Belgium declares war on Italy

In the second half of November 1940 the Belgian government-in-exile in London, headed by Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot, decided that Belgium, occupied by Germany since May, was also at war with Germany’s ally, Fascist Italy. Until then Belgium had not formally been fighting Italy. When Rome declared war on 10 June on France and Britain, its declaration did not mention Belgium, and throughout the summer Belgian ministers had carefully avoided any step the Italians might regard as hostile. Two things forced a change: Italian bombers which, from the autumn, had been taking off from airfields in occupied Belgium to raid England, and the sinking of a Belgian ship by an Italian submarine. The decision mattered above all for the Belgian Congo: it opened the way for its colonial troops to take part in the fight against Italy in East Africa.

Popular chronologies give the date as 21 November. Historical studies spread the decision over several days: on 22 November the Minister for the Colonies, Albert de Vleeschauwer, abandoned the Congo’s policy of neutrality towards Italy; the Belgian historian Jean-Michel Veranneman dates the declaration of war itself to 23 November; and on 25 November the Governor-General of the Congo, Pierre Ryckmans, proclaimed a state of war between the colony and Italy.

A Belgium not at war with Italy

When Germany attacked Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on 10 May 1940, Italy was still a “non-belligerent” state. It entered the war two weeks after the Belgian army capitulated, and Benito Mussolini declared war only on France and Britain. Belgium, whose government was then in France, did not respond with a declaration of its own. Formally the two states remained at peace, even though one was the ally of the other’s occupier.

Behind this restraint lay dynastic and political considerations. The sister of King Leopold III, Marie-José, had been married since 1930 to the heir to the Italian throne, Umberto, Prince of Piedmont. Through her ran one of the few channels by which the captive king could communicate with the Axis powers. Leopold III’s entourage believed that the colony should maintain strict neutrality and give neither Germany nor Italy a pretext for questioning Belgian sovereignty over it. The Belgian historian Maurice Lovens states plainly that this was the policy adopted by the king and his circle.

The ministers reasoned in a similar way. Pierlot’s government did want to place the economy of the Congo, rich in copper, tin, gold and uranium, at the Allies’ disposal, but the colonial army, the Force Publique, was only to defend the borders and maintain internal order. As late as 6 September 1940 De Vleeschauwer declared that using the Force Publique against Italy would be “all the more unthinkable since we have never been at war with Italy”. In the Congo itself the mood was different. Governor-General Ryckmans had announced as early as 9 June 1940 that the colony would fight alongside the Allies “until final victory”, and some Belgian officers of the Force Publique openly demanded to take part in the fighting against the Italians, whose forces in Italian East Africa stood more than 500 kilometres from the colony’s borders.

The government of four in London

Throughout the summer of 1940 the legal Belgian government was scattered. Prime Minister Pierlot and Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak were in Vichy France, and only De Vleeschauwer and the Finance Minister, Camille Gutt, were active in London. The threat that the British might recognise the rival centre of power that Camille Huysmans and Marcel-Henri Jaspar were forming that summer persuaded the Prime Minister to leave. Pierlot and Spaak made their way through Spain, where General Franco’s police kept them under surveillance for a time, and reached London on 22 October (some sources, including CegeSoma, the Brussels centre for research on the history of the war, give 24 October). On 31 October the “government of four” held its first meeting.

It was an unusual government. Belgium’s constitution of 1831 reserved the declaration of war to the king, but the king was a prisoner in the palace of Laeken, and since May the ministers had regarded him as unable to reign and had been exercising his powers themselves, so the decision on war could be taken by the Council of Ministers. The government had no influence over the administration in the occupied country, but it had what counted for the Allies: the gold of the National Bank, the merchant fleet, the wealth of the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, and, from the autumn, a voice on the BBC in the broadcasts of Radio Belgique.

Italian bombers over Belgium

Meanwhile neutrality towards Italy was becoming a fiction. In September 1940 Mussolini formed the Corpo Aereo Italiano, an Italian air corps meant to support the Luftwaffe in the fight against England. At the end of September its Fiat BR.20 bombers landed at Melsbroek (PL) near Brussels and at Chièvres, and in October fighters reached airfields in Flanders. On the night of 24–25 October Italian bombers attacked Harwich for the first time, and on 29 October Ramsgate. On 11 November a daylight raid on Harwich ended in disaster for the Italians: RAF Hurricanes shot down several bombers and fighters without losing a single aircraft. The corps’ military value was slight, but the Italians were bombing, from Belgian territory, the country that had given refuge to the Belgian government.

