How Mussolini's Fascists Prepared Italy for World War II

It was October 1922, and Rome was under siege. Attacked from all sides by a vast horde of angry young Italians, there was no guarantee that the king, his parliament, or even the foundations of the state itself would survive. These Italian upstarts were fascists, adherents to the doctrine of a man who hoped to place the whole nation under his authority. Benito Mussolini was marching on Rome, and he would not be deterred.

Mussolini and his forces encircled the king, his presence a thinly veiled threat: meet our demands, or be overrun. The king had the troops to start a civil war, and he might even win it. But Mussolini was before him, daring the king to oppose him. The king, able though he may have been, just didn’t have the stomach for it, and as he stood aside, he opened a door that the Fascists would pour through.

Italy’s Bitter Experience in the Great War

The third member of the Axis Powers, Italy’s turn to fascism and its rise through the interwar years receives far less historical scrutiny than that of Germany and Japan, but its change over those years is no less nuanced. From their place as an ostensibly victorious power after World War I, to becoming Adolf Hitler’s most prominent European backers during World War II, the Italian road to war was one part societal discontent and ten parts strongman dictatorship. The confluence of both would lead to the rise of Benito Mussolini and his fascist rule, and sow the seeds of his downfall long before the Second World War began.

It is probably fair to say that no matter what an individual nation’s ambitions were prior to the start of World War I, they probably would have soured on the whole idea if someone had accurately told them exactly how bad it would get. But at this time in world history, Italy in particular was disinterested in the idea of a war across Europe. Anti-war sentiment among the people was strong, even before the conflict began.

But Italy’s government at the time, a conservative coalition under Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, was not interested in letting a good territorial reshuffle go to waste. At the outset of the war, Salandra and his government held negotiations in secret and gave both the Allied and Central Powers a chance to sweet-talk them into an alliance. Austria and the Central Powers made a good offer, but the Triple Entente of Russia, France, and Britain came back with a better one, promising significant territorial rewards, plus the additional military benefit of de-facto encirclement of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In secret, Italy and the Triple Entente signed the Treaty of London, guaranteeing Italian support for the duration of the conflict. One major reason these negotiations were held in secret was their inevitable unpopularity at home. The majority of Italians, as well as many government officials and the major opposition parties, were against active engagement in the war, and only a loose handful of Italian political factions supported the alliance.

Even worse, the ones who did all had different reasons for their decision. Some interpreted it as an opportunity for territorial expansion, others used it as a pretext for their own agenda toward national unity, and many in the Socialist and Republican parties even thought it was an opportunity for Italy’s own liberation. Many Socialists felt that the war was an opportunity to bring about the collapse of capitalism in Italy.

One very important name in this story, Benito Mussolini, was among them.

Wartime Collapse and the Bitter Aftermath

With the news that Italy had picked a side in the war, both pro- and anti-war protests occurred at home. Despite widespread popular opposition, Salandra’s government forced a war policy through the legislature, one which locked opposition parties into cooperating. This brute-force governance went about as well as one can expect in a representative republic, and Salandra was a lot better at legislating than he was at guiding a war effort.

After some difficult Italian defeats and strategic failures, the pressure from the people and the war effort was too much to bear, and Salandra’s government resigned. The government after that, a center-right administration under Paolo Boselli, also collapsed after a devastating Italian defeat at the Battle of Caporetto in 1917. That particular battle broke a long stalemate between Italy and Austria-Hungary, and when it broke, Austria-Hungary steamrolled the Italians.

A staggering six hundred thousand Italian troops deserted or surrendered after the battle’s end. After this, the war was effectively over for the Italians. The military and its soldiers had been fighting in horrific conditions, often starving or freezing to death on the front lines, and morale had been very low for a while.

The generals involved with this disaster largely refused to accept responsibility, instead blaming the low morale and the cowardice of their troops. The generals were expressing this sentiment from comfortable offices while their troops were undersupplied, underfed, and getting their toes frozen off, and it didn’t go over particularly well with the remaining Italian army. While they accepted the need to hold off the Austro-Hungarians from further invasion into Italy, they rebelled against orders for counteroffensives.

