A fascist warfare? Italian fascism and war experience in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39)

Introduction: The fascist warfare

‘In alto il pugnale’, with the dagger raised, as is depicted in so many photographs. The fascist salute accompanied by a steel blade was the symbol of the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (CTV), the expeditionary corps composed of over 78,000 Italians sent by Mussolini to fight in the Spanish Civil War. ² According to the CTV anthem, the corps was created to liberate Spain and to inaugurate a new history there, to bring a smile back to the faces of a people oppressed by ‘the Reds’, and to build a fascist Europe. Much of the historiography on international intervention in Spain – whether written from diplomatic, military, geostrategic or memorialist perspectives – has either celebrated Mussolini’s support for Franco in a completely acritical way, or relegated this support to a position of complete insignificance. This insignificance has been defined as threefold: geostrategic, military and political. In geostrategic terms, it has been observed that the CTV was unable to control the Western Mediterranean. Militarily, historians have suggested that the force never recovered true prominence after the much-discussed defeat at Guadalajara in March 1937. ³ In political terms, most historians have underlined the low levels of fascist devotion among the CTV’s combatants and the Duce’s supposed failure to implant fascism in Spain. ⁴ Apart from the classic works by Coverdale, Saz, Heiberg or – more recently – Viñas, the CTV has rarely been taken seriously by historians of the Spanish Civil War. On the few occasions where its historical importance has been acknowledged, its relevance has been confined to the period between July 1936 and March 1937: between the sending of the Savoia airplanes and the battle of Guadalajara.

This re-evaluation of Mussolini’s war in Spain is based on the premise that the Italian fascist intervention which took place from 27 July 1936 up to the end of the Civil War was far from inconsequential. ⁵ In fact, it played a decisive role in the evolution and outcome of the conflict. The predominantly political and diplomatic historiography of Italian involvement in the Civil War has contributed substantially to our knowledge of Italian motivations from the perspective of international geostrategic considerations and Italian foreign policy. However, it has also has tended to overlook the development of the intervention itself, and to ignore its military and political dimensions. As this article will demonstrate, these military and political aspects provide us with the most important means of understanding fascist participation in the Spanish Civil War.

The massive Italian intervention in Spain, which must be understood in the broader context of supremacist interventionism in Europe, followed the failure of the Spanish military Rebels’ attempt to seize power through a coup d’état in July 1936. ⁶ Some weeks before the coup took place, the Rebels were already receiving support from the fascist powers. The coup was prepared through a long series of contacts between its leaders and the Italian government. These preparations included the signing of contracts for the purchase of large quantities of weapons. ⁷ Driven by fascist anti-communism and opposition to the Spanish Popular Front, combined with objectives of geostrategic control of the Mediterranean, the construction of a fascist empire and the fascistization of Spain, in 1936 Mussolini launched a geostrategic, diplomatic, military and political intervention outside Italy, whose characteristics clearly fit within the parameters established by Alan Kramer in his definition of fascist warfare. ⁸ This specific way of waging war involved rapid movements, or guerra celere, aggression veiled in voluntarist, positive, protective and transformative rhetoric, fascination with aerial warfare as a clean means of transforming the enemy rearguard, and the convergence of weapons and ideas in a political fascistization that ran parallel to military activity. This was possibly the most fascist of Mussolini’s wars up to that point: Ciano wrote on 22 February 1939 that those who had laughed so heartily at the Italian intervention in Spain would one day understand that the true foundations of the Mediterranean Empire of Rome had been laid on the banks of the Ebro River, in Barcelona and in Malaga. ⁹

This fascist warfare was orchestrated in Spain through a series of common experiences such as enlisting, combat, death, discipline, life in the rearguard and responsibility for violent practices. Rather than a traditional examination of military tactics, two other dimensions of the Italian war in Spain will be analysed here: personal combat experiences and the experience of violence, including the bombing of civilian populations. In order to carry out this analysis, this study uses official and personal sources. These sources, laden as they often are with metaphor, hyperbole and politically partial representations, must be read and used with caution. Nevertheless, they provide us with a unique and immensely valuable window into Italian troops’ experiences of combat, death and fascist warfare from below.

