Foro Segunda Guerra Mundial

The binary infantry division organization was adopted on the eve of war. It was born in the Ethiopian War and was to create a mobile infantry force in which one division would fix the enemy or begin to advance and the second division would bound forward to launch attack and/or push on. The binary infantry division was, by doctrine, supposed to be capable only of frontal attack. Manuever was the prerogative only of army corps. The divisions were to function as attack columns to create and exploit any tactical opportunity. Control both of the movement of individual divisions and of the medium caliber guns was retained by corps headquarters. This flaw should have been realized early in the attacks against France in 1940. Italian units dashed forward into the killing zone of French artillery and were stopped with cruel casualties. The Army Staff misinterpreted the failure and blamed inadequate artillery support rather than on an operational concept that assigned to poorly trained infantry tasks of offensive deep penetrations that no infantry in the world could accomplish in the face of an unshaken defense. In practice, superiority of numbers only produced superior numbers of dead, wounded or captured.

Italian ideas of attack and pursuit were much like those of any other modern army, though the emphasis placed on the offensive almost recalls the pre-1914 doctrines of the French Colonel de Grandmaison. The 1940 Italian doctrine provided that the attack was to be recklessly pressed, was never to halt, and was to “overcome the resistance with continuity of effort.” Initiative, violence and audacity were urged. As for the “continuity of effort,” one Greek tactical authority with much experience in the Albanian campaign against Italy declared that an obvious characteristic of all Italian attacks was their extreme brevity and the failure of officers rather than men to follow through. It became almost a proverb in the Greek army that an Italian attack was certain to flag after the first 20 minutes. A Greek unit, which had successfully sustained an attack for that length of time usually, felt that it had for all practical purposes already won. This was not, of course, what the Italian tacticians had taught. “The Italian military doctrine of the present,” wrote Major Umberto Mescia in 1939, “reaffirms the reasoning which was Caesar’s and Machiavelli’s; the offensive, because only the offensive can bring victory. There is a return to the Roman concept, to the Latin and Italian spirit, because those qualities which bring success—a sense of responsibility and the willingness to meet danger—are particularly Italian, manly in courage and daring in spirit, ready to overcome difficulties. To take the offensive means to attack, to go forward, to force one’s will on the enemy, and in this direction, the mental, moral, and material preparation of all is turned toward an ever greater formation of the offensive consciousness.” The actual performance of the Italian Army often fell somewhat short of this high standard.

In a wartime study, Gen Roatta (himself a major contributor to the problem) found the following deficiencies in the Italian officer corps:

1. Lack of command authority. Timidity.

2. Inadequate technical knowledge

3. Poor understanding of communications equipment

4. Poor map reading and use of the compass

5. Lack of knowledge about field fortifications and fields of fire

6. Poor physical conditioning

7. Total administrative ignorance

Some effort was made to correct these deficiencies in junior officers. No such effort was made to improve senior ranks.

A German staff officer evaluated Italian staff work: “The command structure is…pedantic and slow. The absence of sufficient communication equipment renders the links to the subordinate units precarious. The consequence is that the leadership is poorly informed about the friendly situation and has no capacity to redeploy swiftly. The working style of the staff is schematic, static, and come cases lacking in precision.”


The overabundance of older senior officers cultivated an atmosphere of intellectual rigidity and lack of curiosity. The Army began with two mistaken assumptions it had held fiercely through the interwar period: that the Alps were the most likely theater of war and that numbers were decisive. The first assumption fell away in 1940. The second, despite repeated demonstrations of its fallaciousness, determined Italian doctrine and force structure…and hence use of technology…until 1943.


Gen Bastico evaluated reserve officers: “Divisional commanders were unanimous in informing me that while subalterns, apart from a few exceptions, are rendering good service—even when they come from auxiliary sources, the same cannot be said for the majors and captains recalled from the reserve. These latter in general are too old, and even if they have the will and spirit of sacrifice they lack energy and the capacity necessary for carrying out their duty. Also, nearly all of them reached their rank by successive promotions, the fruit of very brief periods of service. They were also unanimous in lamenting the fact that these officers, nearly all of them, come unprepared and therefore unsuited for the command of their units, or they suffer from congenital illnesses and after the briefest stay they have to be removed—because of professional incapacity or poor health.” Senior officers were not culled after WWI, and the junior officers were gutted during the 20’s by the thousands in a cost-cutting move. Italy was faced with a choice then to either cut the generals (and their higher salaries) or the lower officers and Italy made the wrong choice.

Of junior officers Gen Claudio Trezzani observed, “As long as it’s a question of risking one’s skin, they are admirable, when, instead, they have to open their eyes, think, decide in cold blood, they are hopeless. In terms of reconnaissance, movement to contact, preparatory fire, coordinated movement, and so on, they are practically illiterate…”