A more liberal government took charge in 1917, after which time the Italian troops’ conditions drastically improved. The nation then defended its front line until Germany and Austria-Hungary collapsed under their own war effort, thus bringing an end to the Great War. It was from this brutal series of events that Italy entered the interwar years.

Under successive incompetent administrations, over a half-million Italians had been killed, and the nation’s leaders had made their lack of competence abundantly clear. Italy had kept its territory by holding out long enough for the Triple Entente to essentially come to its rescue, but Italy itself had been powerless to stop the Central Powers from gaining victory. If there was one thing the starkly divided nation could agree on, it was that the war was a sour and bitter memory, one that now cast its shadow over Italy’s future.

But that was all that the people could seem to agree on. In the years immediately after the end of World War I, Italy’s fractured society warred with itself. This was made all the worse when, through the Treaty of Saint-Germain, the Triple Entente denied Italy some of the land it had been promised and declined to offer any African or Asian colony at all, even while the far-flung lands of Germany and Austria-Hungary were now up for the taking.

More and more successive governments collapsed, and in the post-war years, Italy faced the ramifications of wartime inflation. The Italian lira had collapsed to a sixth of its former strength, rendering many people’s life savings meaningless, and after growing fat on wartime contracts, Italy’s military-industrial complex went bankrupt. Strikes, peasant land seizures, and looting dominated the years 1919 and 1920, known as the biennio rosso, the Red Years.

The whole country seemed on the precipice of rebellion from both Catholic and Socialist factions, and all the weak governments could do was suppress the worst of the unrest. Italy was a powder keg, and a single spark, from any source, could be enough to set the whole thing alight.

Mussolini’s Rise to Power and the Blackshirt Campaign

Far from the strongman dictator he would later become, in 1915 Mussolini had been the editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper, a position from which he was later ousted. However, it was not half-bad to be a popular writer on the home front during a major war, because after all, propaganda doesn’t write itself. With the support of the Triple Entente, Mussolini founded a pro-war alternative newspaper called Il Popolo d’Italia, The People of Italy.

But when the war ended and Italy broke down into chaos, Mussolini was among the opportunistic ideologues who took advantage. At this time, there were a whole mess of people looking to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the status quo, in favor of militarist and nationalist ideas. Mussolini was one such man, and it was with this goal that he founded the fasci di combattimento, his so-called “fighting leagues.”

With their name shortened, they became the fascists, the group for which their entire ideology would be named. Radical nationalists with a strong opposition to the church, Mussolini’s first fascists quickly turned to agitation and violence across Italy. In April 1919, they killed four people during an arson attack on the national Socialist newspaper, an attack that wouldn’t be their last on that particular target.

Inspired by the fascists’ displays of physical power and force in the streets, more and more Italians began to join their ranks. Soon, the group was a proper militia, and they led attacks against Communists, Catholics, Socialists, labor unions, and even municipal governments. The fascists had a number of advantages that set them apart from other agitator factions in Italy, but perhaps the most important of all was the support they received from a range of influential backers.

The fascists organized into squads, with a uniform that earned them the nickname of “blackshirts.” And when the blackshirts went to work, the police often didn’t stand in the way. Similarly, the fascists received financial support from landowners and manufacturing bosses.

They shared a similar enemy with the fascists: labor unions, and the competing political ideologies those unions relied on. Well-financed and without local opposition, the fascists overran the countryside, and when it became clear to the people of Italy that the government was either unwilling or unable to stop them, many people publicly abandoned their own ideologies to avoid the fascists’ wrath. As their intimidation campaign progressed, so did their support—not just from the wealthy, but from students, small business owners, and many in the lower levels of government.

In the eyes of many, the fascists were saving Italy from the communist and socialist influence that might lead to a full-scale civil war. Their representatives began to enter parliament, and in response, Mussolini founded the National Fascist Party. The party established trade syndicates as an alternative to the unions and began taking over major cities, relying on street wars that the fascists had now become very good at winning.

