Sun, Sex And Spaghetti

I am reading a book titled 1941: Our Lives in A World On The Edge written by William K. Klingaman. Although I am only some 50 pages into it, the descriptions of Italy's misadventures in the Libyan Desert, before Rommel came on the scene, struck me as so marvelously absurd that I had to write about them. As France collapsed in the spring of 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared war and sent 28 Italian divisions across the border into France. Opposing them stood only 4 French divisions, yet the Italians were unable to gain any ground, and suffered some 5000 casualties against French losses of only 8 men killed. It was decidedly inauspicious beginning for Ill Duce's Roman Legions, and proved to be a foreshadowing of military disasters still to come.

Next up for Italy was an offensive in the north African desert, where Mussolini was attempting to carve out an empire. Despite a promising start, the situation quickly deteriorated for the hapless Italian soldiers. Although greatly outnumbered, the British and Australian troops proved to be more then a match for the already-demoralized Italians, and raced from one big victory to another. Italian soldiers surrendered by the tens of thousands, and strained the allies ability to cope with them. Author Klingaman offers some fascinating examples of what I called the "marvelous absurdity" of Mussolini's attempts to emulate Hitler. Klingaman describes "... ferocious Aussie foot soldiers singing-for reasons best known to themselves-the chorus of The Wizard of Oz", as they assaulted the Italian base at Bardia. But the best account of the aftermath of the battle comes to us courtesy of someone whose job it was to chronicle the events as they occurred.

Alan Moorehead, serving as a war correspondent in northern Africa, followed (British General) Wavell's troops and witnessed the remarkable sights of deserted Italian outposts and subterranean dugouts filled with luxuries almost unimaginable in wartime: "...We sat down on the open sand and ate from stores of bottled cherries and greengages; great tins of frozen hams and anchovies; bread that had been baked somehow in the desert; and wines from Frascati and Salerno and Chianti, red and white, and Lacrimae Christi from the slopes of Vesuvius above Naples. The spaghetti was packed in long blue paper packages and stored with great sacks of macaroni and other wheat foods as numerous as they used to be in the shops of Italy before the war. Parmesan cheeses as big as small cart-wheels and nearly a foot thick lay about in neat piles except where some hungry soldier had slashed one open with his sword. Ten pound tins of Estratto di Pomidoro-the tomato extract vital to so many Italian dishes-formed the bulk of the tinned stuff...We sampled one package that seemed at first to contain dry grass, but brewed itself over a stove into a rich minestrone soup." The book goes on to explain that "...1,704 (Italian) officers and five generals had been taken prisoner and that many of them spent the holidays teaching their British captors how to make spaghetti properly".

Perhaps not surprisingly, if you take into account the enormous effort that must have gone into each meal they prepared, the Italians fared poorly at the art of war. As his disasters mounted in north Africa and in the Balkans, Mussolini was complaining about the miserable material he had to work with. "Even Michelangelo had need of marble to make statues," the Duce told Count Ciano, his son-in-law and foreign minister. "If he only had clay he would have been nothing more then a potter. A people who for sixteen centuries have been an anvil cannot become a hammer within a few years."

Had it not been for Hitler's decision to dispatch a light panzer division, under the command of General Erwin Rommel, to the western desert, then the Italian collapse would most probably have been total. If Italy were to be driven out of Africa in 1941, it seems logical to assume that would have been followed by domestic upheavals in Italy. It is possible that Mussolini might have been overthrown 2 years earlier then actually happened. That raises some intriguing questions. With his southern flank threatened, it seems likely that Hitler would have had to cancel, or at least postpone, his invasion of Russia. A delay of one year would have drastically have altered the dynamics of the struggle, although it remains impossible to know with any certainty exactly how much of a difference an Italian defeat in 1941 might have had on the eventual outcome of the war.

General Rommel, immortalized as The Desert Fox, remains the only one of the combatants who fought, in the north African desert, that anyone really remembers today. Rommel's exploits are the stuff of legend, and his vaunted Afrika Korps commanded the respect of friend and foe alike. He was a superb practitioner of the art of war. Meanwhile, the Italians became the object of scorn and derision by friend and foe alike. To wit, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden in a message to Prime Minister Winston Churchill following the fall of Bardia: "If I may debase a golden phrase, Never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few."

But, if I might play devil's advocate for a moment, let us consider the following: It is at least possible that the Italians, and the French as well, might have been right about the whole nasty business after all. For example, France with a total population of 41,700,000 people suffered some 567,000 deaths over the course of the war; however total military deaths were on the order of 217,600. Compare that number with what France lost in the First World War and you begin to understand why they marched to war again with something less then enthusiasm. The same applies to the Italians. Clearly, both cultures share a common taste for the better things in life, as evidenced by the wonderful cache of foodstuffs surrendered in the desert by the Italians. And if the French had continued the fight in 1940, the end result would have been the same, but at much greater cost. So, they quit the fight in June, and many thousands who would otherwise have been killed, lived and loved for many more years.