Italian troops land at Cádiz

On 23 December 1936 about three thousand Italians in the black shirts of the Fascist militia came ashore in the port of Cádiz. Some studies date the arrival of the first transport to 22 December and its unloading to the following day. Officially they were volunteers who had come of their own free will to fight on the side of General Francisco Franco against the Republic. In reality they were the first wave of a regular expeditionary corps, sent on the orders of Benito Mussolini. By mid-February 1937 nearly fifty thousand Italian soldiers and militiamen were in Spain. From February they bore the name Corpo Truppe Volontarie (CTV), the Corps of Volunteer Troops. From then on Italy was waging a land war in Spain that no one had declared on it and that it did not officially acknowledge.

From aircraft to divisions

Italy had been helping the Spanish rebels since the first days of the civil war. At the end of July 1936 Mussolini sent Savoia-Marchetti bombers to Morocco, which helped to move the Army of Africa to the peninsula. Then came fighters, tanks, artillery, submarines and advisers, and on Majorca the Italian Fascist Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi, known as “Count Rossi”, ruled the island for several months like his own private principality. In September General Mario Roatta, head of Italian military intelligence, came to Spain. In Seville he set up the Italian Military Mission in Spain, which coordinated arms deliveries and trained Nationalist units.

In the autumn of 1936 Franco was convinced that he would take Madrid and win the war before the end of the year. The November assault on the capital, however, broke down in the Casa de Campo and University City, and the first International Brigades and Soviet tanks and fighters reached the defenders. The war promised to be a long one. Mussolini had already staked his prestige on it. On 18 November Italy, together with Germany, recognised Franco’s government, and at the end of November it signed a secret treaty of friendship and cooperation with him, promising further aid. The Duce also wanted victory in Spain to be a victory for Fascism, not merely for the generals. After the conquest of Ethiopia he believed that his army could easily decide another war.

At the beginning of December 1936 the decision was taken in Rome to send entire ground units to Spain. Mussolini took it after consultations with his Foreign Minister and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, and with Roatta, who became the corps commander. Germany, which had sent the Condor Legion in November, did not intend to send ground troops to Spain on a large scale and was happy to leave that role to Italy.

Blackshirts at Cádiz

The first to arrive were soldiers of the Fascist Militia (MVSN), known from the colour of their uniforms as Blackshirts. Formally they had volunteered, but their motives varied. Among them were convinced Fascists and veterans of Ethiopia, but also unemployed men tempted by the pay and men who, according to later accounts, had not been told exactly where they were going. Some thought they were sailing to work in East Africa. Later the “Littorio” Division also arrived in Spain, made up of regular army soldiers who were formally volunteers as well.

Ships carrying Italians put in at Cádiz and other Nationalist ports in Andalusia throughout the Christmas period and January. The transports were escorted by the Italian navy, and unloading was done in a hurry, without a proper plan. Battalions and divisions were formed only on arrival. By mid-February the corps comprised three Blackshirt divisions – “Dio lo vuole” (“God wills it”), “Fiamme Nere” (“Black Flames”) and “Penne Nere” (“Black Feathers”) – the “Littorio” Division, a group of tanks and armoured cars, plentiful artillery and its own air arm, the Aviazione Legionaria. On 17 February 1937 the military mission was renamed a headquarters, and the whole corps became the Corpo Truppe Volontarie.

The arrival of so large a force could not escape the world’s notice. The press wrote about it, and the governments in London and Paris knew the scale of the shipments from their intelligence reports. Italy, however, formally continued to observe the non-intervention agreement it had signed in August 1936. On 2 January 1937, while more Italian transports were sailing for Spain, the British government signed a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Rome on maintaining the status quo in the Mediterranean, in which Ciano gave assurances that Italy had no territorial designs on Spain.

Málaga and Guadalajara

The Italian units went into action quickly. At the beginning of February 1937 the Blackshirts, together with the Nationalists, attacked Málaga, which was weakly defended by Republican militias. The city fell on 8 February. After its capture the Nationalists shot thousands of people, and the crowds of refugees fleeing along the coast towards Almería were fired on by warships and aircraft. Mussolini took the easy victory as proof of his army’s strength.

In March the CTV was to decide the war. Roatta, with about 35,000 men, tanks and aircraft, attacked from the north-east towards Guadalajara on 8 March in order to encircle Madrid. In the Battle of Guadalajara the motorised columns got bogged down in mud, rain and snow, the aircraft could not take off from waterlogged airfields, and the light Italian tankettes stood no chance against the Soviet T-26 tanks. The Republicans, among them the International Brigades with the Italian Garibaldi Battalion, went over to the counter-attack and by 23 March had thrown the Italians back. The corps lost several thousand men killed, wounded and captured, as well as a good deal of equipment. The Republic showed the world documents and prisoners as proof that Italy was waging a regular war in Spain. It was the most notorious defeat suffered by Fascist Italy before the Second World War. The humiliated Mussolini decided that the corps would stay in Spain until it had wiped out this stain.

The corps’ later fortunes

In April 1937 Roatta was replaced by General Ettore Bastico. The weak Blackshirt divisions were disbanded or merged, and the Italians began to command mixed Italo-Spanish brigades in which the cadre was Italian and the rank and file Spanish. The reorganised corps fought well. In August 1937 it played an important part in the Battle of Santander, where part of the Basque army surrendered to it at Santoña. In 1938, under General Mario Berti, it took part in the Aragon offensive, which cut the Republic in two, and under General Gastone Gambara in the conquest of Catalonia in the winter of 1938–1939. At the end of the war the Italians entered Alicante. In March 1938 Italian bombers bombed Barcelona for three days, on orders from Rome and without consulting Franco.

According to Italian figures, some 75,000–78,000 Italian soldiers and airmen passed through Spain in all. Nearly four thousand were killed and more than ten thousand wounded. Italy sent more than 700 aircraft to Spain, about 1,800 guns and thousands of machine guns and vehicles, and its submarines sank ships bound for Republican ports. According to various estimates, the war cost Italy between 6 and 8.5 billion lire, a considerable part of the state’s annual expenditure. In proportion, Mussolini committed more forces and money to Spain than Hitler did.

On the road to war

The landing at Cádiz set the seal on the alliance of the two dictatorships. The joint intervention brought Mussolini closer to Hitler, and the war in Spain bound Italy ever more tightly to Germany and drew it away from Britain and France, with whom, as recently as 1935, the Duce had formed the Stresa Front against German rearmament. When Germany took over Austria in March 1938, Mussolini, whose troops and money were tied up in Spain, no longer tried to stop Hitler, as he had in the summer of 1934 after the putsch in Vienna. The fiction of the “volunteers” became the pattern for the whole policy of non-intervention. Everyone knew about the Italian corps, and the democratic governments pretended not to see it, so long as war could be avoided.

At the same time Spain weakened the Italian army itself. The war consumed equipment, stocks and money that were lacking in 1940, when Mussolini declared war on France and Britain. The lessons of Guadalajara were learned only in part, and many Italian generals from Spain, among them Bastico, Gambara and Bergonzoli, later held commands in North Africa. Roatta, as commander of the Second Army in occupied Yugoslavia, was responsible in 1942–1943 for brutal reprisals against the civilian population. Among those who fought on Franco’s side was also Giorgio Perlasca, who in Budapest in 1944, posing as a Spanish diplomat, saved thousands of Jews.