Italian Blackshirt 1935–45

Italian Blackshirt 1935–45
Author: Pier Paolo Battistelli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2013-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472806387

This book documents the experiences of the Italian armed Fascist militia, the Camicie Nere (Blackshirts), from the Italian–Ethiopian war of 1935–36, through the Spanish Civil War to the end of World War II. It explores their origins, development, recruitment, training, conditions of service, uniforms and equipment, battle experience, political and ideological motivation. The Blackshirt legions were raised under army control from 1928, and were employed in 1933 in Libya in counterinsurgency operations against the Senussi tribes; from 1935 in Italy's war against Ethiopia; and during the Spanish Civil War. Following the outbreak of World War II, the Blackshirts fought in North Africa, Greece, Croatia, on the Eastern Front and finally in Italy itself following the Allied invasion.

Italian Blackshirt 1935–45

Italian Blackshirt 1935–45
Author: Pier Paolo Battistelli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2013-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472818954

This book documents the experiences of the Italian armed Fascist militia, the Camicie Nere (Blackshirts), from the Italian–Ethiopian war of 1935–36, through the Spanish Civil War to the end of World War II. It explores their origins, development, recruitment, training, conditions of service, uniforms and equipment, battle experience, political and ideological motivation. The Blackshirt legions were raised under army control from 1928, and were employed in 1933 in Libya in counterinsurgency operations against the Senussi tribes; from 1935 in Italy's war against Ethiopia; and during the Spanish Civil War. Following the outbreak of World War II, the Blackshirts fought in North Africa, Greece, Croatia, on the Eastern Front and finally in Italy itself following the Allied invasion.

Italian Armoured & Reconnaissance Cars 1911–45

Italian Armoured & Reconnaissance Cars 1911–45
Author: Filippo Cappellano
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472824342

The first Italian armoured cars were used in the war in Libya in 1911-12 against the Ottoman Empire. With few tanks being developed, the Italians relied instead on the development of more mobile armoured cars like the Ansaldo Lancia 1 Z, during World War I, but post-war the army, focusing on the Alpine battlegrounds of Italy's northern borders, did not consider armoured cars suitable for reconnaissance duties. The experience of the Spanish Civil War would provide the much needed last push for the Italians to develop modern armoured cars. The result were the famous AB 41-43 models, which fought against the British in North Africa and Marshall Tito's forces in Yugoslavia, along with other vehicles such as the AS 36 light armoured car. Using detailed colour plates and contemporary photographs, this book examines the development of the Italian armoured car in the two world wars and the inter-war years, from the deserts of North Africa to the slopes of the Alps.

War Through Italian Eyes

War Through Italian Eyes
Author: Alexander Henry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2021-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000410099

There is a popular notion that the Italian armed forces of the Second World War were an inferior fighting force. Despite the vast numbers taken prisoner, detailed studies of the experiences of these soldiers remain relatively uncommon and the value of this group to furthering our understanding of the Italian experience of war under Fascism is also rarely acknowledged. The existence in the National Archives of hundreds of pages of transcripts of covert British surveillance of Italian POWs has made it possible to engage with their experiences and opinions in much greater depth. The euphemistically termed ‘Special Reports’ present historians with a unique insight into how all levels of Italian soldiery viewed Fascist Italy’s experience of war, 1940-1943. This book examines reactions to Italian political leadership, the progress of the war, as well as Italian soldiers’ ‘everyday’ views on sex, war, the enemy, death, food, their allies, bravery, race, and killing. These fascinating documents reveal the complexity of the outlook of these men, which persistent – and influential – national stereotypes and historiographical trends fail to acknowledge.

The Italian War on the Eastern Front, 1941–1943

The Italian War on the Eastern Front, 1941–1943
Author: Bastian Matteo Scianna
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2019-09-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030265242

The Italian Army’s participation in Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union has remained unrecognized and understudied. Bastian Matteo Scianna offers a wide-ranging, in-depth corrective. Mining Italian, German and Russian sources, he examines the history of the Italian campaign in the East between 1941 and 1943, as well as how the campaign was remembered and memorialized in the domestic and international arena during the Cold War. Linking operational military history with memory studies, this book revises our understanding of the Italian Army in the Second World War.

