THE ITALIAN BOOK OF WAR HEROES
Nicholas Farrell warns Britons against
jumping to conclusions following the sudden invasion of Sweden by crack Italian troops
Predappio NO doubt you all had a good laugh in Britain at the news that a unit of crack Ital- ian troops due to take part in a Nato exercise `invaded' the wrong country. So did I, here in Italy. Their charter plane should have touched down in Kristiansand, Norway, last Thursday but for reasons that remain myste- rious touched down instead in Kristianstad, Sweden, hundreds of miles away. It was only when the 116 Alpini, complete with jaunty William Tell felt caps from which protrude a long black turkey feather, flounced off the plane — Italian soldiers don't march — and began to queue at passport control that they realised they were in the wrong country. Ha. Ha. Italians. Typical.
Here was yet another example of one of three things the Italian armed forces ‘have been famous for since the collapse of ,the Roman Empire. The first is comical incom- petence. The other two are: tragic cowardice and sodomy. The touchdown of the Alpini in the wrong country appeals to the yob lurking inside the average Briton who thinks our boys are the best and who is secretly proud of our famous football hooligans. Our boys are boot boys; their boys — especially Italian boys — are bum boys. That's why we won two world wars and they lost.
But then I thought, hang on a minute, this really is most unjust to the Italians. Where is the famous British sense of fair play? Italian soldiers are men, aren't they? Just like the rest of us? Same strengths. Same weaknesses. They cannot all be gay.
The trouble is, as any drinker knows, a reputation once acquired is very difficult to shake off, and the 20th century, it would seem, is littered with things which gave birth to the reputation of the Italian army.
In the first world war, for example, didn't the Italians run away from the Austro- Germans at Caporetto in October 1917? Didn't their commanding officer, no less, brand them cowards? In the second world war, the reputation of the Italians got worse. At least they had won the first world war, or at any rate been on the winning side. Now countless jokes were dreamt up by the smug British Tommy at the expense of his Wop opponent: how many gears does an Italian tank have? Answer: one — reverse. Then there is the story of the German offi- cer who said to the British officer who had captured him: 'You know, the trouble is you have the Americans; we have the Italians.'
There were countless tales, too, which mixed fact and fiction. The Italian soldier's boots, for example, it was said, were made of synthetic material which melted in the snow, and his rifle dated, would you believe it, from 1891. There were also facts that seemed stranger than fiction. For example, in the summer of 1940 during the brief fighting in the Alps against the French, 2,100 Italian soldiers somehow managed to get frostbite.
Hitler, who swiftly smelt a rat when he had to send German troops to bale out Mussolini, after his disastrous invasion of Greece inlate 1940, came to regard the Ital- ian army as a hindrance. He kept telling Mussolini not to send any more troops despite the Duce's desperation to do so. As for those Italian troops who did make it to the battlefield, the German attitude to them is summed up by the advice issued by Fiihrer headquarters to German liaison offi- cers on the Russian Front quoted in Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad:
You should treat them politely, and a politi- cal and psychological understanding is neces- sary.... The climate and environment in
Italy make an Italian soldier different from a German soldier. Italians tire more easily on
the one hand, and on the other they are more exuberant. You should not be superior towards our Italian allies.... Don't call them rude names, and don't be sharp with them,
Beevor comments: 'Understanding did lit- tle to change the Italians' manifest lack of enthusiasm for the war. A sergeant, when asked by a Soviet interpreter why his battal- ion surrendered without a shot, replied with sound civilian logic: "We did not fire back because we thought it would be a mistake."' Since the second world war, the Italian armed forces have not seen much action. It was not until the Gulf War that they fought again, though they did not commit ground troops. The fighting was left to the Italian all force. Alas, the air force did not cover itself in glory. On its very first mission it lost a Tornado. The two crew were captured and one was paraded for the television cameras. Cynics nodded knowingly and said: here we go again. In last year's bombing of Serbia, the Italian government insisted that its all force would stick to patrols. As it turned out, the government did secretly authorise bomb- ing missions, and the Italians acquitted themselves well. Not well enough, however, to prevent the snorts of derision that greeted news of the Alpini invasion of Sweden. But the truth about the Italian armed forces is very different. They were of course no more cowardly than any other soldiers. At Caporetto, they were wise to run away, and King Vittorio Emanuele III sacked the commander who branded them cowards. He had tried to blame his men for the catastro- phe — modern Italy's worst — but the blame was his. The rump of the Italian army soon rallied, on the river Piave and within a year bounced back to trounce the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto. In all, 709,000 Italian soldiers died in the first world war or later from disease and wounds sustained on the battlefield.
Arguably, morale is the most important factor in war. In the second world war the heart of the average Italian soldier was not really in the fight. Like Mussolini, he did not care for Hitler or the Germans at all yet thanks to Mussolini's megalomania he found himself allied to Germany. Further- more, the Italian soldier was bacIlY equipped and badly led, Nowhere was this bad leadership more apparent than when the King and Marshal Badoglio overthrew., Mussolini in the summer of 1943 an signed an armistice with the Allies: theY gave no orders to Italian troops apart from a vague one to 'resist the enemy'. But who, now, was the enemy? The King and Badoglio then promptly fled Rorne for the safety of Brindisi in the south, leaving the Italian armed forces to work out the answer for themselves with catastrophic consequences. Whenever the Italian armed forces were well-equipped and well-led they performer well, as when they defeated the British . North Africa at Bir el Gobi in November 1941 or when commanded by Rommel they routed the British at Tobruk in the early summer of 1942. By the way, didn't the British run awaY ts from Dunkirk 60 years ago? But what count in life is reputation, not the truth.
Previous page