Volunteers for civilization, soldiers of the new Europe

Memorial and official sources published in Italy on actions in Spain depict the Spanish Civil War as a cycle of sinfulness, sin and redemption followed by resurrection and the triumph of truth, light and goodness. Other common elements include the portrayal of Spain – especially the Republican side – as dirty, diseased, backward and uneducated. The fascist evangelization mission would bring cleansing, light, hope and victory. ¹⁰ Enthusiasm, perfection, beauty and voluntarism are the words most frequently repeated in Italian sources to describe the volunteers in Spain, along with other words pertaining to the semantic realm of heroism, bravery and courage. However, much of the historiography on this subject has dismissed these narrations as insincere, propagandistic or entirely false, opting instead for lines of research based on the compulsory nature of the mobilization, the lack of true fascist sentiment in the CTV or its overall political irrelevance. Indeed, Gabriele Ranzato has noted that there exist very few personal sources which are unaffected by the filters of fascist propaganda, at least in relation to the overall group of Italian combatants in Spain. ¹¹ Crucially, beneath the surface of discussions on the compulsory versus voluntary nature of the Italian presence in Spain lie debates regarding the success or failure of fascism as an alternative form of social organization.

Recruitment for the Spanish conflict was based on a mixture of Blackshirt volunteers, the Army, and ‘forced volunteers’. Leaving aside the pilots and technicians of the summer of 1936, the first Italian combatants arrived in Cadiz and Vigo in September 1936. They were incorporated into the Tercio de Extranjeros, or foreigners’ unit. According to Emilio Faldella, these volunteers ‘flooded in with enthusiasm’, with ‘desire for combat’, determined to create ‘the Italian volunteer tradition of victory and glory as soon as possible on Spanish territory’. ¹² Though there were as many motives and real experiences as there were combatants, it is clear that they share certain common elements. Davide Lajolo, a lieutenant in the Mussolini’s regular army who had requested a post in Africa, was called up at the same time as a companion in the Italian fascist militia, the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale or MVSN. Their officers had received a pamphlet inviting them to join up to participate in ‘combatting Bolshevism’. ¹³ Eighteen-year-old Rodoldo de Neri considered the endeavour as something akin to ‘the Spanish Reconquista’; the priest Leone Pangallo saw it as a fight ‘against vile Bolshevism’; Ubaldo Procacci declared he had no wealth, but only his youth to offer. ¹⁴

These men’s profiles are similar to those of the other early volunteers: the 3,364 men (less than 5% of the total of 78,000) who enlisted in the Foreign Legion in the summer of 1936. ¹⁵ Others included adventurers such as 19-year-old Giuseppe Cordedda, without strong nationalist feelings, who set out for ‘unknown places’ in a ‘spirit of adventure’ and with no interest in politics or even the double pay he would receive. ‘I dreamed of new places, so many battles, acts of heroism and glory’. ¹⁶ Some left for – and even returned from – a ‘tourist’s war’. ¹⁷ Some enlisted entirely for work-related reasons, thinking they would be sent as volunteer workers to Ethiopia or to participate in the reconstruction of Spain. ¹⁸ Others even expected to join agricultural projects, though such plans were undone by the Second World War. As Franco himself confirmed in a conversation with Ambassador Viola in May 1939, after they dined together in Leon in honour of the Condor Legion, in ‘Spain in about two years there will be a dearth of reconstruction workers and a need for labourers in agricultural and industrial intensification’. The plan was to make two million farmable hectares of land available to Italian labourers. ¹⁹ Subsequently, Lajolo indicated that the Italians should also be compensated for their courage and acceptance of the risk of death. In a private communication between an officer and the Count of Turin, which was intercepted by the secret services, the first asked: ‘and who wants to go and get killed for a nation that is not his own?’. ²⁰

Though economic determinism is a plausible explanation in some cases, it should never be interpreted as the only one. ²¹ The image of a CTV with no fascist identity which consisted of poor elderly volunteers, young adventurers and ambitious officers simply is not substantiated by primary sources. The role of fascist identity was far from irrelevant. The vociferous, hard-core Blackshirts fascists from the Milizia Volontaria were the majority within the CTV at the beginning of the intervention, and during its most important moments: Malaga, Guadalajara, Bermeo and Santander. For Mario Berti, CTV Commander-in-Chief in 1938, ‘the pride of the volunteer combatants was to give themselves fully to the highest ideal of Italian-ness and fascism’; this was ‘their great motivation for taking up arms.’ Lodoli wrote in 1939 that he had offered his 20-year-old body to fascism with only one idea: ‘sacrifice, mission, crusade’. ²² Several censored letters deposited in archives relate one soldier’s enthusiasm regarding this ‘twenty-day hell of sublime beauty’ in reference to Guadalajara: an experience of death, pain and solitude that he felt should be tasted by ‘every youth in the new Italy’. ²³