It was around this time that Mussolini became Il Duce, The Leader, fascism’s spiritual guide and anointed ruler. Finally, in October 1922, Mussolini marched on Rome with twenty-five thousand of his people. In many ways, this was a dare, a direct challenge to Italian leadership to declare martial law and meet them in battle.

But just as the Italian government had done when the blackshirts ran wild across the rural provinces, they wilted under the pressure instead. Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III attempted to appease Mussolini, offering him the dual position of Prime Minister and Interior Minister, and Mussolini accepted.

Consolidation of Fascist Dictatorship

Il Duce now had all of Italy in his grip, and rather than impose his will immediately, Mussolini saw the value of constitutional leadership in order to mold the country into something a bit more to his liking. Mussolini’s coalition government was initially fairly diverse, and with that credibility came a far greater sense of legitimacy for the fascists. The party grew quickly, its blackshirt squads were organized into an official paramilitary group, and the Nationalist Party merged themselves voluntarily into the Fascist Party.

Mussolini also made some interesting electoral changes, most notably a law that stated that the largest party in parliament would receive an absolute majority of seats with as little as 25 percent of the vote. In an expansive multi-party system like Italy’s, this was a huge change, and helped to consolidate the Fascist majority in the 1924 elections. By this point, “election” was perhaps a generous term, since Mussolini’s blackshirts were now empowered and widespread enough to intimidate voters across large portions of the country.

Opposition parties panicked about the best path forward and ended up devolving into a whole lot of internal squabbles, arguments that would keep them mostly out of Mussolini’s way in the future. By this time, it was clear to Mussolini that the idea of constitutional legitimacy needed support from Il Duce more than Il Duce needed constitutional legitimacy. After the elections, a prominent Socialist, Giacomo Matteotti, called out the Fascists’ clear voter intimidation and was promptly murdered by fascists led by one of Mussolini’s press personnel.

The resulting controversy, and the murmurings that Mussolini had directly ordered the attack, was able to put his rule in jeopardy, but with a parliamentary majority and the support of the king, Mussolini was able to hang on. This moment was the closest that the opposition ever came to real unity, of the kind that would have let them overthrow the government, and with tensions rising, Mussolini understood that he had to take decisive action. To deal with this crisis, he did the one thing that the opposition would never suspect.

He took responsibility—not just for the violence and political upheaval of the fascists, but for Giacomo Matteotti’s death. Far from being an expression of his remorse, this was yet another dare from Mussolini, who doubted that the same king who had given him parliament just over a year ago would move against him now. And Mussolini was right.

The king did nothing, and the Fascists had no one left to fear. One day after Mussolini’s admission of guilt, his troops spread throughout Italy, on direct orders to control any political organizations that would oppose him. In the next two years, Mussolini let loose.

He put an end to the electoral system, abolished protections for freedom of speech and affiliation, and tore the Italian constitution to bits. Opposition parties and labor unions were stamped out, while Fascist appointees replaced local leaders and their thugs hunted down any and all centers of antifascist resistance. Thousands of opposition leaders were exiled, and many others were killed outright.

A secret police organization began to carry out operations both at home and abroad, and fascism became inextricably intertwined with the elite and wealthy who had always run Italy from behind the scenes. By the end of 1927, Italy would be completely under Mussolini’s control, with no one left to stand against it.

Social Control, Economic Management, and the Church

The Fascists made the same transition as many other dictatorships have, before and since: from political domination to social control. In the coming years, the Fascists extended their hooks into every facet of Italian life, from factories to schools to social clubs. Mussolini’s propaganda machine roared into life, with the press, film, and radio all firmly under its command.

Italian leisure was just as important to the fascists as its working economy, and the government became the sole provider of approved leisure activities. The Fascists were believers in the carrot and the stick; do as they said, and citizens would be taking affordable, luxurious vacations on the Mediterranean coast; get in their way, and the secret police would ruin a whole lot more than their day. That is not to say that Mussolini had all of Italy on lockdown; far from it, especially in the economic sphere.