The second impulse was an incident at sea. On the night of 15–16 October 1940 the Italian submarine Comandante Cappellini, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Salvatore Todaro, sank the Belgian steamer Kabalo (5,186 GRT), which had become separated from a British convoy, in the Atlantic some 700 nautical miles from Madeira. Todaro then took a lifeboat with 26 survivors in tow and landed them on the Azores on 19 October. His chivalrous gesture passed into legend, but what mattered to the Belgians was that the Italian navy was treating their shipping as enemy shipping. Italian studies explicitly link the sinking of the Kabalo to the proclamation of a state of war between Italy and Belgium.

The decision of November 1940

Once the full government had assembled, the matter came to a head within a few weeks. According to Belgian studies, it was only then that the government adopted the principle of the colony’s military participation in the war. On 22 November De Vleeschauwer – the same man who in September had ruled out fighting Italy – recognised Italy’s hostile attitude towards Belgium, ordered the internment of dangerous and suspect Italians in the Congo and abandoned the policy of neutrality. The next day, according to Veranneman, the declaration of war was formally made. The literature calls this act a declaration of war, although in practice it was the recognition of a state of affairs the Italians had created by their own actions; the available studies do not quote its exact wording.

From the government’s point of view, the consequences in Africa mattered most. On 25 November Ryckmans proclaimed in Léopoldville (today Kinshasa) a state of war between the Congo and Italy. In 1942 the American correspondent George Weller called this proclamation the signal for the expedition against Italian East Africa. In those same days the Greeks, attacked by Italy on 28 October, were driving the Italians back into Albania, and British torpedo bombers had inflicted heavy losses on the Italian fleet at Taranto.

The prisoner king

The decision was taken by the ministers without the king and against the logic that guided Leopold III. The king considered himself a prisoner of war and refused to perform political acts, but he sought talks with the Germans about the fate of the prisoners of war and the country’s future. On 19 November 1940, two days before the date usually given for the Belgian declaration, he was received by Adolf Hitler at the Berghof through the mediation of his sister Marie-José. He asked for the release of Belgian prisoners, better supplies for the country and an assurance of Belgium’s independence after the war. Hitler promised nothing, and the conversation was cool. The government in London and many Belgians took a dim view of the meeting. Declaring war on Italy, the country of the king’s sister, showed that the ministers were pursuing their own policy without regard for Laeken. The rift between a king who wanted to sit out the war and a government that wanted to wage it deepened with every such step, and after the war it became one of the main strands of the so-called Royal Question.

Place in the war

The declaration of war on Italy was a minor diplomatic episode, but it had real military consequences. At the turn of 1940 and 1941 the Force Publique placed its 11th Battalion at the disposal of the British in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and on 18 January 1941 a decree of the Governor-General formally mobilised the colonial troops for the war. After travelling more than two thousand kilometres by river, rail and lorry, columns from the Congo attacked Asosa together with units of the King’s African Rifles on 11 March 1941, took Gambela at the end of March, and then for several months besieged the forces of General Pietro Gazzera on the plateau at Saïo. On 3 July 1941 General Auguste Gilliaert launched an attack, and on 6 July Gazzera surrendered to the Belgians with eight other generals and more than six thousand men. In the whole East African campaign the Force Publique lost, depending on the method of counting, between about 460 and about 500 men, most of them Congolese, many of whom died of disease. Saïo was the first major success of Belgian arms since the defeat of May 1940 and an important argument for Pierlot’s government in its dealings with the Allies.

In these months the government’s own position also grew stronger. In December 1940 Britain recognised the ministers in London as the legitimate government of Belgium, and the government assumed all the legislative and executive power that the king, as a prisoner, could not exercise. The Italian air corps began leaving Belgium at the start of 1941, and in December 1941 Pierlot’s government declared war on Japan as well, without hesitation. After Italy’s surrender in September 1943 the fighting between the two countries ceased, but the state of war was formally ended only by the peace treaty with Italy signed in Paris in February 1947, to which Belgium was a party. The November decision shows how a government-in-exile, without territory or an army at home, could nonetheless wage war: with the forces of its colony and with legal acts that turned an occupied state into a full ally.