Evidently, there was an enormous difference between what was happening in Republican Spain and what was actually known about it, especially in a context of scarce information and inordinate political manipulation in Italy. ²⁴ Many legionnaires based their decision to go to fight in Spain on distorted, propagandistic information. Indeed, stereotypes and biased news reports regarding anti-clericalism, killings of priests and sacrophobic violence carried immense qualitative weight in motivating the first wave of enlistments. Echoes of religious persecution in revolutionary Spain had helped to magnify what Giulio Castelli described – in 1951’s La Chiesa e il fascismo (a somewhat conditioned interpretation written six years after the end of fascism) – as the ‘generous, heroic participation of Italian volunteers’ in the fight ‘against barbarism and atrocities of international atheistic communism in all its Bolshevik extremism and terrorism’. According to Dario Ferri (a pseudonym given by the person who interviewed him, who did not have permission to reveal the individual’s real identity), the volunteers went into combat as the ‘new legionnaires of Christ’. ²⁵ ‘We volunteers’, they would say, ‘are the true crusaders of the fascist idea that will triumph with our infallible victory over all Spain, imposing on our enemies the human and divine truth it brings with it’. These fascist Italians were on a sacred crusade ‘for the homeland and for Christ’ against atheistic terrorism and Bolshevik barbarism. ²⁶

Edgardo Sogno’s perspectives on the war were later collected in a small volume Due fronti, where he recalls his decision in 1938, at the age of 22, to fight for the victory of the ‘national’ Spain and ‘eject the communists from within Europe’. ²⁷ The violent ‘revolution’ of the war facilitated a clash between ‘Bolshevik materialism and Roman Catholic spiritualism’; ²⁸ only a poor Italian or a bad fascist would not have followed the ‘so, so many Italians who spontaneously go there, where the Ideal [sic] calls them’. ²⁹ The section of the book La Grande Proletaria attributed to Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi (‘Count Rossi’) is clearly plagiarized from the Spanish falangist Agustín de Foxá, and as such repeats many classic images of Red terror and odious characterizations of the enemy. Nevertheless, its rhetoric provides some enlightening insights into Italian fascist anti-revolutionary perceptions. ‘Count Rossi’ depicts a Spain of ‘azano [sic, referring to Azaña] and quirosa’ [sic, referring to Casares Quiroga]’ which has been turned into ‘a province of the Socialist Homeland’, a ‘branch office’ of the Soviet Union in Europe. This ‘forward base’ is full of loveless women with flaccid bellies and rickety, hunchbacked men, alcoholics reeking of blood, people who have never set foot in a museum and satanic beings with ferocious smiles, driven by diabolical obsession. ³⁰

Mussolini himself wrote in the Proceedings of the Grand Council of Fascism that in Spain for the first time – and perhaps the last – the Blackshirts had faced Bolshevik forces on the international stage in the first confrontation between two revolutions: the reactionary one of the nineteenth-century, and the twentieth-century fascist one. ³¹ Later on, another book in honour of the legionnaires described them as ‘Volunteers for Civilization, defenders of human and divine law, soldiers of the new Europe’ who would be endowed with the ‘supreme and eternal principle’ of faith, progress, peace, concord, exaltation of life, for honouring women and defending children, for opposing the ‘spasmodic hordes’, the ‘barbarians’, the ‘unleashed human beasts’ and their obsession with death, massacre and savagery. ³²

