The Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia

On 10 July 1941 an army corps stationed in Cremona was given a new name: the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia (Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia, CSIR for short). That same day the first troop trains left Verona, Cremona and Rome, carrying Italian soldiers through Austria and Hungary to the war against the Soviet Union. Three divisions, a legion of the Fascist militia and an air force contingent, some 62,000 men in all, were Benito Mussolini’s answer to the German attack on the USSR of 22 June. Nobody in Berlin needed these troops, but the Duce believed that Italy could not be absent from a war that was to decide the shape of Europe.

Some lists state that on 10 July units of the corps “began arriving” in Russia, and that it included a legion from the Independent State of Croatia. Both statements need correcting. On 10 July the transports were only just leaving Italy. The movement lasted until 5 August, and the last division reached the front on foot only at the beginning of September. The Croatian legion that set off east in the summer of 1941 fought as part of the German forces, not the Italian ones. A smaller Croatian unit served with the Italians, and it reached the front only in the spring of 1942.

The Duce wants his share of the crusade

Mussolini knew of the German preparations for war with the Soviet Union, although Hitler had not let him into the details. On 30 May 1941 he summoned the Chief of the General Staff, Ugo Cavallero, and instructed him to prepare a corps that would go east in the event of a German–Soviet war. German plans provided for the participation of Romania and Finland – neighbours of the USSR with scores to settle with it – but not of Italy. Adolf Hitler would have preferred his ally to strengthen its forces in North Africa, where since February the German Afrika Korps had been having to rescue the Italians, and to concentrate on the war in the Mediterranean.

On the morning of 22 June Mussolini, who was on holiday at Riccione, learned of the attack from a letter from Hitler. He told Cavallero to speed up the preparations, and his Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, to inform the Soviet ambassador of the declaration of war. Hitler, in their last exchange of letters, still tried politely to decline the help, but in the end he accepted it. As with Hungary and Slovakia, it was the ally that sought a part in the war, not Germany that sought its help.

Historians describe Mussolini’s motives in different ways. Anti-communism was one of the foundations of Fascism, and the Duce had never fully reconciled himself to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. A war against “Bolshevism” allowed him to appear once again as Europe’s foremost defender against communism. More important, though, were political calculations. After the defeats in Greece, East Africa and Libya, Italy had lost much of its prestige as an ally in German eyes. Mussolini’s biographer Renzo De Felice believed that what the Duce feared above all was that, after a swift German victory over the USSR, he would be pushed to the margins by Hitler’s other allies and have no say in the ordering of post-war Europe. According to Ciano’s diary, Mussolini did not doubt that Germany would win, but hoped that this time it would not be a walkover and that the Wehrmacht would emerge from the war weakened, which would restore the balance within the Rome–Berlin Axis.

Three “transportable” divisions

The core of the new corps was the Transportable Army Corps (Corpo d’armata autotrasportabile), which in April 1941 had fought in Yugoslavia and advanced through Dalmatia as far as Dubrovnik. On 10 July it received the name CSIR and three divisions: the 9th Infantry Division “Pasubio” and the 52nd Infantry Division “Torino”, both formally “transportable” (autotrasportabili), and the 3rd Fast (Celere) Division “Principe Amedeo Duca d’Aosta”. Attached to the corps was the 63rd “Tagliamento” Legion of the Fascist militia – the “Blackshirts” – about 2,000 strong.

“Transportable” was a euphemism. These divisions had no motor vehicles of their own. They could travel by lorry if the command allocated lorries to them; if not, they marched. The corps had only one motor transport group, which according to the plan was to move the divisions one after another. In practice this did not work, and the “Torino” Division covered most of the way to the front on foot. The fast division combined traditional cavalry, in the “Savoia Cavalleria” and “Lancieri di Novara” regiments, with Bersaglieri on motorcycles and bicycles. The corps’ only armoured unit was this division’s battalion of about 60 light L3 tankettes, defenceless against Soviet T-34 and KV tanks.

According to Italian figures, the CSIR numbered about 3,000 officers and 59,000 other ranks, 5,500 motor vehicles, often requisitioned from haulage firms, 220 guns, 92 anti-tank guns of 47 mm calibre, and 4,600 horses and mules. It was accompanied by a Regia Aeronautica contingent of 83 aircraft: Macchi C.200 fighters, Caproni Ca.311 reconnaissance aircraft and Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 transports. By the standards of an Italian army fighting simultaneously in North Africa while occupying the Balkans and part of France, this was a considerable effort. Set against a war in which Germany threw more than 3 million men into the east, however, it was a token contingent.

General Francesco Zingales was appointed to command the corps. He fell ill on the way to the front and on 13 July was taken to hospital in Vienna. He was replaced by General Giovanni Messe, who assumed command on 14 July (some Italian studies give 17 July). Messe was one of the few Italian generals to have come out of the war with Greece with a good reputation. From December 1940 he had commanded the Special Army Corps in Albania, which halted the Greek offensive towards Vlorë. From the start he complained about the CSIR’s equipment. He later described the corps as a compromise between what had been wanted and what had been possible.

Across the Carpathians into Ukraine

The movement lasted from 10 July to 5 August. According to Italian figures, 216 trains were needed. The railway lines ended in what were then Hungarian towns at the foot of the Carpathians – Máramarossziget (Sighetu Marmației), Felsővisó and Borșa – which today lie in Romania. From there the units crossed the Eastern Carpathians into Romania and then marched hundreds of kilometres along bad roads into Ukraine. Downpours turned the roads to mud, and the shortage of lorries slowed the march.

