Sebastiano Visconti Prasca

Sebastiano Visconti Prasca was a general whose name became a byword for recklessness in Italy. A trained staff officer, military attaché in Belgrade and Paris and the author of a book on “decisive war”, he commanded the Italian forces in Albania in 1940. At a meeting in the Palazzo Venezia on 15 October 1940 he assured Benito Mussolini that the operation against Greece had been prepared “down to the smallest detail” and that the Greeks were “not people who like to fight”. Two weeks after the invasion began he lost his command, and a few weeks later he was retired. Mussolini later said that the one fatal mistake of his life had been to believe Visconti Prasca. For the rest of his life the general tried to prove that others were to blame.

Early years and two wars

He was born in Rome on 27 February 1883 into the Visconti Prasca family, which belonged to the patriciate of the city of Alessandria in Piedmont. He graduated from the Royal Military Academy of Infantry and Cavalry in Modena and was commissioned as an infantry second lieutenant on 5 September 1904. As a lieutenant he fought in the Italo-Turkish War for Libya; for the battle of Merkeb on 27 January 1912, in which, despite being wounded, he spent the whole day carrying orders to the units, he received the Bronze Medal of Military Valour.

In the First World War he fought on the Italian front from 1915 to 1918, mainly on the Isonzo. He earned a second bronze medal for more than two years of daring reconnaissance and carrying orders in the front line. He was promoted to major and then, on 1 November 1917, in the days of the defeat at Caporetto, to lieutenant colonel. After the war he graduated from the War School in Turin and in October 1919 joined the Army General Staff.

Silesia, Belgrade and Badoglio’s staff

In January 1920 Visconti Prasca went to Upper Silesia as a member of the Inter-Allied Commission that administered the region ahead of the plebiscite of March 1921; the Italians, alongside the French and the British, had their own military contingent there. In 1921 he returned to Rome to the War Ministry, and in 1922 he moved to the Army Council.

In March 1924 he became military attaché in Belgrade, the capital of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with which Italy was competing for influence on the Adriatic and in Albania. He spent six years there and rose to the rank of colonel. In April 1930 he had to leave because the Yugoslav government openly accused him of espionage. Mussolini already thought highly of him by then. After his return Visconti Prasca commanded an infantry regiment and, from 1933, the military administration in Bologna.

In October 1933 he moved to the office of the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio. During this time he wrote the book La guerra decisiva (“The Decisive War”), in which he argued that future wars would be settled by rapid, mobile strikes rather than by exhausting positional fighting – an Italian counterpart of the theory that in Germany later came to be called Blitzkrieg. Mussolini read it while it was still in typescript and was delighted with it; some Italian historians suggest that it strengthened his belief that a quick war against Ethiopia was possible. In April 1934, on Badoglio’s orders, Visconti Prasca carried out a reconnaissance in Eritrea, and his report was used in drawing up the plans for the invasion of Ethiopia. In October 1934 he was promoted to brigadier general.

Shortly afterwards Badoglio removed him from his staff, suspecting that Visconti Prasca had leaked the secret understandings the marshal had reached with the French Chief of Staff, Maurice Gamelin. From December 1934 to early 1935 he commanded the Italian contingent of the international force that kept order in the Saar Territory during the plebiscite of January 1935. He became an honorary aide-de-camp to King Victor Emmanuel III, served as deputy commander of the Cosseria Division in 1935–1937 and was promoted to major general in September 1937. In 1938 he was made a count.

Attaché in Paris

From 1937 or 1938 (sources give different dates) Visconti Prasca was military attaché in Paris. From there he watched Franco-Italian relations deteriorate after the Munich Agreement and Italy’s demands on France, and then the first months of the war. He was regarded as a Francophile. In January 1940 he reported a conversation with Gamelin to Galeazzo Ciano and, as the minister noted, considered the French army the best in the world and was convinced that Germany had already lost the war. In mid-December 1939 he was recalled to Rome and placed at the disposal of the War Ministry; according to some sources he also briefly commanded an army corps on the French border.

Albania and Greece

On 26 May 1940, on the recommendation of Ciano and of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Ubaldo Soddu, Visconti Prasca was appointed commander of the Italian forces in Albania in place of General Carlo Geloso. He took up the command on 5 June, a few days before Italy entered the war. Under him was a reinforced corps of about 100,000 men in five Italian divisions together with Albanian units. From the first weeks he also organised irregular Albanian bands that were to operate on the Greek side of the border, in Chameria.

In August 1940, when Ciano and the Lieutenant-General of Albania, Francesco Jacomoni, unleashed a press campaign against Greece, Mussolini summoned both of them to Rome. On 12 August Visconti Prasca assured him that a strike into Epirus was possible, even easy, provided it was made at once. He drew up a plan based on only a few divisions, which foresaw no need for significant reinforcements before Epirus was taken. A few days later an Italian submarine sank the cruiser Elli, but Berlin demanded calm in the Balkans and Mussolini postponed the attack.

