Stone, G. (2009) Italo-German collaboration and the Spanish Civil ...

achieve true great power status in the conflict with the western powers. It was Italy‟s
successful contribution to Franco‟s victory which probably encouraged Mussolini to
think that a break out into the Atlantic via the Straits of Gibraltar was a real possibility. 92
Ciano certainly thought so when he noted in his diary on 22 February 1939: „Those silly
people who tried so hard to criticize our intervention in Spain will one day perhaps
understand that on the Ebro, at Barcelona, and at Malaga the foundations of the Roman
Mediterranean Empire were laid‟. 93 The power calculus suggested that Italy lacked the
credible military resources to achieve such an ambitious goal. But Hitler and his military
leaders overlooked Italian shortcomings in the military sphere. Undoubtedly, their shared
collaboration and cooperation with Fascist Italy in Spain contributed significantly to the
eventual military alliance, the Pact of Steel of May 1939, which the Germans no less than
the Italians pursued, but when it was finally tested after June 1940 it was found to be
wanting in the highest degree. The common experience of intervention and victory in the
civil war in Spain by contributing to the Italo-German alliance of the Second World War
played its own part in the eventual defeat and destruction of Nazi Germany and of Italian
fascism.
92 MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy’s Last War,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 40. MacGregor Knox, „The Fascist regime, its foreign
policy and its wars: “an anti-Fascist” orthodoxy?‟, Contemporary European History, vol. 4, 1995, p. 359.
Alan Cassels, „Reluctant neutral: Italy and the strategic balance in 1939‟ in Brian McKercher and Roch
Legault (eds.), Military Planning and the Origins of the Second World War in Europe, Westport, CN:
Praeger, 2001, p. 38.
93 Malcolm Muggeridge (ed.), Ciano’s Diary, 1939-1943, London: Heinemann, 1947, p. 33.
17