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FASCIST Italy contributed mightily to the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War. A good argument can be made that the Nationalists probably would not have prevailed without such assistance. Certainly Franco would not have been able to bring the war to a successful conclusion in March 1939 without the Italian military aid he had received over the previous thirty-two months. Given the changes in Western attitudes toward the Axis in the spring of 1939, had the Spanish conflict continued, Britain and France likely would have intervened. That would have brought serious--if not fatal--consequences for the Nationalist cause. Thus, Franco had good reason to be thankful for Italian military intervention.
But the effect of the war on Fascist Italy and its armed forces has been much less clear to historians. Did Italy gain or lose from its participation in the Spanish conflict? What influence did the war have on the readiness of the Italian military? Considering their poor performance in 1940-41, it seems that the Italian armed forces learned few or no lessons from their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Why did the Italians fail to take advantage of their operational experiences, considering how much their German allies learned from the same war?
Until recently, it was difficult or impossible to answer such questions. Even for historians with a knowledge of Italian and a familiarity with the relevant archives in Rome, access to the necessary documents was difficult or impossible to obtain. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of books and articles by Italian participants or knowledgable observers had appeared regarding Italian participation in the Spanish Civil War. But even the best of these suffered from the influence of Fascist ideology and the effects of censorship.(1) Beginning in the late 1960s, a second wave of studies on Italian Fascist military involvement in Spain began to appear, mostly in Italian and Spanish. These works were more objective and informative than their predecessors but still suffered from the limited availability of primary sources.(2) Basic data about the number of troops and the amount of equipment the Italians had shipped to Spain, the casualties and losses they suffered, and anything more than the bare outline of Italian operations remained uncertain or in dispute.
Nonetheless,...