Italian invasion of France
The Italian invasion of France lasted fifteen days in June 1940 and yet managed to change the shape of the entire war. On the evening of the 10th of June, Italy declared war on France and Britain. Within hours, Italian troops were moving toward Alpine passes that had been fortified by France for years. The question hanging over the entire operation was whether Italy could seize enough French territory to matter before France signed an armistice with Germany.
Benito Mussolini had spent the better part of a decade describing the Mediterranean Sea as a prison. He called Corsica, Tunisia, Malta, and Cyprus the bars of that prison. Gibraltar and Suez were the guards. Getting out of that prison, in his mind, required confronting Britain and France directly. The invasion of France was his first real attempt to do that.
What actually happened on the Alpine front was a story of poor maps, frostbitten soldiers, obsolete tanks stuck in minefields, and French forts that held even as France itself collapsed. How a military campaign so brief left such a complicated legacy is what the rest of this documentary will explore.
On the 4th of February 1939, Mussolini addressed the Fascist Grand Council in a closed session. His speech drew explicit comparisons to Hitler's secret disposition recorded by Colonel Hossbach. Mussolini argued that a country's freedom is proportional to the strength of its navy, and that Italy was a prisoner in the Mediterranean Sea.
That logic had been building for years. In the late 1920s, Mussolini had argued that Italy needed an outlet for its surplus population. By 1935, Italy had launched the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, which observers at the time described as a nineteenth-century colonial campaign waged out of due time. The war exposed vulnerabilities in British and French power that Mussolini intended to exploit.
The Spanish Civil War followed in 1936. Italy's military contribution to Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces was so large that it played a decisive role in the Nationalist victory. Mussolini had framed this as a way of placing Italy on a war footing and building what he called a warrior culture.
In October 1936, Italy and Germany signed a treaty of mutual interest. Mussolini called it the Berlin-Rome Axis, around which Europe would revolve. The treaty had grown partly from shared policy on Spain and partly from Italian dependence on German coal following League of Nations sanctions over Ethiopia. From that point, as one historian later put it, Mussolini fell under Adolf Hitler's influence from which he never escaped.
By the 30th of November 1938, Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano was addressing the Chamber of Deputies on the natural aspirations of the Italian people. The deputies shouted back: Nice, Corsica, Savoy, Tunisia, Djibouti, Malta. Those six words captured the territorial vision that would eventually drive Italy into France.
On the 26th of May 1940, Mussolini summoned Marshals Pietro Badoglio and Italo Balbo to tell them he intended to join the German war. His stated reason was to be able to sit at the peace table when the world is to be apportioned. Badoglio argued back that divisions were not up to strength, troops lacked equipment, and the merchant fleet was scattered across the globe. Mussolini's reply, recorded in the historical record, was blunt: I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.
On the 10th of June, Italy formally declared war. The French ambassador in Rome, André François-Poncet, called it a dagger blow to a man who has already fallen. United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded publicly that the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.
The French response was methodical rather than panicked. General René Olry, commanding the Armée des Alpes, had already ordered the evacuation of the border town of Menton, the largest on the Franco-Italian frontier, under the code name Exécutez Mandrin. French engineers then destroyed transportation and communication links across the border using fifty-three tons of explosives. In Nice, over five thousand Italian citizens reported to police within three days of a government order requiring them to do so, and nearly all signed declarations of loyalty.
For the first week, nothing decisive happened on the Alpine front. Both sides had built their positions for defense. There was skirmishing between patrols, and forts traded artillery fire, but no general assault. Then, on the 17th of June, Marshal Philippe Pétain announced on radio: it is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting. That changed everything. Mussolini believed the French army was dissolving, and he ordered Army Group West to begin a general offensive within three days. Badoglio said converting the troops from a defensive to an offensive posture alone would take twenty-five days.
By June 1940, Italy had mobilized over one and a half million men and formed seventy-three divisions. Only nineteen of those divisions were complete and fully combat-ready. The rest were in various stages of formation or not ready at all. The forces deployed along the French border totalled around three hundred thousand men in eighteen infantry and four alpine divisions, arranged defensively at the entrances to mountain valleys.
