During the winter 1942-1943, from the African sands to the snowing Russian countryside, a bitter sense of anti-German rancor surged up within the ranks of the Italian Royal Army. That feeling did not spring only from the bitterness of defeat but covered the precariousness of the Italo-German alliance despite its ideological binding agent. Italian recriminations, in fact, followed an outburst of analogous feelings on the German side inclined to charge the causes of defeat upon its allies. Those mutual recriminations soon acquired a political dimension and became a tool of pressure in the exchange between the two poles of the Axis. Mainly from the German side, they were used, on one hand, as a probe to explore Rome’s real will to fight to the end, on the other, as a mean to divert and weaken the Italian attempts to redefine the overall war strategy. The growing Italian impatience against the Germans, rather than being confined in a self-absolving effort to avert from Italian armed forces the stains of defeat, thus became an additional playing card in Mussolini’s hands to win the game against Hitler’s strategic stubbornness. After Alamein, the Duce’s hopes to repulse with success the western Allied onslaught were pointed on his chances to reach a settlement, via an armistice or a separate peace on the Russian front, and on a total reversal of Berlin’s strategy. Mussolini pursued this goal until the very morning of the 25 July, and in this task, he had to evoke to Hitler the ghost of an impending Italian collapse. In so doing, Mussolini endorsed the stiffening toward the Germans promoted by the Italian high command in which the vast official survey –analyzed in that article- to record the German behavior in the aftermath of Alamein and Stalingrad played an important role.

UNEASY ALLIES: THE ITALIAN ROYAL ARMY AND ANTI-GERMAN RECRIMINATIONS, 1942-1943.

GIN, Emilio
2013-01-01

Abstract

During the winter 1942-1943, from the African sands to the snowing Russian countryside, a bitter sense of anti-German rancor surged up within the ranks of the Italian Royal Army. That feeling did not spring only from the bitterness of defeat but covered the precariousness of the Italo-German alliance despite its ideological binding agent. Italian recriminations, in fact, followed an outburst of analogous feelings on the German side inclined to charge the causes of defeat upon its allies. Those mutual recriminations soon acquired a political dimension and became a tool of pressure in the exchange between the two poles of the Axis. Mainly from the German side, they were used, on one hand, as a probe to explore Rome’s real will to fight to the end, on the other, as a mean to divert and weaken the Italian attempts to redefine the overall war strategy. The growing Italian impatience against the Germans, rather than being confined in a self-absolving effort to avert from Italian armed forces the stains of defeat, thus became an additional playing card in Mussolini’s hands to win the game against Hitler’s strategic stubbornness. After Alamein, the Duce’s hopes to repulse with success the western Allied onslaught were pointed on his chances to reach a settlement, via an armistice or a separate peace on the Russian front, and on a total reversal of Berlin’s strategy. Mussolini pursued this goal until the very morning of the 25 July, and in this task, he had to evoke to Hitler the ghost of an impending Italian collapse. In so doing, Mussolini endorsed the stiffening toward the Germans promoted by the Italian high command in which the vast official survey –analyzed in that article- to record the German behavior in the aftermath of Alamein and Stalingrad played an important role.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11386/4032853
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