The third group was made up of officers broken in during the First World War and later transferred to Libya. It was here in the 1920s that a new generation of officers with good experience in counter‐insurgency was formed. In Libya, officers trained on the field to fight a war based on mobility, coordination, logistics and communications: in fact, it was in the 1920s that soldiers with experience typical of a colonial army began to emerge in the [Regio Esercito].48
The testing ground of Libyan ‘pacification’ helped form an expertise which found its natural use in the Ethiopian campaign of 1935–36 and later on, in the operations to quell Ethiopian resistance. To a certain extent this reversed the scheme which had existed for almost two decades and had seen officers trained in Eritrea being transferred to Libya with their acquired experience: in the mid 1930s it was experience matured in counter‐insurgency in Libya that counted most for transfer to Ethiopia.
Pietro Maletti, for example, remained in Libya from 1917 to 1935, where he was one of the protagonists of ‘pacification’ in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In 1935 he accompanied Graziani to Somalia, and remained in Italian East Africa until 1939. Tactics and procedures used in the ‘pacification’ of Libya were also employed in Ethiopia, leaving behind an equal amount of bloodshed and violence. It was the men led by Maletti who carried out the massacre in Debra Libanos and Engecha in May 1937.
General Maletti died in 1940, while fighting the English in Libya.49 His profile is reminiscent in many respects of General Ottorino Mezzetti’s. Mezzetti, when still a lieutenant, had his first colonial experience in the Congo, from 1903 to 1906, and then in Libya from 1911 to 1912. After fighting in the First World War, in 1924 he was again in Libya, first in Tripolitania and then in Cyrenaica, taking part in the ‘re‐conquest’ of the two territories. From 1937 to 1939 he was governor of Amara.50
(Emphasis added.
Click here for events that happened today (February 2).
1873: Konstantin von Neurath, Axis war criminal, was unfortunately born.
1932: Tōkyō assigned Prince Hiroyasu to the Imperial Navy General Staff and made Kichisaburo Nomura the commanding officer of 3rd Fleet.
1933: In Berlin, the Chancellor met with top military leaders, ensuring that he would cooperate with the military, easing their fears that the SA organization would one day overtake the traditional military. On the same day, he attended the premiere of the film Dawn which was set in a doomed German submarine and was about sacrifice in war.
1935: Berlin issued the order for the construction of U‐23.
1937: Tōkyō named Osami Nagano the Imperial Navy Combined Fleet’s commander‐in‐chief.
1938: Troops of Imperial № 1 Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force, 284 men, landed at Yantai, Shandong Province, supported by light cruiser Kuma (flagship of the operation). № 5 Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force and № 6 Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force would soon arrive to reinforce № 1 Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force (which met unexpected resistance).
1940: The Fascists completed Guglielmo Marconi as Fascist submarine U‐59 (Kapitänleutnant Harald Jürst) was on patrol in the North Sea close to Lowestoft, England and sank two British merchant steamers.
1941: The Axis lost fortifications defended by 8,000 troops and 32 field guns at Barentu, Eritrea and Axis armed merchant cruiser Atlantis stopped and captured Norwegian tanker Ketty Brøvig in the Indian Ocean overnight.
1942: Axis submarine U‐751 damaged Dutch tanker Corilla off Halifax, Nova Scotia at 0746 hours and Axis submarine U‐103 sank U.S. tanker W. L. Steed east of Virginia, slaughtering 34 of 38 aboard.
1943: The last of the German Sixth Army surrendered in Stalingrad around the same time that an Axis reconnaissance aircraft was dispatched to fly over there, confirming that all fighting had ceased.
1944: A transport from Trieste, Italy arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and the Axis exterminated most of the prisoners upon arrival, but in the Warsaw area HSSPF, somebody murdered SS‐Brigadeführer Franz Kutschera at the gate to his headquarters. Meanwhile, the Axis defeated Yankee troops in the Battle of Cisterna near Anzio, Italy.
1945: With the Soviet arrival at the outskirts of Stargard in Pommern, Germany (now in Poland), an Axis official gave orders to evacuate the Stalag IID prisoners of war camp. The Allied prisoners, which include a large contingent of Canadians captured following the disastrous Dieppe Raid in August 1942, would march westward for 44 days along snow covered roads until eventually, at the end of April, their guards fled and the column having been strafed on the road by RAF fighters were finally liberated by an advance reconnaissance unit from the Royal Staffordshire Regiment. Likewise, Gauleiter Karl Hanke announced the formation of new Volkssturm militia units at Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) on the same day that Berlin named Major General Hans von Ahlfen the commanding officer of the Fortress City of Breslau, and an Axis V‐2 rocket hit Deptford, London, England, slaughtering twenty‐four.
Nazis were inspired by what Fascists did in Libya