Italian soldier in North Africa 1941–43

Italian soldier in North Africa 1941–43
Author: Piero Crociani
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2013-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1780968566

Despite the attention paid to the Afrikakorps over the years, it was the numerically far superior forces of the Italian Army that held the line and formed the bulk of the fighting power available to the Axis powers during the War in the Desert from 1941 through to 1943. Their performance has been unfairly criticised over the years – the best units of the Italian Army were equal to those of the British and Germans – but they suffered from a lack of mobility and poor equipment that made it impossible for them to meet mobile British forces on anywhere near equal terms. Despite this, the Italian Army went through many changes through the period, with the introduction of a variety of elite units – armoured, mechanised and parachute divisions that did much to restore the fighting reputation of the Italian soldier in the desert war. Their German allies belatedly acknowledged this with the redesignation of Panzerarmee Afrika as 1st Italian Army in February 1943. This title details recruitment, organisation and experience of the Italian forces in this theatre, casting new light on a force whose fighting power and capabilities have been unfairly ignored and maligned for too long.

The Concept of Resistance in Italy

The Concept of Resistance in Italy
Author: Maria Laura Mosco
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2017-05-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1783489596

Reassesses the Italian Resistance movement, historically conceived, and explores the concept of Resistance within the contemporary cultural context from a multidisciplinary perspective.

World War II Partisan Warfare in Italy

World War II Partisan Warfare in Italy
Author: Pier Paolo Battistelli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472808959

When Italy surrendered in 1943, it sparked a resistance movement of anti-German, anti-fascist partisans. This book explores the tactics, organizational structure and equipment of the brave Italian resistance fighters. Beginning with low-level sabotage and assassinations, the groups continued to grow until spring 1944 when a remarkable, unified partisan command structure was created. Working in close co-ordination with the Allies, they received British SOE and American OSS liaison teams as well as supplies of weapons. The German response was ferocious, and in autumn 1944, as the Allied advance stalled, the SS and Italian RSI looked to eradicate the partisans once and for all. But when the Allies made their final breakthrough in the last weeks of the war the partisans rose again to exact their revenge on the retreating Wehrmacht. From an expert on Italian military history in World War II, this work provides a comprehensive guide to the men and women who fought a desperate struggle against occupation, as well as the German and Italian fascist security forces unleashed against them.

Mussolini’s Army against Greece

Mussolini’s Army against Greece
Author: Richard Carrier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-03-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429015321

This book analyses why the Italian army failed to defeat its Greek opponent between October 1940 and April 1941. It thoroughly examines the multiple forms of ineffectiveness that plagued the political leadership as well as the military organisation. Mussolini’s aggression of Greece ranks among the most neglected campaigns of the Second World War. Initiated on 28 October 1940, the offensive came to a halt less than ten days later; by mid-November, the Greek counter-offensive put the Italian armies on the defensive, and back in Albania. From then on, the fatal interaction between failing command structures, inadequate weapons and equipment, unprepared and unmotivated combatants, and terrible logistics lowered to a dangerous level the fighting power of Italian combatants. This essay proposes that compared to the North African and Russian campaigns where the Regio Esercito achieved a decent level of military effectiveness, the operation against Greece was a military fiasco. Only the courage of its soldiers and the German intervention saved the dictator’s army from complete disaster. This book would appeal to anyone interested in the history of the world war, and to those involved in the study of military effectiveness and intrigued by why armies fail.

The Addis Ababa Massacre

The Addis Ababa Massacre
Author: Ian Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190874295

In February 1937, following an abortive attack by a handful of insurgents on Mussolini's High Command in Italian-occupied Ethiopia, 'repression squads' of armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleashed on the defenseless residents of Addis Ababa. In three terror-filled days and nights of arson, murder and looting, thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were roasted alive, shot, bludgeoned, stabbed to death, or blown to pieces with hand-grenades. Meanwhile the notorious Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, infamous for his atrocities in Libya, took the opportunity to add to the carnage by eliminating the intelligentsia and nobility of the ancient Ethiopian empire in a pogrom that swept across the land. In a richly illustrated and ground-breaking work backed up by meticulous and scholarly research, Ian Campbell reconstructs and analyses one of Fascist Italy's least known atrocities, which he estimates eliminated 19-20 per cent of the capital's population. He exposes the hitherto little known cover-up conducted at the highest levels of the British government, which enabled the facts of one of the most hideous civilian massacres of all time to be concealed, and the perpetrators to walk free.