In 1926, the Italian lira had been revalued a bit too enthusiastically, and unemployment and wage cuts became commonplace as a result. However, Italy was able to react decently well; domestic heavy industry was expanded in response, and Italy became far less dependent on the whims of foreign markets. This ended up being a good bit of economic inoculation in 1929, when the Great Depression gave most of the world’s economies a good kick in the face.

Italy had to bail out many of its banks and heavy industry companies, but many Italians were able to keep their jobs through infrastructure and welfare spending. The bailouts, too, served to Mussolini’s advantage, making it far easier to institute state leadership over ostensibly private industry. Italy’s steel, arms, and hydroelectricity production took off, energy became cheaper, infrastructure improved, and the financial sector came out better-off in the short term.

The Fascists would ride this wave all through the 1930s, combining Italy’s improved economic capacity with the social control they now held over the Italian workplace. If there was any group that could stand against Il Duce, it was the Roman Catholic Church. The church had been cooperative with Mussolini in his early days, but Fascist leadership soon grew wary of Catholic influence, especially when it came to youth organizations.

These organizations were the last remaining vestige of non-Fascist social structure—and, mind you, they weren’t necessarily anti-Fascist either. They just weren’t explicitly Fascist. The relationship between the Catholic Church and the state was cordial enough through the early 1930s, but Mussolini was acutely aware that if the people ever became disillusioned with his rule, those same Catholic organizations might be where they ended up.

War and Expansion: Spain, Ethiopia, and the Alliance with Hitler

Just as Mussolini was all about flexing Italian muscle at home, so too did he seek out ways to demonstrate Italian Fascist power abroad. The first opportunity came courtesy of Europe’s other big Fascist upstart at the time, Spain’s future dictator Francisco Franco. In 1936, Franco had started the Spanish Civil War in an attempt to take power, and Mussolini was all too happy to help out.

For Franco’s war, Mussolini dedicated sixty thousand Fascist militia fighters, plus almost a thousand warplanes and close to a hundred ships. His dismay was considerable when the Italians were beaten back in 1937’s Battle of Guadalajara, and the war incurred fifteen thousand Italian casualties. To make matters worse, even though Italian anti-fascists weren’t willing to show themselves on Italian soil, they did so in Spain, with some three thousand picking up valuable combat experience and organizational guidance from their Spanish hosts.

The expedition to Spain became not just an embarrassment for Mussolini’s troops, but an event that would plant the seed of problems yet to come. On the topic of Mussolini cozying up to other totalitarian despots, his relationship with Adolf Hitler, whose meteoric rise to power in Germany had particularly impressed Il Duce, is notable. Mussolini really liked what Hitler had going on, even though many Fascist party elites didn’t share his view.

Mussolini adopted Hitler’s antisemitic policies in Italy in 1938, and with the king’s signature, Jews were banned from entering Italy, banned from receiving an education, banned from marrying purported ‘Aryans’, and strictly limited in their mobility and economic activity. In 1939, Italy signed the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany, a military and political alliance that would be followed up by the Tripartite Pact in 1940 between Germany, Italy, and Japan. The 1930s didn’t see the official Italian military sitting on their laurels, either.

Italy had had its heart set on conquering Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia, since the 1890s, and Mussolini set his sights on the nation as a major territory ripe for the taking. Ethiopia was one among a small handful of independent African states, and with Italian Somaliland right next to it, Italy took advantage of a border incident in late 1935 as pretext to invade. The war was quick, lasting under a year, and it wasn’t particularly difficult for Italy, as Ethiopian troops were poorly armed and minimally trained.

Italy’s modern military, and the deployment of mustard gas, were too much for Ethiopia to take, and they capitulated in mid-1936. The real threat of opposition came from the League of Nations, which condemned the invasion shortly after it began and attempted to sanction Italy. But in yet another of Mussolini’s dares against authority, he kept the invasion going, and British support for sanctioning largely died out when it was clear that no other major powers cared enough to cause a stir.