He returned to it in October, angered by the arrival of the German military mission in Romania. At the meeting in the Palazzo Venezia on 15 October 1940 Visconti Prasca was the most self-assured of those present. He spoke of a two-to-one superiority (70,000 Italians against 30,000 Greeks in Epirus), of a non-existent Greek air force and of a plan “as perfect as is humanly possible”; he promised to take Epirus and the port of Preveza within two weeks and declared that three additional mountain divisions would be enough for the further march on Athens. He also reported that he had French weapons ready for a staged Greek attack on the border. Historians also explain his optimism by ambition: he was a corps general young in rank and knew that if he asked for larger forces, a more senior commander would be put at the head of the expedition. According to some writers he hoped that taking Athens would earn him the baton of a Marshal of Italy. According to some historians Badoglio and General Mario Roatta advised Mussolini to replace him with someone more experienced, but the Duce kept him.

On 28 October 1940 Visconti Prasca’s troops crossed the Greek–Albanian border. In the first days the general cabled Rome that the advance was proceeding “at an accelerated pace”. Soon, however, torrential rain, swollen rivers, the lack of roads, mules and supplies and, above all, fierce Greek resistance brought the Italians to a halt. The Greeks under General Alexandros Papagos almost encircled the Julia Alpine Division in the Pindus mountains and went over to counter-attacks. It became clear that Visconti Prasca had neglected the basics of logistics and that the superiority he had counted on did not exist, because the Greeks had managed to mobilise and move far more troops into Epirus than he had assumed.

As early as 6 November General Ubaldo Soddu left for Albania to take over the supreme command, which he formally assumed on 8 or 9 November (sources differ), when the offensive finally ground to a halt. Mussolini was, as Ciano recorded, furious with Visconti Prasca and Jacomoni, “who presented the operation as too easy and certain”. As a consolation Visconti Prasca was given the newly formed 11th Army on the southern sector of the front, from the Pindus mountains to the Ionian Sea, but he criticised Soddu’s defensive arrangements and after a few days (on 11 or 16 November, according to different sources) he was replaced by General Carlo Geloso. The general was sent back to Italy and retired at the turn of November and December 1940. On 4 December 1940, as the Greeks were advancing deep into Albania, Mussolini told Ciano: “Every man makes one fatal mistake in his life. I made mine when I believed General Visconti Prasca. But how could I have avoided it, when the man seemed so sure of himself?” On the same day Badoglio stepped down as Chief of the General Staff.

Resistance and captivity

Sidelined, the general sat out Mussolini’s fall in July 1943. After the Italian armistice of 8 September 1943 and the German occupation of Rome he joined the anti-fascist resistance. On 24 October 1943 he was arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was not carried out; it was commuted to imprisonment in Germany.

Visconti Prasca was sent to Oflag 64/Z in Skoki (German: Schokken) in Greater Poland, which had been annexed to the Reich. The Germans had gathered there most of the Italian generals and admirals taken prisoner after the armistice who had refused to serve the fascist Italian Social Republic. They were regarded as traitors, badly treated and starved; several died in the camp. In January 1945, ahead of the Red Army’s arrival, the Germans drove the prisoners west on a march through the snow, during which SS men shot six generals who could not keep up. The rest were freed by Soviet soldiers a few days later. According to Italian biographies Visconti Prasca then witnessed the entry of Soviet troops into Berlin. He returned to Italy in October 1945.

After the war

Immediately after his return Visconti Prasca published his memoirs under the defiant title Io ho aggredito la Grecia (“I Attacked Greece”; Rizzoli, 1946, though some bibliographies give 1947). He blamed the defeat on poor organisation, the vanity and incompetence of the high command, corruption and the lack of cooperation between the services, and he compared the fierce Greek resistance in Epirus with the Turkish defence of the Dardanelles in 1915. Historians regard the book as a failed attempt at self-rehabilitation in which the general played down his own responsibility. He repeatedly appealed against his 1940 retirement, including to President Luigi Einaudi, but he was never reinstated. He devoted his last years to private orders of chivalry; from 1951 he was Grand Master of the so-called Sovereign Military Order of St George of Carinthia. He was married to Angelica Zoppi, sister of the general and senator Ottavio Zoppi. He died on 25 February 1961 in Monte Porzio Catone near Rome.

Significance

Visconti Prasca did not make the decision to attack Greece – Mussolini took it himself, pushed by Ciano. But it was his assurances of an easy victory that gave the dictator an argument against the caution of Badoglio and Roatta. While the marshal spoke of twenty divisions and three months, the commander in Albania promised Epirus in two weeks with the forces he already had. His self-confidence, his underestimation of the enemy and his disregard for logistics became a textbook example of how Fascist Italy waged war: according to Italian historians, the general told the Duce what he wanted to hear.

The consequences went far beyond his career. The defeat in Epirus wrecked Italy’s “parallel war”, led to Badoglio’s resignation, brought the British to Greece and Crete and, in April 1941, forced Hitler into the Balkan campaign. For the Greeks, the first weeks of the war, in which Visconti Prasca’s army became bogged down in the mountains of Epirus, became a source of national pride, commemorated every year on 28 October.