This narrative would permeate all Italian fascist cultural, literary, scientific and technical fields just as European Red Terror literature had. General Sandro Piazzoni recalled how the national anthem played as the volunteers were shipped off to Spain to face ‘sacrifice and death for the triumph of fascism over Bolshevism and of social order over crazed criminal barbarism’. ³³ This offensive and defensive anti-communism would protect fascist identity: volunteers would not be shedding their blood under a foreign flag, but ‘for the salvation of a common civilization’ under the fascist flag, as only the Duce understood. ‘Anti-fascists’ included all the enemy forces, and fascism was what ‘democratic Bolshevism’ strove to bury. To some, ‘so much Italian blood sacrificed’ for the cause was crucial for Spain but not always considered beneficial for Italy. However, this was not mere generosity and sacrifice. These aristocrats, imbued with warrior courage, would fight to fulfil the ‘political and spiritual objectives of the Italian Nation [sic]’. ³⁴ ‘It was right’, said Italian National Volunteer Commander Eugenio Coselschi in the commemorative volume Legionari di Roma, that in ‘Mediterranean Spain one fought and won in the name of Rome’. To defend the Mediterranean was to defend ‘the tradition and unity of the entire European continent’ and to stop ‘Soviet leprosy’, that ‘voracious Empire’ from corroding its shores. ³⁵

The same metaphors of corruption, dirtiness and darkness appear in many other texts dedicated to exalting the heroism of the legionnaires. These carriers of light, evangelizers of the fascist idea, fought against the Bolshevism that had ‘begun’ the war and the democracies that had supported the Madrid government long before the first fascist support arrived, according to Enrico Martini. For him, faith drove the desire for combat: the noble ideal of maintaining Latin civilization in Spain. Legionnaires were guided ‘by the light of an idea that is the bloodline of fascism, the new crusaders were the Italo-Roman lineage’ and Arian carriers of faith that would renew the world under the emblem of the Littorio. ³⁶ This emblem was of central importance to legionnaire Bruno Salvatore, who died as a lieutenant of the First Frecce Nere Regiment in December 1938. In January of the previous year, he wrote home from aboard the Sardegna, ‘navigating in our sea’ towards Spain, giving thanks for the opportunity to demonstrate through victory that for him Italy was more than a word, as were peace and victory: with peace would come the ‘greatness, liberty, unity of this country and of our people’ and from it would emanate the ‘victory of liberating and civilizing fascism over the barbarianism of Masonry and communism’. ³⁷

Civilizers against barbarianism, evangelizers against the dark practices, liberators against oppression. ‘They do not like us’, wrote Franco Bonezzi in his diary: ‘the Reds describe us as thieves who have come to Spain to plunder its riches and take its lands’; but ‘noi ce ne freghiamo’ (we do not care). One day, everyone would understand why they had come to ‘this land martyrized by the Red barbarians’. ³⁸ Renzo Lodoli wrote later that they knew they would be treated as misled or self-promoting mercenaries, legionnaires, adventurers or even conscripts; ‘but they did not see our faces, or perhaps they did not want to’. These were not the faces of the war’s bureaucrats or gas suppliers, but of those who carried the dagger, the most beautiful part of the war. No conflict between faith and obedience clouded these faces, though many were rewarded for their sacrifice with a shovelful of dirt and a cross of wood. ³⁹ Many volunteers, at least those who wrote and published their memoires, felt they were heirs to a long ancestral tradition: from the ‘volunteers of the Black Bands of Giovanni and Attendolo Sforza, the victorious sailors of Venice and Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi’, to the soldiers of the ‘Savoy, the Visconti, the Gonzaga, the Scaligeri’, to the men who with Napoleon had ‘reached the heart of Russia victoriously while the Russians had never reached the heart of Italy and never will’. ⁴⁰

The redefinition of the past proposed by fascism established the CTV as one more link in the long chain of the Italian tradition of volunteering for just causes, in defence of the nation or of European civilization. The instructions received were to ‘shed your blood unconditionally for the Homeland’, for from this the ‘legionnaires of the DUCE extract righteousness and force’ to achieve the victory that would usher in the New Order. ⁴¹ Thus, Italy would join the sacred union of fascism, and the crusade to defend European civilization against the scum of Europe. ⁴²

Per vincere aggredire: CTV’s combat experiences

Italian fighters, though they were outnumbered ‘four to one’ by enemy volunteers, would take on the enemies of Europe, of fascism and of Spain: a nation with ‘simplistic and fickle’ people who were being subjected to ‘persecution, their most sacred sentiments violated’. ⁴³ Accordingly, the abject, criminal, merciless Reds were ‘humanity’s most despicable people’, renegades of ‘the most sacred, the Homeland’, sold out to ‘the foreigner’, ‘mercenaries of the Soviet, of Masonry and other putrid dark international organizations’. Vittorio Ceccherelli explained to his girlfriend that when such cowards ‘outnumber us ten to six, they all throw themselves’ into combat; yet when they were outnumbered five to one by the Italians, ‘just one of our men can fight alone and bravely with no help from anyone’. ⁴⁴ Cowards like these had no honour, and the legionnaires would ‘cleanse Spain of this putrefaction’, ‘exterminate’ the delinquents, the deserters, the ‘assassins of the Homeland and Civilization’. ⁴⁵ This was a matter of faith and right was on their side. As the Frecce Nere hymn declared: ‘the first enemy out front / we will crush his head mercilessly’.

