Poorly trained and badly motivated, the Italian soldier of World War II went off to fight equipped with a motley collection of infantry weapons, ranging from outstanding pistols to appalling machine guns. Italian weapons saw service and caused casualties on battlefields from East Africa to Russia, even in the defense of Berlin in 1945. However, like much of Italy's war effort, they have been relegated to obscurity.

Italy went to war heavily armed, but with World War I equipment, most of which had been in storage since 1918. Italy produced aircraft, submarines, and guns of high quality, but to resolve the nation's trade balance, Benito Mussolini sold much of the newer equipment to foreign clients like Bulgaria, Finland, and China, while denying his forces the weapons they needed.

The results were inevitable. Italian troops wore cardboard shoes. Armored divisions had to borrow vehicles from the police and private companies to take part in military parades and the invasion of Russia. Field gun production in World War II was lower than in World War I.

In 1940, Marshal Pietro Badoglio told Mussolini that by working day-and-night shifts, Italy could be prepared for war -- by the middle of 1942. Italy lacked oil, steel, and iron, and had to depend on Germany for those supplies, which were short for Germany, too.

Italian organization was also poor, and rampant defeatism and anti-Fascist sentiment plagued the Italian war effort. Mussolini himself, despite holding the Ministry for War portfolio for years, was more concerned with teaching his troops the"passo romano," a slavish imitation of the Nazi goose-step, and deciding when troops and Rome policemen should change from summer to winter uniforms.

By early 1943, Italian workers, embittered by rising food prices and frozen wages, staged strikes at the Caproni, Fiat, and Westinghouse plants. In Milan, soldiers were sent in as strikebreakers at the Pirelli tire plant. The soldiers flung down their rifles and embraced the workers in sympathy. Mussolini was forced to cave in and grant wage increases. All these internal weaknesses showed up on the battlefield with poorly-made and inefficient weapons.

Despite these deficiencies, Italian troops repeatedly made determined attacks, often in World War I fashion, against British, Soviet, and American troops, facing superior firepower.

Pistol

Ironically, some of those Italian weapons were quite useful and highly prized, beginning with their smallest arm, the pistol. Small, compact, often well-made, the pistol possesses a mystique of its own, generated by crime and Hollywood. In warfare, it is usually the personal sidearm of an off~cer, and thus a symbol of personal leadership.

Italy's pistol was the Pistola Automatica Beretta Modello 1934. The 1934 Beretta was a conventional blowback pistol with exposed hammer, whose slide was held to the rear by the magazine platform after the last of seven 9mm rounds had been fired. The pistol had an effective range of about 30 yards and a muzzle velocity of about 830 feet per second.

It was originally produced in 1915, and subsequent models were improvements right through to the 1934. Allied troops sought it as a souvenir or memento, and many thousands of this 3.5-inch- long snub-nosed weapon found their way to drawers and lockboxes in Britain, America, or New Zealand.

After Italy changed sides in 1943, the Beretta factory was taken over by the Germans, and production continued for the German forces, with a gradual decline in quality, probably largely due to industrial sabotage by disaffected Italian workers. The 1934 Beretta was replaced in 1952, and subsequent models are replacing the American .45 Colt automatic as the standard US military pistol.

Submachine Guns

Italy was an early producer of submachine guns, starting off in 1918, with the Villar Perosa, used in the mountain campaigns against Austria-Hungary. Submachine guns also carry with them a glamour, due to their rapid-fire and association with gangsters, special forces, and movies. However, they have problems with accuracy.

Beretta also produced Italy's submachine guns, including the Beretta Modello 1918/30 and the Beretta Modello 38A, the most widely used weapon. There were several versions of the Modello 38A including one capable of taking a bayonet, but common to all was the perforated barrel jacket. Magazine capacity was limited to 10 or 20 rounds, but a 40-round one was available.

Modello 38Z was 37.2 inches long, had a 12.6-inch barrel, and weighed 8.7 Ibs. It was described by some authorities as the finest submachine gun ever made, and Beretta cranked them out until 1944, with many going to German and Rumanian forces.

This Beretta was similar in outline to a short rifle. A one- piece wooden stock was cut into a &irly conventional shape with a long tubular receiver and barrel on the top surface. Overall length was just over three feet; a rifle type bayonet was fitted as standard. This weapon came with two triggers, one for automatic fire, the other for single shots.

The early Beretta submachine gun was robust, fairly simple, heavy, and above all, beautifully made. Most of the metal parts of the Beretta were made from high quality steel machined out of the solid by expensive and slow methods. The only concession to mass production that occurred in the six years of manufacture was a sheet steel stamped jacket for the barrel. The resulting gun was excellent in every way, but out of date when it first came into service.

