Italy’s War at Home

Brings the story of World War II in Italy and among Italians to an English-speaking audience and adds to our understanding of the collapse and ruin of dictatorships.

Italy’s World War II experience might be described as a blunder, a mistake, or a tragedy. Since 1922, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime had been constructing a paper tiger – lots of bluster but not much to back it up. A dictatorship, sometimes based on coercion and sometimes on enticement, could never be sure of popular support. When, in June 1940, the drumbeats announced Italy's entry into the most terrible war in history, the regime’s goal to build a race of “new” men – brutal warriors for Italy- proved utterly futile. Exposed in lies and corruption, without any serious war plans, incapable of protecting its citizens, stuck in a disgraceful alliance with the unforgiving Third Reich, and now trapped in an absurdly uneven war against a coalition of unstoppable power, Mussolini and his Fascists were doomed. Bombardments of cities, the strafing of innocents, hunger and shortages, along with Nazi brutality, took massive physical and moral tolls. Mussolini’s totalitarian endeavors to control the lives of Italians proved futile when his armies suffered defeat everywhere, and Anglo-American air armadas brought the “new” men to their knees. Aspects of “old” Italy, however, – Catholicism, for example, the Renaissance and Enlightenment traditions, and working-class solidarity, pillars of Italian identities that have little to nothing in common with Mussolini’s dictatorship – soon surfaced to shape postwar and post-Fascist Italy.