King Odoacer and Ancient Irredentism

It was on this day in 480 AD that Odoacer, King of Italy (who had earlier forced the abdication of the last emperor Romulus Augustulus and pensioned him off) occupied Dalmatia in what is now Croatia. The area then became part of his Kingdom of Italy but, of course, that was only the beginning. The irredentist cause in this area in particular is often not understood by outsiders or even many Italians, mostly because, unlike other areas farther north, the Italian population in Dalmatia has not been very large in modern times. However, the idea that Dalmatia should be Italian has very deep roots and, despite being interrupted on various occasions, recurs throughout history. Of course, originally, it was part of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire who were the first to give it the name Dalmatia after a local tribe (Emperor Diocletian even had a magnificent palace there). After the fall of the Roman Empire it became part of the original Kingdom of Italy under Odoacer on December 9, 480 AD. Later this became the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy under King Theodoric the Great who replaced Odoacer and Dalmatia was included in that as well. Later it was contested by the Croats, Hungarians, Byzantines and even raided by the Mongols. However, it had been part of the Kingdom of Italy in the Dark Ages and was restored to Italian rule in the Middle Ages when it became part of the maritime empire of the Republic of Venice. After the decline and defeat of Venice it became part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy and when that fell was absorbed by the Austrian Empire, later Austria-Hungary and grouped with Croatia. However, even in Austria-Hungary it was always listed separately from Croatia in the list of the territories of the Kingdom of Hungary (in union with the Austrian Empire). It was then occupied by the modern Kingdom of Italy during World War II but the final status of it was still disputed during the short-life of the Independent State of Croatia under the nominal reign of Prince Aimone of Aosta. Since then it has been part of Yugoslavia and now Croatia.

General Alessandro Pirzio Biroli

Alessandro Pirzio Biroli was one of the most accomplished (and later controversial) Italian soldiers of World War II. He was born in Bologna on July 23, 1877 into a family of noted explorers. An athletic youth, he was a particularly skilled swordsman and won the silver medal in fencing at the 1908 Olympic Games in London. He joined the army as a young man, served in the First World War and by 1918 was promoted to commanding officer of the 8th Bersaglieri Regiment. In 1921 he was assigned to the General Division in Padua and has his first experience with the new Fascist movement. A short time later, however, he was sent to head the military mission to Ecuador, remaining there until 1927. After returning to Italy he was made commander of the Monte Nero Division in 1932 and in 1933 was promoted to command the V Trieste Corps, a post he held until 1935. During the Second Italo-Abyssinian War he commanded the colorful Eritrean Colonial Corps. His men fought with such vigor that they were often employed as assault troops during the campaign, in spite of their training being somewhat outdated and the fact that they were often poorly equipped. This was due to a combination of the skill of their general and the tenacity of the Eritrean colonial troops who had a particular zeal for fighting the Ethiopians, their traditional enemies, who were always threatening to conquer them. For Biroli, the high point of the campaign was his capture of Dese which had formerly been the military headquarters of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

Emerging from the war with a military record of success, though with some the fact that he commanded African troops meant he might not always have the reputation he deserved, General Biroli continued in the colonies, serving for a year as Governor of Amhara province, the native land of the original Ethiopians, in Italian East Africa (the combined name for Eritrea, Somalia and Abyssinia). When the Kingdom of Italy entered World War II, General Biroli saw action on the Balkan front, taking command of the Ninth Army in 1941, leading it in the latter stages of the war with Greece. After the Greek surrender, General Biroli entered the most controversial phase of his career, being assigned as military governor of the Kingdom of Montenegro, a post he held until 1943. A firm believer in the imperial legacy and destiny of Italy, Biroli was convinced that it was their duty to bring Roman civilization to the backward lands of the Balkans and he would tolerate no opposition to this mission. He was also disgusted by the contrasting reputations of the German and Italian soldiers with the Germans always viewed as the harsh, brutally efficient warriors and the Italians as the casual, fun-loving “nice guys”. As far as the locals were concerned, the appointment of Biroli as governor certainly meant, ‘no more mister nice guy’.

In a pamphlet distributed to his men, General Biroli encouraged his Italian troops to deal with any opposition harshly, reminding them that “It is the same people against whom we fought for centuries on the shores of the Adriatic.” He did not see only the present conflict but also the Slavs who had fought for Austria-Hungary against Italy in the First World War, the Turks and their Slavic subjects who fought the Italian city-state of Venice and all the way back to the barbarian tribes first subdued by the Roman legions thousands of years earlier. Enemy partisans were dealt with severely and their friends, family and associates often suffered along with them. Adolf Hitler was certainly impressed and awarded General Biroli the Knight Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a rare award for anyone much less a foreigner not of the highest military rank. However, in all fairness to General Biroli, it should also be remembered that World War II in the Balkans was an extremely brutal affair all around. Throughout history, even to our own time, it is a region where mercy is so rarely given that few expect it. The communist enemies he was fighting were every bit as brutal as he was and quite often much more so.

The Italian armistice of 1943 marked the end of his military career. The general who had fought red guerillas in Montenegro and led African troops to victory in Ethiopia retired to private life and died in Rome on May 20, 1962.

