The Spanish Civil War through Italian military censorship

Resumen

The Spanish Civil War was the most ideologically charged war that Italians fought in the decade of 1935-1945. This paper focuses on the censorship of the volunteers' correspondence coordinated by the Army. It aims to give some insight into the war experience of the Italian military, with particular regard to the archetypes and stereotypes used by soldiers and officers to transmit these experience to their friends and families in Italy. Censored letters may suggest the degree to which the fascist discourse of legitimisation was internalised by the volunteers, and whether it entered in conflict with the Army's own ways of legitimising an ideological intervention in a foreign civil war.

The main source of this paper is the reduced amount of transcribed letters preserved in a censorship folder held by the Italian Army’s Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito. Censors either entirely transcribed representative letters or wrote summarised reports containing short and stereotyped judgements about the troops morale and fighting spirit. This source is thus very different from that of other cases of military censorship carried out during the Spanish Civil War, as well as from the censorship later organised by Italian authorities during the Second World War.

This article aims to offer further insight into the rare ego-writings written during the Spanish Civil War, analysing Italians’ letters written in the Italian “decade of war” of 1935-1945 and thus coordinating these two intermingling frameworks. In this way, the similarities between military mentality and fascist (para-military) ideology, as well as their irreducible differences, will be highlighted. These differences shaped the way in which Italian political and military institutions dialogued and were reciprocally influenced by their respective cultures and agendas, whereas the politicisation of the Italian Royal Army was carried out thanks to the political war fought in Spain. Even if the Italian Army was not strictly fascist, it was responsible for fighting fascism’s wars, in that it enforced fascism’s as well as its own policies. Therefore, this article will argue that, as in other politicised armies, the borders separating fascist ideology and military mentality were progressively blurred, and ultimately overshadowed by Mussolini’s charisma.