The results were threefold for Italy. Not only did they now hold massive new swaths of territory and their corresponding economic value, but Italian imperialist expansion had been legitimized under Mussolini in a way that the major powers might not have allowed previously. But it also served to deepen the stark divide between Europe’s democracies and its autocracies, both a cause and a reaction to Italy, Germany, and Spain’s increasingly interwoven diplomacy.

Between participatory League of Nations countries’ growing preference to keep Italy at arm’s length, and the new commitment of resources needed to grow Ethiopia into an economic powerhouse for Italy’s benefit, the short-term effects on Italians were not ideal. Taxes went up, the government issued levies, and the Fascist government was as painfully bureaucratic and extortive as ever. This is when some formerly loyal supporters of the Fascist movement began to question their patterns of support for the first time.

The Road to World War II and Italy’s Entry into the Conflict

War on the continent was drawing ever closer, and by the late 1930s, Mussolini’s hold on Italy was beginning to slip. Restrictive policies to keep people in Italy, and even within their same provinces rather than migrating elsewhere, added to popular frustration without restricting much movement. Cities swelled in size as the rural population sought opportunity, and a government policy meant to increase birth rates didn’t have much of an effect.

But rather than slowing his roll enough to address these issues, Mussolini was instead focused on Albania, where he had been slowly growing Italian influence for a number of years. In April 1939, Mussolini invaded, pushing Albania’s king out and annexing the territory. This strategy was contingent on what Mussolini believed to be the value of his relationship with Hitler, but in that relationship, too, it quickly became clear that Italy was more of a little brother than a business partner.

Mussolini had hoped that by allying with Hitler, Britain and France would be cowed into standing back as Italy took more and more territory in Africa, but that didn’t seem to make Italy itself look any scarier in reality. Furthermore, Hitler himself annexed Austria and placed the borders of the Third Reich directly against the Italian north country. And while the Pact of Steel was indeed the ultimate step in consolidating Italy’s alliance with Germany, it also constrained Italy’s ability to start its own military actions.

In September 1939, Nazi Germany surged into Poland and rolled over massive parts of Europe in a span of time once thought inconceivable. Technically speaking, this put the Pact of Steel into effect, but Mussolini was hesitant to join in the fighting. Italy hadn’t had ample enough warning prior to Hitler’s invasion and was not fully in a war posture when it took place, a turn of events that left Mussolini scrambling.

Over the next several months, he readied the Italian public for war, trying to time Italy’s entry to the conflict just right to pick up swaths of territory without going head-to-head against a major power. After all, compared to Hitler’s troops, Mussolini’s were still of questionable quality; they’d rolled over a tiny neighbor in Albania and a poorly defended nation in Ethiopia, but they’d been defeated in Spain just a few years ago. So Mussolini held out on invading just long enough to see the signs of France’s imminent collapse.

On June 10, 1940, Italy declared war on France and Great Britain, and ten days later, the Italian military invaded. Mussolini feared they would meet stiff local resistance and they had a difficult time making any actual gains. Before long, though, France would collapse anyway, courtesy of Hitler’s conquest of Paris.

On a technicality, Italy won those first battles, and Mussolini had now committed himself to Hitler’s war. Underprepared, with his grip already beginning to loosen on the home front, Il Duce found himself in a situation that only minimally resembled his own design, and one that he ultimately would not survive.

Why Fascist Italy Never Became the Threat That Nazi Germany Did

In interwar Italy, many of the same factors at play in Germany and Japan were present—the imperialist ambition, the rise of strongman dictatorship, the pervasive social control that was meant to leverage all of Italy’s potential into military and economic strength. But the utter fecklessness of early interwar leadership played just as big a role in Mussolini’s rise as anything. The Fascists were a threat to Italy’s government, to be sure, but for a long time, they were also convenient, from the perspective of the landowners and industrialists who ran most of the nation.