Twenty years earlier this religious, fascist faith had led Francesco Odetti to fight in Tripoli, then in the bloody trenches of Carso, in Fiume, in the March on Rome, in Ethiopia and finally in ‘this extreme fringe of European land to fulfil my duty as an Italian and a fascist’. ⁴⁶ For Lodoli, it was also what made it possible for a legionnaire to live for months ‘only for the crusade. Someone called him crazy and accused him of being an adventurer. Se ne fregò (he did not care)’. ⁴⁷ Dario Ferri, a proud fascist – albeit one who hid behind a pseudonym – saw all the legionnaires as ‘inspired by a single faith’, which many like him carried from Africa and Spain to the Eastern Front in 1941 and to the Republic of Saló. ⁴⁸ Such was the faith of Davide Lajolo, who felt there was a crucifix between his fingers, the nails of a Christ who suffered to save the world. He saw the Italians who had fallen in the battle of Guadalajara as part of the same sacrifice. ⁴⁹ This faith, according to Luigi Mosca, fed a victory that began in Spain and lifted its wings to cross the Apennine Mountains, flying over the Mediterranean, soaring over the imperial causeways to the ocean: The Duce had ‘conceived the New Europe long ago and the war in Spain marks the beginning of this unavoidable reality’ – a reality that would lead to the reconstruction of a Europe based on justice and equality among peoples. ⁵⁰

This ardent faith in the Duce, and the strong emphasis placed on Mussolini’s religious dimensions, echoed most resoundingly in imperial reification and fascist war, in the sense that being fascist elevated all individuals to the level of supreme communion with ‘the hero’, Mussolini. Such was the faith of the fascist volunteer, who embodied the ancient legions of Caesar. On Armed Forces Day in May 1939, the pamphlet Volontari dell’Esercito nella guerra di Spagna was published with a cover picture – recognizable throughout the Christian world – of Saint George killing the dragon. It exalted the ‘heroic tradition of volunteers, a magnificently recurrent flame in our political and military history’ that burned ‘in all the battlefields of Europe and beyond, anywhere that people fought for the victory of a great idea’. The flame of this tradition had now been reignited on Spanish soil, where ‘the old and the very young, citizens of all categories, castes and conditions’ united by a single creed, (reportedly) responded with one voice.

There is no shortage of testimonies, which describe CTV combat experiences. These accounts, written by journalists, observers and field nurses or doctors, are filled with stark – and strongly propagandistic – tales of courage and bravery. Alfonso Pellicciari, a legionnaire who became disabled during the war, described how there was such disregard for danger, such decisiveness and speed, that a large percentage of casualties involved injuries to the lower limbs. Due to their legendary fearlessness, enemy combatants assumed that the CTV soldiers were wearing armour and tried to shoot them in the legs by aiming just above the ground. ⁵¹ Annibale Bergonzoli wrote that the modest heroes of the Littorio Division went smiling into combat and fell smiling into the arms of death, as though in a lover’s embrace, proud of the victories achieved. ⁵² In his own words, glory never came without sacrifice and martyrdom. The general himself – who was nicknamed ‘electric beard’ – could always be found at the forefront of the battle – between danger and glory – where he was eventually injured. ⁵³ In his exalted narratives, Lodoli represents the reckless abandon of the legionnaires more clearly than any other writer. He maintains that the legionaries considered trench warfare, defensive waiting and the war of positions as antithetical to their collective character. Indeed, they hated such forms of combat and saw them as a trap, which would undermine their spirits. CTV fighters imagined themselves as ‘battering rams’ designed for assault tactics. They considered muskets, machine guns and mortars as minor weapons: the real weapon was the bomb. ⁵⁴

