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Divided Italy

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Southern Italy Series

-----Divided Italy-----

In the decades between the founding of Italy and WWI, the economy and industry of the northern cities slowly grew and prospered. But though the southern cities also grew prosperous in their own right, they failed to rival the wealth of the north. Part of the reason was the frequency of earthquakes. As R. J. B. Bosworth wrote in his book Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship, “Struck by an earthquake on the morning of 28 December 1908, Messina fell to the ground. Up to 100,000 people died in the city and surrounding comuni, whether in Sicily or, across the strait in Calabria – some flattened by the quake, others overwhelmed by the tsunami or tidal wave which swept in from the sea….Much about peasant life, especially in the south, is embodied in the statistic that from 1894 to 1908 Calabria averaged 5,000 dead each year, victims of one natural disaster or another.”p24 Mussolini’s Italy

Beyond earthquakes was the sheer lack of industry in the region “In 1914 Italy’s most numerous city, at just over 700,000, was still, as it had been for centuries, Naples, despite the glaring absence of modern industry in a place still half regretful at the loss of its past as capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” p37 Mussolini’s Italy

Amid cholera and typhoid epidemics, many chose to immigrate. “In 1913, the year when departures peaked, 407,475 Italians entered North America, 148,850 the countries of South America and 307,627 left for Europe, France and Germany, with each country receiving more than 80,000. Of the regions, the north-west lost 175,224, the north-east 123,853, central Italy 208,641 and the south 364,780. Sicily alone bid farewell to 146,061 of its inhabitants.” p30 Mussolini’s Italy

But though many immigrated, many also returned. “Even in 1913, 111,298 Italians came back from North America, 64,726 from South America, while repatriations from Europe were naturally more numerous.” p32 Mussolini’s Italy


As described by Norman Stone in his book World War One: A Short History the experience of soldiers in the Italian army was a terrible one, far worse than that of British or French regulars, “the military establishment were inclined to blame the men. Somewhat as in Russia, there was an enormous gap between officer class and men, and the north Italian Cadorna, who ran the strategy (he was the son of the man who bundled the Pope into the Vatican when Italy was united), reckoned that his men would only fight if terrorized. If men did not get out of their trenches to attack, their own guns must fire on them. After the war, monuments to the Unknown Soldier went up in Paris and London – men who had been blown to pieces of bone and could no longer be identified, with widows of such men chosen at random for an opening ceremony. The Italians had such a monument, but the area where the Second Army fought was excluded from the search for unidentified remains, because any soldier there might have been killed by his own generals. One such officer, who became head of the fascist militia (and was probably murdered in revenge, thrown from a train, in 1931) used to take his stand in the front trenches, with his revolver, shooting down his own men if they hesitated. Cadrona even adopted the Roman practice of decimation, shooting every tenth man at random in a regiment that had done badly. There were some cases of extraordinary cruelty – for instance, a father of seven shot for being the last to go on parade because he had overslept, this in a brigade that had been cut off in no man’s land, had tried to surrender, had been rescued, after an otherwise commendable record, and was now supposed to be punished.” p144 World War One

The broken morale of the Italian soldiers contributed as much as anything else to their reverse at Caporetto. “Suddenly, on 24 October 1917, the forces of Austria-Hungary, leavened by German troops withdrawn from the Russian front, launched an offensive, announcing their advance with a massive gas attack. It would be called the Battle of Caporetto, after a village known in Slovene as Kobarid on the upper Isonzo. Before the fighting was over, the Italians lost 40,000 dead or wounded, 280,000 POWs, 350,000 deserters or stragglers, a huge volume of arms and equipment and a slice 150 kilometers long of prime land in the Veneto. With the help of eleven British and French divisions, rushed to their aid (but greeted with suspicion by the military leadership, some ordinary soldiers and the common people), the Italian armies eventually resisted and held on the Piave river, only about thirty kilometers from Venice and the opening to the entire Po valley. The rally had occurred on 9 November, two days after the Bolsheviks had seized the Winter Palace and one day after they had announced that their new administration was offering peace, land and bread to its population. At that moment, Italy seemed very likely to follow Russia out of the war and into domestic revolution.” p64 Mussolini’s Italy

But though pushed, Italy did not break. Instead, it scaled up production and redoubled its efforts. “Fiat’s workforce expanded from 4,300 in 1914 to more than 40,000 at the end of the war; Alfa Romeo’s from 200 to 4,130. By 1918 Fiat, helped by the seventy-hour week it had imposed on its workforce in March 1916, had become the largest producer of vehicles in Europe, manufacturing 70,862 (including Italy’s first tanks) between 1915 and 1918, as against its pre-war production of 3,300 per annum.” p69 Mussolini’s Italy