Italian Air Offensive in the Middle East

Many may not be aware of this (I have an entire shelf full of books on Italian military history in my library and I was unaware of it) but in the early days of World War II, planes of the Regia Aeronautica carried out a record-breaking, long-range bombing raid on British installations on the east side of the Arabian peninsula in the Persian Gulf. Stripped down and loaded with extra fuel and launched from the Italian-held island of Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean, on October 19, 1940 a force of four Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.82 bombers attacked the British Protectorate of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, damaging the local American-operated oil refineries. The bombers also hit Dhahran, Saudi Arabia but that had very little impact. These areas were taken by complete surprise as the British certainly never expected an attack to come so far from the front-lines. The planes made their bombing run and were able to return successfully to land in Italian East Africa, setting down in Eritrea. It was not an extremely crucial attack as there was not much damage that only four bombers could do and those stripped down to be flying fuel cans, however, in did cause a panic and sent the message to the British high command that there were no safe areas and that the armed forces of Italy could reach out over incredible distances to strike at them wherever they were. Because of this, Allied forces had to divert resources to defend areas that they never would have thought would have been in any danger -and most honestly were not, but still, because of the raid on Bahrain, the Italians had proven that they could reach the British in some of their most vulnerable areas so that action had to be taken.

On This Day in History

On this day in 1812 the Servant of God Maria Cristina of Savoy, daughter of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia and Queen consort of the Two-Sicilies was born. Support her cause for canonization!

Queen Maria Cristina

Her Cause Started

Support her Cause

Italians on the Western Front

It was on this day in 1918 that the guns on the western front fell silent at the end of World War I. Many nations celebrate this as Armistice Day, Remembrance Day or, as it later became known in America, Veterans Day. Everyone familiar with World War I knows that this most prominent area of operations was the western front, stretching from the Belgian coast, down through France and ending at the Swiss border. However, not too many are aware of the Italian presence on the western front which actually predates official Italian entry in the Great War. Peppino Garibaldi, grandson of the famous Giuseppe Garibaldi, a man driven to fight for Italia Irredenta, led 4,000 Italian volunteers in a mass enlistment of the French Foreign Legion to join the war on the western front. This was in the winter of 1914-1915. When the Kingdom of Italy joined the war later in 1915, they left to join the Regio Esercito, most going into the Alpi and Re Brigades. Even then, many continued to wear their red shirts underneath their uniforms in honor of "The Thousand" nationalist volunteers of Giuseppe Garibaldi from the last century. In late 1917 the Kingdom of Italy sent the Corpo Truppe Ausiliarie in Francia to serve on the western front, which was a collection of labor battalions to aid in preparing trenches, gun emplacements, fortifications and other such jobs. Later, in the summer of 1918 the Kingdom of Italy also dispatched the II Corps, a complete combat unit with full artillery and even air support. These Italian troops saw fierce fighting in the last stages of the war, fighting alongside the French, British and Americans in stopping the last German offensive in the Bois de Reims sector and then going on, with the other Allies, in the final offensive that crushed the German front line and ultimately forced them to seek an armistice. Many Italians displayed great heroism in these brutal engagements, many were killed and many were wounded. They should never be forgotten.

Early Unsung Success in Africa

Throughout World War II, the royal armed forces of Italy were always at a great disadvantage, fighting with undersupplied armies, outdated weapons and in areas that were rarely given top priority. However, in spite of all these difficulties, the courage and tenacity of the Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen were still able to upset the odds and win stunning victories. However, relatively few people (outside Italy at least) are often aware of these heroic battles. Sometimes they are left out of historical accounts altogether. For example, following the first Italian invasion of Egypt, when the British had broken the Italian forces (many of whom were colonial troops) and sweeping across Egypt most accounts state only that the British held back out of caution or stopped from sheer exhaustion and this allowed time for the arrival of the German Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel which then saved the day and turned the tide of battle. However, that is not the whole truth. The British were actually pushing on quite aggressively to destroy all that remained of the shattered Italian forces and completely crush the remaining Italian front in Cyrenaica. They did not succeed because of a stunning victory won by a totally outmatched group of Italian soldiers who did nothing less than save the Italian army from total disaster.

M11/39 medium tank

On December 9, 1940 the Italian Tummar posts destroyed fourteen British tanks, buying precious time for colonial forces in the area. When the British attacked with their armored forces, consisting of the heavily armored Matilda tanks, the Italian “Maletti Group” rushed in to stop them with totally outmatched M11/39 tanks dismissed by so many as practically useless. Yet, in spite of their deficiencies these Italian M11/39’s managed to destroy 35 of the 57 British Matildas. It was a spectacular feat of arms and due entirely to the courage and skill of the individual Italian tank crews and commanders.

Later, on January 24, 1941 the former commander of the Sirte Division, General Valentino Babini, rushed into service the newly organized Special Armored Brigade (“Brigata Corazzato Speciale”) which managed the seemingly impossible task of halting the British offensive, if only temporarily. The British were driving forward with an awesome attack force of some 177 tanks and the Italian Special Armored Brigade managed to totally destroy or disable 21 of them; a rather spectacular feat given how vastly outmatched the Italian forces were. The first year of the war had been a terrible one for the Italian forces in north Africa, without question, and yet, thanks to hard fought actions like these, the front in Cyrenaica was saved from total collapse. The 10th Army had been practically destroyed but because of the brave men who made huge sacrifices and stood down vastly superior enemy forces, the remaining troops were able to fall back to safety, reform, reorganize and before the British could achieve total victory the first units of the Afrika Korps had arrived and the initiative in the desert shifted to the Axis powers.

It is amazing what a handful of even outmatched M11 tanks can do with enough skill and courage driving them into battle.

The Day He Came to Office

It was on this day in 1922 that HM King Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Benito Mussolini prime minister of Italy. Sometime in the, hopefully, not too distant future, I will be writing an article on this as in spite of all the time that has gone by since then it remains one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented points in all of Italian history. Whatever you think about it, the truth is probably not what you have heard.