How Mussolini's Italians Legions Froze to Death (Thanks to Hitler)

Michael Peck

History, Europe

A terrible, foolish affair.

Key point: Rome sent its conscripts to fight a losing war and they were horribly crushed.

Why in God's name were Italian peasants freezing to death outside Stalingrad?

They should have been home eating pasta in Palermo, or veal in Venice, during that bitter winter of 1942–43. Instead, they were being trampled into the snow by waves of Soviet tanks that had materialized like demons from the freezing fogs of the vast Russian steppe.

Some Italian soldiers fought, and others fled. Many were killed, and those that weren't disappeared into the Soviet gulag prison camps. Nearly half of the Italians who fought in Russia never made it home.

But what were they doing in Russia in the first place?

Blame the megalomania of two dictators. The first is Adolf Hitler, who conceived and ordered Operation Barbarossa, the fateful invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The second was Benito Mussolini, the clown prince of despots, who sent 115,000 Italians to die in a conflict where they didn't belong.

Mussolini had become the first Fascist dictator in 1922, when Hitler was just the obscure leader of a minor extremist party. How humiliated he was that Italy should end up as the bumbling little brother in the Axis family. Even more humiliating was that Germany never told Italy that it was planning to invade Russia (perhaps because the Germans were convinced that anything they told the Italians would soon be leaked to the British). When Mussolini learned of Hitler's plans, he insisted as a matter of Fascist solidarity that the Italians participate. Besides, if the Soviet Union were to be conquered, might there not be some spoils for resource-poor Italy, whose economy desperately needed Russian oil, coal and other raw materials denied it by the British naval blockade?