The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (59 page)

    Before seeing how the international crises of this period unfolded into war, it is important once again to examine the particular strengths and weaknesses of each of the Great Powers, all of which had been affected not only by the 1914–1918 conflict but also by the economic and military developments of the interwar years. In this latter respect,
Tables 12
–
18
above, showing the shifts in the productive balances between the powers, will be referred to again and again. Two further preliminary remarks about the economics of rearmament should be made at this point. The first concerns differential growth rates, which were much more marked during the 1930s than they had been, say, in the decade prior to 1914; the dislocation of the world economy into various blocs and the remarkably different ways in which national economic policy was pursued (from four-year plans and “new deals” to classic deflationary budgets) meant that output and wealth could be rising in one country while dramatically slowing down in another. Secondly, the interwar developments in military technology made the armed forces more dependent than ever upon the productive forces of their nations. Without a flourishing industrial base and, more important still, without a large, advanced scientific community which could be mobilized by the state in order to keep pace with new developments in weaponry, victory in another great war was inconceivable. If the future lay (to use Stalin’s phrase) in the hands of the big battalions, they in turn increasingly rested upon modern technology and mass production.

The economic vulnerability of a Great Power, however active and ambitious its national leadership, is nowhere more clearly seen than in the case of Italy during the 1930s. On the face of it, Mussolini’s fascist regime had brought the country from the hinterlands to the forefront of the diplomatic world. With Britain, it was one of the outside guarantors of the 1925 Locarno agreement; with Britain, France and Germany, it was also a signatory to the 1938 Munich settlement.
Italy’s claim to primacy in the Mediterranean had been asserted by the attack upon Corfu (1923), by intensifying the “pacification” of Libya, and by the very large intervention (of 50,000 Italian troops) in the Spanish Civil War. Between 1935 and 1937, Mussolini avenged the defeat of Adowa by his ruthless conquest of Abyssinia, boldly defying the League’s sanctions and hostile western opinion. At other times, he supported the status quo, moving troops up to the Brenner in 1934 to deter Hitler from taking over Austria, and readily signing the anti-German accord at Stresa in 1935. His tirades against Bolshevism won him the admiration of many foreigners (Churchill included) in the 1920s, and he was wooed by all sides during the decade following—with Chamberlain traveling to Rome as late as January 1939 in an effort to stop Italy from drifting completely into the German camp.
⁴²

But diplomatic prominence was not the only measure of Italy’s new greatness. This fascist state, with its elimination of factious party politics, its “corporatist” planning for the economy in the place of disputes between capital and labor, its commitment to government action, seemed to offer a new model to a disenchanted postwar European society—and one attractive to those who feared the alternative “model” being offered by the Bolsheviks. Because of Allied investments, industrialization had proceeded apace from 1915 to 1918, at least in those heavy industries related to arms production. Under Mussolini, the state committed itself to an ambitious modernization program, which ranged from draining the Pontine marshes, to the impressive development of hydroelectricity, to the improvements in the railway system. The electrochemical industry was furthered, and rayon and other artificial fibers were developed. Automobile production was increased, and the Italian aeronautical industry seemed to be among the most innovative in the world, its aircraft gaining a whole series of speed and altitude records.
⁴³