The Model 38, despite its virtues, was too heavy, and the Model 38/42, with short wooden stock, shorter barrel, fewer working parts, and little machining in the manufacture (most parts being made from steel stampings or welded components) replaced the 38. A final version, the 38/44 was created near the end of the war, but does not appear to have seen combat.

Rifle

A more familiar weapon to most infantrymen is the rifle, which soldiers usually meet in basic training, and spend most of their careers cleaning. In 1939, most combatants were armed with bolt-action rifles that differed little from those used in the Boer and Spanish-American wars. With good reason...bolt-action rifles were simple to maintain, very sturdy, and could fire a bullet with accuracy for about half a mile. The British .303 Enfield rifle of 1939 was little different and just as effective as the Enfield of 1895.

The Italians started off with the Mannlicher-Carcano Modello 1891, which was outdated by 1918, and compared unfavorably with the British Enfield. The Mannlicher-Carcano used a light bullet (6.5mm) and low chamber pressures to give a light rifle with low recoil, but retained a reasonable range.

Ballistics on this weapon were bad, so the build lost velocity downrange. A Mauser type bolt was used, and the receiver was kept low in weight by machining off all unnecessary metal. This gave the rifle a reputation for being weak and dangerous.

In 1938, the Mannlicher was updated by using a 7.35mm bullet, which required a new cartridge case and barrel. The bullet was made lighter with a long pointed nose, making it faster at the muzzle, and an aluminum nose section which made it unstable when it hit anything and began to tumble.

However, the Italian government found it could not afford to put enough money into the project to ensure all rifles were converted. To ease the strain on the logistics force, all weapons were ordered changed back to 6.5mm. Thousands of 7.35mm Mannlichers sat out the war gathering dust and cosmoline, to be sold off after the war as curios or to gun collectors.

Carbine Version

Even so, the Italians pressed on, creating a carbine version of the Mannlicher Carcano. One such weapon found itself in the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, and gained notoriety as the weapon that killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

This weapon was the lightest rifle of any World War 11 combatant, and had one or two odd features. It was loaded with a six-round clip that remained in the magazine until all rounds were fired, at which point it fell out through a large hole in the bottom, as with all Mannlicher designs. The same hole was also a convenient scoop for collecting mud and sand, which interfered with rifle effectiveness. The backlight was a fixed vee notch, offering no alteration for range or windage. The carbine also came with a knife bayonet (useful for opening ration tins) and some with a grenade launcher.

Although robustly made, the launcher was awkward and clumsy, being a separate barrel and breech. A ballistic cartridge was used to fire the grenade out of the barrel, and the breech was sealed by taking the bolt out of the carbine, and fitting it onto the launcher. The carbine is thus unbalanced by the load on one side, the weight is excessive, and while firing this weapon, the rifleman is defenseless. It also took a great deal of time (not a handy commodity on a fast-moving battlefield) to bring this weapon into action.

Italian troops also took with them into battle some 8mm Mannlichers from World War I, which only strained Italian logistics more. The Italians also fielded some Breda Model 1935 semi-automatic rifles, which fired 6.5mm rounds and worked by gas action. These were never in great supply.

Machine Guns

The switch in weapon caliber from 6.5mm to 7.35mm and back also affected Italy's machine guns. There were at least seven different calibers in use because of the bureaucratic confusion, and a vast difference in types of ammunition, adding to the suffering of Italian supply officers.

The standard light machine gun was the Breda Modello 1930, which was 6.5mm, and described as ugly and ungainly-looking. The barrel lies in a trough, the magazine is a permanent fixture, sticking out to one side, and the butt stock and trigger group look as if they were clipped on afterwards to the back of the receiver. Such a weapon is diffcult to keep clean, particularly in mud, snow, or desert. Logically, Italian troops fought in all three terrains. The Breda Modello 30 required a great deal of oil, and the mechanism became quickly fouled up with grit, oil, burned carbon, and soil.

This machine gun had no actual carrying handle (unlike the Bren), so the whole outfit had to be cradled in the arms or held by the folding bipod or pistol grip, with all the bits and pieces catching in the soldier's clothing or web belt.

The Breda Model 30 was operated by a form of delayed blowback in which the barrel moved back as well as the bolt, hence the trough for the barrel, as it needed a bearing surface at the front. ARer a shot travel, bolt and barrel parted, and the usual actions of ejection, feed, and chambering were carried out. One immediate snag to moving the barrel is that the foresight has to be on the body of the gun, and so is not lined up with the barrel itself; so, if the barrel has changed, the new one may easily be out of line with the sights. That made the Breda an inaccurate weapon which often lacked power.

