Germans made little headway and were ultimately thrown out of North Africa in 1943.
The campaigns into Greece and the Balkans were ostensibly won quite quickly, but the time lost conquering these countries delayed Hitler’s invasion of the USSR by over a month. This delay left the Wehrmacht struggling for decisive portions of its opening campaign into Russia through rainy autumn conditions that slowed down its forces. They were unable to even begin Operation Typhoon – their big push to capture Moscow – until late November 1941, by which time freezing temperatures were bringing their tanks and planes to a standstill and causing hardship and death for thousands of German soldiers. Moreover, while the German victories in Greece and the Balkans were stunning – including an audacious airborne conquest of Crete – the Germans still suffered tens of thousands of casualties and the destruction of critical tanks and aircraft. These losses were so great that Hitler refused to let paratroopers be used as anything other than ground troops ever again. Those soldiers who were redeployed to the Russian offensive after the campaign were tired and possessed poorly maintained equipment. Finally, soon after the German victory, resistance in the Balkans– especially in Yugoslavia – flared into life. Fending off this resistance became increasingly costly, so that by the end of the war roughly 100,000 German soldiers needed to be stationed in the Balkans for counter-guerrilla operations. These men could have been readily used on other fronts.
The forces tied up to support Italy in Greece and North Africa could have proved instrumental at numerous junctures of the war. One example was the Battle of Smolensk in 1941, during which the Germans performed a gigantic encirclement of three Soviet armies. At a critical moment in the battle, Field Marshall Kesselring (who was deployed in Russia before being sent to the Mediterranean) saw that an opening existed, through which some of the Russian forces could flee. He tried to plug the gap with the Luftwaffe but failed and over 100,000 Soviet soldiers escaped. Kesselring subsequently opined that his manoeuvre would have been successful if only the elite XI Airborne Corps had been available, but noted sadly that it was still recovering following Crete. The absence of additional forces became significant again during Operation Typhoon, where German forces made it to within 12 miles of Moscow, so close that “German officers could see the Kremlin buildings through their field glasses”, but just could not close the final distance. Had Moscow been captured, it would have been crippling to the Russians, as it served as the administrative capital, railway hub, and symbolic heart of the country, as well as being a major production center in its own right. The Russians would likely have fought on, but the loss would have been severely damaging.
The War in the Atlantic, during which the Germans attempted to blockade Britain via an intensive submarine campaign, also suffered. In his efforts to stymy the British and Americans in North Africa, Hitler diverted a growing number of U-boats from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean – sending 81 U boats by 1944, 19 of which were sunk or damaged during transit. This unquestionably helped to ease the pressure on Britain in receiving supplies from America and its own empire.
Italian forces again hurt the German war effort during the invasion of Russia itself. Despite ultimately contributing 700,000 men to the campaign, these forces suffered from a “lack of tanks, antiquated weapons [and a] lack of motor vehicles”. They also routinely ran away, to the point that the German cinematograph units took to filming the Italians as they fled. Worse still, there were times when the Italians were depended upon to hold critical positions (which would otherwise have been manned by more reliable German forces) that cost the war effort dearly when they were abandoned. In the Winter of 1942, for example, the entire Italian front on the River Don dissolved against a Russian offensive, allowing the German forces in Stalingrad to be encircled.
In July 1943, Hitler’s nightmare came true when, following the surrender of the remaining Axis forces in Tunisia two months earlier, the Allies invaded Italy. The Italian people – tired of war and frightened by the advancing forces – overthrew Mussolini in a coup and then unconditionally surrendered two months later. Conscious of the threat that Allied conquest of Italy would pose, Hitler once again felt compelled to intervene. The Germans seized most of the country, creating a new front in the war against the Allies.
The fallout from the events in Italy was far-reaching. First, it raised the risk of contagion amongst Germany’s other satellites, which induced Hitler to reinforce the number of German forces near and inside all the countries allied to Germany for fear that their populations might copy Italy and launch their own internal coups. This deprived the Germans of forces that they desperately needed on other fronts. Second, the troops that Hitler used to seize and then fortify Italy took troops away from other areas, particularly in the East. The Battle of Kursk in 1943 was, for example, adversely affected when Hitler withdrew the elite Second Panzer Corps from the battle and sent one of its divisions to Sicily to shore up the rapidly disintegrating Italian forces there. Similarly, German efforts to contest the battle for Normandy were hindered when Hitler withdrew eight divisions from it to reinforce the Italian front.
Throughout the war then, the Italian alliance impaired the German war effort. Most notably, had the Germans not been compelled to bail Mussolini out in North Africa and the Balkans, the Germans could have invaded Russia earlier, with a larger and fresher force. This could have facilitated far greater inroads being made into Russia and even brought about the fall of Moscow. Such an outcome could have transformed the outcome of the war. Hitler himself (although a problematic source for numerous reasons) summed it up acerbically in his Final Testament:
Ironically then, the free world today owes much to Mussolini for his incompetent and counterproductive contributions during World War Two. But there is a broader lesson to be drawn here – the importance of choosing allies wisely and avoiding falling into the trap of assuming that the fruits of strategic partnerships will always be positive.
