In Italian history, June 10, 1940 was a day of infamy, when Italy declared war on Great Britain and France. Eighty-one years ago this month, Mussolini and the Savoy monarchy chained their nation to a Teutonic ideologue whose insanity knew no bounds. What went into such a decision?
Historians quote Mussolini’s simple motive: a jackal who wanted “a few thousand dead” to earn a place at the peace conference to divide up the spoils. After the war, Churchill suggested that if Italy had chosen differently in June 1940: “Peace, prosperity, and growing power would have been the prize.” Unfortunately, neither Churchill nor Great Britain ever wanted another “growing power” in the Mediterranean to compete with it.
Relations between Fascist Italy and Great Britain during the 1930s revolved predominately around the Mediterranean. Our researchers at the Italic Institute have spent considerable time on this contentious period, and our findings paint quite a different picture than popular histories.
While oceans are vast enough to host competing powers, the Mediterranean has but two outlets to the high seas: Gibraltar and Suez. The English took Gibraltar from Spain in 1713 and bought into the Suez Canal enterprise soon after its completion in 1869. By the end of the century, the Mediterranean became a British lake – a shortcut that saved three weeks in reaching British India, the mainstay of Britain’s economy. To secure the Mediterranean even tighter, the Brits took control of Malta (1814), Cyprus (1878), Egypt (1889), and Palestine (1919). Only the reunification of Italy threatened Great Britain’s Mediterranean monopoly; and Fascist Italy was looking to restore Rome’s Mare Nostrum. This in a nutshell, was the obsessive fear of British governments throughout the 1930s. Fear of Hitler was secondary. As Anthony Eden announced at a Cabinet meeting: [an agreement with Hitler might have] “a chance of reasonable life…whereas Mussolini is…a complete gangster.”
Mussolini did more to unnerve the Brits than Hitler did – that madman only wanted to restore Germany’s WW I borders – no loss for Britain. But, Italy’s navy was becoming formidable; over 100,000 Italians colonized French Tunisia; Mussolini’s “pacification” of Libya allowed thousands of Italian colonists to migrate to that Mediterranean shore; the conquest of Ethiopia gave Italians control of Lake Tana which fed the Nile River – lifeblood of British Sudan and Egypt; Italy’s victory in the Spanish Civil War gave it a client state at Gibraltar; Fascist radio broadcasts were worsening Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine; Italy was pressing for participation on the Suez Canal Board, where it was always excluded. Suddenly, the laughable Italians looked like they could restore Mare Nostrum.
Hitler promised not to interfere with the British Empire or its naval domination – he even signed a secret naval treaty with the Brits in 1935, unbeknownst to France or Italy. But, conceding anything to Italy was considered the road to ruin for British leaders. Still, there were clearheaded Brits, who realized that Hitler, not Mussolini, was the ultimate menace. Foreign Office Undersecretary Sir Robert Vansittart summed up his best advice in August, 1934: to maintain the friendship of Fascist Italy, and that Anglo-French-Italian cooperation was “the only real bulwark of peace.” Duff Cooper, a British Cabinet Minister had this post-war assessment: “In any case, we should have retained the friendship of Italy; and the Axis, which was to prove the pivot of Hitler’s assault upon Europe, and without which he could hardly have launched the Second World War, would never have been formed.”
Neither the Brits nor French ever ceded anything to Italy to maintain the old WW I alliance, consequently this forced Mussolini to envision an alternate path with Nazi Germany. In May, 1939 Italy took the plunge by signing the Pact of Steel, the military alliance with Germany. But Hitler blinded-sided Mussolini with the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August and the invasion of Poland in September. The Duce’s shocked reaction: neutrality.
Once the German juggernaut was unleashed, the world came to understand the word blitzkrieg (lightning war). Mussolini’s son-in-law documented in his diaries how Mussolini hoped the Allies would stop Hitler and the chaos he wrought. But, by June, 1940, and the collapse of France, Italy’s “non-belligerence” would now leave it open to German revenge, like taking back Italy’s South Tyrol (Alto Adige) and the Istrian Peninsula. In the nine months of Italian neutrality, the Allies had cut off its imports of German coal, harassed its merchant ships in the Mediterranean, restricted the Suez Canal, and treated neutral Italy as a Nazi accomplice.
So, Italy took the gamble. -JLM
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