The Italian military was plagued by structural problems. General Alberto Pariani had reorganized all Italian divisions between 1938 and 1940, converting them from triangular to binary formations: two infantry regiments instead of three, reducing total divisional strength to around seven thousand men. Divisional artillery was cut at the same time. Pariani's reforms also promoted frontal assaults to the exclusion of any other doctrine. Front commanders were forbidden to communicate directly with naval or air counterparts, making inter-service coordination almost impossible.
The equipment situation was worse. Of seven thousand nine hundred and seventy artillery guns in the Italian army's arsenal, only two hundred and forty-six were modern. The rest were up to forty years old, including many taken as reparations from the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1918. The vast majority of Italy's tanks were L3/35 tankettes, armed only with a machine gun and protected by armor thin enough for machine gun rounds to penetrate. Italian historians later described them as useless. One study found that seventy percent of engine failure in the tanks was caused by inadequate driver training.
Facing them, General Olry commanded the Armée des Alpes, which by June had been stripped down to three alpine divisions, various battalions, and fortress brigades. He had around eighty-one thousand men in forty-six battalions facing Italy, supported by sixty-five groups of artillery. The French also had eighty-six platoons of elite ski troops, the sections d'éclaireurs-skieurs, each numbering thirty-five to forty men and trained for mountain warfare and climbing. The Italian army intelligence service, the Servizio Informazioni Militari, overestimated French strength at twelve divisions. In reality Olry had at most six.
On the 11th of June, the day after Italy entered the war, Savoia-Marchetti SM.79s from Sicily and Pantelleria struck Malta twice under fighter escort, beginning a siege that would last until November 1942. The first strike that morning involved fifty-five bombers, but Malta's anti-aircraft defenses reported an attack of between five and twenty aircraft, suggesting most of the bombers never found their target.
The British responded with a night raid. On the night of the 11th of June, thirty-six RAF Whitleys took off from bases in Yorkshire to bomb Turin, the industrial heart of Italy. They refuelled in the Channel Islands before crossing the Alps. Most were forced to divert because of icing and turbulence. During the early hours of the 12th of June, ten bombers reached Turin and two bombed Genoa. Italian air defenses failed entirely: the aerodrome at Caselle mistook the incoming British aircraft for Italian planes from Udine and lit up the landing strip to receive them. The Turin air raid alarm was not raised until the bombers had already left. The results were fifteen civilians killed and no industrial targets damaged.
On the 17th of June, Italian bombers struck the center of Marseille, killing one hundred and forty-three people and wounding one hundred and thirty-six. On the ground, RAF bombers reportedly dropped leaflets over Rome. One read: women of Italy, your sons and husbands and sweethearts have not left you to defend their country. They suffer death to satisfy the pride of one man.
During the general offensive of the 21st to the 24th of June, the Regia Aeronautica tried to bomb French fortifications along the Alpine Line, but the results were poor. General Giuseppe Santoro later concluded that the strategy was incoherent: the fortifications were designed to withstand heavy shelling and were partly buried in mountainsides. Poor maps, fog, and snow made target identification nearly impossible. Only one hundred and fifteen out of two hundred and eighty-five bomber sorties managed to locate their targets, dropping just eighty tonnes of bombs. On the morning of the 23rd of June, Italian pilots searching for French artillery at Cap Martin accidentally bombed their own guns on Capo Mortola, ten kilometers away.
At three in the morning on the 21st of June, Italian troops crossed the French border along the entire Alpine front. General Roatta had written to Army Group West two days earlier asserting that French mobile troops in the rear were probably already in retreat. Some Italian officers had been so confident of a walkover that they joked with their troops about how to behave with French girls. What they found instead were functioning French forts and elite French defensive units.
In the north, the main Italian attack fell to the 4th Army's Alpine Army Corps, pushing through the Little Saint Bernard Pass toward Bourg-Saint-Maurice. The French had destroyed the bridges, and seventy men with machine guns held the ruined fort called the Redoute Ruinée at the pass entrance. The 101st Motorised Division Trieste was brought up from Piacenza to reinforce the push. At eleven in the morning, Trieste's motorcycle battalion broke through the pass and advanced two kilometers. They forded a river under heavy machine gun fire while Italian engineers repaired the demolished bridge. On the 22nd of June, the division's tank battalion was stopped at a minefield. Two L3 tankettes became entangled in barbed wire. A third hit a landmine trying to go around them. Another fell into a ditch. The remaining two suffered engine failure. The Redoute Ruinée held until the armistice, and its garrison was allowed to march out with full honors of war.