Military power, too, seemed to give good indications of Italy’s rising status. Although he had not spent much on the armed services in the 1920s, Mussolini’s belief in force and conquest and his rising desire to expand Italy’s territories led to significant increases in defense spending during the 1930s. Indeed, a little over 10 percent of national income and as much as one-third of government income was devoted to the armed forces by the mid-1930s, which in absolute figures was more than was spent by Britain or France, and much more than the American totals. Smart new battleships were being laid down, to rival the French navy and the British Mediterranean Fleet, and to support Mussolini’s claim that the Mediterranean was indeed
mare nostrum
. When Italy entered the war it possessed 113 submarines—“the largest submarine force in the world except perhaps that of the Soviet Union.”
⁴⁴
Even larger sums were being allocated to the air force, the Regia Aeronautica, in the years leading up to 1940, in keeping perhaps with
early fascism’s emphasis upon modernity, science, speed, and glamour. Both in Abyssinia and, even more, in Spain, the Italians demonstrated the uses of air power and convinced themselves—and many foreign observers—that they possessed the most advanced air force in the world. This buildup of the navy and the air force left fewer funds for the Italian army, but its thirty divisions were being substantially restructured in the late 1930s, and new tanks and artillery were being planned. Besides, Mussolini felt, there were the masses of fascist
squadristi
and trained bands, so that in another total war the nation might well possess the claimed “eight million bayonets.” All this boded well for the creation of a second Roman Empire.

Alas for such dreams, fascist Italy was, in power-political terms, spectacularly weak. The key problem was that even “at the end of the First World War Italy, economically speaking, was a semideveloped country.”
⁴⁵
Its per capita income in 1920 was probably equal to that achieved by Britain and the United States in the early
nineteenth
century, and by France a few decades later. National income data concealed the fact that per capita income in the north was 20 percent above, in the south 30 percent below, the average; and the gap, if anything, was widening. Thanks to a continued flow of emigrants, Italy’s population in the interwar years increased by only around 1 percent a year; since the gross domestic product grew by 2 percent a year, the average per capita rose by a mere 1 percent a year, which was not disastrous, but hardly an economic miracle. At the root of Italy’s weakness was the continued reliance upon small-scale agriculture, which in 1920 accounted for 40 percent of GNP and absorbed 50 percent of the total working population.
⁴⁶
It was a further sign of this economic backwardness that even as late as 1938 over half a family’s expenditure went on food. Far from reducing these proportions, fascism, with its heavy emphasis upon the virtues of rural life, endeavored to support agriculture by a battery of measures, including protective tariffs, widespread land reclamation, and, finally, complete control of the wheat market. Important in the regime’s calculations was the desire to reduce dependence upon foreign food producers and the strong wish to prevent a further drift of peasants into the towns, where they would boost the unemployment totals and add to the social problem. The consequence was a very heavy
under
employment in the countryside, with all of the corresponding features: iow productivity, illiteracy, immense regional disparities.

Given the relatively backward nature of the Italian economy and the state’s willingness to spend money both on armaments and on the preservation of village agriculture, it is not surprising that the amount of savings for entrepreneurial investment was low. If the First World War had already reduced the stock of domestic capital, the economic depression and the turn to protectionism were further blows. To be
sure, companies boosted by government orders for aircraft or trucks could make a good profit, but it is unlikely that Italy’s industrial development benefited (on the whole) from attempts at autarky; tariffs merely gave protection to inefficient producers, while the general neo-mercantilism of the age reduced the flow of foreign investments which had done much to stimulate Italian industrialization earlier. By 1938 Italy still possessed only 2.8 percent of world manufacturing production, produced 2.1 percent of its steel, 1.0 percent of its pig iron, 0.7 percent of its iron ore, and 0.1 percent of its coal, and consumed energy from modern sources at a rate far below that of any of the other Great Powers. Finally, in the light of Mussolini’s evident eagerness to go to war against France, and sometimes even France and Britain combined, it is worth noting that Italy remained embarrassingly dependent upon imported fertilizer, coal, oil, scrap iron, rubber, copper, and other vital raw materials—80 percent of which had to come past Gibraltar or Suez, and much of which was carried in British ships. It was typical of the regime that no contingency plan had been prepared in the event of these imports ceasing, and that a policy of stockpiling such strategic materials was out of the question, since by the late 1930s Italy didn’t even have the foreign currency to cover its current needs. This chronic currency shortage also helps to explain why the Italians also could not afford to pay for the German machine tools so vital for the production of the more modern aircraft, tanks, guns, and ships which were being developed in the years after 1935 or so.
⁴⁷