Heavier machine guns led off with the Fiat Revelli Modello 1914. Looking like a Maxim gun of Sudan days, it had tbe usual underpowered 6.5mm round, delayed blowback, oil pump, and magazine feed. The magazine held 50 rounds in 10 compartments of five, which made for slow fire rate, about 400 to 500 rounds a minute.

The Modello 1914 was updated with the Modello 1935, which had an air-cooled changeable barrel. It was not heavy enough for the job and heated quickly. The magazine was replaced by a belt, and the oil pump dropped. However, it inherited from Modello 1914 an operating rod that ran outside the top of the receiver and buffered against a block just above the handgrips, which endangered gunners' fingers. The weapon could also overheat and "cook off" a bullet in the chamber, further endangering the gunner.

Breda Modello 1937 came in 8mm and was the best of this poor lot, but suffered from a unique feed system. Rounds were fed in from little trays or flat magazines inserted from the side, and having fired the cartridge, the gun then replaced the empty case into the tray, and pushed the whole thing out of the other side. Thus to replace a tray, one had to remove the empties first, a time- consuming operation in battle.

Hand Grenades

A British military treatise of 1887 dismissed hand grenades as relics. 30 years later more hand grenades were hurled in one week than in the whole of history prior to 1887. Grenades provide infantrymen with a"really big bang," and action movies with a source of drama.

The Italian hand grenade came in a number of types and appearances from a variety of manufacturers, but were all enameled in a pretty red fmish. They also didn't go off all the time. Allied troops found many such grenades lying around the Libyan desert and named them "Red Devils." Vast numbers of grenades were shipped to Libya and dumped and forgotten, and have periodically reappeared over the past 50 years when they kill unwary desert travelers.

There were three principals models, Modello 35, coming from Breda, OTO, or SRCM, each differing slightly from the others. They were all thin-cased blast grenades, fused to give an"allways" effect. All had large safety plates on the outside, connected to safety shutters which held striker and detonator apart and when thrown the plate would drag in the air and pull out the safety device to leave the grenade armed to detonate on impact.

The OTO model was fairly foolproof and usually went off when it landed, but the other two would sometimes fail to act if the grenade landed at an odd angle. They were still highly sensitive, though, and would go off when disturbed, intentionally or unintentionally, hence their evil reputation.

Even less reliable was the PCR grenade, named for its maker, which resembled an evaporated milk can. This weapon consisted of two explosive containers full of TNT with a central all-ways fuse between them. Each container had its own detonator, with a firing pin held above it on a bowed spring. Between the two springs fitted two aluminum cones and a heavy lead ball. A safety trip locked cones and ball together until aRer it was thrown. After that, any movement of the ball would cook off the detonators.

After Italian troops observed Germans use their "potato masher" stick grenades to good effect, Breda responded with Modello 42, a large spherical can which could be screwed onto a Model 35, for an extra two Ibs. of TNT. This weapon had limited value.

Mortar

Rounding out the Italian infantryman's arsenal was the Modello 35 4.5 centimeter mortar, mounted on a tripod-baseplate that also seated the mortar's operator. This breech-loaded weapon was operated by pulling a handle to withdraw the lower part of the barrel from the upper and thus leave a gap into which a bomb could be dropped, and the breech section included a gasport system. With one port closed, the mortar could lob a l-lb. bomb to 550 meters, with it open, it could reach 350 meters. The whole thing weighed 34 lbs.

The company mortar was the 81mm Modello 193S. Its 7-1b. bomb could be tossed 4,430 yards, or a heavyweight 15-lb. bomb could be hurled 1,650. The latter bomb had folding fins, which did not work properly, as the f~ns lost their tension during prolonged storage. The result was that the bomb would have a peculiar flight or even fail to launch, exploding mortar, bomb, and operator.

The Italian soldier represented a country that was renowned for the design and manufacture of world-beating cars, ships, and aircraft. Italian weaponry had been tried and tested in the Spanish Civil War, giving designers time and opportunity to see what went right and what didn't. Benito Mussolini, a military-minded dictator, had ample opportunities to intervene to sort out weapons production in one way or another, but, as he usually did, preferred not to make a decision.

Once battle was joined, Italian troops suffered from their weapons, and suffered accordingly. It is a considerable irony, and the results of the irony are thousands of Italian soldiers killed and maimed in the Balkans, Russia, and Africa, each a personal price paid for political folly.

The poor show often put up by Italian forces in World War II has been often attributed to their bad morale, but without doubt, that morale -- and battle effectiveness -- was surely impeded by the weapons that served them.

Sources

Allen, W. G. B. Pistols, Rifles, and Machine Guns Oxford-University Press.
Hogg, Ian. Grenades and Mortar; Ballantine.
Smith, J. E. Small Arms of the World; Stackpole.
Weeks, John. Infantry Weapons; Ballantine.