“In the last days of October 1918, a fortnight or so before the trenches emptied on the western Front (a primacy Italian patriots then and thereafter loved to recall), Italian armies, moving forward from the Piave and on Monte Grappa (but not yet reaching the line they had held in October 1917), found that Austrian resistance had melted away as revolution or collapse dissolved the Habsburg empire. The town of Vittorio Veneto fell on 30 October. A few days later, Italian forces ‘liberated’ Trento and Trieste, the key targets for those who viewed combat as completing the Risorgimento by bringing ‘unredeemed’ Italians home to the nation.” p96 Mussolini’s Italy

Postwar Italy was shaped by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s seizure of the city of Fiume (today Rijeka), a city many felt should have been part of the nation’s spoils of war at the Versailles peace conference. The 1920s also saw the rise of similar militant organizations such as the Fascists as a way of countering increasing socialist anarchy in the wake of rampant unemployment. The threat of socialist revolution came to an end when Mussolini and the Fascists marched on Rome in October 1922.

Mussolini’s dictatorship lasted for many decades, but in many ways failed to achieve the Duce’s goal of recreating Italy from a preindustrial nation into a totalitarian one. A major blow came to the regime in 1931 after the death of Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo. “the mobile and smiley dictator of the 1920s gave way to an ever stiffer semi-diety. With his brother gone, Mussolini transmogrified into a shaven-headed (his hair went white within a year of Arnaldo’s death), uniformed and grim faced, Easter Island monolith, legs akimbo, chest puffed out, chin jutting and bellowing an order to any underling around (since, for such a mighty chief, one homunculus who crossed his path was indistinguishable from another). Trusting no one, the Duce now assumed that no one trusted him and his cause and took for granted that the world was a harsh place of battle without quarter.” p350 Mussolini’s Italy

In 1934 the Fascists blocked a Nazi Anschluss with Austria by bluffing military strength and championing the independence of Austria, their former enemy. Following the 1936 invasion of Ethiopia however the Italians found themselves diplomatically isolated. The 1936 Spanish Civil War however soon found the Italian Fascists and the Nazis working in the same general alliance to assist Franco and the Spanish Fascists. “By now one die was all but cast. Througout 1936-7 there were increasing signs that Italy was abandoning its objections to an Anschluss. Italians began to point out that, after all, the Austrians did not like them. In Febuary 1937 the crowd in Vienna booed the Italian national team and then pelted its players with rubbish and empty bottles when they arrived for a football match. The vain Ciano let it be known that his last visit to Austria had been received coldly; those attending diplomatic banquets did not burst into the sort of spontaneous applause he believed his due. People like that, it now began to be said in known circles, were not worth defending. In March 1938 the Nazis completed the job they had botched in 1934 and occupied Austria.” p403 Mussolini’s Italy

The high point of Mussolini’s rule was the Munich Agreement “ ‘the great victor’ at Munich was ‘Mussolini. To Mussolini, and only to Mussolini does the world owe its salvation.’” p404 Mussolini’s Italy

The Kingdom of Italy soon joined the Pact of Steel on May 22nd 1939. WWII began in September with the German invasion of Poland. On June 10th 1940 Italy joined the war, a week after the British had withdrawn at Dunkirk and just as the Nazis were closing in on Paris. On September 27th 1940 the Italians signed the Tripartite Pact with the Nazis and the Japanese.

The Italian armies fought well in the colonies, particularly in capturing British Somaliland. But by July 1943 the Allies had landed in Sicily. The Italian Campaign had begun [link] .

Southern Italy Series

500 BC [link] Origins
264 BC [link] The Punic Wars
115 AD [link] The Roman Empire
405 [link] East and West
526 [link] Collapse of the West
565 [link] Reconquest
572 [link] Lombard Invasion
751 [link] Lombard Italy
814 [link] Charlemagne’s Empire
1000 [link] Italy and the Holy Roman Empire
1095 [link] The Norman Conquest
1154 [link] The Kingdom of Sicily
1250 [link] Hohenstaufen Italy
1280 [link] Anjou Sicily
1300 [link] War of the Vespers
1400 [link] Black Death
1492 [link] Renaissance Italy
1559 [link] Italian Wars
1715 [link] Habsburg Italy
1780 [link] Bourbon Italy
1799 [link] Revolutionary Italy
1812 [link] Napoleonic Italy
1860 [link] United Italy
1943 Divided Italy

2/19/12 EDIT:
map base source [link]
map base created by Citypeek [link]
Image size
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Comments8
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MechoArt's avatar
Your map is invalid,write Macedonia in that place,not Bulgaria.