These memoires paint sugar-coated or biased pictures of the wartime reality; fear, cowardice, lice, nits, vermin, cruelty towards living enemies or viciousness towards their corpses are never present. Aldo Santamaria constructed his account of the geography of the war by presenting the testimonies of brave CTV members who believed that they belonged to the only army capable of annihilating the bloody bandit enemy. Testimonies tell of the heroic Second Lieutenant Federico Padovani, who fell fighting against the Basque battalions in the north – ‘ferocious Reds’ who sought to force the Italians into retreat. The testimonies also describe the experiences of tank soldier Renato Zanardo, who launched himself against the enemy in the midst of an ‘indescribable hurricane of fire’ in order to keep the ‘Reds’ from blowing up a bridge. Zanardo then refused to be sent to the infirmary to have his hand amputated until the enemy had retreated. The testimonies overflow with patriotic obedience, national grandeur and modest heroism such as that of Private Mario Donda, who when praised responded that he had only done his duty. Legionnaire Ferrara Guiseppe Lorenzi wrote to his mother that she should be proud to be ‘an Italian mamma, just as I am proud to be here among so many young people, fighting for a just and holy cause’. He wrote to his ex-combatant father that now it was the son’s turn to represent ‘our great and beautiful Mother Italy’. These would be the last words he wrote before his death. ⁵⁵

Heroism, fearlessness, arditismo (Italian temerity). Dario Ferri (a pseudonym) described the enormous amount of nerve that was required to implement a combat tactic unique to Italian assault battalions: first they threw grenades from positions close to the target and then immediately fought body to body with pistols or knives against shell-shocked enemies. ⁵⁶ According to their General-in-Chief, the Frecce Nere motto per vincere aggredire (‘Victory by Assault’) expressed ‘our tactical doctrine, derived from our fascist spirit, forged in the strong foundations of the national war and the radiant days of the March on Rome and our rebirth’. ⁵⁷ This fascist conception of war was born of bravery, invincibility, faith and exalted patriotism. According to Lodoli, there was no fear, only pride – as well as a strange sense of happiness – among fighters ‘drunk on every passing moment, happy to suffer’. ⁵⁸ Major Luigi Mosca lost a leg to a bomb in Trijueque; after requesting amputation without anaesthetic so he would feel the saw in his body, he only lamented the torment of ‘having had to abandon the battlefield’. ⁵⁹

Alma Giola, a volunteer Red Cross nurse, corroborated this temerity. Letters to relatives from soldiers in the Gradisca and Aquileia hospital ships were obviously re-written and quite possibly modified (or even invented) in order to give the legionnaires a ‘heroic, glorious story’. Twenty-two-year-old fascist Eugenio Pacitto was proud finally to become a ‘true legionnaire’ by having shed his blood for Nationalist Spain. Bloody shrapnel became a ‘universal relic of pure Italian blood’, which was prized above ‘any gold’. When Lieutenant Cassandra of Rome was injured by an explosive bullet in a clash with greater numbers of ‘Reds’, he exclaimed upon the amputation of his right arm that ‘I still have the left to carry on with’. At 25, Ugo Diappi from Milan – who had volunteered in Africa before Spain – was injured in both legs. He was more wounded in spirit than in the flesh, as he lamented having to interrupt his fight against the ‘Bolshevik criminal hordes’ and counted the days until his return to the front where ‘one fights, one suffers, one falls in the name of God, but always victorious’. Sicilian Giovanni Pizzurro actually escaped from hospital so he could return to battle. Another Sicilian, Salvatore Ciluppo, was considered ‘a perfect fascist full of enthusiasm in the fight against brutal communism’. His compatriot Seleni, a gunner from Ragusa, lost both legs in an ‘action of superhuman heroism’ but felt the pain of not being able to ‘return to the front to avenge my fallen comrades’ more acutely than that of mutilation. ⁶⁰ One report sent to Mussolini described a legionnaire with a fatal injury, whose feet had also frozen and whose final request was for pencil and paper to write: ‘long live the Duce’. ⁶¹

