In June 1940, Benito Mussolini led Italy into the Second World War convinced that the nation’s “historic destiny” demanded nothing more than a brief, low-cost show of force. The idea behind that conviction had been years in the making, and it was tested in Africa within about eighteen months.
Thirty Centuries of History
In 1934, Mussolini addressed a crowd in the port city of Bari, on Italy’s Adriatic coast. According to accounts of the speech, he told them that Italy owed nothing to ideas that came from “beyond the Alps,” a dismissal, in the shorthand of the time, of northern Europe’s claim to lead European thought. He is remembered for invoking Julius Caesar, the poet Virgil, and the emperor Augustus as proof that Italy’s past gave it a standing no other nation could match. The phrase attached to the speech, as it has come down to us, is blunt: Italy’s “thirty centuries of history,” he is reported to have said, entitled it to look at other peoples “with disdain.” It was 1934, six years before any of it would be tested, and at the time the claim cost nothing.
Reading the Signs
Over the following years, Mussolini read much of what happened in Europe as confirmation of what he had said at Bari. Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, and when the war ended in an Italian victory the following May, Rome folded Ethiopia together with the older colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into a single territory, Italian East Africa (sources differ on whether the proclamation came on June 1 or May 9, 1936). By 1939, that colony covered roughly 666,000 square miles (1,725,000 km²) and held an estimated 12.1 million people. To Mussolini, it looked like proof that fascism could still build empires the way Rome once had. He read the civil war underway in Spain, where Italian forces had intervened on the Nationalist side, the same way, and the rise of Hitler’s Germany the same way again. Each, in his own account, showed fascism “rejuvenating” a tired European civilization, with Italy as its source and its New Rome. These were his conclusions, and the record does not confirm them; they say nothing yet about what any of the three conflicts had actually cost.
Second Place
The trouble, for Mussolini, was that the fascist movement he considered an Italian invention was no longer behaving like one. By the late 1930s, Germany, not Italy, had become the obvious engine of the continent’s turn toward fascism. Hitler commanded a larger, faster-rearming military and increasingly set the pace of events, leaving Mussolini to react rather than lead. That sat badly with what he had claimed at Bari about Italy’s inherited right to look down on other nations. The gap between the boast and the reality belonged to Mussolini alone; it changed nothing in how Italy’s allies or adversaries read the balance of power in Europe.
A Virile Nation
On June 10, 1940, Italy declared war on Britain and France. Mussolini framed the decision as destiny rather than strategy: no “virile,” fascist-minded nation, in his telling, could stand aside from the great test of the age. Eleven days later, on June 21, Italian forces launched an offensive into southern France, part of the wider Battle of France then underway. Italy’s armed forces were not especially prepared for a European war, and little in the planning behind the declaration suggests that preparedness weighed heavily in the decision. Mussolini went to war on a feeling about history, and the country’s readiness for it never entered the calculation.
A Few Thousand Dead
Around the time of the declaration, Mussolini is recorded telling his chief of staff, Pietro Badoglio, what he expected the war to cost. He needed, he said, only a few thousand dead, enough that Italy could sit at the peace table afterward as a nation that had fought. No staff study produced that figure; it came from Mussolini’s own sense of what history required and of how cheaply that requirement might be met. This account does not set that number against what Italy’s war in Africa would go on to cost. It survives only as a window into what Mussolini believed the war would be: brief, affordable, and symbolic.
The Reckoning in Africa
By November 27, 1941, Allied forces had completed their occupation of Italian East Africa. The empire Mussolini had pointed to since 1936 as proof that fascism was reviving Europe was gone, a little over five years after its creation. The campaign that produced that outcome, its battles, its commanders, its toll in dead and wounded, belongs to a separate and longer history than this one can hold. What stands here is only the result: the empire that was supposed to confirm the claim made at Bari in 1934 did not exist by the end of 1941.
What the Record Leaves Out
What happened on the ground in East Africa between June 1940 and November 1941, the specific engagements, the commanders on each side, the verified toll in dead and wounded, is a separate history, and a longer one than this episode can hold. So is any real comparison between the number Mussolini gave Badoglio and what the campaign actually cost. What can be said here is only the shape of the gap. Mussolini priced the war at a few thousand dead and a seat at the peace table. About a year and a half later, Italy had lost a colony of roughly 666,000 square miles (1,725,000 km²) and an estimated 12.1 million people, the empire his 1934 speech had claimed thirty centuries of history to justify. What the campaign itself cost in lives, Italian, Ethiopian, and British, is not part of this account. That reckoning still waits to be made.