The corps was placed under the German 11th Army of General Eugen von Schobert, which together with Romanian troops was advancing from Romania through Bessarabia as part of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South. The Germans did not wait for the Italians to assemble in full. At the end of July the commander of the German III Motorised Corps, General Eberhard von Mackensen, asked for at least one division. On 30 July Messe sent the “Pasubio” Division to the front, reinforced with a motorcycle company and artillery. The rest of the corps came up throughout August.

The Croats: with the Germans, not the Italians

The call to the “crusade” was also answered by the Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941 on the ruins of Yugoslavia. Its leader, Ante Pavelić, offered Berlin volunteers for the Eastern Front on 25 June, and Hitler accepted the offer on 2 July. The choice of Germany rather than Italy was no accident. Pavelić owed his power to Mussolini, but under the Treaties of Rome of 18 May 1941 he had had to cede most of the Dalmatian coast to Italy and agree that Croatia would have no navy in the Adriatic. In Ustaše Zagreb the Germans were seen as a counterweight to Italian ambitions, especially after the partition of Yugoslavia, in which Rome had seized large areas of the coast.

In July a regiment of volunteers began forming at Varaždin. Its third battalion was formed in Sarajevo, and about a third of the volunteers were Bosnian Muslims. The unit wore German uniforms with the Croatian chequerboard on the sleeve and helmet, and its men swore allegiance to Hitler, Pavelić, the Reich and the Croatian state. As the 369th Reinforced (Croatian) Infantry Regiment, commonly called the Croatian Legion, it was part of the German army. After training in Austria the regiment went to Romania in August, and in October it joined the German 100th Light Division of the 17th Army on the Dnieper. In 1942 it advanced with that division to Stalingrad, where it was almost completely destroyed in the ruins of the Red October works. At the end of January 1943 the remnants of the regiment under Marko Mesić surrendered to the Red Army. Besides the regiment there were the Croatian Air Force Legion, whose pilots began training in Germany on 15 July, and the Croatian Naval Legion, which arrived at the Bulgarian port of Varna on 17 July and later fought on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov as part of the Kriegsmarine.

A smaller unit served with the Italians: the Light Transport Brigade (Laki prijevozni zdrug; in Italian, Legione Croata Autotrasportabile). It was formed at Rome’s request in July 1941, following a conversation between an Italian general and Pavelić, and numbered about 1,200 volunteers. It trained for a long time in Croatia and Italy and reached the Eastern Front only in April 1942. It fought as part of the Italian 3rd Fast Division, by then within the 8th Army, and in December 1942 it was destroyed on the Don. The statement that in July 1941 a Croatian legion formed part of the Italian corps thus merges these two units into one and confuses the dates.

From the Bug to the Don

The CSIR fought its first action in August, in a German operation to encircle Soviet forces between the Dniester and the Southern Bug. On 11 and 12 August the leading units of the “Pasubio” Division, advancing along the Bug towards Mykolaiv, clashed near the villages of Pokrovske and Yasna Polyana with a Soviet regiment, which withdrew, leaving dead and prisoners behind. On 14 August the corps came under the command of General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 and covered its flank on the Dnieper. At the end of August Mussolini, visiting the headquarters of Army Group South at Uman with Hitler, reviewed Italian troops. Messe complained to him then about the lack of lorries and winter equipment.

At the end of September the Italians carried out their first independent operation, the encirclement of Soviet units at Petrykivka east of the Dnieper, and according to their own figures took some 10,000 prisoners for the loss of 87 killed. On 20 October Bersaglieri took the railway station at Stalino, today’s Donetsk, and on 2 November the “Pasubio” Division captured Horlivka after street fighting. In the last days of December the corps, with German help, beat off a Soviet offensive in the Donets Basin, which Italian propaganda hailed as the “Christmas battle”. From August 1941 to July 1942, according to Italian figures, the CSIR lost 1,792 killed and missing and 7,858 wounded and frostbitten.

Significance

For Mussolini the CSIR was above all a political gesture. It had no influence on the course of the 1941 campaign, but it bound Italy to a war in the east that proved far longer than Rome and Berlin had expected. When Barbarossa failed to bring a quick victory, it was Germany that began demanding more troops from its allies. In the summer of 1942 Mussolini – although Messe was pressing for better weapons rather than more men – expanded the corps into the 8th Army, known as the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR), some 230,000 strong under the command of General Italo Gariboldi. The former CSIR became its XXXV Corps. Messe, at odds with Gariboldi, asked to be recalled to Italy in November 1942.

In the winter of 1942–1943, after the Germans had been encircled at Stalingrad, Soviet offensives on the Don, including Operation Little Saturn, shattered the 8th Army. According to official Italian figures, 84,830 soldiers did not make it back to the German lines, and the veterans’ association puts the number of dead and missing at about 95,000. Just over 10,000 ARMIR soldiers returned to Italy from Soviet captivity. The defeat on the Don became one of Italy’s most painful experiences of the Second World War and contributed to the collapse of confidence in Mussolini, who was overthrown in July 1943. Sending the corps east in the summer of 1941 was the first step along that road.