Mussolini’s rise was more about weaving fascism in with Italy’s existing sociopolitical structure than overthrowing the old order and starting anew. There was no real revolution in Mussolini’s Italy, but a cycle of intimidation, threats, and finally, the challenges that would see whether Mussolini’s opponents truly wanted to stand against them. Time after time, they backed down, and every time, Mussolini respected their surrender.

As for why the Fascists never became the kind of threat to the world order that the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese did, it is hard to isolate just one reason. Mussolini’s promises to the Italian people never included war on the European continent, and although his leadership was bent on taking territory and growing the Italian empire, it was never with an eye to the sorts of great-power conflicts that Hitler was after. Not only that, but the Fascists’ attempts at strongman rule didn’t hold up to scrutiny after Italy’s intervention in Spain, let alone their failure to achieve any long-term military objectives during the later parts of the Second World War.

And certainly, this was compounded by the Fascists’ choice to ally with Hitler, whose plans certainly would not be thrown away simply because Italy wasn’t yet ready to take part. But perhaps most central of all were the repercussions of Mussolini’s own attempts to bully his way into power. As he strode into office, he became an enforcer for the wealthy elites of his nation, a convenient tool with which to stamp out labor opposition and the seeds of ideological discontent.

But as the Fascists consolidated their rule and shifted their focus elsewhere—to domestic repression, to attempts at expansion, and finally, participation in Hitler’s war—Mussolini began to do more harm than good to a social structure he never truly disrupted. Italy would live through the Second World War, and though its society was forced to endure the transition from Fascist rule to the devastation of war, it would emerge on the other side. Mussolini, and his dictatorship, would not.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Mussolini rise to power in Italy?

Mussolini founded the fasci di combattimento in 1919 as street-fighting squads that attacked Socialists, Communists, and labor unions. Backed financially by landowners and industrialists, the blackshirts spread across the countryside while police looked the other way. In October 1922, Mussolini marched on Rome with twenty-five thousand followers, daring King Victor Emmanuel III to resist. The king capitulated and appointed Mussolini Prime Minister and Interior Minister.

Why did King Victor Emmanuel III appoint Mussolini rather than suppress him?

The king had troops that might have defeated the blackshirts in a civil war, but he lacked the political will to start one. Mussolini presented himself as a force that could stabilize a fractured and economically battered country, and a broad coalition of landowners, industrialists, and politicians saw the fascists as a useful bulwark against communism and socialist labor movements. The king calculated that accommodation was safer than confrontation.

How did Mussolini consolidate one-party dictatorship after becoming Prime Minister?

Mussolini changed the electoral law so that the largest party received an absolute parliamentary majority with as little as 25 percent of the vote, helping cement Fascist dominance in the 1924 elections. After the Fascist-linked murder of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti sparked a crisis, Mussolini publicly took responsibility and dared the king to act — and the king did nothing. Within two years Mussolini abolished the electoral system, silenced the press, banned opposition parties, and established a secret police, leaving Italy completely under his control by 1927.

What role did the invasion of Ethiopia play in Mussolini’s foreign policy?

Italy invaded Ethiopia in late 1935 using mustard gas against a poorly armed opponent, achieving capitulation by mid-1936. The League of Nations condemned the invasion and attempted sanctions, but Mussolini kept the offensive going and British support for enforcement collapsed. The victory legitimized Italian imperialist expansion under Mussolini, deepened the divide between Europe’s democracies and its autocracies, and drew Italy closer into alliance with Nazi Germany and Francisco Franco’s Spain.

Why did Italy enter World War II in June 1940?

Mussolini was hesitant to join Hitler’s war after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, because Italy was not in a war posture and its military had a questionable track record after being beaten in Spain. He waited to time Italy’s entry for maximum territorial gain at minimal military cost, eventually declaring war on France and Britain on June 10, 1940, only after he saw signs of France’s imminent collapse. The Italian invasion made little headway on its own, but France fell to Germany shortly afterward, technically giving Italy a victory it had not truly earned.

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