Along the coast, the 5th Infantry Division Cosseria was pushing toward Nice and Menton. The planned amphibious landing behind the French fortifications at Cap Martin had to be called off after engine failures, overloaded boats, and rough seas made it impossible. The Regia Marina had resorted to commandeering fishing boats and pleasure craft for the assault. Without that support, the Cosseria took heavy fire from Cap Martin. Then, on the night of the 22nd and the 23rd of June, fog and thunderstorms gave them cover. The Cosseria bypassed Cap Martin and entered the Garavan quarter of Menton. Menton was the most significant conquest of the entire campaign. The French troops at Cap Martin continued firing at Italian coastal shipping until the armistice came into force.
On the 21st of June, the French had maneuvered a battery of 280-millimeter mortars into position below Fort de l'Infernet to fire on the Italian fort atop Mont Chaberton, which the French nicknamed the battleship in the clouds. Over three days of firing, interrupted by adverse weather, French gunners silenced six of the eight armoured turrets on the Italian fort in just fifty-seven shots. The two remaining turrets continued to fire until the armistice behind a screen of fog.
On the evening of the 24th of June, an armistice was signed in Rome. It came into effect just after midnight on the 25th of June, at precisely the same moment as the armistice between France and Germany, which had been signed three days earlier on the 22nd of June. An armistice control commission, the Commissione Italiana d'Armistizio con la Francia, was established in Turin to oversee French compliance.
The terms gave Italy the territory it had managed to capture in the brief fighting. A demilitarized zone was created on the French side of the border. Italian economic control was extended into southeastern France as far as the Rhône. Italy also obtained rights and concessions in certain French colonies.
Mussolini had entered the war expecting to arrive at the peace table with concrete territorial gains. What he got was a thin strip of French territory, the town of Menton, a demilitarized buffer, and economic access to the Rhône. His armies had penetrated only a few kilometers into France against fierce resistance and had failed to take any of their primary objectives, including Bourg-Saint-Maurice, Modane, or Nice.
The historian consensus, as the source records, is that Mussolini's decision to enter the war was opportunistic and imperialistic. His moment had been the rapid German advance: by June 1940, France was already falling, and he calculated that the cost of entry would be low. What he had not calculated on was the Alpine Wall holding as it did, or French artillery crews still firing from fort turrets as Italian soldiers walked past them toward a ceasefire line. General Graziani had kept meticulous minutes of every staff meeting during June 1940, specifically in order to absolve himself and condemn both subordinates and superiors should the offensive fail, which he had expected it would.
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Common questions
When did the Italian invasion of France take place?
The Italian invasion of France took place from the 10th to the 25th of June 1940. Italy declared war on France and Britain on the evening of the 10th of June, and the armistice came into effect just after midnight on the 25th of June.
What were Italy's territorial goals in the invasion of France?
Mussolini sought the elimination of Anglo-French domination in the Mediterranean, the reclamation of historically Italian territory, and expanded Italian influence over the Balkans and Africa. Specific territorial ambitions included Nice, Corsica, Tunisia, Djibouti, and control over the Suez Canal Company.
Why did Italy's Alpine offensive fail to achieve its objectives?
The Italian offensive stalled because Italian divisions were converting from a defensive to an offensive posture with little preparation time, equipment was obsolete, and French fortifications on the Alpine Line held firm. Most Italian tanks were L3/35 tankettes that Italian historians later described as useless, and only nineteen of Italy's seventy-three divisions were fully combat-ready.
What territory did Italy actually capture during the invasion of France?
Italy captured only a few kilometers of French territory, with the coastal town of Menton being the most significant conquest. The armistice terms gave Italy the territory it had captured, a demilitarized zone on the French side of the border, and economic control extending into southeastern France up to the Rhône.
What was the role of the Mont Chaberton fort in the Italian invasion of France?
Fort Chaberton, an Italian fort atop Mont Chaberton at an altitude of 3,130 meters, was nicknamed the battleship in the clouds by the French. During the offensive, French gunners using 280-millimeter mortars silenced six of its eight armoured turrets in just fifty-seven shots over three days. The two remaining turrets continued firing until the armistice.
What armistice control body was set up after the Italian invasion of France?
The Commissione Italiana d'Armistizio con la Francia, known as the CIAF, was established in Turin to oversee French compliance with the armistice terms signed on the evening of the 24th of June 1940.
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2 references cited across the entry