Regia Aeronautica

• 1. Introduction

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  The Regia Aeronautica, Italy's Royal Air Force, holds a distinction few military organizations can claim: it pioneered aerial warfare before most nations had even imagined it. On the 23rd of October 1911, during the colonization of Libya, Italian airmen conducted the first reconnaissance flight in the history of warfare. Nine days later, on the 1st of November, they carried out the first bombing raid ever recorded. By the time the force was formally established on the 28th of March 1923, Italy already had a head start on the rest of the world. The questions worth asking are how that advantage was built, how it was squandered, and what became of the men who flew under the tricolor roundel through some of the most brutal theaters of the Second World War.

• 2. Records and Propaganda

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  Benito Mussolini understood that aircraft could serve a purpose beyond warfare. From the moment the Regia Aeronautica became an independent service, he shaped it into a propaganda machine of the first order. Italian planes flew with the national flag colors painted across the full undersides of their wings, visible from the ground in unmistakable tricolor bands. Between a span of months in the late 1930s, Italian airmen established no fewer than 110 world records, covering round trips, long-range flights, high-speed runs, and altitude climbs. The crowning technical achievement came in October 1934, when Francesco Agello piloted the Macchi-Castoldi MC-72 floatplane to a world speed record of 709 km/h, a mark that has never been beaten by a piston-engined seaplane. A year earlier, General of Aviation Italo Balbo led a formation of Savoia-Marchetti S.55 flying boats on a round trip to the United States and back, covering 19,000 km in total. The Decennial Air Cruise made stops in Amsterdam, Derry, Reykjavik, Labrador, Montreal, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Washington D.C. The highlight was a landing on Lake Michigan directly in front of Chicago Navy Pier, followed by a procession through the city before crowds of thousands of Americans, timed to coincide with the Century of Progress Exhibition. By July 1939, Italy held 33 world aviation records. Germany held 15, France 12, the United States 11, and the Soviet Union 7. On paper, the Regia Aeronautica stood at the pinnacle of world air power.

• 3. Ethiopia and Spain

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  October 1935 brought the first real combat test of the new air force, when the Second Italo-Ethiopian War began. The Regia Aeronautica deployed up to 386 aircraft, operating from Eritrea and Somalia, against an Imperial Ethiopian Air Force that fielded just 15 transport and liaison aircraft, only nine of which were serviceable. Despite facing no aerial opposition, the Italian air force lost 72 planes and 122 aircrew while supporting ground operations, and its aircraft dropped poison gas bombs on Ethiopian forces. After hostilities ended on the 5th of May 1936, the Regia Aeronautica spent another 13 months helping Italian forces fight Ethiopian guerrillas. The Spanish Civil War, which ran from July 1936 to March 1939, brought a different kind of engagement. Italian pilots dressed in Spanish Foreign Legion uniforms airlifted Francisco Franco's Army of Africa from Spanish Morocco to the Spanish mainland. The force sent to Spain, called the Aviazione Legionaria, included roughly 720 aircraft: 80-90 Savoia-Marchetti SM 81s, 100 SM.79 bombers, and 380-400 Fiat CR.32 biplanes. Mussolini dispatched 6,000 aviation personnel in total. The Aviazione Legionaria claimed approximately 500 aerial victories and lost 86 aircraft in air combat, along with about 200 flying personnel. The success of the Fiat CR.32 biplane in Spain planted a dangerous seed. The Italian Air Ministry, dazzled by its performance against Soviet-built Polikarpovs, concluded that biplanes could still dominate modern air war. That conviction led to the mass production of the Fiat CR.42 Falco, which would go on to be the last war biplane in history.

• 4. A Force Full of Gaps

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  When Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940, the Regia Aeronautica had a paper strength of 3,296 machines, a number that suggested formidable power. The reality was sharply different. Only 2,000 aircraft were fit for operations, and of that number just 166 were modern fighters: 89 Fiat G.50 Freccias and 77 Macchi MC.200s. Both types were slower than the aircraft they would face, including the Hawker Hurricane, the Supermarine Spitfire, and the French Dewoitine D.520. The domestic aircraft industry was using obsolete production methods, and the force had neither long-range fighters nor night fighters. German technical assistance provided little remedy. On the 10th of June 1940, Italy declared war on France and the United Kingdom. Italian aircraft flew 716 bombing missions during that brief campaign, dropping 276 tons of bombs on French fortifications, military bases, and airfields at targets including Toulon, Briancon, Traversette, and Cap San Martin. General Giuseppe Santoro later wrote that the Air Force had not been prepared for bombing operations against fortifications, and that only about 80 tons of that total actually hit their targets. A separate problem emerged after the war: rumors spread across France that Italian aircraft had strafed civilian columns fleeing toward Bordeaux. Investigations disproved the claim. Italian aircraft lacked the range to reach such distant targets and were focused on short-range military objectives; the wing roundels at the time featured three fasci littori, not the tricolor pattern that witnesses described. The confusion arose partly from the reputation the Regia Aeronautica had built in peacetime, a reputation that the Battle of Britain would strip away.