Clearly, descriptions of CTV combat experiences in war and post-war publications rather brazenly sought to bury, under tonnes of faith and blood, the March 1937 fiasco of Guadalajara and the nickname of ‘cowards’ conferred on the CTV by enemies and allies alike. Wartime jokes gave the CTV initials new meanings, such as ‘Cuando Te Vas’ (when you leave) or ‘Corren Tutto Veloce’ (retreating at full speed). Witty verses were also crafted in their honour: ‘Guadalajara is not Abyssinia / here the Red bombs actually explode’, or ‘Fewer trucks and more balls / shameless Bergonzoli / General of many defeats / to take Trijueque / with the tykes you bring / you need more than firing squads / you have to come with balls’. ⁶² Captain Federico Garofoli observed that tension between the Rebels and the Italians had been mounting since the victory at Malaga, which the latter group had described – in exaggerated terms – as something the Spanish troops would never have achieved without them. In reality – and judging by the warnings regarding insufficient training that the CTV General Staff had been issuing since January 1937 ⁶³ – the victory in Andalucía had been little more than a treacherous mirage, a dream which had been shattered abruptly by the nightmare of Guadalajara.

Conclusion

The CTV’s history in Spain began with military and diplomatic support for the Rebels and evolved to transform the force into another belligerent power in a foreign land. The final count of 78,474 troops (45,000 regular army, 29,000 MVSN fascist militia (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale)) may not appear numerically significant at first glance. However, if we understand Italian involvement as an intervention in support of an allied faction in a domestic war, we see that Italian troops represented a quarter of the total forces used in conquering the fascist empire, and almost double the number of soldiers who fought in the International Brigades. Mussolini achieved the true internationalization of the Spanish Civil War, deploying the largest contingent from one single foreign country to Spain. His troops accounted for approximately one-tenth of the estimated overall total membership of Franco’s Army, and he spent the equivalent of an entire annual budget for the armed forces – some 8.5 billion liras – in Spain. ⁷⁷ As well as the well-known land operations in Malaga, Bermeo, Santander, Aragon, Catalonia and the Levante, we must also consider the considerable importance of the military actions by air and sea. ⁷⁸ The war helped the Italians to explore techniques of war such as the bombing of civilian populations, something which occurred in Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia. Finally, the Italian intervention in Spain had a strong and clearly apparent political content. The Italian forces created platforms of political action, economic penetration, and cultural impregnation in Spain. These were represented by a range of bodies and individuals including the PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista), the SIM (Servizio informazioni militare), the Army, Milizia agents, representatives of private enterprise, as well as representatives of the Ministries of Industry, Foreign Affairs and Popular Culture.

The Italians were crucial to the success of the Rebel army in occupying Malaga, Bermeo and Santander, in breaking through and stabilizing the Aragon front, in the occupation of Barcelona and Girona and in concluding the Levantine campaign. They participated with similar success in terror campaigns in the Republican home front, in bombing raids on Valencia, Alicante and Barcelona. They were also responsible for conspicuous failures such as Guadalajara, which has become symbolic of the memory associated with the CTV and Italian fascism. It would be absurd to reduce the diverse and complex factors that precipitated their defeat to a simplistic explanation of the cowardly and confused behaviour of Italian fascists. Though few armies have experienced such a campaign of humiliation, mockery and sarcasm as the Italians in Spain, the Guadalajara syndrome cannot easily be extended to all Italian participation in the Civil War.

To overcome that syndrome, they carried an image of bravery, daring and violence to the extreme and were essential to the Rebel victory. The Italians sent troops and supplies during the coup phase; fascist armed forces participated outright in the territorial conquests of a total war; they bombed military and civilian objectives and waged a naval offensive that influenced the outcome of the Civil War, from both the Spanish and Italian perspectives. The wartime experience opened a new chapter in the use of diplomacy and propaganda for the fascistization of Europe and its intensification through total war. The war in Spain best defined Italian fascist ambitions with regard to Europe, the Mediterranean, Spain and foreign policy with surrounding countries, at least prior to the Second World War. It also definitively framed the inseparable relationship between fascism and war, between expansion, penetration and violence, between combat and belief.

Bombings and the intensive use of the aerial warfare connected with the fascist idea of war, but if there was a fascistization experience above any other, it was the experience of total war. The Civil War was the context for fascistization in Spain, and Mussolini’s political, military, social and cultural efforts were of fundamental importance, despite having being neglected by historians. ⁷⁹ However, more than the Duce, it was the combatants – their motivation, their faith in fascism or lack thereof, their combat experiences in the rearguard and their violence – who helped make the Spanish Civil War the epitome of what we understand as a fascist war. What Nuto Revelli referred to as the ‘Littorio generation’ by nature took symbols, slogans and national mythology seriously, and defended them to the death. ⁸⁰