Economic backwardness also explains why, despite all the attention and resources which Mussolini’s regime devoted to the armed forces, their actual performance and condition were poor—and getting worse. The navy was probably the best-equipped of the three services, but probably too weak to drive the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean. It possessed no aircraft carriers—Mussolini had forbidden their construction—and was forced instead to rely upon the Regia Aeronautica, a poor arrangement given the lack of interservice cooperation. Its cruisers were fair-weather vessels, and its great array of submarines proved to be a heavy investment in obsolescence: “The boats lacked attack computers, their air-conditioning systems gave off poisonous gases when tubing ruptured under depth-charge attack, and they were relatively slow in diving, which proved embarrassing when enemy aircraft approached.”
⁴⁸
Similar signs of obsolescence could be seen in the Italian air force, which had shown itself capable of bombing (if not always hitting) Abyssinian tribesmen, and had then impressed many observers by its Spanish Civil War performances. But by the late 1930s the Fiat CR42 biplane was totally eclipsed by the newer British and German monoplanes; and even the bomber force suffered from having only light to medium bombers, with weak engines and stupendously ineffective bombs. Yet both the above
services
had
secured increasing shares of the defense budget. The army, by contrast, saw its share drop from 58.2 percent in 1935–1936 to 44.5 percent in 1938–1939, and that at a time when it desperately needed modern tanks, artillery, trucks, and communications systems. The “main battle tank” of the Italian army, when it entered the Second World War, was the Fiat L.3, of three and a half tons, with no radio, little vision, and only two machine guns—this at a time when the latest German and French tank designs were close upon twenty tons and had much heavier weaponry.

Given the almost irremediable weaknesses which afflicted the Italian economy under fascism, it would be rash to suggest that it could ever have won a war against another proper Great Power; but its prospects were made the bleaker by the fact that its armed forces were the victims of early rearmament—and swift obsolescence. Since this was a common problem in the 1930s, affecting France and Russia to almost the same degree, it is important to go into it in a little more detail before returning to our specific analysis of Italy’s weaknesses.

The key factor was the intense application of science and technology to military developments in this period, which was transforming weapon systems in all the services. Fighter aircraft, for example, were swiftly changing from maneuverable (but lightly armed and fabric-covered) biplanes which could do about 200 mph to “duraluminum monoplane aircraft laden with multiple heavy machine guns and cannon, cockpit armor and self-sealing fuel tanks”
⁴⁹
which flew at up to 400 mph and required much more powerful engines. Bomber aircraft were changing—in those nations which could afford the move—from two-engined, shorter-range medium bombers to the massively expensive four-engined types capable of carrying large bomb loads and with a radius of over two thousand miles. Post-Washington Treaty battleships (e.g., of the
King George V, Bismarck
, and
North Carolina
sort), were much faster, better-armored, and equipped with far heavier antiaircraft defenses than their predecessors. The newer aircraft carriers were large, well-designed types, with a much greater striking power than the updated seaplane carriers and converted battle cruisers of the 1920s. Tank developers were rushing ahead with heavier, better-armed, and better-armored models which required far more powerful engines than those which had driven the light experimental prototypes of the pre-1935 years. Furthermore, all of these weapon systems were just beginning to be affected by the changes in electrical communications, by improvements in navigational devices and antisubmarine detection equipment, by early radar and improved radio equipment—which not only made the newer weapons so much more expensive, but also complicated the procurement process. Did one have enough of the new machine tools, gauges, and jigs to switch to these improved models? Could armaments works and electrical suppliers meet the rising
demand? Did they have enough spare plant, and trained engineers? Dare one
stop
producing the tried but perhaps obsolescent older models while waiting for the newer types to be tested and then built? Finally—and critically—how did these desperate rearmament efforts relate to the state of the nation’s economy, its access to overseas as well as domestic resources, its ability to pay its way? These were, of course, not new dilemmas—but they pressed upon the decision-makers of the 1930s with a far greater urgency than ever before.