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Radio War Nerd EP #227 — Annibale's Italy on the Eastern Front, Pt. 2: The Invasion (Patreon)

Published:
2020-04-30 03:28:46
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Annibale

Recorded: April 24, 2020

In this second part of Annibale's look at Italy on the Eastern Front in WWII, Hitler agrees to have a modest-sized Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia join the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union to perform mostly backup duties well behind the front lines. By mid-late 1942, the Italian military presence swelled from 60,000 to 250,000 in the renamed Italian 8th Army, which moved as far east the Don River by late 1942 . . .

Map

*Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941-2

*Italian 8th Army reaches the Don, situated between the Romanian 3rd Army and the Hungarian 2nd Army

Follow Annibale on Twitter. Listen to Annibale's popular RWN series: Italy on the Eastern Front in WWII (#226); Venetian Empire (#207, #208, #209, #214); The Hundred Years War (#175, #176, #177, #180, #182, #183); Italy's Years Of Lead (#134, #135, #136, #139); Italian Resistance in WW2 (#131). 

Total time: 2:34:19

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here.

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Comments

MoldyTolge

Not that the Allies’ grand strategists were free of neurotics or people with a driving interest in proving a point of national pride (Monty, our boy Patton), and hindsight is 20/20, but imagine how big of a brain you’d need to come up with the plan of deploying irreplaceable assets to the Eastern Front just so you can save Germany out of spite. From Annibale we’ve heard about all the Fascists that didn’t want to get involved, but I guess the ones who just wanted to hatefuck Hitler won out the day.

Davitt

Guys, the audio quality on these episodes gets progressively worse with each release. Meanwhile random basement podcasters are putting out NPR quality audio. Love the topics but I can’t make it through because of 24kbit quality.

Timothy DuPont

Loving the series so far. Also for those criticizing the audio it might have something to do with the hosts leaving the studio and NYC behind. There is a pandemic going on after all.

ymichaux

The Nazi programme really was different, in that, as Aimé Césaire said, they attempted to do in Europe what hitherto had only been done in the America's, Africa and Asia. You can't understand Hitler's project without understanding this simple fact: he wanted Germany to be like the USA of Europe, a single great power with access to plentiful oil and plentiful land, with German settlers displacing the native population. He didn't just want this, to his mind, with the US basically under the control of the Jews, and geopolitics a struggle of all against all with only one possible winner, it was necessary: the only way for Germany to compete on a global scale was to acquire lebensraum and resources, to do what the U.S. did, to make the Volga their Mississipi (actual quote), and they needed to act fast to ensure Germany wouldn't forever be a loser nation, subservient to other races.

ymichaux

Once you understand this, you also understand *why* they made so many, as you keep calling it in the podcast, "mistakes": because there was no other option. Either Germany would win against the Soviet Union, acquire their lands, acquire access to the all-important oil fields that were the lifeblood of the modern war machine and economy, or they would lose, and thus be forever condemned to be a second-rate power, a subservient client state of the Jewish-ruled U.S., or even the USSR, a fate quite literally worse than death. There was method to the madness, in some ways Hitler saw very clearly, it just happened within a warped ideological framework, that's still quite present in many today. He was a true believer of social darwinism in race as well as nation, drew this to its logical conclusion, and acted to make Germany the great European land power, with its British ally, that could compete long term with U.S. and Soviet power.

PAUL bUTLER

Get talking with craig murray, before he dies in prison.

Peter M

I think its wrong to generalize Western Ukraine as "receptive" to the invasion. Besides the position of Jews and other minorities on certain elements of the Ukrainian community, especially the nationalists and the clergy, participated in collaboration. The USSR policies of the 30s certainly made more collaborators, but this is heavily exaggerated today.

mickthebrick

These episodes with Annibale are very interesting. It's a common problem but I don't think I'd ever fully considered all of the nuance, human elements, mistakes, people etc. involved in history. Just how real it all was. I don't know enough to be critical or pass comment on anything that was said, but I'm sure that will come with time lol

Annibale

The population in Ukraine was definitely more willing to "help" than those east of the Donets, but the perception I've tried to transmit in the show is that coming from memories of Italian soldiers - and those were not "typical" of the Eastern Front situation. As I've mentioned in the first episodes, atrocities and abuse against the local population were seen on a daily basis everywhere as soon as you crossed the Soviet Union landscape.

Tupac Chopra

Would *love* to hear Annibale's take on Nazi vs. Soviet weapons procurement. Professionals study logistics and all of that.

ilya y

Around 1:30:00 John talks about WWII was one of the few cases in history where an ideology was quelled (normally defeat doesn't destroy an ideology as the American South demonstrates). Annibale begins to answer and it's two-fold. I think the first part of his answer is that the Nazi ideology was a "giant with clay feet" and the breakout from Nikolayevka (accent on "la", please) demonstrates this. But as far as I can tell he never gets to the second part part. I can't let this loose thread be, I would love to know what the rest of the answer was going to be.

Martin Knutsen

Did any of the italians get reprimanded for doing something against the atrocities? If I know my Italians right, one out of 60 000 must have. And those of us who read history know that the Nazis in the east looked on the slavs as chattel. This is the true horror.

Martin Knutsen

And very interesting point about training people for atrocities. Abu Ghraib and the great waterboarding debate was interesting, because that was the great intermilitary conflict aboutt all that, structurally.

Annibale

Nobody was ever reprimanded for opposing atrocities. This is another point that's not been probably stressed enough - if you would refuse to beat, torture, rape and in general mistreat people, nothing would happen of it, so any idea that killing Jews or torching isbas was inevitable because "one had to obey orders" is simply idiotic. Both Omer Bartov and Lutz Klinkhammer have extensively proved this, but even in my experience of interviewing veterans, if one opposed "bad stuff", he would go away with it. And I've a lot of anecdotal evidence of opposition to atrocities, limited opposition, to be sure, but in some occasion, Italian troops stood up against abuse . This doesn't mean of course there was a sort of higher moral ground from the Italian side, the opposition was often for merely practical reasons. Alpine troops, in particular, were afraid to ignite partisan opposition in their rear because they had no way to fight effective antipartisan warfare, plus in few areas some kind of tacit support from the population was required to make the life of grotesquely under-supplied Italian tolerable. But in some case there was opposition from officiers on the ground that "we don't do these things". It's interesting to note that German reactions to that and to "accidents" between Italian and other Axis troops were often of bureaucratic nature. When soldiers from the Div. Cosseria stole supplies from a neighboring Waffen SS unit, the SS made a highly formal protest, commander-to-commander, but didn't bother to go and ask the supplies back. It's interesting to see how having to face people who was (at least in theory) heavily armed and often trigger happy made them prudent.

Annibale

Yes I didn't follow my own line of thought. The second reason is that Nazism was always eminently an ideology for victory, not for defeat. I will discuss some of this in the next episode

Charles Wild

I would be very interested to hear an episode about the processes driving German & Italian materiel procurement

Stefan

As Mark asked at the start of the last segment, it would be very interesting to hear Annibale’s view of the Swedish approach to covid-19 (as I live in Sweden).