• 5. The Battle of Britain Debacle

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  On the 10th of September 1940, Italy stood up an independent air corps specifically to support the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. Designated the Corpo Aereo Italiano, or CAI, it was placed under General Rino Corso Fougier and comprised roughly 170 aircraft: 80 Fiat BR.20 bombers and 98 fighters made up of Fiat G.50 Freccias and CR.42 biplanes. The transfer of aircraft to Nazi-occupied Belgium was completed by the 19th of October. What followed was a study in institutional mismatch. The CR.42 biplanes, which had seemed adequate in Ethiopia and serviceable in Spain, met British Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires over the English Channel in November. The Italians and the British clashed only twice. Italy claimed five victories and nine probables. Five Fiat biplanes were shot down. The RAF reported zero losses. The 17 bombing raids carried out by the BR.20s caused little material damage. By January 1941, with aircraft urgently needed in Greece and North Africa, the bombers and CR.42s were recalled to Italy. Two squadrons of G.50 fighters stayed on until mid-April 1941. The campaign's final accounting was grim: 36 aircraft lost, 26 of them in accidents rather than combat, 43 aircrew dead, and not a single confirmed aerial victory. The biplane question, which Spain had appeared to settle in Italy's favor, had received a definitive answer over the English Channel.

• 6. Malta and the Long Siege

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  For two years, the British island of Malta sat at the center of the air war in the Mediterranean. The Regia Aeronautica and the Luftwaffe needed to suppress it to protect Axis sea routes from Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy to North Africa; the British needed to hold it to strangle those same routes. By the end of 1940 alone, Italian aircraft had flown 7,410 sorties against Malta, dropping 550 tons of bombs and losing 35 aircraft. Italy claimed 66 British planes in those first six months, a figure that investigators later found to be inflated. By 1941, Italian airmen had developed a fear of Maltese fighters and anti-aircraft artillery so acute that the flight to the island acquired a name among the crews: the rotta della morte, or route of death. In 1942, between the 1st of January and the 8th of November, the Regia Aeronautica lost 100 more aircraft in action over Malta. Malta's defenders, for their part, claimed nearly 1,500 Axis aircraft destroyed during the siege, three times the actual number. The real losses to the end of November 1942 were 357 aircraft for the Luftwaffe and 210 for the Regia Aeronautica. The RAF's own losses in the same period were heavier: 547 aircraft lost in the air, 160 on the ground, 504 damaged in the air, and 231 damaged on the ground. Malta held.

• 7. Aces and the Individual Record

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  The Regia Aeronautica did not keep individual kill statistics as a matter of institutional practice. Kills were reported at the unit level and attributed to the unit commander. Pilots, however, were permitted to maintain personal log books, and the few who survived the war preserved individual records that give a partial picture of who the force's most effective aviators were. Teresio Vittorio Martinoli and Franco Lucchini each recorded 22 kills, the highest figures in the log books that survived. Leonardo Ferrulli claimed 21, with one of those in Spain. Franco Bordoni-Bisleri and Luigi Gorrini each tallied 19. Mario Visintini and Ugo Drago each reached 17. The list of pilots credited with ten or more kills runs to more than twenty names. At the other end of the scale, the Regia Aeronautica's best-performing fighter in the desert war was the Macchi C.202. During the Battle of Bir Hakeim from the 26th of May to the 11th of June 1942, the C.202 achieved a kill-to-loss ratio of 4.4 to 1 against the Desert Air Force's fighters, outperforming the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which recorded a ratio of 3.5 to 1 in the same battle. That figure represents the high-water mark of Italian fighter performance in the war.

• 8. Collapse and Division

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  From the 10th of June 1940 through the 8th of September 1943, the Regia Aeronautica lost between 5,201 and 6,483 aircraft depending on the source, including 3,483 fighters and 2,273 bombers, torpedo-bombers, and transports. Personnel losses came to 3,007 dead or missing, 2,731 wounded, and 9,873 taken prisoner. The last mission of the unified force was the defense of Rome and Frascati during American bombing raids on the 8th of September 1943. When the armistice was signed that day, the air force split in two. The Royalist Italian Co-belligerent Air Force, headquartered at Salerno, flew for the Allies in the Balkans. The National Republican Air Force, operating in northern Italy and around the Baltic, flew for the Italian Social Republic and the Axis. The two Italian air forces never fought each other directly. The founding Chief of Staff, Pier Ruggero Piccio, had built an institution that outlasted the kingdom it served; on the 2nd of June 1946, when Italy voted to become a republic, the Regia Aeronautica became the Aeronautica Militare, the name it still carries today.